Civil Defence

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 5 December 1962.

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Photo of Mr Anthony Greenwood Mr Anthony Greenwood , Rossendale 12:00, 5 December 1962

At 6 p.m. on Saturday, 27th October, two of the Home Secretary's constituents decided to find out what the public could and should do in order to protect themselves against any nuclear attack. The first step they took was to consult the telephone directory, and they telephoned the Lambeth Civil Defence Division, from which they received advice to telephone another number. They telephoned the second number, and got no reply. They then telephoned Willesden Civil Defence; there was no reply. Their fourth call went to the London Civil Defence headquarters, from which there was no reply. They then telephoned the Home Office, where the night watchman suggested that perhaps they should telephone the police. At the Hampstead police station they were told to telephone the Hampstead Town Hall. They telephoned the Hampstead Town Hall; there was no reply. They then telephoned Hampstead Civil Defence, and from that office, too, there was no reply.

When I questioned the Home Secretary in this House on 15th November, the right hon. Gentleman told me that …civil defence measures can be put into operation at short notice, in case of necessity." —[OFFICIAL REPORT, 15th November, 1962; Vol. 667, c. 540.] It is, I think, difficult to conceive of a graver emergency, short of actual war, than the one we experienced at the time of the Cuba crisis, and other members of the Government certainly seem to have thought that we were within measurable distance of such a disaster.

It is also difficult to conceive the effect of the Home Secretary's apathy on the morale of the civil defence workers. I had a letter from a civil defence worker in North London, in which he said: We have all been trained to expect a period of tension prior to hostilities. In this period we have been told that we must inform and advise the public, set up posts and chains of communication and control, and do countless other tasks to give us even a fighting chance to save life and restore some order should attack come.… After 'Cuba', many of us are asking who is bluffing who? I feel that someone at the top took the gamble of a lifetime. Should there be a next time, another gamble may not come off. I have had letters from many parts of the country—from Lancashire, Devonshire, Essex—and my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. George Craddock) showed me a letter from a civil defence worker in which this passage occurred: We give our time and money on many occasions in what some of us believe, perhaps now misguidedly"… and I emphasise those three words: is a worth while cause, so that we might be able to help the public in case of nuclear attack. Let us look at the danger with which we are faced. Peace News, in a most valuable report to the nation on "H-bomb War" which was compiled from responsible and authoritative sources, has said that our civil defence policy is based on the premise that a ten-megaton bomb would be dropped. That would produce a blast circle 16 miles across, and a fire circle 45 miles across. But 100 megaton bombs are now a practical proposition, meaning 10 miles the power of the biggest bomb envisaged in our civil defence plans; a bomb producing a blast circle 34 miles across, and a fire circle with a diameter of 140 miles.

Peace News has given the effects of a 100-megaton bomb. I can paraphrase it by saying that there would be a fire ball 8 miles across, that brick houses would be destroyed within a circle of 34 miles, that fires would be started, and the skin blistered, as far away as Oxford and Cambridge—if the bomb burst over London—that radiation from the explosion would cause death or serious sickness within a circle of 14 miles across, and that the fall-out over at least 1,000 square miles would be so bad that anyone unprotected for as long as an hour would die from the radioactivity. And the Government expect to get four minutes' warning of such a disaster once the Fylingdales early warning station is completed. They estimate that it will take them 20 seconds to transmit the warning throughout the country, leaving 3 minutes 40 seconds in which the public will have to take precautions.

The position is still more alarming when we realise that Russia, for example, now claims to have a missile with a 12,000-mile range, which can fly round the world and come in behind the expensive early warning system which the Americans and ourselves have got. In the circumstances it is not surprising that a year ago London County Council faced the reality and admitted: There is no practical means of providing Londoners with effective defence against thermo-nuclear war. With that conclusion I agree, and I deplore the way which the Government deceive the public by pretending that adequate defence is available.

