A Timely Reminder...

 

The purchase of the two books featured above is separated by some forty-three years: the hardback underneath the paperback arrived this week, and the paperback above the hardback, I bought on publication in 1980, or shortly thereafter, at the start of the second 'flowering' of the Cold War: the Thatcher/Reagan years of the early/mid 1980s. "Attack, Warning Red", by Julie McDowall is a short history of Britain's preparations for the eventuality of nuclear war from the division of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall, forty-four years later, but raising the question of the possibility that the Ukraine War might herald a third phase of the nuclear threat to humanity. "The Nuclear Survival Handbook" by Barry Popkess, however, is written from what would now be called a 'prepper's' viewpoint, with the serious intention to suggest that survival of nuclear conflict is actually an option. Both books, although driven by different motivations, serve to emphasize the absolute un-survivability of such a conflict should it ever happen.

I bought the Handbook out of a sense of ironic fatalism at the time when the then government were, in all seriousness, punting the slender pamphlet "Protect & Survive" as some kind of 'public service announcement' that all would be well if the ordure hit the fan, provided everyone followed some simple rules and obeyed the government's pronouncements [from their deep, nuclear-hardened bunkers]. The information contained in the Handbook is basically an affirmation that we would find ourselves, within hours, back in The Stone Age, but alas completely lacking our forebears talents of day-to-day survival. The realization that this would be inevitably be the case, led to the 'Protest & Survive' rejoinder, the Greenham Common occupation and a revival of the fortunes of CND.

The Handbook was, and is, the most pertinent and salutary reminder that without the life-support systems mankind has built up over millennia - in particular the last century or so - our survival and continued existence would hang by the most tenuous of threads imaginable. Never mind the immediate threat from the bomb and its subsequent after-effects; the disruption of all the basic services we take for granted - water, power, transport, medicine, &etc. - would be cut off at the knees instantaneously, leaving the majority of us with at most a few weeks of survival, only to be overtaken by starvation, thirst, disease and radiation poisoning. These two books alone should be required reading on all school curricula: in fact everyone should read the damned things and watch the old newsreel footage of nuclear bomb testing: all sobering stuff that any complacent population should be aware of...