Failure of UK Civil Defence Policy

The Politics of UK Civil Defence

Kevin Hall

January 7, 2013

Contents1 Introduction 2

1.1 Reduction or Modernisation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2 New Policy of the 1960s 32.1 Abolition of the Civil Defence Corps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3 Policy in the 1970s 53.1 Indivisible from Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63.2 Redrawing the Hopelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83.3 Government Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93.4 Cost Cutting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

4 Would you ever get to Hospital? 11

5 Reasons to be Fearful. . . 13

A Protect and Survive, background notes 14

List of Tables1 Civil Defence—Personnel Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Protect and Survive—Short Films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 1968-69 – Home Defence Spending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 1969-70 – Home Defence Spending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

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1 IntroductionFrom the middle to the end of the Cold War (1970-90), Civil Defence become almostentirely rewritten as “Home Defence;” Civil Defence had not officially changed muchin character since 19491 in that it was still organised around giving aid and assistance tothe civil population during war or emergency. However in the intervening time changesboth domestic and foreign would ensure that Civil Defence would be forever changed.Even by the 1950s events were already overtaking the premise of the Civil DefenceAct; Duncan Sandys, Minister for Defence, produced a White Paper in 1957 whichadmitted to there being “no defence against the atomic bomb” and clearly signallingchange in what had been known as Civil Defence. By 1972 the Home Secretary hadfinished his review of civil defence[1].

1.1 Reduction or Modernisation?There can be little doubt that by the early 1960s the proliferation and effectiveness ofnuclear weapons was undermining the premise of civil defence in the eyes of some. Thewartime model of civil defence was becoming an uncomfortable fit in the nuclear age.This left Britain with a serious dilemma; it wasn’t possible to say there was no defenceagainst nuclear attack because it undermined the idea of deterrence, because a deterrentthat a government wouldn’t use was no more than an expensive bluff. However nogovernment could dream of publically admitting the write-off of the population withoutundermining its support for the nuclear deterrent.

The commitment to civil defence ultimately divided into two camps; the first saidsome help is better than none at all and the second saw civil defence as being nothingmore than thinly disguised propaganda to make nuclear war seem less than devastat-ing since it was possible to construct some defence against it[2]. It does not requirescratching far enough under the surface to reveal one basic truth of the time: beyondall the other arguments the central objective of the government was in ensuring nationalsurvival which is wholly distinct from survival of the nation; it made a clear separationfrom the survival of a political body and the people which it was meant to represent.

However, the potential for inflicting ruin on an adversary had been increasing tothe point when President Johnson’s administration began to call it “Mutual AssuredDestruction”[3], the point of having Civil Defence was becoming arguably moot. Thehydrogen bomb and the overwhelming number of speculative targets for the USSR todestroy meant in the UK began to give the impression that attempts at providing tradi-tional Civil Defence were futile.

An additional problem with having a large standing Civil Defence Corps was intheir “survivability” during and after nuclear attack. Essentially the resources of a civildefence organisation might not survive the initial attack and there were few guaranteesavailable to ensure this (particularly as they were nearly all volunteers). For example ifthe bulk of personnel and their stores relate closely to likely attack data then it seemsvery likely that in the very early stages of a nuclear attack most members of the CivilDefence Corps would be among the first casualties.

Of course, there were additional practical problems with Civil Defence in the way ithad been established in 1949. The high turnover of staff and poor retention rates of thisunpaid, voluntary service undermined its effectiveness. The high turnover meant thatthe CD Corps was constantly losing vital skills and therefore the training costs were

1with the implementation of the Civil Defence Act 1948

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Date§ Numbers Recruits Net Loss SourceMay 04, 1950 24,649 3,264 – The Times, p 8Jul 26, 1950 31,809‡ 7,160 – The Times, p 4Feb 16, 1951 110,000 – – The Times, p 3Nov 19, 1951 159,903 – – The Times, p 3Aug 15, 1952 205,392 4,043 – The Times, p 3Nov 17, 1952 221,997 8,265 – The Times, p 3Apr 22, 1953 253,940 >9,000 – The Times, p 3Jan 29, 1954 302,406 – – The Times, p 2May 09, 1955 334,819 3,628 – The Times, p 4May 02, 1956 336,265 7,534 10,105 The Times, p 6May 03, 1957 327,773 10,905 1,931 The Times, p 3Nov 13, 1957 321,751 6,770 2,161 The Times, p 13Nov 11, 1959 328,473 – >2,500 The Times, p 7Aug 10, 1960 321,301 6,559 – The Times, p 6June 2, 1961 320,580 7,987 2,498 The Times, p 9Mar 9, 1963 294,531 16,419 30,928 The Times, p 5Sept 3, 1963 262,361 7,652 8,495 The Times, p 16Nov 26, 1964 211,570 – 13,264 The Times, p 8Dec 15, 1966 >122,000 – – The Times, p 6

Table 1: Civil Defence—Personnel Numbers§Date of publication in The Times

Note— the figures do not include numbers for Industrial Civil Defence, Auxiliary Fire Service or any othervoluntary branches

¶Recruits and Net Loss are indicated for the preceding quarter.‡End of June (30th)

extremely high. As volunteers were enlisted as civilians, they did not have the con-tractual obligations of the Territorial Army until the early 1960s when CD volunteerswere required to complete 50 hours of training per year. As volunteers were not legallyobligated to a length of service or even mandatory participation there were never anyguarantees that even if most of the corps survived a nuclear attack they would actuallyemerge as an effective force.

