Supreme emergency

How Britain lives with the Bomb

Andrew Corbett

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526147370
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte der Neuzeit

In Supreme emergency, an ex-Trident submarine captain considers the evolution of UK nuclear deterrence policy and the implications of a previously unacknowledged aversion to military strategies that threaten civilian casualties. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book provides a unique synthesis of the factors affecting British nuclear policy decision-making and draws parallels between government debates about reprisals for First World War zeppelin raids on London, the strategic bombing raids of the Second World War and the evolution of the UK nuclear deterrent. It concludes that among all the technical factors, an aversion to being seen to condone civilian casualties has inhibited government engagement with the public on deterrence strategy since 1915.

1

The War Game, a case study

The fate of The War Game, a radical film about the effects of nuclear weapons, provides a clear illustration of the ambiguity of government engagement with the public on nuclear deterrence policy in the context of the height of the Cold War and puts into context the inquiry that the rest of this book seeks to address.

In May 1965, a fictional BBC television documentary-drama depicting the possible aftermath of a nuclear attack on Britain was completed and the initial draft shown to the Controller of BBC2, Huw Wheldon. Five months later, the BBC announced it had decided not to air the programme on television because it was an ‘artistic failure’.¹ It was subsequently given a limited cinematic release and won the 1966 Venice Film Festival Award for best documentary, and the best documentary Academy Award (Oscar) in 1967. Eventually, the BBC screened it on television on 31 July 1985, twenty years after its completion. To this day, its director insists that the film was suppressed because of its political impact.²

From the beginning Wheldon was well aware of the political impact that the film might have and insisted on close supervision of the filming process. The film’s director, Peter Watkins, had previously directed Culloden, a dramatic depiction of the defeat of the 1745 Jacobite rebels, and his film had been very well received critically and publicly. Watkins had a list of difficult topics which he wanted to address with his docu-drama format, both challenging received wisdom on the subject matter and stretching the use of television as a medium for entertainment and information. Watkins’s intent was to ‘challenge viewers’ assumptions and provoke different perspectives’.³ Top of his list was nuclear war.

Watkins’s research was meticulous, including interviews with survivors of Second World War mass bombing raids, both British and German, and members of the emergency and police services. He also sent a number of detailed questionnaires to government departments and local government offices regionally, inquiring specifically into the detailed preparations being made in civil defence during the early 1960s. From its very inception, The War Game was potentially contentious, politically; it set out to depict on television the aftermath of nuclear war in a way that directly challenged the official view.

Inherently pacifist, Watkins was perturbed by the lack of public information and understanding of the nature of nuclear war, and by the government claims about the effectiveness of preparations being made for civil defence within the United Kingdom. This is the central refrain of the film and is literally echoed by the narrator at the end of the film as the camera pans across a group of children orphaned by the nuclear attack:

On almost the entire subject of thermo-nuclear weapons; problems of their possession; effects of their use; there is now practically total silence; in the press, in official publications and on television. There is hope in any unresolved and unpredictable situation but is there a real hope to be found in this silence?⁴

The War Game is filmed using handheld cameras in a highly dynamic ‘newsreel’ style, closely reflecting the contemporary footage being returned from the conflict in Vietnam. The cast are almost all amateurs, locals of the town where the film was made. The film portrays plausible outcomes of a nuclear war, starting with the immediate aftermath of blast and heat; already well understood. The memories of the bombing raids of the Second World War were still vivid to many. The War Game specifically parodies the civil defence information films being produced by the Home Office; the narrator repeatedly uses the phrase ‘This is what nuclear war means’, which had been a central motif of Doom town, a 1955 Pathé civil defence training film depicting search and rescue in burned-out buildings.⁵

The government Civil Defence Corps had produced a number of training films and publicity ‘shorts’ in the 1950s and early 1960s.⁶ These films depicted civil defence exercises and scenarios which were scripted to run up to the evacuation of casualties to conveniently located first aid posts where assistance from unaffected areas was available. The rescue services always appeared in control and there was a clear message that civil defence was a viable response to a nuclear attack. The War Game scenario develops beyond this point and the film portrays the failure of the Civil Defence Corps to respond to the demands of ever-increasing casualties, including the inadequate provision of medical care, mercy killings of very seriously burned casualties by the police and mass cremations in order to prevent the spread of disease. As time passes in the film, the situation changes from one of immediate emergency to one of protracted crisis attributable to failure of the civil defence organisation, leading to food shortages, looting and finally the imposition of martial law on the streets; graphically depicted in the summary execution of food rioters by police firing squad.

