Just listened to a cracking documentary programme on BBC Radio 4, The Siren's Song, all about the way we're simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the sound of the siren. From the mythical call of the mermaids that lured sailors to their deaths to the Cold War sirens we instantly associate with doom and imminent destruction. The programme maker, Peter White, visited a decommissioned nuclear bunker in Essex to interview its current owner.
Having myself visited one of the largest nuclear bunkersin Scotland a few years ago, there's something intensely chilling about the realisation that dawns upon you the instant you see the physical reality of the cold, hard, real-ness of the Cold War manifested in an underground town encased within 3 metres of concrete and capable of sustaining 300 people 100 feet below ground and behind blast doors that weighed 3 tons, like some James Bond bad guy's extinct volcanic lair.
Seeing such things first hand confirms, if ever there was any doubt, that the Cold War was very real. It wasn't just a nightmare fantasy talked about by journalists and TV presenters of the time. Our governments were making real plans to help them sustain power and basic existence in the event of mutually assured destruction.
In the Radio 4 programme this evening, (which you can listen to here) if you have half an hour), there was discussion about the instructions that would have been issued to the British public in the event of an imminent nuclear air attack; the famous one about staying indoors and sitting under your kitchen table for safety wasn't actually for your own safety - unless your kitchen was encased in 5ft thick concrete underground - but actually to help prevent anarchic rioting in the streets and to make it easier to for the authorities to identify your 'at-home dead body' rather than your lying about in some 'random street nameless body'.
Chilling stuff. Maybe that's why they called it the Cold War.