To say that is in no way to disparage the work of devoted civil defence volunteers who, in my view, will always have an important task to discharge in areas on the fringe of explosions. But they will be able to do that only if the Home Secretary shows himself more aware of the gravity of the situation and of the need for urgent action than seems likely at the moment. Not the slightest progress has been made with the Government's plan for evacuating 12 million people. No headway has been made with the provision of deep shelters. According to the Home Office there are only seven deep shelters in London allegedly safe from radiation, and all of them are underground railway stations. According to Sanity, the journal of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, one of the 500 scheduled shelters in London is a men's lavatory in the middle of Fleet Street.

One of the most thorough surveys of our lack of preparedness and the fantastic state of muddle and sloth in the Home Office was published in the magazine Topic for 10th November, under the title "Where you go if the bomb drops". It is prefaced with the words: The article printed below is not a Goon Show script or a 'Private Eye' satire. It is the result of a serious investigation into the most serious question of the day: 'If there is a nuclear attack on Britain, what can we do?' No attempt was made at encouraging officials into making frivolous statements, and TOPIC has no reason to think they were joking. What emerges is a picture of unbelievable muddle and incredible fatuity in Britain's arrangements for civil defence—at a price of no less than £23,000,000 a year. It tells how at the height of the Cuban crisis an official in a London civil defence district decided there was no need to spoil the weekend of the men and women in his corps by calling on civil defence personnel to stand by. He explained his action in these words: Well, I read the papers pretty thoroughly that morning and thought things were not bad enough to keep a lot of people sitting around their telephones. It turned out I was right. I hope that the Home Office intelligence system will inspire more confidence in future.

After spending a week of investigation in the Home Office and at civil defence headquarters throughout the country, Topic said that it had found what it called a series of contradictions about public warnings, an almost criminal lack of information, and an arrogance among certain officials… There was, for example, virtually no way of telling people of imminent nuclear attack. When the Home Office was asked how the public would be informed, it took three days to get an answer from it. The answer was The public would be informed. A second attempt elicited the answer: The Press, radio and television services would be used. A third question got the reply: The TIM talking clock is linked with the Fylingdales early warning system, and in the event of an alert sirens would be sounded. No cognizance was taken of the fact that Fylingdales will not operate until the spring, or that in many parts of the country sirens are used to call firemen to fires.

One civil defence spokesman took the view that maroons would be used in the event of radioactive fall-out. Another complained that nobody had ever said when the maroons would be used. Another said that maroons would constitute the first warning—before the sirens.

Fortunately Mr. X of the Home Office came to the rescue. I do not want to pillory him for the fatuity of Home Office policy and it is only fair to refer to him as Mr. X. He announced that a warbling note on the sirens would give warning of imminent attack. Danger of fall-out would be announced by another siren accompanied by church bells and other noises. Imminent fall-out would be signified by maroons sounding the letter D in the Morse code—"bang, pause, bang, bang". The article in Topic says that Mr. X added reassuringly that, until maroons were manufactured, we should have to improvise by banging the letter D on dust-bin lids and so forth.

This is really too absurd even for the Home Office. If the Government are not hoodwinking the public and are not guilty of a giant and cruel confidence trick, what progress has been made, for instance, in the training of personnel, the preparation of shelters, the completion of evacuation plans, the manufacture of maroons and sirens, and, above all, in telling the public what is expected of them?

The rich advice of the City of London civil defence service was given in Topic as follows: It would be a good idea to whitewash your windows against radiation heat. And, if you have time, pull up the floorboards in your front room and dig a trench. It makes good cover". What I hope are the more serious proposals of the Home Office are contained in a 31-page booklet, "The Hydrogen Bomb". When the Hampstead Borough Council decided to obtain copies, it announced that they could not be sold to anyone who wanted a copy to keep. The town clerk and borough civil defence controller made this comment: We have been told by the Home Office that we cannot sell the booklets or give them away. We understand that the Government do not want to get people worried about the H-bomb in peace time". The Council is keeping the booklets on the shelves of the public library so that people may go and consult them.

It is not surprising that Mr. X, who, after all, is simply carrying out the right hon. Gentleman's inept, absurd and fumbling policy, should have replied, when asked what we should have suffered if the Cuba crisis had produced nuclear war, "I suppose that we should all of us have been wiped out".

It is a shocking story of muddle, fatuity, indifference and incompetence. It is time that the Home Office told the public the truth.