London After the Bomb

I picked up this small and unassuming volume in a secondhandbookshop in Dublin. Written by a team of five research students in the early 80s, it details the likely consequences of a nuclear attack on London, based on conditions specified by a 1980 simulation carried out by the British government (Operation Square Leg).The consequences are appalling. Having grown up in the 80s, constantly aware of the late-Cold War nuclear standoff (and old enough and half-English enough to remember the British Home Office's notorious "Protect and Survive" handbook on what to do in the event of a nuclear holocaust), this book strikes very close to home for me. As indeed it would for anyone else aware of the number of countries in the world with a nuclear arsenal.The book clearly demonstrates that even with a relatively limited attack such as was assumed in Square Leg (five fairly low-yield bursts around the periphery of Greater London), the majority of the population of London would be dead within a few months - using 1977 census figures, that's 5 out of 7 million people! - and a great majority of the rest would suffer from a variety of radiation-related illnesses, mostly leukaemia. The infrastructure (medical care, power, water, waste disposal) would be rendered useless, civil power would be in the hands of the military, food would be scarce to the point of unavailable, and there would not be enough hospital beds in the rest of Britain to cope with all the curable wounded. Now that the START II treaty has limited the nuclear capacity of the two major superpowers, and Britain's participation in the arms race has been cut down greatly from its mid-80s peak, the chance of a nuclear war between the US and Russia has been greatly reduced. But this is still a vital book for anyone who still believes that even a tactical nuclear exchange would not escalate, and that a major nuclear exchange could possibly be in any way "survivable". Any exchange of nuclear weapons threatens the survival of life on this planet. It must never happen; the cost of such a thing is scrupulously accounted in this book.Good look hunting down a copy, though.