Atomic psychosis has a date of birth: 1949. That year, the Soviet Union achieved its first nuclear test in Kazakhstan, in a decor simulating a peaceful suburban suburb. During the experience, the reconstituted village was sprayed, the animals watched – which served as guinea pigs – cremated in a second. The Cold War is officially declared. Now, each camp will strive to accumulate the maximum of nuclear warheads in order to dissuade its opponent from using his own arsenal.
Won by nuclear anxiety, the civilian population is preparing for the worst. The possibility that humanity self -provaporizes has suddenly become a tangible reality. In American schools, students are told to take refuge under their desks in the event of a bomb alert. The newspapers promote survival essentials: Geiger meters (which are used to measure ionizing radiation), canned food and gas masks are sold like hotcakes. Anti -ientomic shelters colonize the cellars and without stories. Government brochures and pamphlets distill, in the sanitized language of bureaucrats, the emergency measures to be applied.
Survival for dummies
The Americans were used to discovering these kinds of documents in their mailboxes. Established by President Harry Truman in 1950, the Federal Administration of Civil Defense (FCDA) delivered more than 400 million brochures, in order to awaken the American population at the risks of nuclear war. In the United Kingdom, it will be necessary to wait for the paroxysm of tensions that a guide of the same nature is made available to civilians: the memorable Protect and Survive (“Protect and survive”), arrived in bookstores in May 1980.
Why such an emergency? Because it was during this period that the United Kingdom agreed to receive American missiles on its territory. However, as the Daily Telegraph points out in February 1980, “The presence of cruise missiles on British soil, added to the fact that the United Kingdom will provide the main air and sea bases for NATO reinforcements (…) indicate that we will be the number one target”. Under the aggressive mandate of Ronald Reagan, the United States shows the teeth. The global stock of nuclear weapons reached 64,500 warheads in 1986, almost 90% of which are to be credited by the two Russian superpowers and American. Nuclear apocalypse has never been so close.
This is why, after six years of gestation in the administration of His Majesty, the booklet Protect and Survive is finally accessible to British citizens. First intended for emergency services (police brigades, firefighters, etc.), it has only been disseminated to the general public under the pressure of a worried population. The first sentence of the guide will not have to reassure it: “Read this booklet carefully. Your life and that of your family could depend on it. ”
Bunker in recycled materials
The first thing you learn there is how to prepare your home for the possibility of an attack. “Your best protection is to create a part and build a shelter”advises the manual. Supporting diagram, he suggests barricade all the entries of the refuge with recovery materials, in order to limit the penetration of radiation. “Bricks, concrete or concrete blocks, wood, earth funds, sand, books and furniture can all do the trick.”
Second priority: bringing together a survival that will allow refugees to hold for fourteen days. First water (up to around 16 liters per person), which can be drawn from the toilet if necessary. Then canned food, a radio, spare batteries, a box, cutlery, a first aid kit, a torch lamp, soap, without forgetting warm clothes, a few sleeping bags, matches … and toilet paper. In this regard, the brochure includes a manual for improvised sanitary facilities: a chair amputated from its seat, under which we placed a bucket of plastic.
If the dreaded explosion occurs, do not panic: you have to stay inside at all costs. “The danger of radioactive fallout is the largest in the first forty-eight hours”warns the survival guide. What if you end up with a body on your arms? Here again, the text keeps a clinical tone: “If a death occurs while you are confined in the room, place the body in another room and cover it as solidly as possible. Join an identity document. “ Without contact with the competent authorities within five days, “You must temporarily bury the body as soon as you can go out without danger and mark the location”.
The ridiculed government
Far from reaching its goal – discipline an anxious population -, Protect and Survive is quickly derived in the United Kingdom. For what? Because he announces, in substance, that it is up to everyone to take charge of their own survival, by arranging only a little resourcefulness and notions of DIY … deemed infantilizing and derisory in a context which demanded much better than a vague assembly notice, its advice considerably erodes the confidence of British public opinion towards its institutions, throwing discredit on the ability of the government to manage a crisis of such a scale.
A thousand times parodied and ridiculed, Protect and Survive will serve, for lack of better, a collective benchmark for a generation that grew up in the shadow of the nuclear fungus. A visual from the book will even appear on the cover of the single “Karma Police” from the British rock group Radiohead, released in 1997.
#nowplaying
Radiohead –
Karma Police
https://t.co/05d16yhaoe pic.twitter.com/x9sfxmqcvh– Soundstory 🎧 (@Soundstoryuk) March 11, 2025
A sign of times, the manual was reissued by the London Museum of Imperial War Museum in 2017 … But does it still have its place in a museum? In view of recent geopolitical earthquakes, everything suggests that survival brochures published in the middle of the Cold War could soon regain service. To your pierced chairs!
