Original subtitles

The human body is a fragile thing.

At speeds of more than 8 miles an hour,

an impact with

a hard surface can cause leg and ankle fractures.

A skin temperature above 70 degrees centigrade

will produce serious burns in less than a second.

Large fragments of broken glass

traveling at more than 35 miles an hour

will penetrate and lacerate the skin.

Acute exposure to radiation will produce bleeding,

loss of hair, and loss of white blood cells.

All these effects are produced by a nuclear weapon.

Could we survive?

Suppose, a mile above the dome of St.

Paul's Cathedral in London, on a clear morning,

a

single one megaton weapon explodes.

This film is about what happens to a city,

any city, underneath such an explosion.

Most of us live in cities.

How effectively could we shelter from a nuclear weapon?

Would we survive its three main effects?

At the instant of detonation, the temperature of a nuclear fireball is 20 million degrees,

as hot as the centre of the sun.

This is the first effect, a pulse of intense heat and light.

Across large areas of central London,

people and objects burst into flames,

melt or char.

If we freeze time at the exact instant of the explosion,

these are the effects of the heat alone in different parts of the city.

At St Paul's itself, ground zero,

directly under the fireball, the initial heat is intense enough to melt the great bronze cross.

It vaporises the liquid metal as it runs down the dome.

It melts the stained glass windows and ignites objects inside the cathedral.

Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery.

Inside, at the same instant, paintings are burning.

In St.

James' Park, the same thermal rays are hot enough to ignite trees and scorch away the grass.

In the shallower parts of the lake,

the water boils to leave the lake bed dry and steaming.

The temperature is around 4,000 degrees.

In precise terms, the heat energy at this distance is 350 calories per square centimetre.

That is enough to vaporise the road surface,

melt parts of statues and set fire to everything

combustible.

Around Battersea Power Station and Battersea Dogs Home in South London,

the heat from the

fireball will ignite the upholstery and rubber tyres of cars and their petrol tanks.

It will

will melt the sheet metal of buses.

In the first seconds of a nuclear explosion,

many vehicles will catch fire in streets exposed to the direct flash.

In the same streets, window frames and doors will char or burn.

This will happen from Chalk Farm to Camberwell.

The heat rays, like light, travel in straight lines.

Areas in shadow are not affected.

In this Battersea street, any window from which the fireball is visible will emit the

heat rays into the inside of the house.

At this radius, around four miles,

they will pass through the glass and ignite most flammable

things they touch.

What is the effect of this incredible heat on people caught by it?

Everywhere inside this seven mile radius,

for example at the shops in Holland Park Avenue,

the effect on directly exposed flesh is the same.

It behaves like the meat in the butcher's window.

Animal fats melt and burn.

Tissues are charred to black carbon.

This is at four and a half miles.

The temperature is around 1,800 degrees.

Only at the fringes of this area,

here at Wimbledon, do the burns become treatable.

At the lawn tennis ground, the heat scorches plywood.

This makeup shows what it does to flesh.

A third degree burn through the full thickness of the skin looks like this.

It requires extensive skin grafts.

A mile further out still, Kew Gardens,

over eight and a half miles from St Paul's.

The initial burst of heat here will melt a raincoat.

On the human face it produces severe second degree burns with blistering of the skin.

Even at 11 miles out, here at Twickenham Rugby Ground,

the flash will permanently damage

the eyesight of anyone looking directly at the fireball.

Because of the eye's focusing action,

severe burning and possible hemorrhage of the retina are possible.

At Hampton Court Palace, some of these tourists will receive the equivalent of a severe sunburn.

Notice the shielding effect of clothing.

As everywhere, only the exposed skin is affected.

The area covered by the hat isn't burnt.

At the same radius, around 12 to 13 miles,

even in direct light from the fireball will cause temporary blindness, lasting

from 10 seconds to several minutes.

All these effects have happened in the first

three seconds of a one megaton explosion.

Many people will be completely shielded,

even quite close to ground zero.

However, up to 650,000 people will have suffered

major burns from the fireball in these first few seconds.

Three seconds after the detonation, a mile above the cathedral,

the blast wave arrives.

It is as if St.

Paul's was smashed by a giant,

million-ton piston.

At enormous pressures and with winds up to 2,000 miles an hour,

the blast wave spreads

outwards following the heat flash as thunder follows lightning.

Within 20 seconds, the destruction as far as Bayswater is virtually total.

Many reinforced concrete buildings are leveled.

Factors are several.

Even further out, ordinary brick houses are hit by the blast like this.

What is the effect of this massive power on the unprotected human body?

The major injuries come from the secondary effects of blast,

impact with flying debris and solid walls.

As far as Walthamstow or Hampstead,

people can be carried by winds of 150 miles an hour

and thrown against buildings.

Arm and leg fractures are likely,

with a high proportion of skull injuries.

Closer in, the pressure itself may even rupture the lungs

and burst the eardrums.

However, the most widespread injuries are from flying glass.

