"A nuclear attack on Britain would be the greatest catastrophe this country has ever suffered . . . No reasonable person can doubt that such a war must be avoided at all costs. Anything that weakens our determination to prevent such a war is to be condemned. And Civil Defence does just this."[1]
In November 1963, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) produced a mock civil defence paper exercise to raise public awareness about government plans for nuclear attack on Britain.[2] In the final paragraphs of an accompanying pamphlet, the authors argued that civil defence policies were weakening the ability of the public to make informed judgements about government defence measures because “it hushes up the facts, plays down the terrible reality and deludes its own supporters into believing that “it will be all right on the day.”’[3] In effect, the CND argued that civilians were being lulled into a false sense of security by the artificial preparedness extolled by civil defence guidance. Yet, civil defence exercises were organised in Britain, and across the Cold War world, to practice tasks necessary for communities to survive nuclear attack and to gather intelligence on civil defence operations that would be used in its refinement.[4] Where anti-nuclear protestors saw futility, policy-makers perceived opportunity.
Naturally, then, the Home Office (responsible for policy-making on civil defence and its regulation) closely followed the activities of anti-nuclear campaigners, because, as in this case, the potential for “embarrassing the Government” required mitigation.[5] On 15 October, a scientist from the Scientific Advisers’ Branch (SAB) was alerted to the CND’s planned action and asked to provide detailed analysis of the CND’s attack scenario, accounting for contingencies, so that the department could be ready to counter the CND claims, particularly as their publicity might “give rise to a number of letters from M.P.s and others and probably to Parliamentary questions”.[6]
The concept of civil defence—the training of civilians in readiness for attack—in the nuclear age left ministers, policy-makers, and volunteers alike open to criticism. Was it even possible, the public and parliamentarians wondered, to prepare and defend against nuclear weapons? This question became increasingly acute as weapons developed from the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to hydrogen bombs and then thermonuclear long-range missiles: civil defence therefore went from being based on scientific evidence (though even the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were debated) to conjecture. As a result, many British people came to believe that nuclear survival was the stuff of fantasy, not reality. Meanwhile, in an effort to get closer to the facts, scientists used civil defence exercises as a means for British communities to rehearse nuclear attack.[7] But without any concrete basis for the quantification of thermonuclear warfare, such practice and forecasting was abstract.
The CND, which was formalised in 1958, comprised members from many political persuasions, with varying approaches to activism.[8] However, at the core of its method was the intention to raise awareness to counter what it believed were nuclear falsehoods. Campaigners firmly believed that if only the British public could become cognisant of government misinformation and secrecy, then the electorate would rise up and thwart its nuclear policies. This is why anti-nuclear marches often passed military facilities outside of London: to highlight the presence of the British and American nuclear state on the doorsteps of ordinary, peace-loving citizens.[9] Indeed, more radical strands of the anti-nuclear campaign, influenced by anarchism and the doctrine of civil disobedience, emphasised the need to fight secrecy head on, through damage to military property, trespass, and exposé.[10]
An initiative like the FALLX 63 publication is a prime example of the way in which the CND repurposed government outputs to shed light on, and parody, the reality behind them. A NATO-wide civil defence operation named “Fallex-62” occurred the year before and there is no doubt that the CND intended to debunk that exercise. Mainstream campaigners were committed to demonstrating against the state in respectable, plausible and convincing ways.[11] Employing the tools and language of the state to undermine and prove fault in civil defence guidance was an attempt at credibility and legitimacy in the face of increasing criticism of its disruptive methods. On this occasion, while policy-makers and scientists in Whitehall disdained the suggestion that anti-nuclear campaigners could “put out” the “facts” about civil defence, they were keen to lead the battle of information.[12] Despite strict controls on how defence was discussed in the press, the public was well-versed in the facts and fictions of the quantitative difference that nuclear war would mean for bomb and fire damage, radioactive fallout, mortality, casualty, evacuation, and homelessness.
The final report, produced by Edward Leader-Williams, who was Senior Principal Scientific Officer at the Home Office, dealt with a scenario in which no attack warning had been given, and one in which there had been a four-minute warning, also accounting for the availability of shelter and evacuation. In both cases no fewer than 15.5 million casualties would be incurred by the blasts and the radiation fallout.[13] The scientist emphasised civil defence “savings” estimated at 16.5 million casualties (the total without civil defence measures therefore being 32 million casualties).[14] While the report made in-depth calculations about the efficacy of various civil defence measures, once casualty numbers reached into the millions such promises meant little. Civil defence chiefs understood this problem, hence, when an official at the national civil defence training base at Sunningdale requested to use the SAB statistics, he was met with immediate and resounding refusal.[15] SAB scientists’ reticence about publicising their own data contained several contradictory elements: the desire to contain security information that might be useful to the enemy, the impulse not to engage with the CND and thereby legitimise any claims it had on the topic, and the subtle recognition that regardless of whose estimates the public saw, the thought of millions of nuclear attack casualties rendered civil defence meaningless and might even stoke civilian anxieties.
