Dan Snow's History Hit - How to Prepare for Nuclear War

Episode Date: March 26, 2023

With Putin's war in Ukraine raging on, the threat of a nuclear conflict feels as real as ever. But since the Iron Curtain fell, our understanding of what to do in the event of a nuclear strike has waned. In this episode, we look to the past to discover the extraordinary things that the British government have done to prepare the nation for nuclear war. What plans did they put in place, and would they have worked if the missiles had started flying? Dan is joined by Julie McDowall, an expert on the nuclear threat and author of Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War, to shed some light on the unnerving history of nuclear preparation.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got one of my favourite guests back on the podcast now, the atomic hobo herself. The social media and podcasting phenomenon that is Julie McDowell. She's a journalist specialising in the nuclear threat. She's just written a book called Attack Warning Red, How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War. She hosts the Atomic Hobo podcast. She said to talk to us about all the extraordinary things that governments tried to do to ameliorate the effects of a gigantic nuclear strike. Spoiler alert, it was all totally pointless,

but governments have got a plan. That's what they're there to do. It is chilling and scary and fascinating and sometimes even funny. And it's particularly poignant now that nuclear saber rattling is back on the agenda following Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This is not a podcast for the squeamish, folks. This is not a podcast if you're feeling anxious generally in life. There's not a lot of optimism here. Nuclear

war is pretty awful and there's not much you can do about it. But the good news is that Julie McDowell is a brilliant communicator and journalist and you're going to find this fascinating. Enjoy. Julie, so good to have you back on the pod. Well, thank you for inviting me, Dan. You've gone from strength to strength. You're now the world's leading nuclear war influencer, which is a strange and wonderful thing. That's right. This all started when I was a three-year-old, when I saw the nuclear war

film Threads on the BBC. So I couldn't have imagined back then as a tiny three-year-old that this would lead to a career. And sadly, of course, these days it's a career which is increasingly relevant because we're all rediscovering the nuclear anxiety that we thought we had left behind at the end of the Cold War. Yeah, because let's start it there. When I talked to you two years ago, we were laughing and saying how funny the government were making these kind of, really in retrospect, kind of pathetic. And what they're up against was so enormous and so terrible. It felt like all of our little interventions were so inconsequential. But now, you know, we've had all sorts of nuclear alarms. And I'm sure when the history comes to written of last year, I think there were moments when

things were very, very tense indeed, in a way that we can only guess at at the moment. But yeah, how does it feel now doing your scholarship against the backdrop of nuclear sabre rattling by Vladimir Putin and always talks of escalation? Well, if I'm being selfish, I'm glad that it's brought the issue of nuclear weapons back to people's attention because I think a lot of us, and I was one of them previously, thought that after the Cold War, the threat not just of nuclear war, but of war on the continent of Europe had receded. I was guilty, certainly when I was younger, of thinking of war, of something which only happened back in the old days, something which was in black and white. And now it's incredible that this is back with us now. So I'm almost glad, as I say, in a selfish way, that this is forcing nuclear weaponry back into people's attention,

because, of course, nuclear weapons didn't go away at the end of the Cold War. And there is an argument that they became more dangerous after the end of the Cold War because during that conflict we had strict rules and everyone knew where they stood. Accidents, of course, and bad luck could always intrude and upset that, but at least on the surface there were rules.

Everyone knew what we were supposed to do, what we were supposed to be avoiding, what you couldn't say, because it might lead to misunderstandings and escalation. And I think these days, we're a lot more lax, a lot more relaxed about the whole concept of nuclear war. As we saw with Donald Trump, when he first became president, he said something like, well, what's the point of having them if you can't use them? Because of course, the whole point is they mustn't be used. They exist, hopefully, silently, and they are there to deter war. So that's the point of them. So it's good to have that reinforced to us that these things are hideous, monstrous, but they are still there. They are still on alert. They could still be launched with just minutes notice. So let's just talk about the context of when I was born, 1978, for example, and into the

80s. People forget that it was pretty dark before dawn, wasn't it? In some ways, the 80s was one of the darkest times of the Cold War and the nuclear threat. What was that threat? What would have been the effect of a general global thermonuclear war? The effect of a nuclear war, it changed over the course of the Cold War. At the beginning, of course, we had the atomic bomb, which, of course, we saw used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm not trying to lessen that horror, of course, but an atomic war would have been potentially survivable. It would have been hideous. It would have been horrific. It would have been the most destructive thing ever to happen, but it would have been potentially survivable. But in the 50s, we escalated up to the hydrogen bomb, which made the atomic bomb look like, well, peanuts, basically.

