Faustine wrote:
[...snip...] > For all its propagandizing, I still think it's entirely possible to come away > from that film convinced that as a nation we need more and better preparation, > not less. That's the point - you as a nation (the USA) might well have been able to prepare for it. Over here in Britain, the only way I could be more than 30 miles from a probable target is to emigrate. There is only one county in England which had (then) no active military base (Sussex - though it did have some admin for the Royal Engineers & it does have the HQ of the Military Police. Not, I suspect a likely ICBM target) Rochester, where The War Game is set, is just south-east of London. It's about 20 miles downwind of a major international airport (Gatwick), less than 15 miles from a serious army base at Woolwich, not far from oil refineries, power stations & chemical works (not necessarily targets, but things you don't want to be near downwind of when they are blowing up) right next door to a naval dockyard (Chatham, since closed down), and at a transport choke point where road and rail bridges cross the river Medway. If not a target itself it is within walking distance of 2 or 3. Of course Tim would just say "don't live in Rochester". Support for civil defence mostly evaporated in Britain in the 1960s after the Russians converted to ICBMs. The left tended to regard it as a government excuse to increase social control and erode liberties; and the right saw it as a waste of money - because it would always be cheaper for the Russians to build more missiles than it would for us to defend ourselves from them. Also there was the idea that spending enough on CD to survive an enemy strike breaks up MAD, so if the enemy think you are going to do it it pays them to first strike (that is if they ever had any serious intent to nuke you in the first place which we now know the Russians never did). So spending less on CD was thought of as making a war less likely. Things are different if you are thinking about *limited* nuclear war rather than MAD. Which is why old lefties like me who would have opposed CD in the 60s & 70s (mostly on civil liberties grounds) would now be rather in favour of it under the current conditions. A Britain targetted by 50 or 100 warheads is going to be Airstrip One. A Britain in which a single suitcase bomb goes off somewhere, or in which a few nutters from Iowa start throwing bugs around, is a place in which individual precautions might make sense. As it is I'm right in the centre of London right now with something like a dozen serious biomedical labs within 2 blocks of me. The nearest one with live human pathogens being 2 metres from my backside as I write, So if even a small bomb goes off in this street I start going upwind as fast as I can. Ken Brown
