26 January 2012
I was a bit of a worrier in my teens. I worried about school, friends, girls, religion, rabies, how unfair life was and pretty much everything else. What really had me worried, more than anything else, was the threat of global thermonuclear war. I obsessed over every terrifying detail of what an all out attack would unleash upon me and my soon to be burned-to-a-crisp world. Horrifying images of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to be everywhere, as did the chillingly spectacular footage from the American atomic weapons testing programmes. There were diagrams of concentric circles radiating from a central point marked 'ground zero.' Each circle represent the death you could expect depending on how far away way you were from a nuclear explosion. My family lived in the blasted, burned, irradiated and left to die by a collapsed social infrastructure zone. The government had secretly produced public information films, that were to be broadcast in the event of impending war. These films soon became unsecret. Called 'Protect and Survive' they seemed as laughably naive as the 'Duck and Cover' films of the fifties. America's strategic war machine came to the UK in the form of heavy bombers, cruise missiles and elaborate listening stations to detect a sudden attack. These stations, we were told, would give us 4 minutes warning of an impending nuclear catastrophe, just enough time to put your head between your legs and kiss your arse goodbye, we joked without laughing. There was a sound that that gave a voice to my armageddon anxiety syndrome, it was the demon-baby wail of the air raid sirens, whose city wide cries would herald the end of our lives, of civilisation and maybe even life on Earth.
On a clear autumn day in 1981, I sat in registration at the start of another school day. Mr Ballard called our names and ticked our presence in the register. The sirens call cut across everything, exactly as my fearful imagination told me it would. The sound rose in pitch, echoing across the roofs of factories and houses, its power not diminished by distance. We blinked, I looked at Mr Ballard, a rational man, a teacher of history, one of the few adults I looked up to. His expression was blank, empty, like his features couldn't be arranged in a way to express what he was feeling. He was the first adult I'd ever seen looking really frightened. In that exact moment I believed the sum of all my fears was upon me. The pitch of the siren fell away, as did its volume, the sound fading out into a world that seemed to be holding its breath. Slowly it became clear that this was not the end of days. It was a system test, probably an exercise for the emergency services and those tasked with our orderly transition to an extinct species (it turned out that the Regional Nuclear Emergency Command & Control bunker was buried deep in the ground less than a mile from school. After the cold war it was opened to the public before eventually being decommissioned and sealed).
I joined CND.
The 4 minute warning was a lie. An invention by politicians to sell the placement of American weapons and early warning systems on English soil to a skeptical public. If there had ever been a surprise Russian nuclear attack we'd have died in our millions having never know what hit us.
The 4 Minute Warning • Opuss № I