What would life have been like in East Anglia, one of the UK’s most vulnerable regions, had the Cold War turned ‘hot’ and, as was feared in the 1950’s and 60’s, the Soviet Union launched a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the UK?
One can only guess at the nightmare scenario. But Cold War planning in Whitehall gives some inkling of what those who survived may have faced.
With the Prime Minister and his leading Cabinet colleagues deep underground in the government’s central bunker at Corsham in Wiltshire, the rest of the UK would have been placed under the control of twelve senior Ministers appointed to the role of Regional Commissioner. In the case of East Anglia, had the Cuban Crisis deteriorated by 1963 into nuclear conflict, the regional commissioner would have been Suffolk MP John Hare, Minister of Labour in Macmillan’s Conservative government. He would have been vested with draconian powers of life and death over those who survived. So extensive were the powers intended to be devolved to Ministers appointed to their own regional fiefdoms, the draft Emergency Powers Bill which contained them was kept under lock and key in Whitehall for fear that if ever it had to enacted under the shadow of nuclear attack it would have been considered a voluntary abdication by Parliament of the whole of its functions. In East Anglia democracy would have given way to autocratic rule from the Commissioner’s Cambridge war-room. No one outside the secret confines of Whitehall had sight of these drastic proposals over life and liberty, property, and the distribution of food and water until the draft bill was declassified and the file containing its details lodged in the National Archives nearly 40 years later.
Because of the number of strategic sites which peppered East Anglia during the Cold War, particularly the early years until the mid to late 1960’s, the region was hugely vulnerable in any Soviet strike. Winston Churchill famously called it ‘the target and perhaps the bull’s eye of a Soviet attack’. East Anglia was host to America’s front-line nuclear response, as well as to a large proportion of the UK’s V-force, and from 1958, launch pads for the first operational nuclear missiles in the Western armoury.
There would have been volunteers who would have faced the terror of nuclear war, isolated from their families, inside more than a hundred cramped bunkers, deep below the East Anglia countryside. Their task was the recording and measurement of nuclear strikes and tracking the subsequent clouds of deadly fall-out so that warning could be given to their fellow citizens. Volunteer Royal Observer Corps members who were also part of the UK’s Warning and Monitoring chain, staffed the group bunkers where the grim facts of nuclear attack would be processed The Commandant of No. 6 Group ROC, whose headquarters was a bunker located in Norwich, had one overriding fear beyond that of the dreadful reality of nuclear confrontation – that his underground operations centre, capable of accommodating over 200 people, would be overrun by terrified members of the public desperately fighting for a place to shelter from an imminent nuclear attack.
Was life even possible after thermonuclear bombardment? Could indeed the nation state survive it? The British Government hid its deepest fears, concerned that public morale would break down if the true facts were known. But prospects of survival for much of East Anglia were bleak.
Jim Wilson OBE, is the author of Cold War: East Anglia, the story of how the Cold War impacted on the people of East Anglia. Had nuclear conflict broken out, the region would have found itself as the target for any Soviet strike for the simple reason that it housed the launch pad for not only the British deterrent, but also America’s first line of defence. The book also examines the early development of the UK’s nuclear arsenal with ballistic and environmental testing of nuclear bombs at Orfordness and storage and maintenance at one of the country’s most secret sites, Barnham. Cold War: East Anglia reveals a number of the secrets of the years of confrontation, and looks at what life might have been like had the Cold War turned ‘hot’.