Anti-nuclear campaigners, of a range of social and political backgrounds, found a fruitful source of critique and derision in civil defence policy, and its dismantling became a cornerstone of anti-nuclear and pro-disarmament publicity. At the heart of this criticism was the contention that even the government admitted that civil defence was pointless. Ultimately, perhaps they were correct—the Civil Defence Corps was disbanded in 1968.
[1] Kew, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), HO 338/149, Civil Defence and Nuclear War (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1963), 13–14, available via British Online Archives (hereafter BOA) at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#%23h=reasonable&cv=53&xywh=-1081%2C-1%2C9214%2C4552, images 54–55.
[2] TNA, HO 338/149, “FALLX ‘63”, November 1963—two maps detailing bomb blast and radioactive wind travel, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?xywh=-1437%2C0%2C12769%2C6307&cv=17, images 18–19.
[3] TNA, HO 338/149, Civil Defence and Nuclear War, 14, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?#%23%23h=reasonable&cv=54&xywh=-1081%2C-1%2C9214%2C4552, image 55.
[4] Marie Cronqvist, Rosanna Farbøl, and Casper Sylvest, ed., Cold War Civil Defence in Western Europe: Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Survival and Preparedness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); Jessica Douthwaite, “‘Covering the ‘Scottish position adequately’: Planning Civil Defence in Post-war Scotland, 1948–59,” Modern British History, 35, no. 3 (September 2024): 278–293; Matthew Grant, After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945–68 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Melissa Smith, “‘What to do if it happens’: planners, pamphlets and propaganda in the age of the H-bomb,” Endeavour 33, no. 2 (2009): 60–64.
[5] TNA, HO 338/149, letter from R. A. J. (A.1 division) to Dr Sergeant (Scientific Advisers’ Branch), 15 October 1963, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?xywh=2018%2C293%2C4561%2C2253&cv=56, image 57.
[6] TNA, HO 338/149, letter from R. A. J. to Dr Sergeant, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?xywh=2018%2C293%2C4561%2C2253&cv=56, image 57.
[7] Tracy C. Davis, “Between History and Event: Rehearsing Nuclear War Survival,” The Drama Review 46, no. 4 (Winter, 2022): 11–45; Jessica Douthwaite, '‘… what in the hell’s this?’ Rehearsing nuclear war in Britain’s Civil Defence Corps,” Contemporary British History 33, no. 2 (2019): 187–207.
[8] Christopher R. Hill, Peace and Power in Cold War Britain: Media, Movements and Democracy, c.1945–68 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
[9] Holger Nehring, Politics of Security: British and West German Protest Movements and the Early Cold War, 1945–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[10] TNA, HO 322/651, pamphlet by Ipswich Anarchists, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50339/ho-322651-pamphlet-by-ipswich-anarchists#?xywh=-3817%2C-267%2C10809%2C5340. See also, Sophie Scott-Brown, “Inventing Ordinary Anarchy in Cold War Britain,” Modern Intellectual History 20, no. 4 (2023): 1251–1272; Sophie Scott-Brown, “An Artful Science: Activism, Non-Violence, and Radical Democracy in Cold War Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History 59, no. 4 (2024): 639–659.
[11] Jodi Burkett, “Re-Defining British Morality: ‘Britishness’ and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 1958–68,” Twentieth Century British History 21, no. 2 (2010), 184–205.
[12] TNA, HO 338/149, letter from R. A. J. to Dr Sergeant, 15 October 1963, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?xywh=2018%2C293%2C4561%2C2253&cv=56, image 57.
[13] TNA, HO 338/149, secret draft report, “Casualties from the “Fallex 63” attack,” 11 November 1963, 11, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?xywh=1265%2C-22%2C4616%2C2280&cv=20, images 21-39.
[14] TNA, HO 338/149, memo from E. Leader-Williams (Senior Principal Scientific Officer, Home Office) to Inspector General, 3 February 1965, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?xywh=2862%2C23%2C6136%2C3031&cv=10, image 11.
[15] TNA, HO 338/149, letter from Nicholas Copeman (Regional Civil Defence Headquarters) to E. Leader-Williams (Senior Principal Scientific Officer, Home Office), 20 January 1964, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?xywh=958%2C17%2C5149%2C2543&cv=16, image 17; letter from R. A. James (Home Office) to Nicholas Copeman (Regional Civil Defence Headquarters), 3 February 1964, available via BOA at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/50359/ho-338149-estimates-of-casualties-from-the-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-cnd#?xywh=-640%2C137%2C5953%2C2941&cv=12, image 13.