Britain may be an insignificant little rock in the North Atlantic,
but for centuries, the island we call home
was coveted by foreign powers,
making fear of invasion a fact of life.
From north to south, east to west,
2,000 years of threats have left their mark.
In this series, we'll seek out these reminders,
from weaponry and castles to warships,
as we tell the story of a centuries-long obsession
with attack from overseas.
From my headquarters here at Walmer Castle,
I'll be exploring how a thirst for power,
both here and abroad, led to some of the most turbulent periods
in British history...
There's now the concern
that Hitler is going to continue.
..and getting my hands on some truly extraordinary artefacts.
And this is the original?
Engineer Professor Danielle George and historian Dr Onyeka Nubia
will be travelling the UK in search of the physical evidence
that tells of a centuries-long struggle...
Look at this all the way up as well!
..and experiencing how those foreign threats impacted the lives
of ordinary people.
Walking in here, I think I would be over-awed.
I'm Professor Alice Roberts,
and this is the story of Fortress Britain.
CHURCHILL: To defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
In October 1962, the world held its breath as America
and the Soviet Union engaged in a game of nuclear brinkmanship.
Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has...
..placed and is placing medium and intermediate-range missiles
and sites in Cuba? Yes or no?
Don't wait for the translation. Yes or no?
I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventualities.
The Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to turn the Cold War red hot,
and if the unthinkable happened, Britain was on the front line.
This is the story of how Britain,
still bruised and battered from World War II,
was forced to adapt to a terrifying new kind of warfare.
It would require vast new defences and our own nuclear deterrent.
It was a world in which our closest ally refused to help us...
The Americans don't trust us.
They shut down nuclear secrets.
What this does is turn Fortress Britain
into a kind of prison of paranoia.
..and one where we had to prepare for the nightmare scenario.
What we're looking at here is five or six miles
from ground zero. Right.
If you were at ground zero, it would be completely wiped out.
Joining me at Walmer Castle to explain how Britain found itself
at the heart of a potential nuclear Armageddon
is historian Dr Jessica Douthwaite.
Jessica, it's 1962. East and West are facing each other off
with nuclear weapons in their hands. How does it come to that?
In the early 20th century, with the development of nuclear science,
authors and artists were already imagining what a nuclear future
would look like. I've got here a book by HG Wells,
which was written in 1914, called The World Set Free.
This extract is taken from the moment the bomb goes off
and he writes, "Certainly it seems now that nothing
"could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier 20th century
"than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible.
"They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst
"in their fumbling hands.
"Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind."
1914, he wrote this.
And then, of course, what he's imagining there is realised.
So, when does fiction become fact?
By 1940, there are scientists in Britain,
who are Jewish emigres from Germany,
who imagine how nuclear fission could be put to use in a weapon.
They're very fearful that Hitler will be beginning a nuclear project
in Nazi Germany.
And of course, during the Second World War,
we have two atomic bombs being dropped,
so that research and development happens incredibly quickly.
It happens extremely quickly
and that's because of the combined efforts of the Manhattan Project,
which was an American-based project, drawing together international
expertise and huge economic resources and material resources
to work on engineering a nuclear weapon.
And then we have the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well.
Yep. So, that brings us then to the end of the Second World War.
So, Churchill assumed that America and Britain would continue
to cooperate in atomic weapons development
and had agreed to that with President Roosevelt,
but President Truman had a completely different impression
of how the end of the war would be managed.
So, by 1946, we end up with this,
which is what's known as the McMahon Act, the Energy Act of 1946.
Basically, it means that any agreements up until this point
with overseas partners are null and void.
British engineers, British scientists,
British politicians in particular are completely locked out
of any of the new weapons research and development
and new knowledge being created in the US.
But worse was still to come.
Having been shunned by America, in August 1949, Britain received
the terrifying news that the Soviet Union
had successfully tested THEIR first nuclear weapon.
So, America had a nuclear bomb,
the Soviet Union had a nuclear bomb,
but we didn't.
And because Britain was a founding member of Nato,
whose primary objective was to counter the rising threat
posed by the Eastern Bloc, it meant that we were now also a target.
