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 All
of the talk that has been in circulation since 9-11 about
the possibility of terrorists attacking western countries
with an atomic weapon (such as a “suitcase bomb”
or a “dirty bomb”) brings back to me an intriguing
event that occurred in the latter part of 2000.
Shortly before Christmas of that year,
I was contacted by a source that had a remarkable story
to tell. Essentially, he had acquired an original edition
(not a photo-copy) of a near-200-page British Royal Air
Force file that dated from the late 1960s and that dealt
primarily with nuclear, biological and chemical defense
issues within Britain. The file was found contained within
a larger collection of books for sale at a used-books
and antique store in eastern England. How the file made
its way there, however, and from whom precisely, remains
a mystery.
Broadly speaking, the file (a copy of
which is in my possession) was intended as a training
aid for a variety of Royal Air Force and other military
personnel who took part in a training course in May 1968
at the Defense NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) School,
Wiltshire, England. Needless to say, the contents of the
file make for fascinating and disturbing reading.
As might be expected, the file contains
entries with titles such as Contamination Control; Protection
Against Nuclear Attack; Nuclear Fallout; Survival Shelter
Design; Radioactive Sources – Storage And Transportation;
and Home Office Prediction And Fallout Warnings.
The file is not without its dark side,
however. In a section titled Riot Control Agents, there
are guidelines informing the military how to respond to
incidents involving members of the public caught in the
carnage of a post-nuclear, biological or chemical holocaust.
As I will shortly reveal, this is a matter of both profound
controversy and significance.
Under the heading Chemical Warfare Training
Aids, the file reveals how personnel assigned to the course
were briefed on the dangers posed by such agents as CS
Gas, Mustard Gas, Bromine, and the battlefield use of
chemical agents dispatched via aircraft (in a real-life
situation at the time, the file reveals, the Royal Air
Force would have deployed Hunter aircraft armed with chemical
weapons in response to enemy attacks) and bombs.
The file also includes a host of data
on the use of Mustard Gas in training exercises. As one
of the entries states: “Mustard Agent: This is the
only live war agent that may be used for training. It
can cause serious casualties and even death if incorrectly
used.”
Nevertheless, this
did not prevent the author of the document from adding
that troops should be allowed to “experience Mustard
Agent in the following ways: (a) a drop can be applied
to the troops’ bare wrists and then decontaminated…Bleach
powder can be applied to liquid Mustard to demonstrate
the spontaneous combustion that takes place…Some
liquid may be heated to provide vapor which the troops
can then smell…”
Moving away from chemical warfare, the
file devotes much of its attention to nuclear issues and
what would happen – from the military’s perspective
– if a localized or countrywide nuclear attack had
occurred in Britain. These particular entries focus most
of their attention upon the ways that the military would
have assisted in attempting to coordinate some form of
government in the wake of the attack. However, survivors
of the holocaust would have found themselves subject to
two specific pieces of Home Office legislation –
(a)Public Protection and Warning; and (b) something ominously
known as Justice.
That the government and the military of
the time realized that in a post-nuclear attack scenario
the surviving populace (that would be reduced to scattered
bands of starving, irradiated and desperate souls) would
pose “problems” is self-evident from scrutinizing
the file.
Millions of people across the country,
it states, would be suffering from (among other things):
“flash blindness; retina burns; likely-to-be-fatal
damage to lungs, stomach and intestines; and serious burns.”
This, in turn, the file expands, inevitably would have
led to “social collapse” and “riot”
situations. Of course, in reality, the "rioters"
would be nothing of the sort: they would simply be normal
men, women and children desperate for food, water and
essential provisions.
And to control the “rioters”
(those taking part in the course were informed), CS Gas
was seen as the preferable agent to use (for “political
reasons”) and was considered quite acceptable for
use on both “children and elderly people.”
How comforting to know that in the even
that they even survive the unthinkable, your family members
may face being subjected to CS Gas attacks for just trying
to stay alive.
But, incredibly, in the aftermath of such
an attack, the military was seen as being unlikely to
fare much better. For example, personnel were told that
to try and gauge the extent to which the country had been
contaminated by nuclear radiation, “men are going
to be deliberately exposed to residual radiation.”
The file makes it very clear that strict guidelines were
to be enforced to keep exposure to a minimum; however,
that some personnel would suffer adversely in a real-life
scenario seems inevitable.
The file continues in a similar vein and
detail the precautions to be taken with respect to chemical
and nuclear agents; how the military would operate in
a post-holocaust environment; and the way in which military
personnel should be trained both physically and psychologically
to cope with the shock and realization of seeing the British
Isles reduced to an irradiated and ruined land.
But it is without doubt the areas of “riot
control” and the vaguely defined “justice”
that give most cause for concern. The East-West Cold War
is now over. However, if we should one day face the unthinkable
(suitcase bombs and dirty bombs smuggled into a Western
country by supporters of terrorism and detonated to create
maximum devastation), it is a sobering thought to see
what else we, the public, might face in addition to the
horrors of nuclear destruction – and not just from
our enemies, but from our own governments as they put
into place these dark and disturbing plans for controlling
the surviving, post-attack population.
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