Within a stones throw of Cornwall’s premier holiday resort lurks a huge ghostly Cold War presence. Visible today, is the bureaucratically named United States Navy Atomic Weapons Department. Once heavily guarded bunkers Integral to The Joint Maritime Facility. Held Nuclear depth charges for US and Dutch Orion aircraft and UK nimrods The original Naval Facilities and later, consolidated, processing centers were high security installations characterized by an outer security fence and gate checkpoint. The terminal buildings within were double fenced with separate entry security. US Marines manned lookout towers with mounted machine guns. Not all personnel assigned to the facility had access to the operational part of the installations. The JMF headquarters building was a three story structure built completely underground, set on huge springs and with sensitive electrical components and cabling cased in lead to protect from Electro Magnetic Pulse from Nuclear blast. The hub was for processing data from the vast undersea SOSUS listening system, an undersea sonar submarine tracking system. The LOFARGRAM screen representation of acoustic signatures was represented in shades of grey, and it was discovered that Ocean Technician operators with colour blindness displayed an advantage. As technology advanced rapidly it was decided the JMF was no longer essential and huge savings could be realised by closure of the base, the US and UK teams and equipment transferred to the Naval Ocean Processing Facility at Dam Neck Virginia. So the last US Navy Base in the UK closed. The complex was returned to UK control and has since sat as monument to a chilling period of history. No attempt to demolish or re-purpose the area has occurred to which we may speculate.