Julie Mcdowall’s history of British preparations for nuclear war, Attack Warning Red, was one of two incredibly disturbing books I read about the subject this year. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of nuclear war has receded but it’s still there. The world has around 12,500 nuclear weapons, 2,000 on high alert (source).
Attack Warning Red discussed the often-futile measures taken in readiness for nuclear war with Russia. Britain is a small, densely packed country and the fallout from even a small number of strikes would have affected most people. Much of the preparations and planning was a sham. In the 1980s, journalist Duncan Campbell calculated that the sandbagging requirements of Hull alone would exhaust the entire national supply of sand.
Mcdowall discusses the plans for forced labour crews to clear corpses from the streets and how hospitals could mercifully end lives when there was no medicine. In one health authority, it was suggested that medical staff forage for folk remedies. Toilet facilities in large bunkers were designed without doors or were too few in number to reduce the risk of suicides.
Reading this book gave me a few nightmares and left me wrestling with the horror of a world in which we casually allow an existential threat to linger. There is little comfort. I read the Wikipedia list of nuclear tests in attempts to reassure myself – we’ve exploded over a thousand of these without the world ending. I read the essay collapse won’t reset society which looked at the black death and the fall of Nazi Berlin to show how bureaucracy endures even the worst disaster. Towards the end:
U.S. government estimates predict a death toll of between 13 to 34 million people for a nuclear exchange involving 3,000 warheads, with substantial additional fatalities that would result from a lack of medical care, lack of utilities, and ensuing food shortage. But even at a final death toll of 10 to 20 percent of the total population, and infrastructure destruction similar to the situation in Germany after the Second World War, the total shock of nuclear war could likely fall within the range historically absorbed by modern economies and governments.
I don’t understand how the world’s political leaders are not thinking about nuclear war all the time, and it horrifies me that nobody is trying to fix this. Wikipedia also lists military nuclear accidents and some of these are horrifying. In 1983, an order was given for a nuclear strike and refused. Eventually we are going to be very unlucky.
These weapons are so obscene that it’s hard to justify owning them, even in a defensive capacity. Trident is solely designed for retaliatory strikes, and I’m not sure it’s worth killing millions of civilians in revenge if the Trident deterrent fails.