How Britain prepared for Armageddon from the 1950s onwards

Julie McDowall ‘first encountered Armageddon’ in September 1984 when she was only three. Her father was watching a BBC Two drama called Threads about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, but instead of putting her to bed (which he obviously should have done) he let her watch it too. She saw ‘milk bottles melt in the nuclear heat, blackened fingers claw out from the rubble’ and was convinced this was really happening. ‘The experience scarred me for life,’ she declares, ‘and it is the reason you are reading this book.’ In her twenties, she suffered panic attacks and agoraphobia, so she decided to confront her fears by becoming a journalist specialising in the nuclear threat. This book – and it is a very good one – is the result. 

Her narrative begins in the optimistic 1950s when Britain was coming out of post-war austerity and Harold Macmillan was telling people they had ‘never had it so good’.