The Civil Defence Corps was also trying to recruit at a time when people hadmuch less free time than they do now. Shift work was more common, more jobs werein industry and manufacturing and the physical slog of an average week would nothave inspired popular enthusiasm for unpaid, voluntary work. As things turned out bythe end of the 1960s the practical limitations of civil defence were about to becomeirrelevant.

2 New Policy of the 1960sAlthough it is often remarked that the end of formal civil defence came about in 1968and the cessation of the Civil Defence Corps, the gradual elimination of them happenedsome time before.

The post-war civil defence organisation was was enacted as part of the Civil De-fence Act 1948 to “provide a statutory basis for a new civil defence organisation.[4]”However within only a few years of the revival of civil defence, there was growingunease as to the point of it, particularly after the USSR exploded their first hydrogen

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bomb in 1954. Coventry City Council passed a resolution saying “[that] civil defenceis a waste of time and public money in view of the reports of the effects of the hydrogenbomb.[5]”

A similar incident occurred in 1957 when St. Pancras Borough Council when theirgeneral purposes committee called to end civil defence, describing it as a “waste ofmoney” and hoped that other councils would follow suit (similarly to the “NuclearFree Zones” in the 1980s[6]) and that the Government “might be impressed with theurgency of abolishing all forms of atomic and hydrogen bomb warfare.”[7]

In 1966 the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, announced the results of a review of theHome Defence Force” and it is in this review that possibly the most influential changeof policy occurred. In its attempt to reduce the cost of Civil Defence, Jenkins said that:

“The Government have decided to restrict preparations for nuclear attackto those that would likely to make a significant contribution to nationalsurvival[8]”

It is important to emphasis the phrase “. . . significant contribution to national sur-vival” because this idea of national survival and what national survival is would be-come a dominant theme of all UK civil defence during the latter half of the Cold Warright up to the final stand-down of the UKWMO2.

The first cuts of Civil Defence in February 1966 leading up to this radical shake-upin the policy of it was to cut the numbers of volunteers in the CD Corps. At the timethe Home Secretary said that he wanted to “substantially” reduce the numbers in CDfrom 80,000 in England and 30,000 in Scotland. In drawing to a close this era of civildefence and embracing national survival as the central objective, the Government alsobegan to change it’s thinking on shelters and evacuation if Britain should come undernuclear attack. The Government concluded that “the best protection against radioactivefall-out would be to stay in their homes and act on advice given.[9]”

By December 1966 much of this policy was brought before the Commons by theHome Secretary which finalised the ideas presented the previous February. Again, theidea of national survival and what that would mean was key to the plans. The HomeSecretary said:

“The future role of the corps will be to help local authorities to man thecontrol system which is the system of government in an emergency.[10]”

The announcements made in 1966 would form the nucleus of what would becomecivil defence throughout the 1970s and 80s. These can be summarised as:

• The prime purpose of civil defence became National Survival—arguably sur-vival of the State over that of the individual

• A focus on those members of the community which would significantly con-tribute to National Survival therefore already discarding large parts of the popu-lation

• The future of formal civil defence resources was in staffing the control systemwhich would become the system of government in an emergency—again the onlyreal value this would have is in the concept of National Survival

2UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation

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• “Stay at Home.” It is clearly stated that the government expects the populationto seek refuge from the effects of nuclear attack in their own homes and to obeyofficial advice. This implies the abandonment of evacuation and/or shelters forthe population. The statement also starts spreading the common falsehood ofhow the average home provides the best protection against fall-out which wouldgo on to mislead the public for years to come

With effect from 1966 both the manpower of the Civil Defence Corps was to bereduced and also spending on it was to be cut to around £19.7M with further smallercuts in the following years, however this would be small beer compared to the actionstaken in 1968.

2.1 Abolition of the Civil Defence CorpsIn the light of the 1966 policy decisions on civil defence, Prime Minister Harold Wilsonannounces to the House of Commons that the Civil Defence Corps is to be abolishedand placed in a “care and maintenance” mode[11]. It is quite telling that in the PrimeMinister’s speech he makes no other reference for the cull of civil defence other thanto cut spending. There was nothing else on offer as a substitute for the loss of theCorps—a clear indication that the ideas of 1966 had gained maturity and was in factall that remained of Britain’s commitment to civil defence.

Policy decisions aside, the budget for Civil Defence was gutted—in 1968 the bud-get was reduced from £25 million to only £3 million[12]. At a stroke this left no moneyfor updating training or equipment and only one training college was left (Easingwold,Yorkshire).

3 Policy in the 1970sAfter the elimination of the Civil Defence Corps in 1968, the British approach to CivilDefence and to government policy on surviving nuclear attack altered radically. By the1970s the role of Civil Defence was being absorbed into nuclear war-fighting plans,that “Home Defence” was in fact now part of the policy of nuclear deterrence[13].There can be little doubt that from the 1970s internal dissent became a major concernregarding preparations for war[14] as the government could see that protest against warmight severely hinder the military’s ability to operate.

It’s clear from commentators of the time that this redefinition of civil defence andits purpose carried a high moral price. Firstly it politicised civil defence because itmade it part of Britain’s policy of deterrence and that of NATO. Second, the natureof civil defence being encouraged (or the flavour of it) was closer to that of wartimepropaganda[15], documents such as Protect and Survive and the measures being out-lined by ministers in Parliament was arguably designed to make the idea of nuclearwar less threatening, that survival was possible and, taken to its logical conclusion, theNATO allies could “win” a nuclear war.

