'Doomsday: Britain after Nuclear Attack' is a 1983 book about possible nuclear attacks on Britain. It starts by looking at possible scenarios (single-warhead exchange, limited nuclear war, general nuclear war, etc), estimates where warheads would land in each case, then projects the effects.
What's both brilliant and horrible about is that it's so dispassionate, factual, data-heavy, and precise; in short, it's an academic book, not pop-geopolitics. It's not written to alarm, or whip up hysteria, merely to give (or, of course, to appear to give) a realistic prediction. This approach is most painfully obvious in the appendices: appendix 1 is 'List of targets and details of attack scenarios', and appendix 5 is 'Casualties in Attacks A to K, by county, calculated as percentages of the pre-attack population' (if you're interested, Oxfordshire gets 32.57% dead and 20.77% seriously injured in the lightest attack, and 79.39% dead and 10.07% seriously injured in the heaviest).
If you liked this book, why not watch The War Game?
Why this was in my school library, i will never know. I'm jolly glad it was, though. It scared the crap out of me! -- TA
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