The danger of starvation would be high in the short term, and significant in the long term too: crops, animals and land would all be contaminated. Nowhere would be ‘free from the risk of radioactive contamination’. The heat flash from one H-bomb would ‘start in a built-up area anything up to a hundred thousand fires, with a circumference of between sixty to a hundred miles’. The force of such an attack would be 45 times greater than all the bombs dropped by the Allies on Germany, Italy and occupied France during the Second World War. Strath assumed an attack involving ten H-bombs, each with a yield of ten megatons. Missile delivery systems, replacing manned bombers, meant that these weapons were now far easier to deploy. A single A-bomb would kill perhaps fifty thousand people a single H-bomb could completely destroy a city the size of Birmingham. Churchill said that the A-bomb was not ‘unmanageable as an instrument of war’, but that the H-bomb ‘carries us into dimensions which have never confronted practical human thought’. The atomic bomb worked through nuclear fission, splitting the atom to release a huge blast of energy the hydrogen bomb used fusion – forcing two atoms into a single new atom – as well as fission to produce a blast many times more powerful. The United States had recently tested its first H-bomb, and the Soviet Union was working on its own version. Strath, a former tax inspector, economic planner and experienced civil servant, came to the conclusion that Britain was unlikely to emerge from a nuclear attack as a functioning society, never mind as a nation able to wage war. I n 1955, William Strath was asked to produce a report for the government on the possible impact of nuclear conflict on the UK.
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