The miring of civil defence in politics dragged it far from the idea that it’s purposewas essentially humane and non-partisan; that civil defence was an extension of police,fire and medical services to aid the population in times of accident, disaster or theeffects of war but not to participate in them. In bringing civil defence into politics itwas clear that it now how a dual function in being both part of war preparations (i.e.part of “deterrence”) and to be part of the propaganda arm of justifying deterrence. As

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Christopher Hitchens said in 1980 “it is to bamboozle a public into accepting a level ofrisk it would never accept in one go”.

3.1 Indivisible from FailureThe political dimension of civil defence during the 1970s made it impossible to distin-guish it from being separate from a war-fighting role. The fact that civil defence wasrelegated to this position ensured that its measures at protecting the public were nextto useless[16] and that civil defence in the United Kingdom became little more thanpaper-exercises with no significant sums of money being spent.

The first major change in Civil Defence policy came about under the governmentof Edward Heath. The Heath administration began to identify internal unrest and insur-gency with being what was now being called “Home Defence” perhaps to emphasisethe shift in focus. The Miners’ strike of 1974 brought this to ahead when wartimecontingencies were brought in[17], the same provisions as had been made under theauspices of Civil/Home Defence. The Miners’ strike brought with it the serious threatof widespread disruption both economically and politically because of power-shortageacross the UK. Internal unrest and possible insurgency led to this being regarded asthe number one priority in Home Defence preparations; it is strange that revival ofUK civil defence was in part brought about because of governmental suspicion of theBritish population and the broadening of what dissent meant.

(Note: The Civil Contingencies Unit formed by the Heath government of the 1970sexists to this day[18].)

This change in policy did not alter greatly when Harold Wilson’s (and later JamesCallaghan’s) Labour government took over from Edward Heath. In fact the deepeningeconomic and social crisis started to have a very significant impact on official policywhen civil unrest and internal divisions began to be regarded as a very real threat to thesecurity of the United Kingdom[19].

The first major Civil Defence project undertaken by Labour was the productionof Protect and Survive both as a series of films/radio announcements and a bookletwhich could also be published in newspapers (see Appendix. 1). In 1975 Protect andSurvive was first seen as a “Restricted” circular sent to Emergency Planning Officersfor review and comment[20]. The films were made by the same company which madethe “Charley Says. . . ” Public Information Films for children. The narration of the filmswas read by Patrick Allen, the phrases used were simple, clear and bold.

Protect and Survive became symptomatic of where Civil Defence policy was duringthis period of the Cold War. Firstly there was a lack of money being put into Civil De-fence. Stan Openshaw notes that in 1983 the Civil Defence budget stood at £45 millioncompared to £42 million in 1938[21]. In real terms the actual value of Civil Defencefunding had hardly ever been less and the UK’s ability to deal with civil disaster (suchas fire, chemical spill, etc) had hardly been worse—not helped by the fact it is illegal touse money from civil defence grants for peacetime measures3. Arguably Protect andSurvive itself was no more than a reworking of much older government advice. DuncanCampbell (in Openshaw’s Doomsday) notes that the Protect and Survive booklet wasactually very similar to the Air Raid Precaution advice that had been published as farback as 1938[22].

The change in Civil Defence became apparent to government planners for a numberof reasons. The first major problem they had was that almost no preparations could

3This is probably a measure that has now changed under the 2001 Civil Defence (Grants) Act.

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even partially mitigate the effects of a large Soviet attack against the UK with nuclearweapons[23]. Until the 1970s it had largely been omitted from official advice to thepublic that given the scale of the estimate Soviet attack, at least 200 megatons, thescale of destruction and loss of life would make any peacetime preparations almostcompletely irrelevant.

This was a bitter pill to swallow, not least that the public had been led to believethat in a nuclear war there were steps that could be taken and lives would be saved.With Protect and Survive the government was making it all too clear that because ofthe numbers involved and the size of attack expected, government advice consisted oflittle more than telling people to remain at home.

The abandonment of Civil Defence came about after a review of it in 1967 whichhad been ordered by Harold Wilson. Wilson’s government took the decision to standdown the Civil Defence Corps and most of the life-saving and rescue measures appar-ently to save money. In truth it seems more probable that in terms of national survivaland the long-term reconstruction after a nuclear war, Civil Defence found itself withno part to play. Callously the government decision not to invest in dealing with theimmediate effects of nuclear attack had more to do with the possibility that there wasnothing you could do; that the large numbers of trapped and injured would die anywayas they would completely overwhelm the means to care for them. As a certain numberof people would survive anyway, it seems likely that the government could not foreseea situation where the Civil Defence apparatus would actually prove effective. After theCivil Defence Corps was stood down in January 1968, communities were left to lookafter themselves during a nuclear attack. This point of view came about because ofgovernment policy[24].

The job of Civil Defence was made all the harder by not wanting to expose gov-ernment policy of deterrence to be nothing more than a sham. The sheer number ofspeculative targets for the Soviets to attack would mean Britain could expect heavierdestruction per square mile than anywhere in Western Europe4. It would suggest that ifdeterrence failed and nuclear war broke out, it would very quickly escalate to makingBritain one of the first major casualties.

The promotion of “Home Defence” was essentially a polite way of detailing whatgovernment priorities were. In the Home Office Emergency Circular (1977), (Trainingfor Scientific Advisors), these were listed as[25]:

1. To secure the United Kingdom against internal threat

2. To mitigate as far as is practicable the effects of any direct attack on the UnitedKingdom involving the use of conventional, nuclear, biological or chemical weapons

3. To provide alternative machinery of Government at all levels to increase theprospects of and to direct national survival and

4. to enhance the basis for national recovery in the post-attack period

Critically, as far as the government was concerned, controlling internal threats wasthe first priority in its description of Home Defence. In fact the severity of governmen-tal powers in post-nuclear Britain even aroused interest in the mainstream media by the1980s[26].