The hydrogen bomb can be as powerful as the scientist who designed it wishes it to be. as the scientist who designed it wishes it to be. So when the hydrogen bomb came along, it changed everything because atomic war planners and civil defence planners were no longer looking at something which was horrific, dreadful, but survivable. It was now, in the hydrogen bomb era, something which was potentially world-ending, not only because of the blast and the firestorms

and the fallout, but because of, as we later discovered in the later Cold War, the effect of nuclear winter, the climatic effect that would come after an all-out nuclear war. So when we move into the later Cold War and we become clear about what hydrogen bomb warfare means, it becomes obvious this is something which cannot be survived and therefore cannot be risked. But of course, we did risk it and therefore cannot be risked. But of course,

we did risk it and we still are risking it. And so in Britain, that means a small country in the era of hydrogen bombs, just sort of 100% devastation in that initial strike? Yes, that's true. Britain, of course, is geographically quite small and very crowded. If we look at the huge expanse of the United States or, of course, of geographically quite small and very crowded. If we look at the huge expanse of the United States or, of course, of the Soviet Union, it would have been possible, of course, for survivors to have existed after an all-out nuclear war because it can't touch everything, at least not in the initial stage. But with Britain, we're so small and we're so crowded, you know, there's a target around every corner in Britain, whether that's a city or an industrial target or a military target. So if we imagine that the Soviets had

plotted each of our targets being hit with a hydrogen bomb, the resulting blast wave and the resulting firestorms and the resulting drift of fallout would quite easily have engulfed every other part of the country. So yes, in theory, a small and crowded country like Britain could quite easily be knocked out of the game completely in a hydrogen bomb war. By the way, how close did we come? I mean, there were the possibility of accidental launches, of mishaps, of close calls.

We've all got our list. There's the time when the Soviet system malfunctioned, and that guy, the man who saved the world, just went, nah, it's barely a malfunction. The US hasn't launched their entire arsenal at us. But had he reported that upwards, there would have been orders to launch, right? That's true. Yes. The man who saved the world, as you say, Stanislav Petrov, he was on duty and he saw an incoming American nuclear missile. But he thought this doesn't seem right, because if the Americans were going to launch a first strike, they would have to throw everything they had at us. Because the idea of a first strike is we are going to try and basically disable your ability to hit back at us, to

retaliate. So you would never just launch one in anger at Moscow. It would have to be throwing everything at the Soviet Union. So it seemed to him quite unusual that they'd only launch one. So he, thankfully, thought this might be an error. So he stood back. He didn't do anything. He didn't press the alarm. He didn't inform his superiors. He waited. And then, after a few minutes, everything lit up again. And this time it was the full works. Here comes everything. And he thought, but we've already had what looks like a little glitch

maybe this is a second glitch and he was right of course if he had blindly followed procedure and ignored his instinct what his knowledge was telling him yes he would have escalated up chain of command and no doubt there was guidance or steps in the so book, which said, if X happens, then we must do Y. There's no room for nuance or discussion or instinct. We just have to do X if Y happens. So if they launch at us, we hit back against them. So in theory, yes, they could have seen that as an attack, therefore retaliation. They would have launched theirs. And in turn, America would have seen the same thing. They would have seen a mass of incoming Soviet missiles. And so they would have launched

and the whole thing could easily have escalated and we would not be here today. Well, that was 1983. And I was a little five-year-old, four-year-old, just playing around. Little did I know that was going on in the world. Did the government just accept the fact the whole country would be obliterated

and we'd be going back to the Stone Age? Or did they try and do what governments do, which is make plans and come up with arrangements in the event of a nuclear strike? All out hydrogen bomb war would have been, as you say, putting us back to the Stone Age. And that was underlined to the government in what was called the Strath report, a top secret report in the 60s, which for the first time made it clear how hideous and unique the hydrogen bomb was. So the government certainly knew by, as we're talking about the 1980s, what an all out nuclear war would mean. I'm lost to defend the government, but to be fair to to them they couldn't exactly have said that to the people they couldn't have went on news night and said yes we're all done for there's no hope. So they had to I suppose issue a white lie a gentle lie to us and say there is a way to protect yourself there is a way to survive this. So the most famous example of their public information campaign was in the 1980s in

the early 80s protect and survive which was a government leaflet accompanied by films although the films were never released which said you will be basically left to your own devices if it happens there will be no public shelters as it was during the blitz of course you will be left to yourself at home so therefore you have to very 1980s very thatcher right take responsibility sort yourself out don't expect us to help you you'll be left at home fortified at home so board up the windows or brick up the windows reinforce the exterior walls with sandbags or with wardrobes packed with boxes of books and clothing. Gather, of course, food, water, first aid supplies, and allocate a room in your house, which is known as the fallout room.

