Siren song

Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War by Julie McDowall Bodley Head, 256 pages, £22

Julie McDowall was three years old when she saw her first mushroom cloud. Terror radiated from a cathode-ray tube, inadvertently exposing her to the 1984 nuclear television drama Threads. She was “old enough to absorb the horror, but not old enough to make sense of it”. Attack Warning Red! is her attempt to come to terms with that moment, and to rationalise the lunacy of preparing for annihilation.

Exploring topics such as evacuation, shelter and healthcare, it captures British bureaucrats’ scramble to find meaningful ways to get ready for Armageddon. Chapters are thematic, self-contained and episodic, reflecting the book’s development alongside the author’s podcast. As a result, the narrative sometimes darts between decades and locales over just a few paragraphs – from a village squabbling with the Thatcher government about converting a castle into a nuclear bunker, via much earlier plans to stash artworks in a Welsh quarry, to later proposals for provisioning public shelters. These rapid shifts can be disorientating, particularly where dates are not provided.

There’s a vast amount of ground to cover, but a healthy mix of the mundane, the eccentric and the disturbing will keep those new to the subject engaged. At times, context is sparse, and those who have read around the topic may find some sections lean a little too heavily on previous histories. Curiously, space is given to Second World War evacuees and US nuclear tests, whereas Britain in the 1970s barely gets a look-in. McDowall concludes where she began, with an analysis of Threads drawn from new conversations with the film’s director.

Although it skirts the big questions, for the casual reader Attack Warning Red! effectively pulls together many strands from this unsettling aspect of British history and weaves them in a way that will alarm and entertain.