Truly terrifying...
...is the verdict on Bob Clarke's Four Minute Warning. Clarke is ex-RAF turned engineer turned archaeologist, and in this book he turns his attention to a description of both the UK's nuclear arsenal and the supporting military infrastructure throughout the Cold War, and then to the civil defence and other mechanisms that would attempt to put society back on its feet in the event of an attack.
The book is structured in two halves - Protect covering the weapons and radar/intelligence networks, and some of the politics (albeit from a fairly right-wing perspective), and Survive covering civil defence. Clarke starts off in typical Subbrit/Research Study Group sort of mode, telling us all about ROTOR bunkers, ROC sites and so on. Then he starts to discuss council emergency HQs, Regional Seats of Government, the need to preserve essential utilities and things start to get bleak. He draws evidence from declassfied official documents and rapidly comes to the conclusion that the rundown of civil defence in the late sixties was not walking away from the problem - it was admitting that there was nothing that could be done about it. His argument is sober, compelling and factual. And bloody terrifying, knowing what we now do about the tonnage that was pointed at the UK.
Clarke contends that any reasonable attempt at a civil defence programme in the fifties and early sixties was based around a few Hiroshima-sized bombs; Dresden-style effects plus some radiation and fallout, essentially. Horrific but essentially survivable on a national level.
Once you're into the realms of multi-megaton H-bomb airbursts, you're talking about entire regions utterly devastated by one bomb; throw in a few ground bursts and most of the country is bathed in fallout. Add up the sort of numbers Peter Hennessy's The Secret State gives for the number of warheads aimed at the UK and the only conclusion you can come to is that Britain would be reduced almost immediately to a small number of doomed, dying civilians in cobbled-together home refuges (remember P&S telling you to pile the doors up against the walls with mattresses over them?), a few bunkers full of equally doomed officials, and perhaps some cobbled-together token emergency services. Until they die, anyway. Any nuclear exchange would quite literally have meant the end of any meaningful civilisation in a country as small, as densely populated and as dependent upon its own food production as Britain.
A powerful book for anyone with an interest in the nuclear state, and the doublethink that said 'limited' nuclear was was somehow possible. There's no such thing as 'flexible response'.
The book is structured in two halves - Protect covering the weapons and radar/intelligence networks, and some of the politics (albeit from a fairly right-wing perspective), and Survive covering civil defence. Clarke starts off in typical Subbrit/Research Study Group sort of mode, telling us all about ROTOR bunkers, ROC sites and so on. Then he starts to discuss council emergency HQs, Regional Seats of Government, the need to preserve essential utilities and things start to get bleak. He draws evidence from declassfied official documents and rapidly comes to the conclusion that the rundown of civil defence in the late sixties was not walking away from the problem - it was admitting that there was nothing that could be done about it. His argument is sober, compelling and factual. And bloody terrifying, knowing what we now do about the tonnage that was pointed at the UK.
Clarke contends that any reasonable attempt at a civil defence programme in the fifties and early sixties was based around a few Hiroshima-sized bombs; Dresden-style effects plus some radiation and fallout, essentially. Horrific but essentially survivable on a national level.
Once you're into the realms of multi-megaton H-bomb airbursts, you're talking about entire regions utterly devastated by one bomb; throw in a few ground bursts and most of the country is bathed in fallout. Add up the sort of numbers Peter Hennessy's The Secret State gives for the number of warheads aimed at the UK and the only conclusion you can come to is that Britain would be reduced almost immediately to a small number of doomed, dying civilians in cobbled-together home refuges (remember P&S telling you to pile the doors up against the walls with mattresses over them?), a few bunkers full of equally doomed officials, and perhaps some cobbled-together token emergency services. Until they die, anyway. Any nuclear exchange would quite literally have meant the end of any meaningful civilisation in a country as small, as densely populated and as dependent upon its own food production as Britain.
A powerful book for anyone with an interest in the nuclear state, and the doublethink that said 'limited' nuclear was was somehow possible. There's no such thing as 'flexible response'.