And that will be a room which is furthest away from outside walls, so therefore furthest away from all the horror that's unravelling outside. And in that fallout room, you must stay for two whole weeks. But even that wasn't sufficient to protect you. So the advice went further it said inside that fallout room you should also create a little corner a little cubby hole almost what you would do to create that is take interior doors off the hinges and prop them against the wall in this fallout room to create a diagonal and you crawl inside the diagonal space first having you know reinforced it with books mattresses bags of clothing and in that tiny space you must stay with all of your family

for 48 hours which is of course impossible it's a hideous thought but that was the advice because fallout was going to be so strong for the first eight hours that the only protection is to be in your house, and in your house be inside your Fallout room, and inside that Fallout room crawl into what was called the inner refuge. So it's like Russian dolls, inside, inside, inside, and at the very core of it, there will be a family hunkering beneath their kitchen door propped against the wall. Now, of course, that's ludicrous that a kitchen door

with a mattress atop of it and some bags of clothing will protect you from armageddon. But as I said at the beginning, to be fair to the government, they couldn't really give us the truth because that would have caused mass panic and it would potentially have caused us all to become anti-nuclear activists and wanting us to lie down to the Soviet Union, I suppose. And that was unthinkable to the government in the 80s. So they did this feeble advice, of course, but really it was the only advice possible. It was either that or deliver the horrible truth.

You listen to Dan Snurse History here. We're talking about global nuclear war. More coming up? March 2023 marks 20 years since the start of the Iraq war. The war was waged to rid the world of a brutal dictator, yet it would end marred in controversy. So why did the Iraq war go so badly wrong? And what legacies has it left behind today? Well, I'm your host, James Patton Rogers, and every Monday on the Warfare podcast from History Hit, we're exploring a different aspect of this tumultuous period in history.

We'll be asking, what was the role of the UK government and Prime Minister Tony Blair? Could the Secretary of State legally order British forces into Iraq? And could British forces follow that law? And how did ISIS rise from the destruction left behind? But ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the US invasion of Iraq. Join me, James Patton Rogers, on the Warfare podcast from History Hit as we look back on one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. you in your brilliant book talk about someone who actually tried to test the government advice and it was unworkable right this poor guy ben i think he just ends up in his house of food's all moldy there's insects everywhere he's gone gone depressed. I mean, it's just chaos. That's right. We have to point out that Ben was a CND activist, so we can assume that when Ben built his shelter and crawled in, he was probably very ready and very keen to show how hideous it was. But even if he hadn't been a CND activist, I don't see how his conclusion could have been anything different. Ben built a shelter in accordance with government advice, crawled inside it and planned to live there for the designated two weeks. And as you say, Dan, his experience was horrible and quite disgusting. For a start, there were maggots

crawling everywhere. He also, when it came to using the toilet, a horrible topic, but one that's unavoidable if you're talking about human beings being enclosed in a small space he of course used a bucket and he used what we can call poo bags I suppose and he wasn't able to leave the shelter of course because outside would be tainted with fallout so he collected his waste and kept it in a little collection of plastic bags over in the corner of the shelter and as he stayed there in the dim light trying not to you know go mad with boredom he heard a strange whistling sound and he couldn't work out where it was coming from is it some malfunction in the shelter is it the breeze where is that strange whistling sound coming from and he finally realized that this is quite disgusting that it was coming

from his little collection of poo bags because the waste inside the bags was giving off gases and the gas was struggling to escape from the poo bags. So those hideous little bags over in the corner were whistling and farting, basically, and he was stuck in there with them, with whistling poo bags and a heap of maggots and condensation and dampness everywhere. So that is what the government would expect us to

do for two whole weeks good i mean i genuinely during last year i thought a lot about this and got very stressed and depressed about nuclear exchange and i live quite near portsmouth naval base on the south coast so i was going to walk down with my kids and my wife and just hold hands stand on the beach and uh hope that we all bought it in the first wave because I think living like a slow lingering death like that would not be good. That's true, yes. On my podcast, I've asked people in the past,

email me and tell me what you would do if it happened, if the four minute warning was sounded. A lot of people are quite sturdy and quite determined. I'm going to make my plans and I'm going to survive it. But my opinion would be, as you said, Dan, to hope that I would be taken in a flash in the first wave. I simply would not want to survive because with nuclear war, it's not simply a case of surviving the blast and the fire.