Professor Danielle George is in Fife on the east coast of Scotland
to discover how we were preparing to defend ourselves,
should tensions spill over into a full-blown nuclear war.
The bombs that brought devastation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were dropped by B-29 bombers.
And, likewise, in 1950s Britain, it would be aircraft
that would carry out any nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.
The British response to such a potential airborne attack
may at first glance look rather underwhelming.
Designed to look like an unassuming farmhouse,
it is, in fact, the entrance to a top-secret bunker.
I'm here to meet Professor Andrew Futter
of the University of Leicester,
an expert in British nuclear strategy.
What a great place.
I mean, this place is just vast, isn't it?
But what would it have been used for?
So, this bunker, one of over 200 that were built
across the United Kingdom in the early Cold War,
were essentially our preparations for nuclear war. Wow.
This was part of a network of similar bunkers
spread across the country, all connected.
One of the main objectives would have been air defence. Wow.
And how far down are we? This bunker ranges over four floors,
between 45 and 135ft below ground level.
In an emergency, the bunker would have housed 300 people.
Everything they'd need to survive
and communicate, should the worst happen,
with what was left of the outside world.
So, this is the radar intercept room,
where any incursions of Soviet bombers would be mapped out
on the screens that you see in front of you.
The radar at the time had a range of around 150 to 200 miles,
which may give you anything up to half an hour of warning
about a possible Soviet attack against the British Isles. Right.
And what's going to happen in that half an hour?
Well, in that half an hour, messages have to go out
to intercept aircraft, those aircraft have to be in the air,
and hopefully some of those aircraft shoot down the incoming bombers.
But for all this technology, there will still be some that get through,
and you don't need many, do you, to get through?
They may well be able to shoot down a number of Soviet bombers,
but there was still a belief and a fear that the bomber
would always get through.
And if they did, it was up to the Royal Observer Corps
to monitor the damage.
Wow. Look at this.
So, this is the Royal Observer Corps Operations Room
and this would have been the place where all the information filtered
in about what was happening - the shape of the attack, where,
if anywhere, had been hit with nuclear weapons
and, potentially, the extent of the damage.
In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, too,
we're still talking about bombs of the size of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
which were still very large, but compared to what came later
were actually quite small.
And these were bombs in the range of 20 kilotons,
so, if we look at somewhere like Edinburgh, a 20 kiloton bomb
would perhaps destroy four or five square miles
of the centre of the city.
In those early years, when there were relatively few nuclear weapons,
there was a feeling that although an attack would be catastrophic,
there would still be large parts of the country that would survive
and need to be governed.
Oh, wow! Look at this.
It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. It really feels like,
you know, you're at the heart of the operation.
Yeah, and that's exactly what it is. The beating heart of the bunker.
This is where the major decisions would be made.
This is where plans and all the information
about what was happening in the world outside would be
brought in and presumably where...
Possibly where nuclear war would be orchestrated and directed.
So, who's working in this room?
This is the Government control centre.
This is where representatives of all the different departments,
everything from emergency services to the military to the Home Office
to Fisheries to a whole host of different things,
and this was essentially a Government-in-waiting.
The idea was that the UK would be essentially sliced up
into smaller pieces, each of which would have
its own regional government and regional governor,
in the possibility that the UK couldn't function as a state.
And there's a room here behind me that's got a bed in it.
That's for the senior person, is it?
So, that's the senior person. That person would,
as the war unfolded, still take orders from the Prime Minister
or from a regional or a national leader.
But, again, in extremis, if the communication was lost,
if other parts of the Government hierarchy were destroyed,
that person would essentially become in charge -
not just of this particular bunker, but of the region around it.
So we've got 300 people in here, but they've got families as well.
What's happening to their families? They're not coming into here.
This is specifically for Government officials
to continue running the war and to plan for what comes afterwards.
I can't imagine being a Government official in here
and leaving my husband and my daughter elsewhere
knowing what can potentially happen to them. That's a horrible thought.
It's entirely possible, I suspect, that people wouldn't come
and report to the bunkers, that would rather stay
with their families or would try and help their close friends and family.
