Author: TARAS. YOUNG
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909829169
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
For almost five decades, the United Kingdom made plans for a nuclear attack that never came. To help their citizens, civil servants, and armed forces prepare, those in power designed and published a variety of booklets, posters, and how-to guides. Most infamous among these was the Protect and Survive campaign, but just as fascinating are lesser-known materials prepared for the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation and the Royal Observer Corps, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. From terrifying images issued by central government, to local councils' sometimes amateurish survival guides, 'Nuclear War in the UK' is a look at the way Britain's authorities reacted to the Soviet nuclear threat.
Author: M. Grant
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230274048
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Civil defence was an integral part of Britain's modern history. Throughout the cold war it was a central response of the British Government to the threat of war. This book will be the first history of the preparations to fight a nuclear war taken in Britain between the end of the Second World War and 1968.
Author: Simon J. Moody
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198846991
Category : Deterrence (Strategy)
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
The primary mission assigned to the British Army from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War was deterring Soviet aggression in Europe by demonstrating the will and capability to fight with nuclear weapons in defence of NATO territory. This "surreal" mission was unlike any other in history,and raised a number of conceptual and practical difficulties. This comprehensive study observes how the British Army imagined nuclear war, and how it planned to fight it. Using new archival sources, Simon J. Moody analyses British thinking about tactical nuclear weapons, the role of the Army withinNATO strategy, the development of theories of tactical nuclear warfare, how nuclear war was taught at the Staff College, the role of operational research, and the evolution of the Army's nuclear war-fighting doctrine. He argues that the British Army possessed the intellectual capacity fororganisational adaptation, but that it displayed a cognitive dissonance about some of the more uncomfortable realities of nuclear war.
Author: Jeremy Mark Robinson
Publisher: Crescent Moon Pub
ISBN: 9781861711731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
NUCLEAR WAR IN THE U.K. An exploration of how the United Kingdom would fare in a nuclear war. There are chapters on: nuclear politics nukespeak and 'nuclear theology' atomic bomb tests and 'accidents' American bases in the U.K. the superpowers' military programmes and strategies the cost of nuclear war British civil defence the Gulf War, 'infowar' and 'smart' technology nuclear attack scenarios and anti-war and peace initiatives. Jeremy Robinson's books include Blade Runner and the Films of Philip K. Dick, Rimbaud, Lawrence Durrell and Hayao Miyazaki. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER TWO: HELL ON EARTH A NUCLEAR WAR WORST CASE SCENARIO Here s how you might die in a nuclear strike. Maximum capability is about one strategic warhead hitting a target every twenty seconds. Let s take a one megaton air-burst scenario. At ground zero, all buildings would be destroyed. Winds of 1,000 mph. There may be an echo of the blast wave (the Mach effect), resulting in double the over-pressure. The fireball will rise at feet/ second, expanding to 6,000 feet diameter after ten seconds. The radioactive cloud would be 3 miles high in 30 seconds. All combustible stuff would ignite, some up to 8 miles away. Air heat rises to 10,000,000 C. Heat travels outwards at 186,000 miles per second. Flesh would melt. People would die in the suffocation from the firestorm. At 1.5 miles from ground zero over-pressure is 30 times than normal atmospheric pressure. From two to five miles away, most buildings would be flattened, within 15 or so seconds. Winds of 130 mph. Clothing would ignite. Radiation sickness is inevitable. At three miles away you ll feel a flash of light (christened the pika-don at Hiroshima); then intense heat which chars to the bone (full-thickness burns); fifteen seconds later the windows would be blown in by the blast wave; and you d be thrown about by the wind. First degree burns as far as 20 miles from detonation. The EMP (electromagnetic pulse) will disrupt computers, telephones, radios, radars and power supplies. Most people would be permanently blinded by the brilliant light. There are about 200 radioactive elements in fall-out. Fall-out is second-stage radiation, contaminating water, the food chain, everything. Everywhere would be a Z Zone, a fall-out zone. Nice to know, too, that radiation is undetectable by the five senses. You may have a mortal dose and not know it. You ll know soon, though. You re in for a party, with radiation comin at ya in four types: alpha, beta, gamma and neutron. Gamma rays can penetrate several inches of concrete. Uranium and plutonium isotopes are nice, affecting bones, the respiratory tract, the liver, kidneys and lymphnodes: radiation lasts up to thousands of years. Ionizing radiation ll give you nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, fever, delirium, exhaustion, haemorrhages, hair loss, ulcers, anaemia and leukemia.
