Artefacts

Nuclear Survival in the U.K.

Instructions for surviving a war, issued by a government that no longer exists.

Artefact record // ART-C1472

Field index

Classification: Magnetic tape. Instructional film
Title given: Nuclear Survival in the U.K.
Issuing body: Army Department, Ministry of Defence
Catalogue mark: SKC, C.1472
Date claimed: Crown copyright 1982, on the film's own clock
Marking: RESTRICTED. Reproduction in any form strictly forbidden
Running time: 4 min 58 sec on the copy held
Condition: Dropout and tearing throughout. Ends at a tape stop
Provenance: Unestablished. No holder, no hand, nothing written on it
Corroboration: None. Nothing else on file mentions the film or the body that issued it
Archive confidence: The tape is real and it plays. What it was preparing for is open

A government film teaching a country how to live through a nuclear attack, made in advance of one by people who expected it. Almost everything else the archive holds was made in the aftermath of something. This was made in the anticipation of it, and the archive cannot establish whether the war it describes is the war that came.

Reproduction in any form is strictly forbidden

Recorded history

The archive holds one copy, on tape, and knows nothing about where it was found or who kept it.

The film identifies itself thoroughly, which is unusual for anything in this collection. It opens on a notice forbidding its own reproduction, then names the Army Department of a Ministry of Defence, claims Crown copyright for 1982, and carries a distributor's mark and a catalogue number, C.1472. It is marked RESTRICTED, which is the lowest marking of its kind: this was not a secret. It was simply not meant for the public.

That is the whole of the provenance. Everything the archive knows about the film, the film says about itself, and there is no second source to set against it.

The film

Nuclear Survival in the U.K. Army Department, C.1472. Transferred from tape and otherwise unaltered; the dropout, the colour bars and the stop caption at the end belong to the recording.

It begins by explaining why it exists, and does so with newspapers. The headlines name a fleet sailing east from Cyprus, a blockade of Cuba, troops crossing into Czechoslovakia, forces put on alert. The archive can date none of these and records them as the film's own reckoning of its past: crises that did not become the war, offered as reasons to prepare for the one that might.

What follows is instruction. Warning is received and passed on. A broadcaster reads precautions off a caption card to a country that is presumably still watching. Vehicles move on empty lanes. A village street is shown with nobody in it, which is the only shot in the film that looks like the world the archive was assembled in.

Then the measuring begins, and the film becomes patient and technical. Instruments are set out in a field beside an underground post. A man goes down a shaft. A survey meter is read in röntgens per hour and the needle is close to the pin. Men in protective suits and respirators work a high street. A car is stopped at a board reading RADIOACTIVITY, and somebody leans in at the window to explain something to the driver.

None of it is frightening and none of it is reassuring. It is a set of tasks, filmed at the pace of the men doing them.

The difficulty

The film describes a war in detail, and it is not a war anything else on file describes.

It is not the collapse in the most sustained account of it, which is a failure of harvests and shipping and government, and in which no weapon is fired. It is not obviously the campaign in the six photographic plates, which has an enemy on the ground and a front in the mountains rather than a sky full of warning. The archive sets it beside both and joins it to neither.

The date is the film's own, and belongs to the film's clock rather than to this one. It falls in the same decade as the dates written on those plates, and the archive notes that and can do nothing further with it. Two objects carrying dates it cannot verify are not two halves of anything.

The one thing the film establishes beyond argument is the intention. Somebody with a government behind them believed this was coming, thought it survivable, and spent money teaching people how. Whether they were right about any part of that is not something the archive is in a position to say, and the world it was assembled in is not evidence either way. A country can be destroyed by something it was not expecting while a film about something else sits in a cupboard.

The restriction notice is still on the front of it. It is unenforceable now, and it is reproduced above.

Archive notes

One copy, on tape. Provenance unestablished: no holder, no annotation, nothing written on the shell.
The film supplies its own attribution: Army Department, Ministry of Defence, catalogue C.1472, Crown copyright 1982.
Marked RESTRICTED, and marked against reproduction. Neither marking has anybody left to enforce it.
Nothing else on file mentions the film, the catalogue, or the body that issued it. There is no second source.
The opening newspapers are the film looking backwards at its own history. They are not evidence of anything the archive can date.
The war it prepares for is not identified with any war on file. It is set beside the accounts of the Fall and the undocumented plates and joined to neither.
Its date falls in the same decade as the dates on those plates. The archive records the coincidence and declines to make anything of it.
Transferred from tape without correction. The dropout, the colour bars and the stop caption are part of the object.