GREG FOOT: This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service.
This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons.
The number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known.
Stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm, and stay in your own homes.
TOM SCOTT: This is the nuclear bunker at Kelvedon Hatch, in Essex, and that's Greg from the
BBC's BritLab reading the actual script that a BBC newsreader would have sent out from
somewhere if the Cold War had become Hot. If that had happened, then this would have
been one of 25 Regional Seats of Government: this is where volunteers would have tried
to ride out the nuclear exchange and lead the country through... well, whatever followed.
Their job was not to save lives immediately: if you were in the blast radius of a nuclear
weapon, you wouldn't last long. But in the days and weeks that followed, one of their
jobs would have been to predict fallout: the radioactive dust and debris blasted into the
atmosphere by nuclear bombs. They'd work out when survivors could leave their homes -- what
was left of their homes -- without too much risk of radiation poisoning, and pass that
on to whatever local civil defence still existed.
But how would they have worked that out, down here in a bunker as the world literally ended
above their heads?
Well mostly, they'd have used special pinhole cameras left above ground: a tin can with
a few holes in it and photographic film on the inside. The blinding flash from a nuclear
weapon would leave a mark on the photographic film. It'd record an imprint with the bearing
and the height. And the plan was that some poor sod would leave the bunker very quickly,
fetch the film, and then they'd triangulate with other bunkers and work out: ground bursts
that produce local fallout, air bursts that spread it much wider, where, when? They could
measure the pressure wave, the blast wave as it went across based on some fairly simple
equipment, and then they could help work out the yield of the bombs. And they'd draw it
all up on this big board, and then, based on that, weather observations, and reports
coming in from smaller, remote bunkers, start making some very horrible calculations.
And in some bunkers, including this one, they had AWDREY, an electronic system. Now AWDREY
is the Atomic Weapons Detection Recognition and Estimation of Yield, and someone must
have been really proud of that acronym.
It was all rather optimistic, odd though that might sound. It'll be a disaster, they said,
but we'll help people through, we'll be able to get weather reports and we'll have local
centres of government keeping everything together. But Britain is a small, densely populated
country. Our National Archives has a list of what our government thought would be Soviet
targets: every major city, every military base. It's safe to say that not many people
would have survived even a day or two, and only very few would have made it a month,
let alone a year. And there's nothing anyone on the planet could have done in the event
of a full-scale nuclear war -- it would change the climate and be an extinction level event.
But in what was called a limited exchange, there were places in Britain that could've
survived, outside blast areas, remote countryside and perhaps a few seaside towns like Brighton
and Aberystwyth that were well away from any strategic targets. And maybe, some of us,
with help from here, might have made it through.
I'm doing some videos with BBC BritLab.
If you want to see what this mess is about, click the link on screen or in the description.
GREG FOOT: Almost got you.
We shall repeat this broadcast in two hours' time.
Stay tuned to this wavelength, but switch your radios off now
to save your batteries until we come on the air again.
That is the end of the broadcast.
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