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FreddieUK I too lived through events like the Cuban Missile Crisis, but one thing we did not have in British schools were attempts to terrify children with things like those "Duck & Cover" drills the USA loved.
I have seen a film made in the 1950s for showing in American schools, both chilling and patronising at the same time, starting with dutiful flag-saluting where UK schools had lightly-religious Assemblies. Its "star" is bizarrely, a cartoon tortoise; the narration dips into in that talking-down style Hollywood thought appropriate for animal programmes aimed at children.The animal's shell, oddly shaped like a GI's helmet but an extension of his skin, would supposedly protect him from a nuclear weapon's heat and blast, just as an inflammable, wooden school desk would protect a child crouching under it....
A very revealing book on the UK's official stance and well-meaning schemes to protect the population if WW3 broke out with thermonuclear weapons, is Julie McDowell's
Attack Warning Red! - How Britain Prepared For Nuclear War.
Much of it seemed little better than WRVS heroics with tea-urns, Blitz style; instructions on making domestic blast-shelters from (inflammable!) furniture; and commandeering the nation's stocks of first-aid and medical requisites from pharmacies against receipts for reimbursement after the war...... More seriously it also relied on secret regional government shelters from which rescue and recovery operations could be directed.
McDowell touches briefly on other countries' equivalents, including the USA's
Duck & Cover drills that simply made very many children very frightened indeed.
For fictional but horribly credible examinations, Raymond Briggs'
When The Wind Blows rather sums up in grim gentility the likelihood for immediate survivors, its only two characters an elderly couple slowly dying, we readers realise, from radiation sickness.
Two BBC TV films,
The War Game and
Threads were also fiction but so horrifyingly realistic the government and BBC were frightened to show them at first. Both concentrate on the aftermath of a nuclear attack; the former examining people's likely forms of behaviour.
Threads centres on a young woman surviving a nuclear bomb that has destroyed Sheffield. Both woan awards.
A Hollywood equivalent gained none because it was just so obviously ridiculous, treating the effects of a nuclear attack as if little worse than a major earthquake or train crash.
We were of course too young to have seen these at the time - but Julie McDowell says she did when far too young, and it left such an impression that it inspired her book many years later.
Naturally, those of us at school in the era (1950s-60s) were aware of the threat but generally understood little or nothing of the very real dangers. The newsreaders, still respectfully calling mere politicians "Mr...." (there were far fewer "Mrs..." politicians), described deadly serious meetings and so on but it was all distant and mysterious to we youngsters. We knew all along that grown-ups - our Elders-And-Allegedly-Betters - discussed or did very strange things for no clear reasons, and were best left to it. Besides, many of them thought such matters were not for mere twleve-year-olds anyway.
With one exception, for me.
My best mate at school showed me a copy of a Civil Defence book issued I think, to his father. He should not have had the book, still less showed me. Aged only eleven then, I still recall its range-radius diagram for a multi-megatonne bomb. I forget the yield but remember the damage range could be out to thirty miles. Thinking of towns in your own part of the country, puts that in terrible perspective.