4See The War Game and Openshaw’s Doomsday

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Perhaps rather more worryingly the fate of the civilian population is essentiallycompletely absent from this list of priorities. The emphasis is clearly based on main-taining government and increasing the chances of “national survival” and it is here iswhat draws the attention to one of the basic failures in the premise of civil defence.

The work of life-saving is something missing in the list of governmental priorities.The basic problem (that everyone from Thompson, Campbell and Openshaw have allpointed out is that the government will go underground and survive and the governedwill stay on top5 with a few old doors resting against an inside wall and have to taketheir chances. Given the almost total absurdity of the plan it is hard to see what le-gitimacy the remaining government would have left over a burnt, starved, blasted andirradiated population.

3.2 Redrawing the HopelessnessDuring the 1970s the Home Office drew up plans for how Britain would be governedafter nuclear attack. The plans were treated cautiously because the surviving populationwould have been living under rule that some would argue would have turned the UKinto a de facto police-state[27]. Selling this idea to the public as a contingency for theaftermath of nuclear war was clearly impossible. Armed police and soldiers were tomaintain public order and that access to vital resources, particularly food and water,were going to be the means of both maintaining discipline in the populous and also asa means to ensure people worked on what the government deemed necessary.

Given that it would have been almost impossible to treat the numbers of trapped andinjured after a nuclear attack, it seems clear from the available evidence that most majorcities were not expected to survive. Although officially the belief was that a nuclearwar would target only military targets (this is the theory of “counterforce” targetting.),the close proximity to cities of these bases and the probability that escalation wouldmean the targeting of of major industrial areas. It seemed impossible that the numberof possible targets and the yield of Soviet atomic weapons would almost surely spellthe end of Britain’s large cities[28].

Both CND and writers such as Edward Thompson dismissed the kind of civil de-fence measures in Protect and Survive as a “cruel confidence trick.” In Edward Thomp-son’s Protest and Survive he said that “current civil defence plans will cost millions oflives[29]” because government advice advocated the “Stay at Home” policy; in Protectand Survive this is further backed up with the threat that “if you leave you home theauthority in the new place will not help you with food, shelter and other essentials[30].”

The stay-put policy and the harsher measures for adopting ad-hoc martial law afteran atomic attack were refined and propagated to the emergency planning officers andother officials towards the end of the 1970s through Emergency Planning Circulars(through the Home Office) but also through mock-exercises such as Scrum-Half andSquare Leg which were to test responses to nuclear attack. These exercises revealedthe extent to what the population could expect from government after attack.

Clearly the government was not expecting order to be maintained easily and thedesignated Wartime Controller (often but not always the peacetime Council Chief Ex-ecutive) would literally have the power of life and death—the expectation was thatCentral Government control would fail or would have already been destroyed6 and thatthe Wartime Controller had almost complete dominion over his district second only

5to paraphrase Robin Cook’s article in Britain and the Bomb (1981)6there is also the possibility that Central Government would have been deliberately dissolved by Parlia-

ment before hostilities

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to the military area commander. It is clear that parliamentary democracy was to besuspended perhaps indefinitely—it is difficult to say for exactly how long because gov-ernment plans did not look very far into the post-attack world.

3.3 Government PolicyBy the mid-70s Government expectations were clear on its policy for nuclear war.In Emergency Circulars the government, particularly the Home Office, could affordto be more forthcoming because the circulars were often on the “Restricted” list—meaning they would end up only in the hands of Emergency Planning Officials. Thewide discrepancies between what the government planned in the circulars and whatit would discuss with the public are clear in Protect and Survive. For example, theProtect and Survive film “Casualties” it’s advice for the treatment of the wounded was:

“listen to your radio, arrangements will be made for the treatment of any-one who is ill or injured, you will be told about what to do, when to do itand how.”[31]

The Emergency Circular itself however deliberately contradicts this. Regional HealthAuthorities and the NHS is instructed only only to:

“treat people who stand a good chance of recovery after minor surgerywithin 7 days.[32]”

Before any conflict had opened, the government’s plans were already consign-ing millions to a squalid and painful death. No one was to be treated for radiationsickness[33] if they had no other injuries. The government acknowledged throughthese circulars that millions of people who had survived the fire and blast would havealready received a fatal dose of radiation and that any medical help would not bringabout recovery. Acute shortages of drugs meant that not even pain-relief would be of-fered to help mitigate the worst of the symptoms. Instead people were instructed tobe cared for at home (by whom? What if “home” was a shattered hulk?) which wasan effective death sentence. The government’s own assessment of why there would beso many radiation cases also contradicts the advice in Protect and Survive. The basicpremise of the “inner refuge” in Protect and Survive was actually based on reasonablygood science in the form of a protection factor[34]. The protection factor was the ideathat varying densities of material would reduce your exposure to radiation, concrete,earth and steel being the best and fibreous materials being the worst.

Unfortunately the government’s expectation for millions to have received a fataldose of radiation implies they did not expect their “inner refuges” to work as recom-mended. In the government booklet Domestic Nuclear Shelters[35] Duncan Campbellnotes notes in War Plan UK that none of the shelters were actually tested[36] and theBMA had no reason to find that the recommended shelters would give any seriousprotection from blast, fire or fall-out[37], they note that the Protect and Survive inner-refuge would give “little protection from fall-out”.

