How did the British prepare for nuclear war during the Cold War?

What was the worst case scenario if thermonuclear weapons were to be used?

I'm your host James Rogers. This is the warfare podcast and in this episode from the History Hit Archives, Dan Snow talks to Julie McDowell about surviving a nuclear attack and how Britain might have remade itself in the aftermath of Armageddon. These are all strangely pertinent

questions for the world we find ourselves in today. Enjoy. Julie, thanks so much for coming on history hit.

Thank you for invading me.

I mean you are the hottest historian in town at the moment.

But I'm really fascinated by your research on what

Britain was going to do in the event of nuclear Armageddon and it's one of those

things that for the planners it's such an overwhelming proposition and yet I suppose they

had to make even if they thought all contingencies just be wiped out they had to make a plan I guess.

That's true yes in my in my work I often paraphrase Taylor Swift and say planners going to plan.

That's their job.

So in the home office which did the most of the planning.

Obviously they were told we need to drop plans for for example the NHS and how to evacuate cities for example and even if they knew it was futile

the fact is the boss said we need this done so it had to be done and I just imagine I have some sympathy

for civil servants in the Cold War.

I imagine them writing this and secretly thinking, oh for goodness sake this is nonsense, but they had to do it because

the boss said get it done. And did they draw heavily on the experience of the Blitz or was it looking at the experience of the Japanese, the German cities that suffered so awfully during the Second World War?

How were they, what were they using?

I think the Cold War can be split into the early part of the Cold War, which was the

atomic age, of course. They did lean heavily on plans from the Blitz and quite naively they thought

we could just transplant everything from the Blitz, which worked well of course, civil defense,

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