Passing Time During The Pestilence

[Spoony]

I used to moan about how little there is to do here (the Cayman Islands). Now I feel like a spoilt brat! This has at least altered my perspective for the better and I’ve never felt so fortunate to have a job I can still crack on with from home.

 

[imavillan]

Another live offering from Tomorrowland on now...Tues 7th

Tomorrowland

Join the global connection and unite through the power of music.

Tune in and enjoy Kungs, Nicky Romero, Don Diablo and Steve Aoki LIVE from their homes, hosted by One World Radio's Adam K.

15h00 – KUNGS (Paris – France)
16h00 – NICKY ROMERO (Veenendaal – Netherlands)
17h00 – DON DIABLO (Amsterdam – Netherlands)
18h00 – STEVE AOKI (Las Vegas – USA)
Time in CEST.

START TIME:  09:00 EDT - 10:00 BRT - 13:00 GMT - 15:00 CEST - 18:30 IST - 21:00 CST

 

 

[Stevo985]

19 hours ago, Spoony said:

I used to moan about how little there is to do here (the Cayman Islands). Now I feel like a spoilt brat! This has at least altered my perspective for the better and I’ve never felt so fortunate to have a job I can still crack on with from home.

 

I want to live there. Need a maid?

[A'Villan]

 

[tonyh29]

Make your own Simpsons intro 

 

[imavillan]

Fatboy Slim premiere on youtube tonight at 7pm

 

 

[Mandy Lifeboats]

I’ve been jotting down some notes from my time in Civil Defence.   Its passed my time.  I hope it passes some of your time and doesn’t depress the hell out of everyone.

Note - Everything I’m writing about refers to the late 1980s & early 1990s and has long since been declassified and been in the public domain.   

I had a place reserved for me in a “Civil Defence Shelter” to deal with Nuclear Armageddon.    In theory we would have moved in at the very early stages of a crisis and remained there until it was safe to emerge.  I remember one of our first briefings. If there was a nuclear war and every single nurse, doctor, ambulance and hospital was miraculously unscathed we could only hope to save 10% of the population.  That’s a stark introduction. 

Once inside it was my job to operate what we referred to as the “doomsday computer”. It wasn’t a computer. It was a series of plastic disks where you entered known facts and a connected disk would give you some assumptions. For instance if radiation levels in Birmingham were x that suggested that we’d been attacked with a weapon yield of y. If we have been attacked by a weapon yield of y that was likely to have caused total devastation for z miles. All of these facts and assumptions were fed in and communicated to any other shelter still operating. That shelter would then use that data to predict problems coming their way. For instance if you know the yield of a weapon, its height when detonating and the wind-speed you can map fall-out accurately. With the prevailing UK winds, Birmingham was mainly at risk from fallout from Bristol. So knowing when it was due to arrive was handy. It gave survivors time to put on a jumper and give the lawn a quick mow. I would keep adding facts to the doomsday computer and testing assumptions to either strengthen or discount them. It sounds complicated but it wasn’t. It was just sole destroying when you set a certain parameter and the disks told you that meant 100,000 dead. But it wasn’t all fun and games. 

We had exercises and played out some common scenarios.  I was only needed for a nuclear threat but a wide variety of emergencies were practiced.  The most common scenario I practiced was that NATO fired the first nuke when Warsaw Pact tanks crossed the Rhine.  This was the point that the Warsaw Pact knew it could not cross.  USSR retaliated immediately with between 100 to 200 weapons hitting the UK. Three waves of weapons would be launched. Smaller yields targeting strategic and military targets. Medium yields targeting population centres. Larger yields targeting wider geographical areas not hit by the first 2 waves. The weapon destined for Birmingham would probably land somewhere between the Baggies Ground and Winson Green. So it’s not all bad news. The weapon was targeted there as it would obliterate the city centre but also cause damage across the Black Country into Wolverhampton.  Not all weapons would find their target and that others would fail to detonate. This gave a real possibility that a coastal town/city with little military or strategic importance might be undamaged.  In one exercise the weapon for Liverpool fell into the sea. If this had occurred for real we would have built society again using Liverpool as a base and with Scousers as the main population. We decided that it would be better to find a spare bomb and launch it at Liverpool ourselves. Armageddon might be awful but it gets no better if everyone is wearing a shell-suit and has a perm.    (This bit might be made up). 

 

One of the big unknowns was whether the Warsaw Pact would hold some weapons back and strike again just as everyone was emerging for their shelters.  Our radar warning systems would likely be targets and unable to give us any warning.  The USSR also had a system that automatically launched weapons if certain criteria were met.  It was known as “Dead Hands” because of the way it worked.  It was thought to monitor certain radio signals and radiation levels from across the USSR.  If those signals stopped and/or the radioactivity suddenly spiked across the country the missiles would be launched.  The UK had a much simpler system for both of these tactics.  Our submarines would monitor things like the World Service, the BBC, military communication satellites etc.   If they believed the UK had been attacked but they had not received any orders the captain would open a letter written by the PM which told him what to do.  The contents of the letter were unknown.  But firing every missile at USSR was a possibility.  As was firing every missile at the USSR 6 months later. 

 

After the attack my role was monitoring conditions across the country using any available data and trying to fill any gaps in data with assumptions.  Others would then make decision based upon that information.   Some of the decisions were truly awful.  Which communities could we help and which ones were beyond help.  Who could we move to a safer area and who would we leave because they were already doomed regardless.    The UK population would drop to 1 or 2 million before stabilising. I think the population was around 50 million at that time.  But the health of those survivors would be poor.  Even the people initially in the shelters would quickly fall ill.   The amount of dead humans and animals would far exceed the ability of the living to dispose of them.  We would start building small communities in safer areas and feed in what resources we could.  Then we’d look to combine the most stable and successful communities together into larger communities.  But we had to take care that the communities were as lawful as you could expect and not a bunch of criminals pillaging everything around them.

