by P. D. Smith
Atlee’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was more outspoken: ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’12
The Royal Air Force received its first atomic bombs in 1953, the year Queen Elizabeth II was crowned amid nationwide celebrations and hopes that a new Elizabethan age was dawning in Britain. Eight years later, the Queen’s air forces took delivery of the most terrible weapons on the planet – H-bombs. As Atlee had predicted, deterrence was now accepted as the only defence against atomic attack. According to historian Peter Hennessy, ‘the bomb was always put before shelters’.13
In the same year that the RAF began carrying atomic bombs, Her Majesty’s civil servants calculated the effects of a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom. They assumed that the aerial assault would consist of 132 bombs of the type dropped on Nagasaki, targeted on major cities and facilities. The result, they calculated, would be 1,378,000 of the Queen’s loyal subjects dead and 785,000 seriously wounded. London might expect to be struck by as many as thirty-five bombs. Each would produce a crater 140 feet deep and 1,400 feet in diameter – about the size of St James’s Park, situated in front of Buckingham Palace. The capital would lose 422,000 of its citizens. During the whole of World War II, Britain had suffered 440,000 military and civilian dead.
In reality, the figures were almost certainly conservative estimates. The Whitehall number crunchers were assuming that nine million civilians, mostly women and children, could be evacuated from the cities before bombing began. This was unlikely. In a surprise attack, the RAF had warned the government that it could expect at best a fifteen-minute warning of attack by bombers operating at high altitude. But if the Soviet bombers came in below 3,000 feet, the warning would be a mere five minutes.
A government memo from 1954 on the subject of evacuation speculated as to whether any people at all would be prepared to remain in ‘vulnerable areas’ during times of tension. The possibility of mass panic and a breakdown of order had to be faced. ‘The standard work on this subject’, wrote the memo’s author, ‘is by Mr H. G. Wells, written, I think, in 1896 –The War of the Worlds – which is much better than any piece of Home Office paper that I have yet seen. It is very important to know whether anybody will be willing to stay in London under imminent threat of annihilation….’14 Even in the 1950s, Wells remained the authority on doomsday.
In America, the trauma of Pearl Harbor remained a fresh wound in the public psyche. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fear of an atomic Pearl Harbor became a national obsession. In 1946, the nightmare of mathematician and science fiction writer Chan Davis was one that many Americans shared: ‘A pillar of multicolored smoke rising from the city, erasing the Bronx and Manhattan down to Central Park, shattering windows in Nyack, lighting up the Albany sky. A nightmare, a familiar and very real nightmare, an accepted part of modern life, something you couldn’t get away from…’15
Davis’s nightmare is one that has returned to haunt us all in the years following 9/11 : an atomic bomb smuggled into a city and detonated without warning. It is not a new threat. Leo Szilard had told James Byrnes in May 1945 that in the atomic age they would face the possibility of bombs being detonated in American cities without warning. In November 1950, a top-secret British Government committee highlighted the danger posed by such clandestine attacks. It also raised the frightening possibility of ‘the detonation of an atomic bomb in a “suicide” aircraft flying low over a key point’. The third surprise attack scenario considered by the committee was of atomic bombs concealed on ships and detonated in a harbour, something Szilard and Einstein had warned President Roosevelt about in their 1939 letter. The Whitehall committee concluded, rather bleakly, that ‘there are no practicable and efficacious steps that can be taken in peace time to prepare against any of these threats’.16
In 1946, no less an atomic authority than Robert Oppenheimer had commented that the most useful tool in the hunt for atomic bombs concealed on ships was not a Geiger counter, but a screwdriver. By 1950, foreign ships were regularly being searched before entering US ports. On 5 August the Polish ship Batory was held outside New York harbour for four hours while it was searched. The authorities were notably silent on how their officials would locate any atomic bomb. A customs man in New York admitted that he had no idea what one would look like and it was known that radiation detectors were not able to discover a bomb concealed in a box. The Batory was suspected of being a ‘Trojan Horse bomb carrier’, said the newspapers, but all the search eventually revealed was that ‘she carried 832 passengers, a cargo of Polish hams and Czech handicraft work but, apparently, no atomic bombs’.17 As the British security committee decided that same year, the only defence against such clandestine threats was to maintain ‘a confidant assurance that we know all about the problem and can deal with it’, in order ‘to mystify our enemy and help to dissuade him from taking so fateful a step’.18 In other words, bluff.