As a new world order started to emerge,
many felt that without our own nuclear capability,
Britain was facing all the dangers of being on the nuclear front line,
but with little influence and no effective deterrent.
As Britain spent heavily to defend itself from a Soviet nuclear attack,
it faced another enemy - an enemy within.
Shut out of the new nuclear world order,
we were striving to create our own nuclear deterrent.
However, we were getting no help from our supposed closest ally -
America.
The fact was, they simply didn't trust us.
Dr Onyeka Nubia has travelled to London to find out why.
It's hard to imagine that this rather nondescript building
in the centre of London's Mayfair was once the headquarters of MI5.
From the end of the Second World War until the 1970s,
this building played an important role
in Britain's intelligence services.
But the truth is, for much of that time,
Britain's Secret Service was anything but.
In the 1930s, a group of establishment figures
who became known as the Cambridge Five
were recruited by Soviet intelligence
whilst they were at Cambridge University.
They were Soviet spies working inside British intelligence,
and some of them had access to Britain's nuclear secrets.
That house there is where Burgess and Blunt lived.
I wonder what it would have been like for Burgess
and Blunt and the others - you know, living in London,
pretending to be something other than what they were.
But how were they operating? And who, if anyone, suspected them?
Professor Richard Aldrich of the University of Warwick
is a leading expert on the complex web of Cold War espionage.
Great. Did you manage to lose your MI5 tails? I think so!
So, Richard, what information were they giving to the Russians?
So the Cambridge Five mostly worked in MI6, the Foreign Office.
They're handing over lots of top intelligence reports,
stuff about atomic secrets, cabinet minutes -
a vast volume of stuff,
and some of Britain's really top-secret material.
We think the Cambridge Five gave the Russians about
20,000 secret documents. 20,000?!
Were they the top echelon of British intelligence?
Kim Philby, who's perhaps the star spy,
he's actually being prepared to be head of MI6.
They're getting him ready for the top job. Wow!
This was in spying terms, you know, an Olympic achievement
on the part of the KGB. Wow.
How was this information delivered?
This isn't the world of secret cameras and microdots.
It's actually a very drunk guy, Burgess, with a briefcase
bumbling in through the door of a pub.
Actually, literally, he dropped some of the documents -
they used to blow down the streets.
The KGB isn't being run particularly well, and, actually,
the spy hunts by the British aren't being run particularly well.
This is... This is chaos and confusion rather than conspiracy.
Remarkable, actually.
Most of us like to feel that we are heroes in our own story.
And I'm wondering, how did they see themselves?
I think initially they saw themselves as heroes.
They're doing this initially out of anti-fascism in the 1930s.
They don't like appeasement. Even in the Second World War,
they feel they're helping the Russian war effort.
But as the Cold War sets in, they start to have doubts.
It's like being part of a drug gang. Once you're in... Yeah.
Pull you back in! Yeah, you can't really...
Yeah. There's no way. There's no way out.
They were under psychological pressure.
They were living double lives.
And they dealt with that partly by drinking really heavily,
so they were... They were in a mess, frankly.
British and American authorities
realised that British intelligence had been compromised
after Burgess and Maclean defected to the Soviet Union.
The British Government attempted to conceal this security breach,
but it was too late.
Probably the most damaging thing is just...
..a collapse of belief in British security,
so essentially what this does, what this does
is turn Fortress Britain into a kind of prison of paranoia.
The Americans don't trust us. They shut down nuclear secrets.
You know, this is a problem if you're trying to share intelligence,
if you're trying to do an atomic programme. Who do you trust?
Although there was a subsequent security crackdown,
the damage was already done, and the relationship
between Britain and America would never be the same again.
If Britain was to establish itself in this new nuclear world order,
it would need its own nuclear capability.
But with America unwilling to help, we would have to do it alone.
Jessica, once the Manhattan Project ends, this means that
British scientists are on their own, but they've been working
very closely with that team in the States,
so how does this play out? Prior to the Second World War,
there was a really rich community of scientists in the UK
who were working on various pockets of atomic science.
And how quickly are they able to create something which works,
which creates a nuclear explosion?
Yeah, so five years after they started, in 1952,
there's a successful detonation of an atomic explosive
in the Montebello Islands in the northwest of Australia.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Slowly, the seconds tick away.
