A little more...
One of my first bosses in Emergency Planning was a an RAF Group-Captain who looked at the likely targetting-strategy. He had access to more military intelligence than we did, so reckoned that the UK had barely a dozen worthwhile nuclear targets. The rest could have been hit by early-generation Russian cruise missiles and bombers using conventional HE or chemical warheads. In fact, a conventional warfare phase was expected on both sides, in the air, at sea and on the ground.
His explanation for the remarkably high numbers of deployed bombs/warheads in Russia and America was simple. There's straight machismo, but also 1. The reliability issue as warheads need reprocessing and 2. you want spare 'birds' after the 'nuclear exchange', to maintain position as a world power. By 1986 we were having to consider the possibility of a lot of nuclear 'duds' or 'broken arrows' from Russian warheads that simply failed to work. their missiles had a bare 60% launch reliability, although they improved that later.
The ROC/UKWMO had explosions occur in the unlikeliest places and I once had the chance to ask one of their bosses why. His reply was coldly simple : "We have a large number of Underground Posts that all need to be exercised, so we have to give them bombs to plot." That meant also using notional bombs that were so powerful that they were greater (in force and number) than an attack warranted. CND didn't take the point - or, more likely, wanted a 'pasteurised planet' scenario.
When myself and some other EP nerds got together to look at this, we realised that the very coarse ROC post 'grid' meant that 1980s Russian bombs might only be spotted by one or two posts. A smaller and more accurate missile with a smaller warhead was always the development objective, on both sides. That's why the Pershings really scared Moscow - the USA had achieved an accurate weapon, not a first-strike one. First-strike with missiles was achievable by the USA by the mid-1950s, by Russia, by the mid-1960s. Fortunately, neither side was brainless enough to do it before the Soviet Union suffered economic collapse. Instead, wily old 'Ray-Gun' made Russia fold in a high-stakes game of poker. And CND were nowhere.
In a Scientific Advisor exercise during 1982, Cheshire looked at the aftermath in considerable detail. I was having to run a switchboard that gave the decision-teams a rather unreliable 'radio' service. At one point, the Crewe & Nantwich District Controller tried to UDI, but was called to heel by the County Controller with the aid of public broadcasts. In a nutshell, he could tell the population where to go for food. However, the threat of a broadcast wasn't needed. But there was a lot of ingenuity - gas-generators for lorries and tractors, the manufacture of ether and chloroform and sedatives, the willingness to look at acid treatment of cellulose to produce sugars - for we're talking of people looking for solutions. The Rough Science programmes had nothing on what these people came up with. The closest I came was electrolysing weak brine with carbon electrodes from batteries and a bike dynamo, to make chlorine water/hypo for disinfectant and water treatment. S.urvival rate after a year was about 43%, but without action was only 5%, so there you go.
Easingwold old hands may recall the notional county based on Nottinghamshire, which was 'Naptonshire'. I recall persuading my decision team to go with roast chicken dinners to use up the birds to feed evacuees along the roadside. Better than wasting the birds - and it kept people moving along to their billets. Billeting was to be emergency, 3 per unoccupied room, final, 1 per unoccupied room. Bad news for somewhere like Chatsworth, but roughly equivalent to the 'three rooms per family' you find in Moscow Right Now. But we anticipated having to use schools as Rest Centres for some months - maybe up to half a year.
Regarding Emergency Feeding - I've built and used brick-built trench cookers and been at exercises where the Soyer Boilers and other kit was in use. Very effective. I was very annoyed when the stocks were dispersed/destroyed in the late 1980s to save a few million. Today we'd have to use trench cookers and the like, after the fuel for gas and liquid fuel camping cookers got used up. I still have the 1960s CD manual on Emergency Feeding.