As the pressure wave sweeps outwards from St Paul's,

it shatters and bursts every window in the city,

from the M4 services near Heathrow

to Hornchurch in Essex, an area of 500 square miles.

This is what flying glass can do to a pumpkin.

In this royal wedding crowd, stretching all the way back to Trafalgar Square.

All the people you can see, plus another quarter of a million,

will die immediately from the blast.

A million and a half more will be seriously injured.

The immediate effects of even a single weapon are awesome.

What can city dwellers do to protect themselves?

We should look firstly at the options open to a couple living in the North

London suburb of Finsbury Park.

Their street is between three and four miles from St.

Paul's, mainly Edwardian

terraced houses.

Joy and Eric live at the southern end.

He's a musician.

She works

for a bank.

What could they do for protection?

The Home Office published

this pamphlet, Protect and Survive, in May 1980.

Most of the booklet tells you how

to shelter from the fallout that may follow an attack.

There's little on how

to deal with the immediate effects.

However, there is advice on fire prevention.

Newspapers and other combustibles should be thrown away.

Buckets of water should be kept handy for putting out fires.

And windows should be whitewashed

to reflect the heat flash.

The remaining advice is how to shield an inner room

from fallout and how to build a refuge within that room.

These preparations took all day.

There was a problem in finding enough heavy materials for the necessary shielding.

There was no advice on blast protection.

How would they survive at three and a quarter miles?

As far as heat is concerned, quite well.

Although the paint on the windows will burn,

the whitewash keeps 80% of the heat out.

There may be fires in unprotected houses nearby,

but Joy and Eric should survive,

at least for 17 seconds.

After that the blast demolishes their terrace of houses.

There's no guarantee that these

measures would protect you from blast if you were much closer than six to eight miles from

ground zero.

However, as we'll see, any shelters that survive further away can still be effective

against fallout.

A second Home Office booklet was published early in 1981.

It deals with

more elaborate shelters.

None of them are last-minute affairs.

Type 1 is for

digging outdoors in a time of international crisis.

You need quite a

large garden.

It has to be well away from buildings and large trees to avoid

falling debris.

Many London gardens will not be big enough to satisfy this

requirement.

It's a shallow 18-inch trench with built-up earth walls held in

place initially with wooden doors.

These are later used for the roof.

It suggested

that all this timber, doors, planks,

braces, should come from cannibalizing your own

house.

But would people really start removing doors unless they were certain

an attack was coming?

At the end of the first day's digging,

the trench started

to fill with water.

By the following morning, this had happened.

Oh dear.

Look at this.

It's filled up.

The local water table was about a foot below the surface.

There were eight inches of water

to be bailed out.

They persevered, although in practice the continuous flooding would

have made their shelter uninhabitable.

The next problem would have been

especially difficult for those with small gardens.

The earth excavated from

the shelter was only a fraction of that needed to cover it.

In fact an additional

four and a half tons had to be imported.

Luckily the ground wasn't frozen, there

were no underground sewage pipes or conduits in the way and the couple had

the necessary time to build it.

It's not known in practice how much,

if any, warning

would be given for shelter building.

Building this took the equivalent of a long,

hard weekend

for two.

The total cost of materials, not including the extra soil,

was about £200.

How does such a structure withstand heat and blast?

The earth cover stands up to heat

very well, although any exposed wood may be charred.

However, the blast pressure at this range is four times what the shelter's designed

for, so it wouldn't protect this couple from the immediate effects.

In this kind of shelter, they'd need to be at least five or six miles away for proper

blast protection.

The booklet has another design that's more resistant to blast.

It's a kit of parts obtained in peacetime and assembled in a crisis.

It's designed for indoors, for a basement or ground floor room.

When it's put together, it's very like the World War II Morrison shelter.

The steel frame took several hours,

then the fallout shielding, layers of bricks.

This took most of a day.

Total cost with bricks, eight to twelve hundred pounds.

It's claimed that it will withstand a two-story house collapsing on top of it.

The shelter itself survives at three miles.

It's right in the centre of the fire zone.

This is the area where almost everything that will burn is on fire,

even after the blast.

The fires burn up available oxygen.

Inside your shelter, you might not only be roasted, but suffocated.

For this reason alone, the shelter is unsatisfactory unless it's at least four and a half to five miles away.

And even then there may be no one to dig you out.

From here on the options take

increasing amounts of time and money.

There are now about 30 firms who will

sell and install for you a purpose-built nuclear shelter in any combination of

steel, fiberglass and concrete.

The amount you pay depends on size,

sophistication and level of comfort.

Most are between eight and twenty thousand

pounds.

Even with a second mortgage or cost-sharing they're probably beyond the

range of all but a fraction of the population.

This one is typical, it's a

buried steel tube and costs about ten thousand pounds.

Inside it's about 15

feet long and the space for five to seven people to live in moderate comfort

supported by an air filtration system.

This is pumped by a hand crank.

There's

sample storage space and running water from a self-contained tank.

A laboratory flushes the waste into an underground pit.