EXPLOSION
"This bang has changed the world." Yep.
"And today, Britain is Great Britain again." Mm.
I think the weapons development programme was seen as
a way of proving to the US that Britain was capable of this
and therefore capable of another partnership.
You know, after this proof of concept,
this is now going to become a weapon. Yep.
So, we've got some replica parts that would have been used
in the early Blue Danube, which was Britain's first nuclear weapon.
These parts were actually built by an ex-RAF armourer
called Peter Sharp, so an armourer would have loaded the weapon
with the fissile core, which is this.
So he was very familiar with the real thing? Yes. Yeah.
So, it was nicknamed the Gauntlet.
The Gauntlet, containing either uranium or plutonium,
and also polonium,
would have been slotted into a sphere of high explosives,
which, in turn was placed into a bomb casing.
When the high explosives were detonated,
they triggered a chain reaction, releasing vast amounts of energy
in a fraction of a second.
Tell me about Australia though, because, you know,
we're choosing to test our bombs in Australia.
The locations where these were tested were Indigenous homelands.
They got very little recognition for their land being used
and the implications of radioactivity for centuries.
Do they know how dangerous these weapons were, the after-effects?
No, but very few people did.
By the late '50s, people began to be quite wary of
this notion of atmospheric testing, radioactivity
in the air, in the soil, in our food,
whereas in the early '50s, when this all began,
it was just unknown.
The nuclear theory had become a reality,
transforming Britain's defensive capability.
Danielle has travelled to Suffolk
to what was once part of RAF Barnham,
where our first atomic bombs were stored.
It's really hard to overstate the pace of development
for those at the sharp end of operations.
The last World War II Lancaster bomber had been retired around 1954.
Yet at the same time, ground crews were preparing
for life in the atomic age.
I've arranged to meet Richard Eldred.
His family have owned the site since the 1960s
and understand the importance of preserving
this part of our Cold War history...
..the place where we kept our first nuclear deterrent.
So, Richard, why here?
What's special about this site?
Well, this site was very much on the military planners' map.
As early as the First World War,
there was mustard gas storage nearby.
The very first tanks were trialled here on Thetford Heath
and then in the Second World War,
there was certainly a very large munition store just over the way,
so it wasn't a surprise that they chose this area
for nuclear weapons storage.
Wow. Look at this.
I mean, I'm guessing this is a replica,
but is it a life-sized replica?
Yep, this is pretty near life size.
24 foot long.
The original bomb was 10,000 pounds.
Wow. And how was it stored?
It's stored in two parts - the nuclear component in one area
and the TNT and the casing in another.
Wow. It's just colossal.
This is one of three buildings constructed
to house the bomb casings and high explosives.
Almost 60 metres long,
most of the structure is surrounded by protective earthworks.
Overhead, you can still see the winches
that were once used to manoeuvre the huge bombs
into this safe storage area.
This looks incredible, Richard.
Is this how it would have originally looked? No.
Originally, it was open-plan. In fact, there's a great picture
from 1966 showing my brother, Mark,
aged two, standing in this building with Mum and Dad,
showing it open-plan as it was. Wow.
The unit would have had space for about 15 Blue Danube bombs.
The Gauntlets housing the nuclear components of the bomb
were stored in a series of 57 small buildings
distributed across the site, known as hutches.
As well as the bombs stored here,
the components of three bombs were also stored
at key RAF bomber bases,
ready to be combined for use at a moment's notice.
At one of the hutches, I'm meeting Richard's father, Keith,
who, along with his wife, Margot,
bought the site from the MOD back in 1966.
How are you? This looks incredible. Would you like to look inside?
I would love to. Thank you. OK, right.
KEITH GRUNTS So this is where
the fissile cores were stored? Absolutely, yes. Wow, OK.
Look at this. Yes, that's one of the safes.
This is amazing! Wow. Can I open it?
Yep.
Ooh.
Wow, it's heavy.
Yes. Oh, my goodness, yeah.
The muscles on this.
Oh, wow. So you can actually see the...
Yes, you can get the container out. Oh, brill. Look at that.
