There is (or rather was) a contingency plan even before the plans for the Chunnel were finalized, but… it wasn’t a very good one.
The plan was to blow up the tunnel with a nuke, which would work, but also irradiate and/or flatten a couple of hundred square miles at either end.
It would appear easy enough just to flood the thing. That makes putting it back into service after the war a bit easier.
Yeah but water wouldn’t actually stop the invaders. All they’d have to do is put on SCUBA gear and swim through the flooded tunnel. Heck, if the tunnel is wide enough, they could even send a submarine through the tunnel. If the submarine was too wide, they could just send it around the tunnel. Oh, wait. Never mind.
If they’re willing to contemplate nukes, a cheaper option would be to flood it with corrosive toxic gas, like chlorine gas. Even assuming the invaders have gas masks, they’ll corrode eventually in that long, dark tunnel. Yes, it would be a war crime, but irradiating your own land is worse than a war crime.
They could split the difference and flood it with radioactive dust suspended in corrosive gas, if they’re dead-set on irradiating something.
I assume the danger would be amphibious or airborne forces landing at the base of the tunnel, capturing it, and then using it to bring in reinforcements. That way they secure it before any sort of demolition procedures could take place.
One widely accepted rumor during WWI was that Russian troops on their way to reinforce the Allies in France were spotted in British train stations.
With snow on their helmets despite the warmth of the season, which showed they were from Russia.
:smack:
A teacher once told me that, during WWII, some people thought the Japanese had invaded Alabama. There were Hawaiian soldiers at the air force base in Montgomery. No idea if there’s any truth to it any part of that.
Humans living in the US today believe there is an actual invasion ongoing now by Russians, or North Koreans, or the UN, or ISIS, or [name it]. Clearly this is a venerable tradition.
Yeah. Park a couple of dump trucks full of sand in the entryway and disable them.
A commuter tunnel is a TERRIBLE way to invade a place for any number of reasons.
It’s plausible, at least. Hawaiian troops were sent only to Europe, not the Pacific, just to avoid misidentifications. Many of them actually were of Japanese descent.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the good people of Hartlepool, England hanged a monkey which had come ashore from a merchant ship, thinking it was a French spy.
Maybe the UK ambassador to the UN has a cunning plan.
They’re called ‘the French’ and to be fair, they’re not all prostitutes.
As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?
Concrete-mixing trucks. Half a dozen of those in each of the three tunnels, disabled, and imaginatively wired with military fireworks should do it.
Space them out with booby-trapped petrol tankers, and if things are really bad some of the spare radioactives that are available.
‘I do not say the French can’t come, I only say they can’t come by tunnel.’
Fair enough I suppose, but then you’re not being invaded *through *the tunnel - you’ve already been invaded by sea or air.
It’s one thing to establish a beachhead, it’s quite another to be able to move enough equipment and supplies and people to subdue a nation. The Allies had been ‘invading’ Europe since the fall of France, but it took the massive D-Day mobilization to actually get divisions of soldiers onto the continent.
That said, the Chunnel is useless because it’s a fixed, known location. The good guys could simply carpet-bomb the exits any time someone poked their head up. For that matter, a bunker-buster at the mouth of the tunnel would almost certainly destoy its use.
Worst case scenario - you drop a nuke on the seabed above the Chunnel and detonate it. The Chunnel is only an average of 45m below the sea bed, and in some places obviously less. You probably wouldn’t even need a nuke to breach that. Just a bit conventional bomb.
Reminds me of a weird B movie where China invades the US via a tunnel. I don’t remember the color of their helmets.
Moderator Note
This being GQ, let’s knock off the political sniping. No warning issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Well…when the tunnelling teams broke through, ISTR they made a thing of the tunnellers from one side travelling right through to the other end. They would have been covered in dust and wearing safety helmets…