Clouds of Deceit by Joan Smith

Author:Joan Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1985-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

As early as 1954, long before Britain had its own hydrogen bomb, the British government knew that the effect of fallout on the civilian population would be ‘bleak’. Cabinet papers from the period show that the Conservative government was terrified that this fact would provoke a public outcry against having the H-bomb if it got out. The result was direct interference with the BBC, which was planning to make a programme on the effects of thermo-nuclear weapons.

In December 1954, the Cabinet had before it a top-secret memorandum written by the then Minister of Defence, Harold Macmillan. In it, Macmillan warned that ‘much of the present indifference of the public would vanish’ if they discovered that the government was having to alter radically its civil defence plans to cope with the terrible devastation which would be caused by an attack with a single H-bomb.

Macmillan wrote the memorandum after studying the very first assessment by British scientists of the effect of fallout from a ten-megaton bomb - the equivalent of ten million tons of TNT. British scientists had put together the assessment from ‘all that we have been able to find out about the effects of the experiments by the United States in the Pacific and elsewhere.’ The memo, and the accompanying assessment, make clear that the government was well aware even before Britain had the H-bomb that the effects of nuclear war would be much worse than those subsequently described in its own civil defence propaganda.

‘There will be an inner zone of approximately 270 square miles in area (larger than Middlesex), in which radiation will be so powerful that all life will be extinguished, whether in the open or in houses,’ the scientists’ report predicts. ‘Because of the persistence of the radioactive contamination of this inner zone, general relief measures would be virtually impossible for some weeks, and possibly months.’

People in ‘specially deep shelters’ in this area, with supplies of uncontaminated food and water, would have some chance of survival, ‘provided they were not entombed by other effects of the explosion’. Outside this central zone, there would be an area of about 3,000 square miles (several counties wide) in which ‘exposure on the first day might easily be fatal’. The report notes that ‘no medical means of curing or even curbing the effects of radiation on human beings are yet known’. In the Marshall Islands, it goes on, ‘natives on an atoll 110 miles from the explosion received about one-third of the lethal dose.’

The scientists’ report raises the possibility of evacuating people in the direct path of fallout in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, since ‘fallout will not occur until 8-24 hours after the burst’ - a proposal directly ruled out in later government advice on how to survive the bomb. A film made by the Central Office of Information, for example, tells people to do quite the opposite: ‘No place in the UK is safer than anywhere else,’ it insists. ‘No one can tell you where the safest place will be.

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