Almost 80 million mobile phones in the UK will receive a call from Armageddon next month.
The cacophony of our world will be drowned by the howling of a cyber siren warning us something is finally in the air, something we should be very afraid of.
Our government, with its reputation for lies and indifference, says they want it to be a one-off and they ‘hope’ we never have to hear that sound again.
Thank you government for making us feel a little safer at a time when so many of us fear we are about to take the final ‘four minute’ journey home.
The government makes no mention of nuclear bombs sailing through our blustery cloudy skies and obliterating all our futures, whether you end up dead or alive.
What chance have we got? 80 million mobiles going off all at once … 80 million tiny plastic hand-held sirens filling our car, our streets, our pubs, our shops, supermarkets. Our homes.
How many of us will actually get back to our homes when those millions and millions of tiny sirens go off for real?
Officially, the government is testing a system that will allow them and emergency services to send an immediate warning to the public if they’re ‘at risk of life-threatening situations’ like flooding or wildfires.
You will not be able to use your phone without acknowledging the message.
The Government’s National Resilience Framework, published in December, says the siren is expected to launch across the UK in ‘early 2023’ but as of yet, it is still in its testing phase.
We are testing our chances of survival by getting some spidery authoritarian government robot to phone every one of us at the same time and tell us we could be about to die.
If it is a bomb from Russia with love, what are we supposed to do? Jump under our cars – or into the nearest ditch – and cross your fingers? Or should we all get under our kitchen tables for a few weeks while death outside reduces to a half-life?
Well, don’t shoot the messenger – but what has changed in the last 50 years?
I dare to say one word – NOTHING!
Protect and Survive was a civil defence public information campaign which began in 1974 and continued until 1980.
It was basically a badly produced document focussed on Nuclear War. And, yep, it told you to jump in a ditch or under your table and kiss your wife, your kids, your dog, your cat and your twitching a”rse goodbye.
It was a useless pointless deadly joke.
And in 2023 NOTHING has changed.
Do you know that In the past 10 years, 36 people have died as a result of flooding in England and Wales. And there were 334 fire-related fatalities in Great Britain during 2021/22.
However, if Putin blasts us, the first bomb to hit the UK is expected to wipe out 6 million – and maim another 4 million.
Let’s take a look at Thatcher’s Protect and Survive – what could it do for us way back then, and what can it do for us today?
What have these prime ministers bothered to do to help out in the case of nuclear war?
Callaghan, Blair, Brown, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak… they are our guardians, our protectors.
THE FUTURE ACCORDING TO THATCHER’S ROAD MAP TO DESTRUCTION
34 MILLION OF US WILL DIE IN PUTIN’S MADNESS, SAYS NUCLEAR WAR SCENARIO
Margaret Thatcher was a tyrant, a grocery girl who ate all the plums.
She chose Meringue for hair and adopted a shrillness that could make a blackboard screech.
But one day the Iron Lady took a step too far … she’d already killed industry, Northern cities were wastelands of boarded-up shops, teachers were banned from discussing LGBT. And the poll tax had just happened.
There were riots on our streets.
On the other hand Vladimir Putin is a working-class hero to millions, a boy-dun-good, the richest man in the world some say.
An action man too.
Most of us though see him as a murderous bare-chested horseman of the apocalypse.
Vlad isn’t very well either. Some say he is about to drop dead. Certainly, he does look a bit autocratically bloated.
Stress I guess.
After all, he has been waving rusty old nuclear popguns in the air and threatening mankind.
He has has taken on inhuman proportions.
And in a way has sent us back to a future as the Iron Curtains are twitching again.
Yep, it’s like we are back in the 1980s when Mrs T came up with her final cynical act.
Dear old Maggie rushed to print with the Protect and Survive government pamphlet. Designed to keep us alive in the event of a Russian nuke piercing the very heart of England.
World tensions were rising. In 1980, nuclear war seemed closer than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis 18 years earlier.
Then we read Protect and Survive! Get under the table, it said. Or hide in a ditch!
And, if you hear the air-raid klaxons clanking and wheezing out the four minute warning, then don’t forget to brick up windows. Oh! And remove handles from all toilet cisterns (to stop usable water being flushed accidently).
And as Putin bombs and maims the Ukraine and threatens the world, Protect and Survive, incredibly, is still probably the best we’ve got!
It’s just been rewritten a bit!
Latest government advice says: “Hand sanitizer does not protect against fall out. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth, if possible.
“Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask.”
The Government advice is, in essence, if Putin nukes us then you still have to get under the table, put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.
Back in the day they published 150,000 copies for a population of 65m people.
Now we have a population of nearly 80m and a myasma of languages and cultures.
In fact there seems to be so little information on how to survive that people like war prepper Yara Ghrewati, aged 39, are going it alone. She has a secret shelter, a car boot packed with essentials, and a bow and arrow to hunt squirrels.
The bushcraft instructor even suggests people should be willing to eat their pets if the worst happens and food supplies are cut. “Any vegetarians are going to have a really tough time,” she said.
It is of course far from certain that Putin would be prepared to be the first leader to use nuclear weapons in wartime since 1945.
U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a “precedent” for the use of nuclear weapons., The invasion of Iraq was a big PR mistake too.
Even if Putin did issue the launch order, there is no guarantee it would be carried out. Nor can he be absolutely sure either that the weapons and their delivery systems would work.
But given Putin’s crimes — from Syria to Crimea to Salisbury— surely this lack of public planning over the past 40 years is just jaw-droppingly complacent on the part of Europe’s leaders.
The annexation – and new bombings – brings the use of a nuclear weapon a step closer by giving Putin a potential justification on the grounds that “the territorial integrity of our country is threatened”.
Any nuclear use in Ukraine would be likely to involve non-strategic, or tactical, weapons. But on average they are far more powerful that the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimates Russia has 2,000 tactical weapons for use on land, sea and air.
But Pavel Baev, a military researcher who once worked for the Soviet defence ministry, said that Putin cannot count on these weapons actually working.
“Most of these warheads are very old,” Baev, now a professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said.
But for the Russian leader, detonation of even a rusty old a tactical nuclear weapon is entirely acceptable.
And so the West needs to do some quick thinking about how it will help us all to survive.
More than 40 years ago, the 30 page pamphlet advised householders to make a fallout room and an inner refuge, like the cupboard under the stairs.
Families would be in there for at least two weeks, so there were tips on what food to stock up on.
People were urged to store three-and-half gallons (16 litres) of water each, keeping it in the bath and basins.
If people were not at home during the nuclear strike, they were advised to “lie flat (in a ditch) and cover the exposed skin of the head and hands”.
Today, the aftermath of a nuclear war will be firestorms, a nuclear winter, widespread radiation sickness and the loss of much modern technology.
For years, crops from California to China will keep dying. Famine will set in around the globe.
Over the decades he total number of weapons has dropped by about 80 percent from an estimated 70,300 in 1986 to 12,700 in early 2022.
But the Ukraine does not have any – a brave and compassionate nation, it gave them up in 1994.