Abstract
Post-war civil defence in Britain has not progressed very far; the population has neither purpose-built shelters nor plans for evacuation. In the absence of these, Britain has emphasised warning and monitoring installations, plans for protection of government and the training of volunteers. As in the United States, civil defence emerged as a matter of controversy twice, first in the late 1950s and again in the years since 1980. In each case, civil defence became caught up in the larger issue of British nuclear disarmament; in each instance the chief result was to disarm civil defence. At no point did Britain’s political leadership rally behind civil defence as did the United States under Kennedy. In consequence, large funds were never appropriated.1
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Notes
T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence (London: HMSO, 1955), p. xvi.
Home Office, Protect and Survive (London: HMSO, 1980) p. 10.
Home Office, Domestic Nuclear Shelters (London: HMSO, 1981) p. 13.
Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London: HMSO, 1950) p. 15.
Home Office, The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids (London: HMSO, 1938) p. 3.
Home Office, ‘Civil Defence Industrial Bulletin No. 1’ (London: HMSO, 1951) p. 3.
Geoffrey De Freitas, Hansard, 20 April 1953, col. 775.
Squadron-Leader Kinghorn, Hansard, 22 March 1948, col. 2681.
Emrys Hughes, Hansard, 24 July 1950, col. 93.
A. G. H. Brend, ‘Address by Chairman of the Society of Industrial Civil Defence Officers’, 23 September 1959, pp. 9–10.
Lord Lindgren cited in Hansard, 5 April 1962, col. 290.
R. T. Paget cited in Hansard, 1 March 1963, cols 1670–1.
Sir David Renton cited in Hansard, 20 July 1967, col. 2618.
Cited in ‘Buildings Ready for RSGs’, Guardian, 4 June 1964.
Home Office, ‘Industry’s Part in UK Civil Defence Policy’, speech of Lord Stonham, 5 October 1967.
Home Secretary R. A. Butler, Hansard, 31 October 1957, col. 89.
Home Office, Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack (London: HMSO, 1963).
Frank Allaun, Hansard, 1 December 1962, col. 1468.
Charles Loughlin, Hansard, 27 June 1963, cols 1835–6.
Alice Bacon, Hansard, 20 July 1967, col. 2615.
Duncan Campbell, War Plan UK (London: Paladin, 1983) p. 80.
R. S. Hodgson and R. S. Banks, Britain’s Home Defence Gamble (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1978).
Home Office, Emergency Planning Guidance to Local Authorities (London: HMSO, 1985).
Roy Hattersley, Hansard, 26 October 1983, col. 343.
Home Office, Civil Defence: Why We Need It (London: HMSO, 1981) p. 1.
Home Office and Scottish Home and Health Department, Civil Defence: The Basic Facts, October 1983, p. 17.
For far more realistic and in-depth analysis of survival chances in London, see the GLAWARS Report, London Under Attack (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
FEMA, ‘What You Should Know About Nuclear Preparedness’ (Washington, DC: FEMA, November 1983), p. 10.
E. P. Thompson, Protest and Survive (London: CND, 1980). Thompson’s pamphlet, though its title is a play upon that of its Home Office precursor, is not primarily an attack on civil defence but a call for a nuclear-free Britain. For Thompson, civil defence in Britain is less about shelters and evacuation schemes than it is about paranoid secrecy and unequal protection, brought about by the Government’s need to defend its continued reliance upon a nuclear deterrent. In consequence, according to Thompson, ‘Protest is the only realistic form of civil defence’ (p. 30). While Thompson’s notion of protest is not, of course, meant merely to protest against civil defence, it served as the most recent intellectual bridge from the civil defence debate to the disarmament one.
Duncan Campbell, ‘Deathtrap For City Dwellers’, New Statesman, vol. 102 (25 September 1981) p. 16. Campbell attributes this statement to Mr Noel Law, the ‘top Home Office Defence planner’ in 1978, during a private meeting.
Phil Bolsover, Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick (London: CND, 1982) p. 17.
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© 1987 Lawrence J. Vale
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Vale, L.J. (1987). Britain. In: The Limits of Civil Defence in the USA, Switzerland, Britain and the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08679-5_7
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