One of the most important questions to consider is why the government was sokeen to avoid treating casualties. Firstly was a lack of money. Throughout the 1970sto the mid 1980s there was very little money for Civil Defence equipment or for stock-piling emergency medical supplies—Britain simply didn’t invest in the wherewithal torecover the Health Service after nuclear attack. Secondly, the Emergency Circular ex-plains that in the days after an attack it did not envisage sending out “valuable” person-nel to treat the sick and injured because levels of fall-out would remain unacceptably

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high for up to 14 days. Again this contradicts the basic premise of Protect and Surviveadvice. Although Protect and Survive claims you will need food and water for up to 14days after an attack, the Casualties film insists that:

“after an attack is over and the all-clear has been sounded arrangementswill be made. . . ”[31]

Although it seems pedantic, under scrutiny there is a gnawing disparity betweenProtect and Survive and the details of the Emergency Circular. It isn’t obvious when theall-clear will be sounded; for example we don’t know whether the all-clear would besounded whether after the danger from further attack has passed or whether the imme-diate danger of fall-out has passed or indeed if the all-clear is ever sounded again. TheProtect and Survive literature notes that the all-clear will be sounded “when the dan-ger from fall-out or further attacks have passed” which doesn’t stipulate exactly whatthe all-clear means. No where in the leaflet or in the films does Protect and Surviveadvise on what to do if the all-clear is never heard—this would be an essential becausethe UKWMO posts which were meant to monitor fall-out were themselves not verywell equipped for long-term survivalthis would be an essential because the UKWMOposts which were meant to monitor fall-out were themselves not very well equippedfor long-term survival. The basic three-person monitoring post was not equipped formore than a 7 day stay, which seems absurd given that the general public are advisedto take cover for 14 days. Given that the primary job of these posts was to monitorfall-out, how would the public know what the local hazards were if the UKWMO postshad packed up and gone home a week before? Additionally, most of the larger UKWMObunkers were only designed for a stay of around three weeks which can only lead toone possible conclusion: such a short time is almost useless for the long term “survivalperiod” but is ideal for its contribution to a nuclear war-fighting role7.

3.4 Cost CuttingIt has been debated for many years why there were so many apparent contradictionsbetween government policy and the sorts of sums the Exchequer was prepared to give.It is difficult to give exact figures on how much was available and how much was spenton Civil Defence, but it seems likely that spending on it reached a peak of £70 millionin 1984[38]. £13.5 million was allocated for Local Authority Grants however thesecould only top £30,000 per grant which according to The Guardian would allow alocal authority to to build a shelter for around 20-30 people.

As an example of how little money was available, the bunker at Pear Tree Housein West Norwood, London spent much of its time in mothballs and that CouncillorSimon Turney said that the doors to the bunker were so ill-fitting they would “need tobe sealed with Sellotape to try and keep fall-out dust out”[39]. In fact this bunker hadlain dormant since 1980’s Operation Square Leg and for more than four years withoutmoney for renovation and maintenance it slowly rotted away.

On paper at least government policy on Civil Defence was aggressive yet that sup-port was never met with increased spending, in fact spending on Civil Defence in the1980s was actually worth less than what was spent in 1938 in real terms citewplukxxx.

However, the actual amount spent on civil defence is also quite misleading as manyof the component parts of “Home Defence” came from many other government bud-gets. The central pillar of civil defence had already been knocked away in 1968 to no

7Check the UKWMO film “Sound an Alarm” which during the post-attack scenes is shown advising theRAF on using airfields near fall-out hazards

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longer provide rescue and life-saving measures in the event of nuclear attack; insteadthe core of what became Home Defence was in the continuation of government andnational survival. The result being is that the large expenditure on measures to protectthe civil population were no longer required. The greater part of the cost for the post-1968 civil defence priorities would be spread amongst different government bodies.The UKWMO was mostly funded by the Home Office, the carrier warning points andsiren system was organised and financed by the Police. Buffer food stores were paidfor by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). Regional governmentheadquarters and those further down the chain were allocated small sums of equippingand building bunkers but on a scale barely sufficient even for the purposes of emer-gency administration. However the bulk of Home Defence of the 1970s and 80s wascontributed by the Ministry of Defence via the armed forces so their own costs wouldnever have been “visible” in the basic costs of civil defence.

4 Would you ever get to Hospital?From the emergency planning information written by government from the 1970s andearly 1980s it is clear that the NHS would not survive nuclear war. In fact Home De-fence Circular (77)1 makes this completely clear[40] and goes onto note how littleof the NHS the government would expect to survive. The BMA also back this up intheir report on nuclear war when comparing the numbers of acute beds and numbers ofprobable casualties[41].

Most government planning from this period never imagined treating large numbersof casualties in hospitals. Even in Protect and Surrive it warns that medical help maybe extremely limitedin the radio version of it (which is siginifcantly different from thebooklet and the Patrick Allen-narrated films) worns that in the event of injury to anymember of your family you may “have to treat yourself without the aid of a doctor ornurse[42]”. This is an odd position to take because it was attempting to reconcile thegovernment argument that they did not know where the attacks would be or the severityof them but by denying people access to medical treatment it seems to betray the factthat they must have already have a reasonably good idea how many casualties therewould be. For example the central assumption in Protect and Survive is that “no onewill know where the safest place will be,” but the pre-planning of medical services bydefinition seems to suggest that they had more idea than they were prepared to disclose.