Wow. Yes. This is heavy as well, actually.
Lead-lined. Lead-lined, yes. Yeah. Weighs about 20 pounds.
Right, so we've got the fissile cores in here. Yep.
I mean, did they understand how dangerous it was?
I think they knew that it was dangerous,
but I doubt that they knew how dangerous it was.
In fact, that would be changed once every month or so
because the polonium only had a half life of 130 days.
Wow. And so they had to change it every month.
Whether the person who changed it took enough precaution,
I don't know.
When that fissile core was taken to be changed,
the siren sounded and everybody on the station
had to freeze and stay frozen until it was back inside again. Wow.
Really? And then the all clear went and then everybody could move again.
Wow. Yes, I think they knew nuclear was dangerous,
but I don't think they knew how dangerous.
Did the locals know what was going on in this site?
I mean, how secret was it? No, they didn't know.
In fact, the general story was that they were training chimpanzees.
So training chimpanzees for the space race? Absolutely, yes.
Oh, right. That's what they thought was happening here?
That's what they thought. That's what the local people thought.
Whilst the creation of Blue Danube was a seminal moment
in our nuclear history, such was the pace of development
that by 1957, Britain had joined America and the Soviet Union
in testing a hydrogen bomb,
a thermonuclear device potentially 1,000 times more powerful.
But in those early days, we were still missing
a crucial piece of the puzzle -
an aircraft that could actually carry the weapons.
As unbelievable as it may seem,
when Britain's Blue Danube atomic bombs
were first delivered to the RAF in 1953,
the Air Force had no bombers capable of carrying them.
The solution, when it came,
would capture the public's imagination
and become the stuff of legend.
Known as the V bombers,
the Vickers Valiant, the Handley Page Victor
and the Avro Vulcan
represented a quantum leap in aircraft design.
By 1957,
all three of these high-altitude bombers had entered service
and were a cut above anything either the Russians or the Americans
had at their disposal.
Having our own nuclear weapons and aircraft with which to launch them
meant that, although still part of Nato,
we were now also an independent nuclear power.
To discover more about the V bombers,
Danielle has travelled to Southend Airport.
In their heyday, these planes achieved almost celebrity status.
For many, they represented a new, modern and powerful Britain
and a seismic shift in our nuclear capability.
I'm here to see an example of arguably the most famous
of the trio, the Avro Vulcan.
XL426 is a stunning example,
kept in a taxiable condition
by a group of volunteers called the Vulcan Restoration Trust.
She regularly wows the crowds,
eager to catch a glimpse of this piece of Cold War aviation history.
She's currently undergoing an extensive service,
allowing me a rare perspective of this extraordinary aircraft.
I'm here to meet trust member and former Vulcan pilot,
Group Captain Bill Burnett.
Right, Bill, as an engineer, I'm absolutely in awe of this.
It's just stunningly beautiful, isn't it?
Well, when you think it was designed in the late '40s,
way ahead of its time, you know, it's staggering.
This new breed of aircraft would also require
a new breed of aircrew to fly them.
24 hours a day,
every V bomber squadron had quick-reaction alert crews
ready to scramble at a moment's notice to defend their country.
Like all V bombers, the Vulcan had a crew of five.
The two pilots sat up top
with the remaining three sitting below and behind them.
So, you're on base.
You hear the call. You know, what do you do?
How long have you got to get in and get going?
Well, we normally worked 15 minutes readiness.
When the hooter sounded, you ran to the car, got in.
You then get into the aircraft.
Once in the aircraft, you'd hear the state that was being declared.
05, 02, or start engines.
So 02 is 2 minutes to go or start engine is literally you're...
Yeah. ..you're off. So you had one button to press.
All the engines start up and off you go.
And then you're off. And so how was that, then?
Were you always feeling like it could be now?
It could be now. Absolutely. Did you ever relax?
Not really, because when you heard the click of the Tannoy,
you didn't know whether they were going to declare there was fog about
or if you were going to be scrambled.
The V bombers were originally designed
to operate at high altitude, but in May 1960,
American pilot Gary Powers, flying a U-2 spy plane over Russia,
was shot down by a missile at an altitude of 13 miles.
