Making a million and a half plastic bowls is easy and probably cheap. They also have the great advantage of lasting almost litterly for ever.
OTOH food is not so easy to store, apart from some things like the ones you mentioned. It goes off, it takes up room, it's expensive and so on and so forth.
You're quite right. Another problem was that the emergency stocks kept getting depleted during the seventies when we were doing a passable impression of a second world country. Tate and Lyle sugar, for example, was released from war stocks during a 1975 shortage.
Apparently pilferage was another low level problem involved with storing these foodstuffs - one can only assume most casual stealers of Mars bars would think twice once the army rocked up.
Btw I'm now the proud owner of a copy of the Emergency Planning Guidance to Local Authorities. I've already spotted a couple of Home Office porkie pies.
Oh my; are they trying to pass anything on the 'fallout-is-actually-really-noisy' level of misinformation?
Yeah, she is, in the Chinese sense lol. The other fictional character(s) she reminds me of is a cross between Susan and Adora Belle Dearhart from the Discworld novels.
Thinking about it, I've realised that the subconscious basis for the Librarian is probably the girl character in '
If...' (which is a fantastic film); certainly, I've got the 'Neighbourhood Watch' visualised similarly to the 'Crusaders' on the roof at the end of the film -
And somehow that's the best shot I can find online, but oh well.
I have been away from AH.com for a while, but I had to come back to see what's happening. Glad to see this TL is still going strong, you are doing an excellent job as always Macragge.
About Sweden and Finland: they were engaged in pretty extensive secret cooperation in the 80s, and had - for example - plans for building a joint defense of the Åland Islands in time of war. Hence, I think the Finnish and Swedish militaries would have the means to communicate between each other also below the governmental level. I am thinking especially about the naval forces near Stockholm on the Swedish side and around Åland and on the Archipelago Sea on the Finnish side.
After the exchange, the surviving Swedish and Finnish naval and air units in this area would certainly try to communicate with each other and to determine the extent of damage on the mainland. Even if the main population centres like Turku, Rauma, Pori, Vaasa etc. on the Finnish west coast and navy bases like Pansio (near Turku) are hit, there would be some surviving Finnish ships out, presumably maintaining some sort of "neutrality patrols" (and/or ostensibly upholding FCMA Treaty responsibilities towards the USSR) and some of these would seek to contact the Swedish Navy especially if they only find ruins when returning to the Finnish coast.
The exchange took place in the winter, and the Finnish coast will likely be icebound until April: thus we are talking only about those ships with at least some icebreaking capabilities - icebreakers, larger merchant ships pressed into service during the emergency, the larger Finnish Navy ships like the Turunmaa class corvettes or the minelayers. Quite likely the civilian ships coming from the south / the Swedish coast to Finland have already been running in escorted convoys before the exchange: even during normal winters icebreakers and cargo ships travel in convoy-like formations out of necessity (like last winter), now they would have been escorted by Finnish and Swedish navy ships, in turn.
If all major centers in Finland have been hit (the capital area, Turku, Tampere, Oulu, Rovaniemi, etc.), the best bet for finding at least some surviving Finnish authorities would be the western countryside in southern Pohjanmaa (Bothnia), say in a small parish south of Vaasa or Seinäjoki. This is the traditional area for evacuating parliament members and government notables, given its good connections (rail and sea) and distance to the eastern border (and the strategic targets along it). It would also be very reachable by Swedish navy and air units.
Glad to see you're still enjoying it, and thanks for the kind words.
Thanks also for the information on all the Scandinavian stuff; it's one of my many blind-spots, and stuff like this will make keeping the story going all the easier.
Just did my Early Modern Europe exam, 'Power, Culture and Belief.' Said something about how the French Revolution made France into a nation because Danton said 'audacity' three times in a row in a speech once. If I pass, I'll eat a hat of some kind.
It is pretty late; all my mates who don't do History pretty much went 'aww' and then laughed in my face, in that order, when they heard.
Great update btw; i'll stop rambling now.
Similar here; I basically rely on bluffing hard and fast and hoping whoever is marking just doesn't care. I've been using the same fake historian as reference since A-Levels; it seems no-one ever checks.
Glad you liked the update!
Excellent update.
Perhaps Whitelaw - besides asking Sweden for some of its food reserves in exchange for the intel and airmen - has his people working on plans for population control?
Specifically, having enough people to perform agricultural (and other) work, while targeting a certain percentage of people to starve.
Cruel and inhuman, without a doubt. At this point, post-exchange, survival is top priority...and I'd imagine numerous options that none of the leaders pre-war would even consider are being planned out.
Thanks!
There's going to have to be an element of 'expediency' in order to keep the country from the brink; the only real certainty is that it's unlikely to be a pleasant process.
I sort of disagree with the idea of a huge influx of Soviet refugees into Finland in the near future, mainly on geographical grounds. North of the Ladoga, the Finno-Soviet border is mostly wilderness; more, it is wilderness with a lot of closed military areas on the Soviet side. Considering that the bigger centres, like Murmansk or Arkhangelsk, are important targets, the population post-exchange would be pretty low here.
South of the Ladoga, there is the Isthmus, also with military targets, and the radiating field of rubble that was just recently Leningrad. Any Soviet refugees from outside the Isthmus (part of which has been likely evacuated in the early days of the war) and the city itself would have to wander through the destroyed Leningrad area on their way to SE Finland. I think this would present an obstacle of sorts, at least in the short run.
But certainly if there is no cohesive (national or local) government to (try to) maintain order, eastern Finland would be, in time, a chaos of civilian refugees and armed groups of men from both sides and the national border would become a legal fiction. Some of this future balance hinges on the level of Finnish mobilization at the time of the exchange: can any local Finnish groups or armed units (or "units") offer a counter to the Soviet (ex)military or civilian groups present here, as well as on the actions of Sweden and other governments / forces active in the Baltic area.
Yeah, I was going to put something like this. Leningrad, Murmansk and all the towns in that sort of area were amongst the most targetted places on earth - we'd hit them more than once, and then the Americans would hit them a few times as well. Far from a 20-30% survival rate, I'd think that anything north of 5% in these areas would be very optimistic.
Interestingly, though I put two good-sized atomic bombs on Newcastle in this timeline, I've still not managed to do as much damage as
Geordie Shore, which must be testament to MTV's awesome, terrible power.