The question still remains why was the government so pessimistic about the sur-vival of the NHS? Fortunately it is one of the easier aspects of nuclear war to be able toapproximate as there is enough evidence in the literature (Glasstone and Dolan, et al)to be able to predict the effects of heat and overpressure at different distances and thencompare this to population density and the location of hospitals.

In an example from another paper8, Sheffield is a city of some 531,000 people witha population density of 1,395 per km2[43] with an over all area of 368km2. Thereforedrawing blast-rings at various points from ground zero allows an approximation to bemade of both casualties and surviving hospitals. Unfortunately when these figures aremade the prospects of receiving any medical care are not good:

For example, the largest NHS Trust in Sheffield is the Sheffield Teach-ing Hospitals NHS Trust with 1,977 beds[44] (2001) and 4,319 medical

8written by myself and due for completion soon—it uses Sheffield as an example from the BBC film“Threads.”

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staff[45] including all consultants, nurses and other staff. Their main siteat the Northern General Hospital is only two miles from the point of explo-sion (Grid Ref: SK362904) and The Royal Hallamshire Hospital is only 4miles (Grid Ref:SK337869)[46]

What does this mean? In simple terms it indicates that Sheffield has lost nearlyall of its hospital places, almost 2000 are made ineffective out of a city-wide total of2,489[47]. Given that average occupancy of the Sheffield hospitals 2,119[48], when theloss of beds and current occupancy is considered, it would be very likely there wouldbe no hospital places left in the conventional sense of the word.

The loss of life would certainly be compounded by other factors. There would be noambulances to take the most seriously injured to hospitals (or what remains of them)because of acute shortages of fuel, drivers and vehicles and also the fact that manyroads would be blocked because of blast-damage—all eventualities the participantsin Operation Square Leg had predicted. Shortages of drugs, bandages and dressingswould also mean that thousands would die from injuries that normally would be easilytreated. Most hospital equipment would also cease to function once the electricity hadfailed—backup generators for the hospitals would only be able to run as long as theirwas diesel for them and there is no evidence from government circulars at the time thatthey would be provided with more fuel.

The First-Aid Posts which the government imagined would take most of the burdenfrom the hospitals and operate a triage system would probably break-down within a fewdays. The government proposed that most of them would be run by voluntary organisa-tions such as the Red Cross and the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade. The problem wouldhave been many of the volunteers themselves would have been casualties[49]—beingcivilians they had no greater chance of survival than anyone else particularly as thegovernment did not equip them with NBC suits or other protective equipment. It seemsunlikely many would have left their families to station the overrun First-Aid Posts andthat in the Civil Defence plans of the 70s and 80s there was never any money to buildreserves of equipment and supplies to run them[50]. In fact throughout the early 1980sthe UK budget for Defence barely kept pace with inflation.

One very curious idea being considered in the mid-80s was filling up steel shippingcontainers with basic medical supplies[51] and distributing them all over the UK. Thisplan ran into difficulties because of the same reasons the MAFF food reserves did. TheMAFF admitted that the “Strategic Food Reserves” could provide neither a balanceddiet or feed the potential numbers of survivors, in which case many commentatorswondered what was the point in the first place? Also such were the kind of flimsybuildings used for the MAFF stockpile most wouldn’t survive the effects of the initialattack[52]. Also such were the kind of flimsy buildings used for the MAFF stockpilemost wouldn’t survive the effects of the initial attack[53]. The MAFF food reserves werea gesture and like filling up old containers with excess bandages and dressings this planprobably came to nothing because these tokens that became an embarrassment and apotential source of trouble; when some of the MAFF stocks were liquidated in 1964 theycaused an outbreak of Typhus in Aberdeen when tins of cornedbeef were sold back tothe food trade. MAFF were apparently left with over 1400 tons of suspect cornedbeef— it took a further two years before the government reached agreement with the foodtrade on his to dispose of it. It is unknown how useful the MAFF stocks would havebeen in a real emergency.

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5 Reasons to be Fearful. . .After the “Spies for Peace” fiasco of 1963 when the existance of the RSGs and their staffwas revealed[54], the nature of Civil Defence would be permanently changed. Spies forPeace was a critical juncture in the evolution of Civil Defence because it demonstratedto the public for the first time how wide the gulf was between the provision governmenthad made for itself and the provision it had made for the public. The revelations of Spiesfor Peace probably dealt the Civil Defence Corps and the whole cause of civil defencea fatal blow, cynicism and mistrust had been born and there was no going back.

The discovery of the elaborate system of bunkers and shelters for central and re-gional government reinforced twin beliefs the public had; firstly the government hasprimarily concerned about its own survival and that of a self-selecting elite, and sec-ondly the general public were largely “expendable” in nuclear war. This serious con-flict gave rise to a sense of being horribly betrayed by government but it also caused thegrowth of an idea that the government was at best, hopelessly naıve about the outcomeof nuclear war.

The 1960s gave rise to two major problems concerning Civil Defence. The first wasthat the lack of preparations on a country-wide scale could only give the impressionthat the government already knew that a large Soviet strike would produce levels ofdeath and destruction that they could not mitigate against. This put the government inthe extremely difficult situation of maintaining a “deterrent” policy whilst at the sametime knowing the use of nuclear weapons would be suicidal. The UK maintained toomany targets and was too close to the USSR not to escape complete reprisal for anynuclear attack the UK or NATO may have launched. The UK was also too importantto the United States not to make her a critical target in any nuclear war. Before thetechnology to build effective military satellites was available, Britain’s listening andmonitoring stations at Menwith Hill, Fylingdales and GCHQ were vital NATO resources.