This meant that the V bomber tactics switched to low level missions
to avoid radar detection.
With the cockpit removed for the engineering work,
it's difficult to imagine that if the crews were required
to launch a nuclear attack,
the cockpit would have been blacked out with screens
to protect their eyesight from the blinding flashes
of nuclear explosions that would be detonating around them.
And just to add to the challenge,
flying at low level meant there was considerable turbulence.
And, yes, it used to bounce quite a bit.
Did it? Because you were only flying 300 feet above the ground.
But you did have the help of terrain-following radar.
So you can actually go on instruments, flying at low level.
You've dropped the weapon, where do you go then?
You wouldn't be going back to the UK, that's for sure. OK.
You'd find out what was available.
Everybody had a plan at the end of it, where to go. Where to go.
It's strange that people wouldn't have known
what you were potentially ready to do.
No. And I think that was a nice secret to have. Was it?
You felt you were doing something good for the country.
In their mission to deter and defend,
the crews of the V bombers put themselves at enormous risk.
But the production of the weapons the planes carried
posed a different type of risk - one that would impact
on an unsuspecting British public.
In order to produce a nuclear weapon, you need the raw materials,
and the raw materials need to be produced,
so, where was that happening?
So, you need a nuclear reactor to produce the plutonium
that's used in a nuclear weapon.
And here in Britain, two of the main nuclear reactors are sited
at a place called Windscale, which is on the coast of Cumbria,
just on the edge of the Lake District.
So, as far as the public knew,
this is about nuclear energy rather than weapons.
Yes. Because on the same site, there was also the early development
of a nuclear energy power plant at the same time.
But in 1957, the nuclear reactor at Windscale explodes
and there's a massive fire.
This is a real disaster. A fire breaks out in the reactor.
It's a huge accident with massive consequences.
There's very little knowledge on how to deal with it.
The fire's raging for three days
and it takes four attempts to put it out.
The three first attempts completely fail.
On the fourth attempt, they decide to cut off the air supply
to the reactor, and that actually works.
In fact, this is the general manager of Windscale and his name
was Tom Tuohy, and he actually assisted in putting out the fire
by scaling one of the nuclear reactors
and assisting professional firefighters.
But I think that just shows how serious it was,
how emotionally invested the personnel were,
but also how collective the effort was to stop it from getting worse.
Yeah, and a real heroic act to wade into that. Certainly, yeah.
What was the fallout - both in radioactive terms -
but in political and social terms as well?
This event really brought home
the environmental consequences of radioactivity.
Cumbria is well-known for its farming, especially milk,
and the Government wasn't really sure how much was irradiated,
but declared that milk from within a 200-mile radius
would be condemned.
So that's the significance of this milk bottle? Yeah. Yeah.
Milk - it's wholesome, you're giving it to your children,
and suddenly you're worried about this being a potential source
of radioactivity, of radiation. How bad was this disaster?
I mean, presumably, there is a lot of radiation being released
into the atmosphere?
Cancers in the local area increased,
livelihoods were affected, particularly those of local farmers
who relied on dairy farming.
The moment that people realised that nuclear science could
actually infiltrate their own homes via food and drink
was a watershed moment.
The nuclear revolution taking place in the 1950s
was happening at breakneck speed.
And should the unthinkable happen, the Government needed a plan
to protect the civilian population.
A key part of their strategy was the Civil Defence Corps -
a Crown service created in 1949 - which was tasked
with taking local control in the aftermath of a nuclear attack.
ARCHIVE: Join now.
We need men and women for headquarters staff,
air raid wardens,
rescue workers, welfare workers and pioneers.
During the 1950s, the Civil Defence Corps' headquarters
for the strategically vital city of Portsmouth were housed here,
in the Victorian Fort Widley.
Onyeka has arranged to meet Taras Young, an author and expert
on Britain's Cold War civil defence strategy.
Taras has agreed to show Onyeka the old Civil Defence control rooms
that are buried deep within the fort's underground complex.
So, you can see we have a few Civil Defence training posters
on the walls here. They're fantastic.
Wow. And these are made in the 1950s?
These would have been late '50s, early '60s.
