On March 10, 1980, a BBC Panorama special dubbed "If The Bomb Drops" was shown and it featured a young Jeremy Paxman. It was aired during the time when tensions in the Cold War were high as the Nuclear Arms Race was heating up and on Christmas Day in 1979, the Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan, in which the US and the UK backed the opposition.
The conflict between the countries sparked fears of World War 3 and the UK government began planning on how it would mitigate the effects of a nuclear attack if it happens, so they released information broadcasts such as Protect and Survive.
A nuclear war that would have wiped out the UK
During the footage of the special "If The Bomb Drops", Colonel Jonathan Alford, the former deputy director at the Institute of Strategic Studies, said that Russians do not accept the mutual part of Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD. Russian clearly think that one day, a nuclear exchange will be made and if that happens, they want to have less damage than the US.
Colonel Alford said that Russia may look at something like 200 targets in the UK and may allocate nearly as many as 400 weapons to the destruction of those targets. Alford added that if the took a map of the UK and put pins in all the military targets, he thinks they would be interested in, there would not be many parts of the UK left.
Later in the program, Paxman took a helicopter ride over London, to assess the impact of nuclear bombs on the capital in case it happens. He said that a one-megaton bomb exploding 7,000 feet above the House of Commons, would create a fireball over a mile across, over Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, which is the heart of London. The fireball would last for 10 seconds and it will reach temperatures of hundreds of thousands of degrees.
Paxman added that over an area for about a mile, down as far as Vauxhall Bridge, there would be winds of 700mph, while some of the more substantial buildings might be left partially standing or shifted on their foundations. Anything else, including human beings, would have simply vanished in just seconds.
What would have happened?
If a nuclear war happens, anyone living in the center of a city like London would be annihilated instantly. However, those living a bit further away from the city could also be in the firing line because of the radioactive fallout that will be caused by the atomic explosion.
So where should people be if they want to survive an atomic explosion? A nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Alex Wellerstein, designed a tool called Nuke Map that lets you see what would happen when bombs are dropped on major cities. It will show you how far the damage would be and how fast the annihilation could be.
The strength of nukes is measures by explosive power. It ranges from one kiloton or the force of 1,000 tonnes of TNT and a megaton meaning one million tonnes of TNT.
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