Secret weapons and secret agents became integral parts of cold-war culture. In Robert Aldrich’s classic film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), gumshoe Mike Hammer is hot on the trail of a small chest whose contents are mysterious, and immensely valuable. But others want it too, and will stop at nothing to get their hands on it. ‘What is it we are seeking?’ one of them asks Mike. ‘Diamonds, rubies, gold, perhaps narcotics? How civilized this world used to be. But as the world becomes more primitive, its treasures become more fabulous.’ When Mike begins to open the lid, blinding light and searing heat burst from the box. Noticing the burn on his wrist, an FBI man will only offer five words in explanation: ‘Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity’. The ‘treasures’ of the modern world are radioactive metals – priceless, but lethal. It is a woman who finally opens the fatal box: ‘you should have been called Pandora’. The terrible energy contained within it burns her alive. The film ends with the house she is in exploding.19
American novelist and civil defence campaigner Philip Wylie turned the post-war fears about a clandestine attack into fiction. His thriller The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1948) tells how a physics graduate student discovers a plot to import uranium cores into Florida and conceal them in American cities for later assembly and detonation. But it was Wylie’s best-selling novel Tomorrow! (1954) that graphically portrayed what Americans dreaded most: a devastating atomic Pearl Harbor.
Tomorrow! was dedicated ‘to the gallant men and women of the Federal Civil Defense Administration’ and to the other ‘true patriots’, the volunteers.20 Wylie’s account of the attack and its aftermath is detailed and horrific. When it was first serialized, editors insisted that some scenes be cut. But Wylie clearly wanted to frighten Americans in order to demonstrate the importance of civil defence. ‘The truth was that after a number of years,’ says his narrator, ‘almost nobody believed there was any danger.’21 Wylie’s novel contrasts the fortunes of two ‘prairie cities’ in the Missouri Basin – Green Prairie and River City – before and after an attack. Predictably, the one that prides itself on its well-organized civil defence suffers least.
‘Is the fate of America ticking away?’ This the question posed on the cover of the 1951 Avon edition of Philip Wylie’s The Smuggled Atom Bomb. In the atomic age, Americans felt threatened as never before.
The atomic Pearl Harbor happens when America’s guard is down: on Christmas Eve. Many choose to disbelieve the warnings on the radio – ‘Just like that Martian gag!’ says one listener. Philip Wylie creates a chillingly convincing account of those terrible moments after the sirens have sounded, as people rush to escape from skyscrapers and the city centre: the crush of people fleeing down narrow and increasingly congested concrete stairwells; sidewalks packed with desperate people who have been turned away from the few shelters; and cars jammed, bumper to bumper, trapped in the glass and steel canyons of the metropolis. And above the scenes of panic, as the wail of the sirens ebbs momentarily, rise the terrified screams of people who know there is nowhere to hide from the blinding, burn
ing flash of atomic energy that is just minutes away. Wylie gives a graphic and powerful description of an atomic bomb exploding above an American city:
The great region, built so slowly, at such cost, by men, for a second liquefied and stood suspended above the ground: it could fall only sixteen feet in that time. Then, in the ensuing portion of a second, the liquid state was terminated. The white in the sky bellied down, growing big and globular, a thousand feet across and more. The liquids gasified: stone and cement, steel and plaster, brick and bronze and aluminum. In the street – if anyone could have seen at all, as no man could in the blind solar whiteness – there were no howling people at all. None.
On the sidewalks, for a part of a second, on sidewalks boiling like forgotten tea, were dark stains that had been people, tens of thousands of people. The Light went over the whole great area, like a thing switched on, and people miles away, hundreds of people looking at it, lost their sight. The air, of a sudden, for a long way became hotter than boiling water, hotter than melted lead, hotter than steel coming white from electric furnaces.