Author: Duncan Campbell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
Author: Matthew Grant
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526101335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
This collection offers a fresh interpretation of the Cold War as an imaginary war, a conflict that had imaginations of nuclear devastation as one of its main battlegrounds. The book includes survey chapters and case studies on Western Europe, the USSR, Japan and the USA. Looking at various strands of intellectual debate and at different media, from documentary film to fiction, the chapters demonstrate the difficulties to make the unthinkable and unimaginable - nuclear apocalypse - imaginable. The book will be required reading for everyone who wants to understand the cultural dynamics of the Cold War through the angle of its core ingredient, nuclear weapons.
Author: Matthew Jones
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351755404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 569
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Book Description
"Volume II of The Official History of the UK Strategic Nuclear Deterrent provides an authoritative and in-depth examination of the British government's strategic nuclear policy from 1964 to 1970. Written with full access to the UK documentary record, Volume II examines the controversies that developed over nuclear policy following the arrival in office of a Labour government led by Harold Wilson in October 1964 that openly questioned the independence of the deterrent. Having decided to preserve the Polaris programme, Labour ministers were nevertheless committed not to develop another generation of nuclear weapons beyond those in the pipeline, placing major doubts over the long-term future of the nuclear programme and collaboration with the United States. Defence planners also became increasingly concerned that the deployment of Soviet anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defences around Moscow threatened to undermine the ability of Polaris to fulfil its role as a national strategic nuclear deterrent. During 1967, under heavy pressures to control defence spending, a protracted debate was conducted within Whitehall over the future of Polaris and how to respond to the evolving ABM challenge. The volume concludes with Labour's defeat at the general election of June 1970, by which time the Royal Navy had assumed the nuclear deterrent role from the RAF, and plans had already been formulated for a UK project to improve Polaris which could both ensure its continuing credibility and rejuvenate the Anglo-American nuclear relationship."--Back cover.
Author: Graham Farmelo
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571300286
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
Churchill's Bomb - from the author of the Costa award-winning biography The Strangest Man - reveals a new aspect of Winston Churchill's life, so far completely neglected by historians: his relations with his nuclear scientists, and his management of Britain's policy on atomic weapons. Churchill was the only prominent politician to foresee the nuclear age and he played a leading role in the development of the Bomb during World War II. He became the first British Prime Minister with access to these weapons, and left office following desperate attempts during the Cold War to end the arms race. Graham Farmelo traces the beginnings of Churchill's association with nuclear weapons to his unlikely friendship with H. G. Wells, who coined the term 'atomic bombs'. In the 1930s, when Ernest Rutherford and his brilliant followers, such as Chadwick and Cockcroft, gave Britain the lead in nuclear research, Churchill wrote several widely read newspaper articles on the huge implications of their work. British physicists, in 1940, first showed that the Bomb was a practical possibility. But Churchill, closely advised by his favourite scientist, the controversial Frederick Lindemann, allowed leadership to pass to the US, where the Manhattan Project made the Bomb a terrible reality. British physicists played only a minor role in this vast enterprise, while Churchill ignored warnings from the scientist Niels Bohr that the Anglo-American policy would lead to a post-war arms race. After the war, the Americans reneged on personal agreements between Roosevelt and Churchill to share research. Clement Attlee, in a fateful decision, ordered the building of a British Bomb to maintain the country's place among the great powers. Churchill inherited it and ended his political career obsessed with the threat of thermonuclear war. Churchill's Bomb is an original and controversial book, full of political and scientific personalities and intrigues, which reveals a little-known side of Britain's great war-leader.
Author: Stephen Robert Twigge
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9789058230065
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
This unique volume provides the first detailed account of Britain's Command, Control, Comunications and Intelligence infrastructure, focusing on the British-American atomic relation- ship and its implications for NATO strategy.
Author: Michio Kaku
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780921689072
Category : Nuclear warfare
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
To Win a Nuclear War records as fully as we are likely to find what has gone on in the minds of American leaders and nuclear strategists on this awesome subject during these fateful forty years. It is an appalling story... This book compels us to re-think and re-write the history of the Cold War and the arms race."--From the foreword by Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the United States. To Win a Nuclear War provides a startling glimpse into secret U.S. plans to initiate a nuclear war from 1945 to the present. Based on recently declassified Top Secret documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, this book meticulously traces how U.S. policy makers in over a dozen episodes have threatened to initiate a nuclear attack. The book also documents the surprising reasons why the war plans were never carried out and discloses the deeper, hidden meaning of the Star Wars program.