These posters are talking about the first hydrogen bombs,
so they're talking about a ten-megaton bomb,
which is about 500 times the power of the bomb at Nagasaki.
So, this one here is before? Yep.
And then that's after. Is that right? That's right.
What we're looking at here is five or six miles from ground zero.
Right. So, yeah, you're seeing the kind of levels of destruction
that would be a little bit further out.
If you were at ground zero, it would be completely wiped out.
How does the Civil Defence Corps actually prepare people for that?
Yeah, it's something that they had to wrestle with.
They talked about how would we deal with the millions of survivors.
So, they didn't focus on the people who'd be dead,
they focused on the people who'd survive.
So, the interesting thing about these posters
is that the pace of technology was constantly changing,
and in order to update them, the Government had to
keep issuing stickers to put over the bomb powers
as bigger and bigger bombs were tested.
So these posters are not accurate?
They would have been accurate for 1958,
not much longer than that. OK, all right.
So, this would have been a control centre,
the nerve centre of the operation.
It's almost as if the people who were once here have
just left it in that state.
At its peak, the Civil Defence Corps had over 4,000 branches
and half a million volunteers.
They were ordinary people willing to play their part at a time
when the Second World War was still fresh in the public memory.
How many of these different organisations were there?
There were four or five different organisations.
There was the Civil Defence Corps, there was the Royal Observer Corps.
There was the Auxiliary Fire Service,
the Women's Voluntary Service.
So, all of these different organisations,
they were all there to pick up the pieces after a nuclear attack.
What about the people at home?
What were they meant to do, just wait to be rescued?
Well, the Government issued various pamphlets, leaflets, guides, films
that would advise them on what to do.
If the present world situation does lead to a nuclear attack
on this country, it is vital that you shall have taken
the necessary measures to safeguard your home as much as possible.
The guides would offer - or try to offer - practical advice.
The earlier ones told you to build a refuge in your house
and then stay there for 14 days.
And the 14 days thing is the key, because that's how long it takes
the fallout to stop being as dangerous
as it is in those initial two weeks.
The question is, how practical were these things?
There were a couple of experiments called the York Experiments.
In the first one, three ladies from the Civil Defence Corps,
in fact, put themselves into this... it was an ordinary living room.
They put sandbags in the windows, locked the door,
and tried to sit it out for two days.
And by the end of the two days, they'd started hallucinating.
They'd suffered boredom, like, on a scale that nobody had experienced.
And it showed up that some of these things really weren't practical.
To illustrate this, Taras is showing me what citizens
were recommended to wear after a nuclear attack.
ARCHIVE: As soon as the heat and blast waves have passed,
one of you should leave your fallout room and find out the extent
to which the house has been damaged.
You should now put on gumboots, or stout shoes,
a coat done up to the neck, a hat or head scarf,
and some gloves. ONYEKA LAUGHS
Oh, dear...!
So, OK, in this attire - with this hat and this coat and this...
This a pump? Yeah.
Right. ..I am meant to put out fires? That's right.
Uh... No.
As nuclear weapons developed, these early civil defence plans
became impractical, outdated and obsolete.
In 1968, the Civil Defence Corps was disbanded.
These early defence plans may seem ridiculous, and even comical,
but the sobering truth is
that the dangers of nuclear war have not gone away.
Perhaps we have merely learned to live with them.
In late 1957, an event happened that would take the Cold War
in a chilling new direction.
And it would also demonstrate that even if the Americans
didn't entirely trust us, they still needed us.
ARCHIVE: Headlines around the world echoed the news -
Russia had blasted a man-made moon into outer space.
The Soviets had scored a scientific first.
When the Soviet Union launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik,
it sent shock waves around the globe.
American high command knew it was just a matter of time
before long-range Soviet rockets would be capable of carrying
more than just satellites.
Whilst the US did possess the Thor rocket,
capable of carrying a nuclear warhead,
it had a range of just 1,500 miles,
not enough to hit the Soviet Union from America -
but it was enough if it was launched from, say, the UK.
Onyeka is in Northamptonshire, where he's arranged to meet
Cold War historian Dr Emmett Sullivan to discover more about
a seminal moment in British Cold War history,
known as Project Emily.