Clothing caught fire, the beggar’s rags, the dowager’s sables, the baby’s diapers, the minister’s robe. Paper in the gutter burst into flame. Trees. Clapboards. Outdoor advertising signs. Pastry behind the bakery windows. In that second it burned…
The plutonium fist followed:
It hammered across Front Street, Madison, Adams, Jefferson and Washington, along Central Avenue and rushed forward. The blast extinguished a billion sudden flames and started a million in the debris it stacked in its wake.
Under the intense globe of light, meantime, for a mile in every direction the city disappeared. In the mile beyond, every building was bashed and buffeted. Homes fell by thousands on their inhabitants. Great institutions collapsed.22
In the time in which ‘a pensive man might draw a breath, hold it reflectively and exhale’, there have been three hundred thousand casualties. But for those who have survived, the terror has only just begun. The atomic blast ignites a ferocious firestorm that rages through the city. Then the Soviets follow up their atomic strike with nerve gas and biological weapons (‘it’s disease war!’). Finally, there comes what 1950s America feared almost as much as atom bombs – the breakdown of social order, when the carefully constructed edifice of civilized life shatters and mob law takes over: ‘Here was gigantic panic, uncontrolled and hideous… Here was the infectious breakdown of the “average mind”, the total collapse of man in the presence of that which he had not been willing to face.’23
This dreaded breakdown of society – which in Wylie’s novel is, of course, more total in the city with no civil defence – was exploited by many writers and film-makers keen to pander to their (male) audience’s fantasies of pillage and rape. The Mad Max films (1979–85), which portray a barbaric road culture in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, have proved the most popular in this genre. In America, the idea of returning to a frontier existence was deeply appealing to some, guaranteeing the commercial success of violent survivalist fantasies such as Dean Owen’s End of the World (1962) and William
W. Johnstone’s Ashes series (1983–2003). It even led to a bizarre subgenre of atomic fiction – post-nuclear porn, including novels such as George H. Smith’s The Coming of the Rats (1961) and Jane Gallion’s Biker (1969).
More thoughtful explorations of the survivalist theme, such as Ward Moore’s ‘Lot’ (1953), reveal that, rather than offering a way to survive the nuclear age, such fantasies were deeply rooted in the very attitudes that fuelled cold-war tensions and brought doomsday closer. As early as August 1945, at the dawn of the atomic age, an American radio commentator pointed to the dangers of such gung-ho attitudes in the new era. Astutely, he predicted an ‘armament race such as this world has never seen’ in which nations would view ‘each other over rocket trajectories, like frontiersmen with their hands on the grips of their six-shooters, knowing that at the first sign of trouble, survival depends upon beating their opponents to the draw’.24 But in a world poised on the brink of atomic Armageddon, neither side could afford to have trigger-happy cowboys calling the shots.
The breakdown of order for which the survivalists longed was, in fact, the objective of nuclear strategists on all sides. As Hennessy says, “‘breakdown” is a word that lives in many a text of the Cold War secret state’.25 In the UK between 1958 and 1964, the Joint Inter-services Group for the Study of All-out Warfare (JIGSAW) met to think the unthinkable. Its deliberations included calculating how many A-bombs and H-bombs would be needed to bring about ‘breakdown’ in any society. JIGSAW estimated that the destruction of three hundred cities in Russia and just twenty in Britain would achieve this goal.
During the cold war, at least $45 billion was spent by the US Government on facilities to protect its officials and key civilians in an attempt to avert a total breakdown of society in the event of war.26 Government departments held regular rehearsals for atomic doomsday. Even the Internal Revenue Service conducted exercises to perfect its techniques of tax collecting after a nuclear holocaust. Around the country, over 75 facilities were constructed deep underground to help ensure ‘Continuity of Government’. They included ‘Site R’, aka the Alternate Joint Communications Center, beneath Raven Rock Mountain, a few miles north of the presidential retreat at Camp David. Operational from 1953, this facility offered over 700,000 square feet of floor space as well as its own reservoir. Should the Pentagon have been knocked out, Site R, with its three thousand personnel, would have been responsible for unleashing the American dogs of war.
