WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en-GB

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GREG FOOT: This is the
Wartime Broadcasting Service.

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This country has been attacked
with nuclear weapons.

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The number of casualties and the extent of
the damage are not yet known.

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Stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm,
and stay in your own homes.

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TOM SCOTT: This is the nuclear bunker at Kelvedon
Hatch, in Essex, and that's Greg from the

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BBC's BritLab reading the actual script that
a BBC newsreader would have sent out from

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somewhere if the Cold War had become Hot.
If that had happened, then this would have

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been one of 25 Regional Seats of Government:
this is where volunteers would have tried

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to ride out the nuclear exchange and lead
the country through... well, whatever followed.

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Their job was not to save lives immediately:
if you were in the blast radius of a nuclear

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weapon, you wouldn't last long. But in the
days and weeks that followed, one of their

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jobs would have been to predict fallout: the
radioactive dust and debris blasted into the

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atmosphere by nuclear bombs. They'd work out
when survivors could leave their homes -- what

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was left of their homes -- without too much
risk of radiation poisoning, and pass that

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on to whatever local civil defence still existed.

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But how would they have worked that out, down
here in a bunker as the world literally ended

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above their heads?

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Well mostly, they'd have used special pinhole
cameras left above ground: a tin can with

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a few holes in it and photographic film on
the inside. The blinding flash from a nuclear

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weapon would leave a mark on the photographic
film. It'd record an imprint with the bearing

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and the height. And the plan was that some
poor sod would leave the bunker very quickly,

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fetch the film, and then they'd triangulate
with other bunkers and work out: ground bursts

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that produce local fallout, air bursts that
spread it much wider, where, when? They could

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measure the pressure wave, the blast wave
as it went across based on some fairly simple

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equipment, and then they could help work out
the yield of the bombs. And they'd draw it

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all up on this big board, and then, based
on that, weather observations, and reports

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coming in from smaller, remote bunkers, start
making some very horrible calculations.

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And in some bunkers, including this one, they
had AWDREY, an electronic system. Now AWDREY

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is the Atomic Weapons Detection Recognition
and Estimation of Yield, and someone must

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have been really proud of that acronym.

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It was all rather optimistic, odd though that
might sound. It'll be a disaster, they said,

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but we'll help people through, we'll be able
to get weather reports and we'll have local

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centres of government keeping everything together.
But Britain is a small, densely populated

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country. Our National Archives has a list
of what our government thought would be Soviet

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targets: every major city, every military
base. It's safe to say that not many people

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would have survived even a day or two, and
only very few would have made it a month,

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let alone a year. And there's nothing anyone
on the planet could have done in the event

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of a full-scale nuclear war -- it would change
the climate and be an extinction level event.

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But in what was called a limited exchange,
there were places in Britain that could've

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survived, outside blast areas, remote countryside
and perhaps a few seaside towns like Brighton

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and Aberystwyth that were well away from any
strategic targets. And maybe, some of us,

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with help from here, might have made it through.

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I'm doing some videos with BBC BritLab.

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If you want to see what this mess is about,
click the link on screen or in the description.

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GREG FOOT: Almost got you.

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We shall repeat this broadcast in two hours'
time.

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Stay tuned to this wavelength, but switch
your radios off now

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to save your batteries until we
come on the air again.

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That is the end of the broadcast.

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