And once that dies down, you can then have the blitz spirit and roll your sleeves up and get back to rebuilding. You've also got the potential collapse of society people becoming brutes basically there'll be no education any longer there will be no music there'll be no art there'll be no it sounds trivial but there'll be no politeness everyone will be in competition with one another for the small amounts of food that are left so there'll be nothing in the world that is decent there won't even be the prospect of a nice hot bath a nice soft bed a nice cup of tea all those basic things which sound trivial but really imagine a life without a nice warm bed and a nice cup of tea at the end of the day all that's gone great culture great art and then all the way down

the pyramid to the very bottom where we look at things like good manners and decency and law and order, everything is gone. So, no, I would certainly not want to survive after that. No podcast, darling. It would be a devastating world. Can you imagine, darling? A world without podcasts. I love the detail that you have, your archival research. You know, ice cream vans, ferries. Tell me about some of the things that the government did kind of think about using. and ferries. Tell me about some of the things that the government did kind of think about using. Well, when it comes to ferries, that's actually quite an interesting story. The idea was in the 60s, the government contracted the ferry companies to build them three special ferries. Now, they were ordinary passenger ferries, but they had special additional features, which would enable

these ferries, if nuclear war broke out, to take government parties on board, go out to sea and basically be floating nuclear bunkers. So they had these ferries built but they of course couldn't just leave them sitting around in case they were ever called upon. So these ferries were painted with the livery of Caledonian McBrain and they were used day-to-day as ordinary passenger ferries. Caledonian McBrain and they were used day to day as ordinary passenger ferries. Caledonian McBrain still exists today, still do the same routes. So back in the Cold War, three of their ferries would have been slightly different. You'd have had to have been quite eagle-eyed to notice the differences. When the cars rolled onto the ferry, behind them the deck could have been sealed

by huge blast doors. There were nozzles on board which could hose down the outside of the ship to try and get any contamination off. So these ferries were just working every day, shuttling around between Oban and Largs, doing their thing. But if it had happened, they would have been ready to receive small government parties

who would have sailed around the sea locks of Scotland, hoping to avoid nuclear war and and of course being mobile, so if a fallout cloud was approaching, they could have sailed away from it in theory. And then when things had hopefully improved, when fallout levels had decreased, the idea was this ferry would dock, the government party would disembark,

and they would then hopefully try and link up with other surviving parties from across the country and try and resurrect some kind of government across Britain. So when we think of our politicians housing in bunkers during a nuclear war, not all of them would have been in bunkers. Some of them would have been on board a nice little ferry in the Scottish sea locks. But what I don't understand about that theory is a Soviet ballistic submarine missile boat in the North Sea. You have like a 90 second warning of a launch and then a gigantic airburst.

How were the politicians going to get to Oban? Like, I guess they'd have gone there a few days earlier when things were looking a bit tense. Yes, when it came to nuclear war planning, the planners were always, I suppose you could call it a bit of a cheat. They always wrote into the plans that we will have lots and lots of warning because if they had said, well, we'll have four minutes warning or 90 second warning from a sub, then of course the plan is useless and they're out of a job. So to paraphrase Taylor Swift, I say that planners got to plan. They've got to make their plans feasible, at least on paper. So they always very generously and very conveniently wrote into the plans that we will have warning, we will have days, perhaps weeks, perhaps even months of warning. Because one of the scenarios they often entertained is that there will be

a conventional war between the Soviet Union and NATO, which will then gradually escalate to nuclear. So they certainly didn't like entertaining the prospect of everyone's going about their daily work when suddenly there's a flash in the sky and that's us gone. They always very generously wove months or weeks of warning period into all their plans, making it easier for themselves. Okay, a very summer of 1914. Speaking of those plans, I love the idea of just getting the politicians to places. And you point out they were all told being conspicuous. If you're a politician and you're like heading for the big bunker under Wiltshire or legs or open to get on a nice cruise ship, the key thing is don't spread panic.

Don't let anyone know you're doing it. So you're just like walking along through London, whistling with your bag of sandwiches, going to try and escape a nuclear apocalypse. That's true. The government were terrified of panic. And this was the same before the Second World War. There were lots of studies done prior to the Blitz, which predicted absolute panic. And as we know, that didn't happen. There was no mass panic. But nonetheless, we feared, or the government feared, that in the case of a nuclear war, panic.

