Protect and Survive
Protect and Survive was a British public information campaign on civil defence. The booklet was published in May 1980. It told people what they should do if there was a nuclear war. [1] It was turned into a series of twenty short public information films for television. They were secret but they were leaked to CND and the BBC, who broadcast parts of them on Panorama.[2] They were later described as "the calm, clipped vowels of a male announcer, advising how to build shelters, avoid fallout, and wrap up your dead loved ones in polythene, bury them, and tag their bodies."[3]
People were told they should make a shelter inside their home by blocking off windows and fortifying the outside walls with furniture or bags of earth and sand; create an inner refuge, for example between two doors leaning together in an A-frame, surrounded by more furniture, books and bags of earth. E.P. Thompson published an anti-nuclear pamphlet called Protest and Survive. [4]
References[change | change source]
- ↑ Young, Taras (2019). Nuclear War in the UK]publisher=Four Corners Books. pp. 25–28. ISBN 978-1-909829-16-9.
- ↑ "If the Bomb Drops". Panorama. 10 March 1980. British Broadcasting Corporation.
- ↑ Rogers, Jude (2018-03-17). "Here come the bombs: the making of Threads, the nuclear war film that shocked a generation". New Statesman. Retrieved 2023-07-22.
- ↑ Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence (2023-07-27). "No Place for Grumblers". London Review of Books. Vol. 45, no. 15. ISSN 0260-9592. Retrieved 2023-07-22.