The blast proofing in most shelters will withstand one to three atmospheres of overpressure.

Here it's three atmospheres.

The whole thing's buried under six feet of earth and takes about a week to install and

equip.

The problems include making sure you're in it,

not outside when the bomb goes off.

There's also the question of neighbours.

You may be the only one in your area with a shelter.

Are you prepared to use force

to keep others out?

And will you be safe?

Blast damage overhead leaves Joy and Eric a little shaken,

but otherwise they're protected

from the explosion.

They could survive the blast even closer in,

a mile and a half to a mile,

but even where

they are, there's still the suffocation problem.

However, if they invested several more thousand on an oxygen making unit,

they'd overcome

this danger too.

For complete protection here, they'd have paid around £15,000.

At last, they're reasonably safe.

Safe, that is, from the immediate effects of a one megaton airburst at St Paul's.

All this destruction was the result of a single warhead.

But a single warhead is unlikely.

For an all-out attack on the London region,

this is a realistic scenario.

Up to 30 large and medium-sized weapons,

many exploding in the central area.

Amidst this incredible destruction, a further nightmare.

Over a third explode on the ground.

These make fallout.

When a fireball touches the ground,

many tons of earth and debris are sucked up,

vaporized and made highly radioactive.

This is fallout.

Starting within hours after the explosion, and continuing for days or weeks,

this lethal dust drops out of the cloud as it's blown by the wind.

Areas hundreds of miles away can be affected.

It is invisible and deadly for at least two weeks.

The radiation from this dust damages and kills living cells.

These are some of the symptoms after a large dose,

a thousand rads.

Within 30 minutes, nausea, tiredness, diarrhea, vomiting.

After two weeks, loss of hair.

After three weeks, bleeding from the gums and all orifices, skin hemorrhages.

Within three months, pain, delirium, and probably death.

A shattered inner city offers little protection from this dust,

or shielding from its intense radiation.

Even an undamaged house is insufficient shelter.

However, if they're properly built and shielded,

all three of the do-it-yourself shelters

could make a life-saving difference in areas that weren't affected by blast,

away from the centre.

Under their thick earth shielding, Joy and Eric are safe much further in.

Their Swiss-designed pump filters the dust from the air supply,

although it does need cranking for 15 minutes every hour.

They will have bought over 2,000 times as much shielding as most other people.

Not all will be as secure.

For most city dwellers, survival depends as much on luck as on foresight.

Would West London, for example, really be in a safety zone,

or flattened by blast, or hit by fallout?

All are possible.

Kenneth and Elizabeth live in Shepherd's Bush.

He's in the building trade.

They've been married for seven years.

The chances of their house looking like this

after a major attack are high.

If they survived such an attack they could still

shelter from fallout if they'd previously dug a trench like Joy and Eric's in the

garden.

We asked them to dig one and to stay down in it for nearly two weeks

entirely cut off from the outside world.

For a two-week shelter these are the

recommended rations, about 50 pounds worth.

Inside, these are the conditions

they took on, and this is the sanitation,

a bucket and chair.

They decided right

away to sacrifice the chair for the extra few inches of room.

The shelter was 36

inches wide.

Organising the tiny space was a nightmare,

even in this well-lit

experiment.

Bad as these conditions were, what would they be like

after a real nuclear blast.

Could you imagine yourself in here?

The confusion, the disorientation.

In such a situation, you would have to face much that was totally alien to you.

As you

tried to sleep on the hard floor,

for example, would you find it possible to forget the destruction

you'd seen as you scrambled into the shelter?

Would you have been able to find all your

family in time?

Your children?

Would your house still be standing outside?

Would you

be injured?

The washing facilities in the shelter are basic.

In a real emergency, probably

in darkness, would you know how to bathe and dress wounds?

Could you remove broken glass

from cuts if you had to.

Could you prevent infection?

After five days, half way through

the trial, Kenneth described conditions in his shelter.

Good morning gentlemen, or should I say afternoon.

Hasn't been a very good night this morning.

I'm bored, very tired, very little sleep,

very restless, otherwise things are going fine.

I'm slightly stiff, I have a slight touch of a cold,

but otherwise I'm fine.

Imagine the sanitation in a real emergency.

The first symptoms of radiation sickness and the symptoms of panic are almost the same.

How would you cope in this confined space for two weeks with vomiting and diarrhea?

There would be many such uncertainties.

Above all, what would be outside?

Even though you knew it might be radioactive and deadly,

could you resist the temptation to go out and look?

And when you finally did, after two weeks, what would you find?

A world you recognized, or a wasteland for which little in your experience had prepared

you?

After an all-out attack, how much of that complex world you now take for granted would

still be there?

Sanitation?

Water supply?

High technology medicine?

Doctors?

Electricity?

What kind of communications?

Who would tell you the extent of what's happened?

How would you travel?

Where would you go to find food?

Would the social fabric still be there?

Would anything?

When after two weeks you crawl out of your trench or your concrete bunker,

it could be that your real problems will just be beginning.