The enemies of America have never managed to launch a significant attacked on the mainland of the United States. At least not until 11 September 2001. After al-Qaeda’s suicide planes plunged into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, procedures and protocols devised for an atomic Pearl Harbor swung into action, from the protection of key government officials to the grounding of civilian air traffic. Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly bunkered down in Site R for several days. The President himself was taken to Offut Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska, until the all-clear was given. In the cold war, Offut’s underground facilities (known as The Hole) formed the nerve centre of the Strategic Air Command. From October 1948, this was led by General Curtis LeMay. His task was to ensure the delivery of America’s nuclear weapons.
In 1958, US Government officials received what must have been the most terrifying document they had ever seen.The Emergency Plans Book (EPB) is a description of what would happen during an actual nuclear attack on the United States of America. Such is the sensitivity of this document that it remained top secret until 1998, when it suddenly turned up in the National Archive at College Park, Maryland. A year later it was reclassified top secret on the orders of an Air Force colonel. Fortunately, historian Doug Keeney had already copied the document, which he subsequently published.
The EPB was prepared by the Office of Emergency Planning (now known as FEMA) just six months after Sputnik had demonstrated that even America was now within the range of Soviet missiles. It reveals that America expected to receive a twenty-five-minute warning of approaching Russian bombers, but for submarine-launched missiles they would have just thirteen minutes. The EPB also anticipated that ‘weapons emplaced by clandestine means’, such as smuggled atom bombs, would be detonated in cities during a Soviet attack.
This chilling account of America’s atomic doomsday shows that an all-out attack would have resulted in carnage and devastation beyond any disaster in human history. America expected to be pounded by the full arsenal of Soviet nuclear weapons – A-bombs and H-bombs. The former would be air bursts, the latter surface blasts producing heavy fallout. Written in the present tense, the EPB gives a real-time account of how the atomic devastation of America unfolds:
Blast and thermal radiation damage extends from 5 miles to as much as 15 miles from ground zeros. Severe fire storms have occurred in heavily built-up cities and many rural fires were started involving growing crops and f
orests. The surface bursts have resulted in wide-spread radioactive fallout of such intensity that over substantial parts of the United States the taking of shelter for considerable periods of time is the only means of survival.27
The nuclear war planners who wrote the EPB estimated that almost one in five Americans would die. That’s 25 million people. The same number would be injured, some seriously. But US officials tried to look on the bright side: ‘More than 100 million people and tremendous material resources remain. Restoration of the economy and our society will be possible and necessary.’28 With cities across the length and breadth of America pulverized by nuclear explosions and fallout swathing the Land of the Free, government planners concluded that the situation was desperate, but not yet serious.
Continuity of Government, however, has taken a battering:
Washington was so severely damaged that no operations there are possible… Because of heavy fallout, none of the personnel at a few of the relocation sites survived. At several additional relocation sites almost all personnel are sick and many are dying… In many areas, including several of the largest cities, where surviving injured outnumber the surviving uninjured active adults, the social fabric has ceased to exist in the pre-attack pattern. Confusion is widespread in these areas and customary control and direction are non-existent.29
After a multi-megaton attack, the United States of America teeters on the brink of total breakdown. As Doug Keeney points out, ‘this is not science fiction. This is how America might have ended.’30 The scale of such a disaster is unimaginable. In his popular study Thermonuclear Warfare (1963), science fiction writer Poul Anderson observed that it ‘would be like nothing ever seen before in history. The Lisbon earthquake and tidal wave of 1755, which made Voltaire stop believing in the goodness of God, killed fewer than 40,000.’31 The catastrophic tsunami of Christmas 2004 shocked the whole world, yet it killed fewer than half a million people. What Anderson terms the ‘technology of hell’, but which is really the lethal creation of ordinary men and women, far exceeds the destructive power of nature.32 Whether any nation on earth could endure such an onslaught is extremely doubtful.