Throughout, this fabricated newsreel footage is interspersed with interviews to camera of equally fictitious ‘establishment figures’ such as a bishop, government ministers, officials and senior military officers. These interviews, however, are filmed at desks or in offices and they rehearse genuine government statements on civil defence planning; assurances that procedures and processes are in place to ensure that nuclear war is survivable. Immediately after each official statement, the film depicts its ‘reality’, directly in counterpoint to the reassuring view of the ‘establishment figure’. This reality includes live unscripted interviews with members of the public who were actually participating in the filming. They were asked real questions and answered from their real viewpoints. Watkins later said ‘And those questions and responses – particularly the responses – are perhaps the biggest single indictment in the entire film of the way we are conducting our present society and of the lack of common public knowledge of the things which affect humanity’.⁷ Ultimately, the effect is that the fictional newsreel and interview footage completely discredits the genuine government statements and Civil Defence Organisation assurances.

The decision not to show The War Game

Even before filming started Wheldon had been in close liaison with Grace Wyndham Goldie (Head of Talks at the BBC) who supported the film in principle: ‘so long as there is no security risk and the facts are authentic, the people should be trusted with the truth …’⁸ This is the essential question here; assuming Watkins’s film was authentic, what was it that prevented government trusting people with the truth?

In parallel, there was an ongoing dialogue with the Home Office throughout filming, with Wheldon insisting on editorial independence despite:

… the Home Office argu[ing] that as ‘partners in the civil defence field’, the government and Corporation ought to work together throughout production to ensure that the film was ‘prepared with the utmost care and responsibility’ given its potentially harmful effects on the public.⁹

Despite Wheldon’s support, The War Game caused considerable unease within the BBC hierarchy during its production. Filming was completed in April 1965, and Watkins completed his initial editing by mid-June. The first cut was screened to Watkins’s panel of expert consultants on 17 June and to Wheldon and Richard Cawston (Wheldon’s replacement as Head of Documentaries) on 24 June. After each of these screenings, the film was edited further. After a further screening to BBC publicity officers, the re-edited film was viewed again by Cawston on 18 August, who gave the film a provisional broadcast date of 7 October, to be followed by Tonight. However, on 2 September, Hugh Carleton-Greene (BBC Director-General) and Lord Normanbrook (Chair of the BBC Board of Governors) viewed the film and decided to ‘take soundings’ from Whitehall. As an ex-Cabinet Secretary, and chair of the 1954 ‘Committee on Nuclear Defence and Civil Defence’, Normanbrook would have been very aware of the potential domestic impact of the film. He wrote to the Cabinet Secretary that the film:

… has been made with considerable restraint. But the subject is, necessarily, alarming; and the showing of the film on television might well have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the … I doubt that the BBC alone should take the responsibility of deciding whether this film should be shown …¹⁰

When informed of this decision by Wheldon, Watkins resigned over what he saw as political interference in the independence of the BBC.¹¹

On 24 September, The War Game was screened to senior government officials including the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend, the Permanent Secretaries from the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence (MOD), and a senior officer representing the Chief of Defence Staff. Trend clearly understood the government position very well; he wrote in October to the Lord President and Prime Minister that The War Game was unbalanced and pessimistic about civil defence, but that ‘the dilemma for the government … was that it could not afford to give the impression that, by overriding the BBC’s duty to educate, it was sweeping under the rug an issue which ministers found politically embarrassing’.¹² Trend met Normanbrook again on 5 November and Normanbrook noted that the ‘… decision should be left to the discretion of the BBC … it is also clear that Whitehall will be relieved if the BBC chooses not to show it’.¹³ On 24 November, Normanbrook ...