 

Life after the attack would initially be complete isolation.  In most cases staying at home was better than venturing out and searching out medical assistance that might not be there. The BBC still has a bunker next to Wood Norton Hotel in Worcestershire.   It used to be a “Training  Centre” for BBC technicians and is now a retirement village.  Assuming it remained operational they would broadcast radio to whatever was left of the nation.  I remember it been a mix of cheery music, Dad’s Army and emergency broadcasts.  In the bunker we had cards, chess sets and a few games.  On exercises the “lads” spent hours discussing which female members of the bunker we’d be repopulating the country with.   We often wondered if the mix of the bunker intentionally included a good mix of young and healthy people of both sexes.  

 

We never practised getting society back to "normal" because that was an unobtainable goal. The future of the UK would be determined by countries that were not destroyed and how they decided to interact with us.  But with a small country in the centre of the battle-zone our chances of rebuilding the country were slim.  In one scenario we evacuated survivors to the coast and then onto boats which took them to an island within the UK.  Somewhere like Anglesey or the Isle of Wight.  We also concentrated all available medical, military and food resources there.   Once this was secure we started to ship the healthier people to South Africa which had avoided any destruction.   South Africa took the survivors and we handed them anything they wanted in return.  By taking our remaining ships, submarines, aircraft carriers, planes and armed forces they became a new superpower.

 

It was interesting stuff but could be terribly depressing.  When I got a wife the thought of waving her goodbye as I disappeared into the bunker didn’t feel right.  So I hung up my doomsday computer.   A lot of the things I see happening now with CV19 are exactly the things we practised.   Everything I have seen is part of a well-rehearsed and practiced plan.  If we say the plan is 200 pages long we’ve got to page 25.  We’ll probably get to page 50.  We really don’t want to get to page 100 because that’s where we start digging mass graves and shooting looters with rubber bullets.   Page 150 is where we don’t even bother burying the dead and Martial Law allows summary executions.    

Edited April 9, 2020 by Mandy Lifeboats
Speeling mishsteak

[mjmooney]

*martial* law. 

[Xann]

37 minutes ago, Mandy Lifeboats said:

Life after the attack would initially be complete isolation.  In most cases staying at home was better than venturing out and searching out medical assistance that might not be there. The BBC still has a bunker next to Wood Norton Hotel in Worcestershire.   It used to be a “Training  Centre” for BBC technicians and is now a retirement village.  Assuming it remained operational they would broadcast radio to whatever was left of the nation.  I remember it been a mix of cheery music, Dad’s Army and emergency broadcasts.  In the bunker we had cards, chess sets and a few games.  On exercises the “lads” spent hours discussing which female members of the bunker we’d be repopulating the country with.   We often wondered if the mix of the bunker intentionally included a good mix of young and healthy people of both sexes.       

The bunker was the bump through the complex next to the tennis courts IIRC? I've been in the doomsday studio part, around when you were there, '89.

It was, and there still is a BBC training facility,  but anyone can pay and do courses these days. I think? There's some BBC technical admin too.

[sidcow]

On 09/04/2020 at 14:02, Mandy Lifeboats said:

I’ve been jotting down some notes from my time in Civil Defence.   Its passed my time.  I hope it passes some of your time and doesn’t depress the hell out of everyone.
Note - Everything I’m writing about refers to the late 1980s & early 1990s and has long since been declassified and been in the public domain.

 

 

It was interesting stuff but could be terribly depressing.  When I got a wife the thought of waving her goodbye as I disappeared into the bunker didn’t feel right.  So I hung up my doomsday computer.   A lot of the things I see happening now with CV19 are exactly the things we practised.   Everything I have seen is part of a well-rehearsed and practiced plan.  If we say the plan is 200 pages long we’ve got to page 25.  We’ll probably get to page 50.  We really don’t want to get to page 100 because that’s where we start digging mass graves and shooting looters with rubber bullets.   Page 150 is where we don’t even bother burying the dead and Martial Law allows summary executions.    

Probably the most interesting post I have ever read on Villatalk.  Thank you. 

[tinker]

On 09/04/2020 at 14:02, Mandy Lifeboats said:

I’ve been jotting down some notes from my time in Civil Defence.   Its passed my time.  I hope it passes some of your time and doesn’t depress the hell out of everyone.

Did it mention anything about how they would finish the football season?  

[snowychap]

 

[Chindie]

Simply brilliant.

[Chindie]

No theme this week besides just a mix of songs that have fun to drum to(and he's sadly decided to mute his mic during the songs which takes something away from it all), but still it's a cool eclectic mix (he starts with a bizarre No Doubt song I've never heard before) and remains **** impressive.

[It's Your Round]

3 hours ago, snowychap said:

 

Not much on the internet makes me genuinely laugh out loud, but this did. Amazing scenes

[limpid]

Free gaming.

 

[Mandy Lifeboats]

20 hours ago, Xann said:

The bunker was the bump through the complex next to the tennis courts IIRC? I've been in the doomsday studio part, around when you were there, '89.

It was, and there still is a BBC training facility,  but anyone can pay and do courses these days. I think? There's some BBC technical admin too.

The whole site is built into the hillside. From the main road the BBC site is to the left, the hotel just ahead and the new retirement village is to the right. 

From memory the bump you are referring to was a decontamination area with showers, toilets, and guard room.  
 

 

[chrisp65]

[maqroll]

I live across the street from a neighborhood park which is arguably busier than usual since mid March. 

[A'Villan]

Been offered a month of free classes in the martial arts that I practice, because my instructor says I have 'good character' and he has permission to train clients one on one. So I've been doing that.