The BT Tower was originally built as a civil-defence asset, part of a ‘Backbone’ microwave network designed to provide telecommunications resilience in the event of nuclear attack. Its architect, Eric Bedford, said of the Tower, ‘it was built to last, bombers or not’.¹ The building’s design follows a template: ‘Chilterns-type’, which comprises several unorthodox design choices that safeguard against nuclear attack such as, a cylindrical concrete core, perspex screening around the dishes and reinforcement at the tower’s base. The Chilterns-type comprises a cylindrical concrete core, or ‘chimney’, with dishes and aerials attached. In the event of nuclear attack, dishes and aerials would be destroyed but their replacement would ensure quick re-connection to wireless national communication.² Despite early considerations, the BT Tower in Birmingham chose to avoid the type two years later in favour of a rectangular shaft.³ This development would imply that concern about the nuclear bomb was waning by then, but in fact, it was more a case that any hope of survival was waning — and that while in 1961 the A-bomb was seen as a counterable threat, by 1963, with the emergence of the much more devastating H-bomb, all hope had been lost for any sort of telecommunications-based civil defence in the aftermath of a strike.

Beatriz Colomina states in Privacy and Publicity that, ‘The modern media are war technology’:⁴ As an ambassador for an age of modern media, the BT Tower itself is war technology, not just a tool of defence, but also offence. Virilio equated propagation of ‘jet-sets and instant-information banks’ to a ‘whole social illusion subordinated to the strategy of the cold war’.⁵ The Tower’s revolving restaurant is a ‘Fun Palace’ and a distraction from the inner workings of the tower — a diversion outwards. It is noted in the banned 1966 film The War Game about the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, that by 1966, ‘silence had descended’ around nuclear war despite the fact that warheads had doubled in the preceding five years.⁶ This silence is a deliberate strategy of pacification, for the threat of nuclear holocaust was increasing at a tremendous rate.

Harold Wilson, Tony Benn, Harold Macmillan and Geoffrey Rippon, engineers of the BT Tower, are equatable to the ‘priests of civilisation’, in that the engineers are those who preach and practice the doctrine of modernity most fervently.⁷ Benn, a devout Christian, was labelled ‘ministering priest or maintenance engineer to the great god Technology’.⁸ Despite the fact that the tower was largely complete by the time that the Labour government came to power in 1964, it has become a symbol of Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ policy.⁹ Its ‘engineers’ became a revolving cast, devoted to a form of progress dominated by control and paranoia. Virilio mentions, ‘the English engineers ended up significantly reducing their motto to UBIQUE… “everywhere.” This means the universe redistributed by the military engineers, the earth “communicating” like a single glacis, as the infra structure of a future battlefield’.¹⁰ Mass media is itself co-opted as a civil defence asset, ‘bread and circus’ became ‘television and revolving restaurants’. Telecommunications are not only the ‘infra structure of a future battlefield’, they are the battlefield itself.

The bomb is political, ‘not because of an explosion that should never happen, but because it is the ultimate form of military surveillance’.¹¹ The threat of the bomb is advantageous to the government, as it allows for creation of ‘war technology’ that consolidates control of their populace. This functions in the same way that religious groups use threat and fear of the Final Judgement and the Apocalypse as leverage in controlling their adherents. The possibility of the bomb is what enabled the government to encroach on telecommunications. This legitimised further encroachment during later events, i.e. the War on Terror and the War on Drugs; framed as crusades against threats to secular civilisation, but rooted in Christian eschatology. Nuclear war portended an alternative apocalypse without redemption or final judgement; pacification was no longer about a promise of a celestial future but about distraction, for which telecommunications could become a primary enabler. In this way, the BT Tower was a flagship for a new way of seeing the end of the world.

After the devastating paranoia of nuclear war; a formlessness started to emerge, a messianic hope for another kind of invisible force to rescue us. ‘It [was] shown that we cannot now change the world any longer, anything that might tend to prove the existence of another form of reality will be welcomed’.¹² It became necessary to find a new way to ‘mobilise, cumulate and recombine the world’; and in this way, ‘telecommunications, not only as space and time transcending technologies, but as technological networks within which new forms of human interaction, control and organisation can actually be constructed’ became the replacement for what religion had provided before.¹³ Telecommunications, and the networks upon which they are built, were the first truly invisible source of power outside of religion, relying on material receptacles (the antennae, aerial, dish) while dispersing an intangible presence into the lives of all who interact with it, just as the church did before.

For Teilhard de Chardin, ‘spirit looks very much like energetic information. Spirit is software in action’, a ‘Network [that] is physical but not material’.¹⁴ In this sense, the BT Tower becomes a pure material representation of the energetic information (spirit) that flows through it; conversations whizz through it, lives are broadcasted, and it enables a disembodiment from the material source of these exertions. It facilitates an invisible reality rather than embodying that reality, and holds the disembodied ‘souls’ of the people whose voices and likenesses it transmits — without any tangible physical or audible presence.

In this way, the ‘place’ of the Tower becomes wherever the network reaches. As the home becomes part of this immaterial network, it is then enabled to fulfil a break in temporal duration. The tower becomes redundant as a typology as technology surpasses it, and those who participate in this extended network become ‘cut loose from the sociality of urban life, separated from the world by the pixilated screen’.¹⁵ For someone like Benn — instrumental in the push for technology and in agreement with Gerrard Winstanley that God is ‘reason’¹⁶ — this rational application of the irrational perhaps aligns with Marx and Kierkegaard’s notion that ‘experience [...] forms the core of religious life’, and that via spiritual ascendency, ‘all confront themselves and each other on a single plane of being’.¹⁷ With the telecommunications network, an invisible Church, and an invisible elect, was created.