The second problem was that large scale Civil Defence could have been seen asunnecessarily provocative by the USSR. There was always a danger that Civil Defencemeasures could be seen as part of a deterrent by a potential aggressor could thereforeencourage a pre-emptive strike. It was part of the doctrine of nuclear war fighting that amajor goal was to deprive an opponent of the means to reestablish itself after an attack.One of the key means of surviving an attack was Civil Defence so it made sense froman aggressors point of view to see these as part of a deterrent.

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1. Nuclear Explosions Explained 1:35 The dangers of atomic weapons2. The Warnings 2:53 The attack, fall-out and all-clear

warnings3. What To Do When the Warnings

Sound2:28 An “immediate action” drill

4. Stay at Home 1:40 A warning never to leave your home5. Choosing a Fall-Out Room 2:06 How to choose a safe room to shel-

ter in6. Refuges 3:54 How to build an “inner-refuge”7. Materials to use for your fall-out

room and refuge1:55 Types of material to resist radiation

8. Make your fall-out room andrefuge NOW

4:42 Action to take to prepare for an at-tack

9. What to put in your fall-outroom

3:03 A summary of fall-out room essen-tials

10. Action After Warnings 4:13 A more detailed “immediate ac-tion” drill

11. Water and Food 2:41 What water and food you need for14 days

12. Sanitation 1:33 Makeshift toilet arrangements13. Fire Precautions 2:02 How to tackle fires and why14. The Importance of your Radio 1:20 How a portable radio is a vital aid15. Life Under Fall-Out Conditions 2:51 How to live during the worst of the

attack16. What to do after an Attack 2:29 Steps to take after the all-clear17. Sanitation Care 2:40 Essential hygiene18. Water Consumption 1:28 Safeguarding and rationing water19. Food Consumption 1:40 Rationing food20. Casualties 1:27 Dealing with injured and any deaths

Table 2: Protect and Survive—Short Films

A Protect and Survive, background notesProtect and Survive was a series of public information films and printed literature de-signed to advise the public on what to do in the event of nuclear attack. There wasa series of 20 short films made that were to be shown on all channels during a timeof increasing tension. Protect and Survive has been referred to in numerous televisionprogrammes such as Threads, The Young Ones and I Love the 80s (all BBC 2). Thebooklet is still available from the Central Office of Information’s “Documents on De-mand” service through http://www.tso.co.uk, ISBN: 0113407289. The filmsare available on video, ASIN: B00005ATG7, Catalogue number: DD3496.

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References[1] The Times.

Civil defence.The Times, page 6, 28 January 1972.

[2] Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (in Russian).British Government’s Measures on Anti-Nuclear Civil Defence.BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 4 August 1980.From the article: As the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ points out, the government [the home

service has: “the Thatcher government, fanning war psychosis”] intends toincrease civil defence spending by L20,000,000 in the near future.

[3] Secretary of Defense William Perry.Pursuing a Strategy of Mutual Assured Safety.http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/1995/

s19950105-perry.html, Jan 1 1995.Perry describes MAD thus: “MAD has been compared to two men standing 10

feet apart, each of them holding a revolver pointed at the other man’s head.The revolver is loaded, their fingers are on the trigger, quivering, and they areshouting insults at each other. This vivid metaphor captures the mutual terrorthat was at the base of our security policy during the Cold War.”.

[4] The Times.Parliament and politics.The Times, page 12, 3 January 1949.

[5] The Times.News in brief.The Times, page 3, 23 April 1954.

[6] The Times.Protests grow in CND campaign.The Times, page 1, 26 October 1981.

[7] The Times.Motion to end Civil Defence.The Times, page 3, 16 April 1957.

[8] The Times.Role of the Home Defence Force.The Times, page 12, 3 February 1966.The full quote is:

“The Government have decided to restrict preparations for nuclearattack to those that would likely to make a significant contribu-tion to national survival. That would allow appreciable savings.The Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Scotland are toconsult with local authorities to settle the details.”

It is important to note the significance of “. . . would allow appreciable sav-ings”.

[9] The Times.Role of the Home Defence Force.The Times, page 12, 3 February 1966.

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[10] The Times.Civil Defence Reductions.The Times, page 6, 3 December 1966.

[11] The Times.The cuts to make devaluation work.The Times, page 7, 17 January 1968.Prime Minister Harold Wilson announces to Parliament a large range of cuts in

many budgets across government departments in the light of the devaluationof Sterling. Reporting to the Commons, Wilson said:

“Now I turn to Home Department Services, including HomeDefence. We have decided to reduce Home Defence—(CivilDefence)—to a care and maintenance basis, with a saving of about£14m. in 1968-69 and £20m. in 1969-70 and in subsequent years.This will involve the disbandment of the Civil Defence Corps, theAuxillary Fire Service and Army Volunteer Reserve Category III.”

Total as at 31/12/67 £27MReductions £14MRevised Total £13M

Table 3: 1968-69 – Home Defence Spending(1967 Survey Prices)

Total as at 31/12/67 £27MReductions £20MRevised Total £7M

Table 4: 1969-70 – Home Defence Spending(1967 Survey Prices)

Notes above show the reduction in spending projected by Wilson in 1968.

[12] The Guardian.Thursday people: Rustic’s nuclear retreat.The Guardian, 18 December 1986.

[13] Duncan Campbell.Britain and the Bomb, volume 3, chapter The Dress Rehearsal, page 63.New Statesman, 1981.In the article Campbell notes a Government circular on Essential Service Routes

and how it was considered essential to keep them clear for the “transition towar” directly relating Home Defence preparations to their part in war-fighting.

