One of the slightly less cheerful things I have to read of late has been The National Health Service (NHS) after Nuclear War (via Chris Lightfoot), a paper detailing a report by the BMA from the mid-1980s of how medical treatment would be rationed and distributed, as well as interesting tidbits of info about the Thatcher government’s own preparations (which have never been made fully public). The BBC’s terrifying post-nuclear apocalypse Threads gets several mentions. The resulting report is chilling, not just for the figures involved:
- Disposal of the dead would be next to impossible (it notes it took the US Army 8 weeks to bury 39,000 dead in Manilla in World War II and this was with adequate fuel stocks, machinery and manpower).
- An 11 megaton attack on the Greater London area would produce 9,782,000 deaths and injuries.
But also the direct consequence - that the only way to maintain any sort of control over what meagre resources were left would be to ration them on strictly utilitarian grounds - all our natural sensibilities and sympathies would be torn up.
It would be logical to assume once people realised how treatment was to be rationed, order would start to break down. Who would get treatment would depend almost entirely on the survivability of the patient and the “useful” role that person would have in the post-attack world.
Although the report was produced two years after Threads was broadcast it does in fact confirm one of the more frightening realities which Threads presented, that children would be no more important than anyone else. If anything, given the levels of illiteracy and how brutalised the post-war generation became, children became almost abandoned to their fate. Dr. Dawson said this about the future of children:
If we do not try to save the children we have no future, but if we put too great an emphasis on saving these dependant, unskilled people, for that is what they are, then we risk the loss of existing physical abilities and skills that will be desperately needed.”
I’m quite glad that I was only four or five when this document came out, as I would have been terrified to know just how serious the consequencs of nuclear war were, and then find out that it was such a distinct possibility that the government was preparing ration cards and transport containers full of medical supplies ready to be deployed to put us on, as the page says, “on a war footing”.
With the end of the Cold War, the prospect of nuclear armageddon almost seems quaint - nuclear bunkers are now museum pieces or secure IT service centres. But this is perhaps a little ignorant of how bad it could have been - we have come mighty close to all-out nuclear war several times, so any talk of the Cold War being mere standoff and posturing is dangerously oblivious to the threats that were out there.
Which brings me to the current continual talk of “threats” to our way of life and (depending on the loony extremeness of whoever you’re talking to) the “clash of civilisations” and “our way of life is under threat” - it’s bunkum. The acts of a few fundamentalists and flag-burners seems quite tame compared to the prospect of London and Manchester being razed to the ground at the whim of the Soviet president - even the prospect of thousands of deaths is a lot more preferable than that of millions. Perhaps this is the one thing that bugged me about The Power of Nightmares - the modern “nightmare” posed by international terrorism is nowhere near as terrifying compared to what was feared in the past.
Perhaps this why there’s all this chatter of late about a nuclear Iran - never mind that they’re years off producing a nuclear test, let alone a functioning and robust battle-worthy weapon, let alone one that can be integrated and reliably flown on a ballistic missile, although the breathy rumours about war and scary-looking glossy graphic would want you to believe otherwise, it seems. Maybe we’ve begun to realise that even the bloodiest conventional terrorist attacks are no good at stoking permanent fear.
This is not to trivialise problems like terrorism, nor to say that they should be ignored or laughed at; it should not be a question of fearing or not fearing, but how we manage our fear, how to look beyond it, how we should be as unemotive as possible about the things that stir our emotive responses, without forgetting why our emotive responses exist in the first place. Threats of terrorism (and many other bad things) need perspective and calculation; to say we should protect ourselves “at any cost” is meaningless - as we will never be able to afford a truly secure environment. There will always be threats and there will never be a conclusive victory. Ironically, it’s leaders like Blair or Bush who claim to be realists dealing with real problems are the ones who are pursuing unattainable absolutes. We should all learn the lesson from their folly.
