Confessions of a 1980s Community Controller

With the government once again warning that our country should prepare for warfare, here is a look back at the time when it previously urged us to make survival plans

I missed the last world war by a year or two, so cannot claim to have been affected by it – not directly at least, though if there had not been that war I would not have existed, but that is a story for another day. One enduring characteristic of WWII was the use, for the first time in history, of an atomic bomb – or in modern parlance, a weapon of mass destruction.

The spectre of nuclear warfare has overshadowed every conflict ever since. And with each one – the Suez crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the cold war, then (the pace speeding up), Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and now America’s bombing of Iran – the threat of deployment of nuclear weapons was/is a menacing subtext. All of them felt (and now feel) as though a tiny little spark could ignite the mass destruction that has been so widely talked about.

And this week the UK government announced for the first time in decades that the “homeland” is at risk of enemy attack.

Back in the 1980s our government became particularly exercised about the risk of nuclear war. It issued a helpful little 30 page booklet Protect and Survive (cost then 50 pence, but with a promise that it would be issued free if war became imminent) which gave advice on: How to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack.

It placed the burden on ensuring survival on local authorities, and opened with a stark warning that if you move away to a new local authority area, you will get no help from the authority in that area, and on top of that your own council may take over your home for use by others. The message was: Stay at home (now where have I read that before in the past few years??)

The booklet contained advice on planning a fall out room and inner refuge, with graphic illustrations showing where the safest place might be in your home, along with advice to block (or even brick) up windows and fireplaces.

All outside services were expected to be cut off and the booklet urged people to fill their baths with water – and not to flush the loo, as well as to buy in candles and at least 2 weeks’ supply of food. The internet was not up and running then. Instead a portable radio was advised, as well as a calendar (presumably in case you lost track of time).

We were told how to recognize when an attack was expected (sounds like an air raid siren) and when fall-out was expected (three loud bangs or whistles)

Back then it was all taken seriously, though it did have a distinct “Dad’s Army” flavour to it. Each village was to appoint a Wartime Community Controller. At the time I was on the parish council of a historic village in West Norfolk, England and I must have blinked at the wrong time because I found myself appointed to the role.

Here is what I wrote about it 44 years ago -

Confessions of a Community Controller (summer 1981)

There were about a dozen of us. We were sitting round a table, nervously fingering the sturdy looking instruments thatwere arranged on it.

"We" were a group of Wartime Community Controllers receiving our first briefing on how to protect our villages andcommunities in the event of a nuclear attack. For those not in the know, Community Controllers have been appointed inmost villages to learn how to deal with a "Wartime Emergency Situation." We were awaiting the arrival of the Emergency Services Planning Officer who was at that moment changing a wheel on his car outside.

The instruments we were looking at were "Radiac" meters for measuring radioactivity.

We were each to receive one of these when war broke out (unless it was a surprise attack). They were, we were to learn, the only weapons we would have with which to combat the after-effects of a nuclear attack.

Eventually, the Emergency Services Planning Officer (who, I am sure, will be known as the ESPO as soon as World War III gets under way) arrived, brushing mud off his hands. He addressed us as though we were a small band of troops ready to goand fight in the jungle. He didn’t actually use the word "Jerry" but he referred to the enemy as “he" and confidently predicted that we had another 18 months before "he" would start to drop bombs on us.

After an initial pep talk, we were handed over to the Scientific Officer who gave us a quick rundown on the more exoticaspects of nuclear war.

We had fireballs over our heads, electromagnetic pulses pumping thousands of volts through our household wiring and, of course, radiation. We were allowed to play with our Radiac meters (but only with pretend radioactivity from amakeshift control panel). We quickly grasped the principles of protective factors for buildings (the amounts by which different types of building reduce exposure to radiation – woe betide you if you live in a bungalow or in the top floors of a tower block) and learned the drill for keeping contamination off our bodies. When we were fully knowledgeable about such technicalities, we were handed back to the ESPO for our briefing on how to carry out our duties.

Maps were given out showing the control posts to which we had to report. The control posts in turn were answerable to Sub­District Control who had to obey commands from District Control who themselves were directed from afar by County Control. At that point we reached the top of the page but no doubt the pecking order goes all the way to Heaven - where many people will already be by then.

Despite this well-ordered chain of command, we were told that our villages could well be cut off from the outside world for days, weeks or even months. Therefore, it had been decided that control would be delegated to levels where it could be exercised most efficiently - namely to each village and - to us. At our briefing we were also issued with a survival guidebook instructing us on everything from the creation of latrines to changing the batteries on our Radiac meters.

It goes without saying that even if people die, bureaucracy must not. Our guidebook included a set of twelve different types of form for us to fill in as we cheerfully set about extracting what was left of our friends from what was left of their houses.

Eventually it was over; the Radiac meters were put in their boxes, and we were allowed back into the real world outside.

That was some months ago. Since then, we have been briefed again. We had a refresher course on our Radiac meters, heard a nice lady from the WRVS telling us about emergency feeding and were given a chilling talk by a police officer about their role in time of war.

With such scanty knowledge as we could retain from less than four hours of coaching, we were each to be responsible for organising the survivors in our villages into lifesaving, rescue, fire-fighting, provision of food, law enforcement, first aid, burial of the dead and all the other grisly activities which would be needed after a nuclear attack.

Leon Brittan QC, the Minister with responsibility for civil defence, made it clear in a radio debate that much of the government’s civil defence effort is directed at establishing information networks to warn the public about radiation levels. This perhaps explains the great emphasis on the Radiac meters (at least half the time of both briefing sessions was spent getting to know how they work). Such knowledge is no doubt important for the protection of the public, yet there is little point in knowing that radiation has reached a lethal dose if there is nowhere to go to get away from it.

There is even less point in Community Controllers making radiation measurements every 15 minutes if there are greater demands on their efforts - like people burning alive in buildings.

The government is currently committed to spend £45 million a year on civil defence. This is less than £1 per head and contrasts starkly with the thousands of millions spent on nuclear weapons. There is an alternative argument put forward in the book "Protest and Survive" that we should spend little or nothing on nuclear civil defence because to do so only conditions the population to expect a nuclear war which they believe they can survive.

Certainly there is far too much talk about the possibility - even inevitability - of a nuclear war. There is far too little thought about how grotesque it would really be. It would, according to a recent editorial in the British Medical Association Review, be a "time when the living would envy the dead"

Nobody really knows how many would die instantly in a nuclear attack on this country. The best information we can ever getfrom the experts is that millions would die - but millions would survive. Taking the population as about 50 million, we therefore could have a choice of anything from 2 million to 48 million dead.

The total civilian and military deaths for Great Britain during the six years of the Second World War was 388,000. Thesuffering caused by such loss of life is still acutely felt 35 years later. Increase that number of deaths by a factor of 10 or 100 and inflict it on a country unprepared for war and which has not had a period of years to acclimatise itself for thebattlefields, and you have something of an idea of what it would really be like if the bomb drops.

Quite apart from the continuing health risk, the genetic mutations and the future deaths, the psychological effect on the survivors could well be such as to cause all of them a complete mental breakdown. It would almost certainly cause thecollapse of civilisation as we know it.

Against this background, the present programme of training community Controllers is likely to be as effective as tilting at windmills.

* * *

Eventually thoughts of nuclear war petered out, and community controllers never had to do any controlling! Even though I wrote that 44 years ago I sense that we are no better prepared now than we were then and the imperative must remain to avoid nuclear war at all costs.