[14] Duncan Campbell.Britain and the Bomb, volume 3, chapter The Dress Rehearsal, page 61.New Statesman, 1981.In the article Campbell notes that issuing of CS Gas became an essential means

of controlling order during 1978’s civil defence exercise Scrum Half.

[15] Christopher Hitchens.A do-it-yourself guide to death.

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New Statesman, page 19, 27 June 1980.Hitchens’ said: “The whole exercise reeks of the worst sub-Churchillian postur-

ing”.

[16] Philip Bolsover.Doomsday refuge.Civil Defence: The cruellist confidence trick, pages 11–13, 1980.In this CND booklet Philip Bolsover attacks the premise of “Protect and Survive”.

[17] Duncan Campbell.War Plan UK, page 203.Burnett, 1982.See Campbell’s note about “Martial Order.”.

[18] http://www.ukresilience.info/home.htm.

[19] The Home Office.ES3/76 Briefing Material for Wartime Controllers, 1976.This document contained controversial guidance on matters such as firing squads,

the maintenance of law and order and executions.

[20] The Home Office.ES9/76 Emergency Circular, 1976.This was a revised version of the 1963 document.

[21] Stan Openshaw, Philip Steadman and Owen Greene.Doomsday. Britain after a nuclear attack, page 226.Oxford. Blackwell, 1983.


[23] Duncan Campbell.War Plan UK, page 170.Burnett, 1982.Campbell notes that the 200MT attack could actually be much higher (see Open-

shaw’s Doomsday – Britain After Nuclear Attack).

[24] Duncan Campbell.War Plan UK, pages 132–133.Burnett, 1982.

[25] The Home Office.Training for Scientific Advisors.Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, 1977.chapter 1, para 1.3.

[26] The Guardian.In time of final crisis / government’s wartime emergency powers legislation.The Guardian, 6 September 1985.

“But the plans that Whitehall has secretly agreed during Mr LeonBrittan’s troubled stay at the Home Office go far beyond anythingthat is allowed for in existing emergency powers legislation andbeyond anything that has ever been imposed by Westminster inwar or peace, even on Ireland.”

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.

[27] Duncan Campbell.War Plan UK, page 203.Burnett, 1982.See Campbell’s note about “Martial Order.”.

[28] Duncan Campbell.War Plan UK, page 57.Burnett, 1982.Campbell notes that the 200MT attack could actually be much higher (see Open-


[29] EP Thompson.Protest and Survive, page 222.Penguin, 1980.

[30] The Central Office of Information.Protect and Survive, 1975.ASIN: B00005ATG7, Catalogue number: DD3496, videocassette.

[31] The Central Office of Information.Protect and Survive — Casualties, 1975.ASIN: B00005ATG7, Catalogue number: DD3496, videocassette.

[32] British Medical Association.Medical Effects of Nuclear War, page 173.Wiley, 1983.Quoted in Home Defence Circular HDC (77) 1.

[33] The Home Office.ES(77)1 Home Defence Circular, 1976.See para 62.

[34] British Medical Association.Medical Effects of Nuclear War, page 75.Wiley, 1983.

[35] The Home Office.Domestic Nuclear Shelters, 1981.

[36] Duncan Campbell.War Plan UK, page 455.Burnett, 1982.

[37] British Medical Association.Medical Effects of Nuclear War, page 122.Wiley, 1983.

[38] Paul Brown.Planning for the Run Up to Nuclear War.The Guardian, August 15 1984.

[39] The Guardian.At Home Week in the Nuclear Bunkers.The Guardian, September 18 1984.

[40] The Home Office.ES(77)1 Home Defence Circular, 1976.See para XX.

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[41] British Medical Association.Medical Effects of Nuclear War, page 122.Wiley, 1983.Need more details here...

[42] The Central Office of Information.Protect and Survive, 1975.Radio version with male and female announcers can be obtained from the Impe-

rial War Museum, London.

[43] Office for National Statistics; General Register Office for Scotland; Northern Ire-land Statistics and Research Agency.

Population density, 2001: Regional Trends 37, 2001.http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Expodata/

Spreadsheets/D5979.xls.

[44] Department of Health.Average daily number of available and occupied beds by sector, NHS organisa-

tions in England, 2001-02, 2002.Department of Health form KH03.

[45] Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.Annual Report and Accounts 2000-2001, 2002.http://www.sth.nhs.uk/trust/index.htm.

[46] Kevin Hall.Effects on Sheffield after Nuclear Attack.Will be published soon at http://ukcoldwar.simplenet.com/, April

2003.






[50] Duncan Campbell.War Plan UK, pages 168–169, 158.Burnett, 1982.Campbell notes that the 200MT attack could actually be much higher (see Open-


[51] Andrew Veitch.Civil Defence Planners Line Up Old Conatiners As Medical Stores.The Guardian, 21 August 1984.

[52] Wayne Cocroft & Roger Thomas.Cold War, page 218.English Heritage, 2003.

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Cold war : building for nuclear confrontation 1946-1989—edited by P.S. Barn-well.


[54] N.J. McCamley.Cold War Secret Nuclear Bunkers, pages 130–132.Leo Cooper, 2002.the full text of the Spies for Peace document is given.

Typeset in LATEX 2ε using MikTEX. References edited using BibTEX.This document is Copyright c© Kevin Hall 2002-2013

http://fallout.ukcoldwar.fastmail.co.uk

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