So, Emmett, you've brought me to this rather ordinary-looking field
in Northamptonshire. Why?
Nothing in history is ordinary.
It might look like an agricultural venue now.
This was the site of RAF Harrington.
RAF Harrington was one of 20 sites across the UK
on which the British government had agreed to house
American Thor missiles.
Their arrival was a clear signal of a shift
in the Anglo-American relationship.
The strategic importance
of Britain's expensive nuclear deterrent was reduced.
From now on, Britain would increasingly rely on the USA
for its protection.
So, from this position, Onyeka, this is the launch site
for the Thor intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
And Britain had 60 of them between 1959 and 1963.
Each missile had a warhead 100 times in size
of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The concrete infrastructure built to contain the blast when the rockets
were launched is the only existing reminder.
This is now the industrial archaeology of, frankly, one of
the most dangerous sites that's ever existed in British history.
Dangerous because of its destructive potential.
So, these are missiles stationed in Britain,
but controlled by America?
Operated by the RAF...
And, ultimately, the RAF could fire the missiles.
But unless they are armed, the warhead is going to go clunk
about 1,500 miles away.
So, in other words, if the Americans don't agree,
then the missiles don't get armed? In principle, that is correct.
In the autumn of 1962, RAF Harrington and its new Thor missiles
were at the heart of one of the most terrifying episodes
in the Cold War - the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For 13 tense days, the world teetered on the brink
of nuclear Armageddon.
The Soviet Union had threatened to deploy ballistic missiles
on the Caribbean island of Cuba,
just 90 miles from the American mainland.
I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventualities.
If the Russian ships carrying those missiles did not turn around,
war seemed inevitable.
The world held its breath.
No-one can foresee precisely what course it will take,
or what costs or casualties will be incurred.
The nuclear arsenals on both sides were primed for action,
including those at Harrington.
And all the way through the period of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
every Thor missile - bar one that was used for training -
was on T-15.
It had to be ready for launch within 15 minutes.
The flight times of these missiles from Britain to Moscow
was 12 to 13 minutes.
So, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, this place was a target?
This place was always a target.
In fact, we would see Britain as one of the most target-rich environments
during the Cold War. Most of the missiles that the Soviets had
would reach London and Edinburgh. We would have been a cinder.
On October 28, and after intense negotiations behind the scenes,
international diplomacy worked.
The Soviet Union agreed to withdraw their missiles,
and the world sighed in relief.
I think you look at that crisis, and it is utterly terrifying.
It did come very, very close.
That really is the essence of brinkmanship.
You don't really know whether you're going to make things worse
or make things better. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge gamble.
In fact, this communication with the Prime Minister in Britain
at the time, Macmillan, demonstrates that quite well.
So, this was a telephone conversation between Macmillan
and Kennedy on the day that he announced the naval blockade.
There's several really interesting passages, but this one stands out,
where Kennedy says, "But what we're attempting to do
"is to begin this escalation in a way that lessens the chance
"of a seizure of Berlin or World War III."
So, Berlin was the epicentre of Cold War flash points.
He then goes on to say, "Now we may not be able to prevent either."
ALICE GASPS So, basically saying,
"I don't actually know if this is going to work." Mm.
But this seems to be the only way to, essentially, put Khrushchev
in his place and show him that we mean business.
I mean, that is chilling, isn't it?
Because he's saying that he's escalating to de-escalate,
and he's also, in the next breath, saying,
I really don't know if this is going to work. Exactly.
Amid stakes which couldn't have been higher,
Britain's Cold War journey to this point had been a troubled one.
But it had secured a place at the nuclear table,
regained American trust,
and with it, access to American nuclear weapons.
From this point on, Britain's nuclear deterrent
and, therefore, its national defences
would be intrinsically linked with that of her superpower ally -
and at a time when the arms race was about to go into overdrive.
It's a sobering thought that just six years after
the Cuban Missile Crisis, the number of nuclear weapons on the planet
had grown to 40,000.
It's easy to view the 1950s and '60s with a certain detached
academic fascination, but if history teaches us anything,
it's that we ignore the past at our peril.
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