And when you have panic, of course, you can't control the population. And that's, of course, their biggest fear, probably now and in the case of a nuclear war, panic. And when you have panic, of course, you can't control the population. And that's, of course, their biggest fear, probably now and in the case of war. Anarchy, lawlessness, a population out of control, a population you no longer fear any sanction from the government or the authorities. So in the period of tension leading up to a nuclear war, they had planned to try and keep us, the population contained in our homes. So if there was a recognised warning period where things were declining, things were deteriorating, they would have encouraged us to stay at home. Schools would have been closed, for example.

People would be encouraged to stay at home to, as I said earlier, fortify the home. So your focus would be on staying where you are and building yourself some kind of protection. In order to deter people from trying to flee, the Protecting Survivors Vice delivered a bit of a threat, actually, which said if you do flee, if you do leave your home and you pitch up in some other local authority area, they're under no obligation to help you. So they won't house you. They're not obliged to feed you. So if you leave your home, you're on your own own so they try to frighten people and just staying put and they would also have closed the roads as well when we got to the final stages before I suppose attack motorways for example would have been closed they would have been called essential service routes and in theory left free and open for official use they didn't want us pesky civilians clogging the place up with traffic jams. Some people had wondered, well, if we can't escape the city through the motorways, let's escape

through, you know, the back roads and the small roads. And the thinking was, well, let them. If everyone tries to flee on these back roads, they'll very soon create gridlock and they'll basically do us a favour, they'll block the roads for us. So really the emphasis was keep us at home and leave the politicians and the authorities free to go about and do their thing. There's a temptation, isn't there, to sort of almost laugh at this stuff. I've always wondered, listening to your work, as you say, planners get a plan, right? The Taylor Swift point.

Even in the 90s and the noughties and certainly more recently, are people still planning? Are these plans still out there? People blow the dust off them and they're like, okay, what's our hydrogen bomb plan here? Yes, we can assume that right now there are still people in Whitehall or in local councils across the country making plans for nuclear war. Towards the end of the Cold War, of course, after Chernobyl in particular, a lot of civil defence planning spread out beyond just nuclear war into nuclear disaster. Obviously, Chernobyl opened our minds to that horror.

So we had to look at things like what if when we're transporting nuclear fuel in the country, what if there's a road or rail accident? So planning did expand beyond nuclear war into nuclear disaster, nuclear accidents. And of course, these days, there's lots of planning about terrorism. So towards the end of the Cold War, planners tried to, as I say, expand it to maybe lessen our fears. It's not just nuclear war. There are a whole host of other things which should go wrong. Now, these other things, of course, terrorism, nuclear accident are horrific in their own

right, but they're not apocalyptic as a nuclear war would be. So even though other horrors were introduced to us in the latter part of the Cold War, they were smaller horrors, if that makes sense. But yes, plans are still going on now. The only reason we are talking about them here is because they are currently secret. And we can assume that in 50 years time, if we're still around, then they will be released to the National Archives and there'll be some podcaster in 50 years time who will sit down and discuss those plans. But yes, we don't know what the current plans are. If I could mention again, the idea of putting government parties on the nuclear ferries, that was known as the Python plan. The idea was split everyone up into little groups and scatter them around the country.

Don't have all your eggs in one basket. And if everyone's scattered around the country, there is a hope that at least some of them will survive. Well, one of my friends and colleagues, Mike Kenner, who's a Cold War researcher, he revealed a lot of the secrets about Python and where these locations would be. He said, though, when he spoke to the cabinet office, that they couldn't reveal too much information because there are similar plans going on these days. And cabinet office that they couldn't reveal too much information because there are similar plans going on these days and of course they can't talk about that they can't give away the location certainly so we can assume that there is a current day version of the python plan where we're planning to send our central government disperse it in small groups all around

the country but of course we don't know what that plan is we don't know where they will be we don't know if they will be on a caledonian McBrain ferry. Probably not, as they're very unreliable these days. But yes, certainly there is stuff going on just now, but the little people like us won't know about it for a long, long time. So Julie, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. That was excellent. Tell us then about your book. My book is Attack Warning Red, How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War, and it's out on the 6th of April. And it's very good. And don't forget to go and subscribe to the Atomic Hobo podcast because it's brilliant. So thanks for coming on the podcast, Julie.

Thank you, Dan. you