After having watched three episodes of “Jericho” a doomsday/survivalist soap, the “what if” questions have popped into my head and won’t go away.
Nuclear attack on London…
Do you ever think about all of civilisation just breaking down? If a war, terrorist attacks or some natural or man-made disaster just destroys all of society as we know it… ?

How would people react? What would it be like to live without any mod-cons.. ? People who are dependant on medicines such as insuline, asthma inhalers etc would have it tough and may not even survive.

You’d be quite pleased if you’d been keeping tinned food, powdered milk and such things at home. Personally I’d be in dire straits as I do not keep such things at all

Growing up during the Cold War, we did thing about these things once in a while. I remember a talk at my school about nuclear war. Somebody from ther Army said that there was enough nuclear weapons to blow the entire planet up 18 times over.

There were also descriptions of false alerts that almost triggered nuclear responses. Admittedly, Sweden would not have been at any immediate risk though.. It probably would have been a fairly safe place to be, bearing in mind how sparsely populated it is, particularly in the North of the country. I imagine people in Washington, New York and Moscow would have thought about nuclear hits on their cities from time to time.
A survivalist’s kit
But we knew that there was a good reason there was conscription. That did not take place solely to disrupt the lives of young men even though it certainly did. There was a threat and that’s why conscription was necessary.

The threat did not keep me awake at night, but in the mid-eighties (when I was too young to have a perspective on it) people got really spooked by the mysterious Soviet submarine infringements on Swedish waters. People started wondering what the USSR was planning. There were stories of mysterious frog-men being spotted on the shores of islands near some of Sweden’s Baltic Sea navy posts. I think that happened just before Perestroika started.

A book by Gudrun Pausewang that I read when I was about 12 really scared me; it was about a group of German children who survived a nuclear war in Europe. The book was gruesome enough to make you a pacifist for life!

Now we are scared of terrorist attacks instead. Here in London it is a fact of life. I used to work at Piccadilly Circus in Central London. The tube station there is probably pretty high on a terrrorists hit list. Passing there at rush hour, this did enter my mind from time to time. After the 7/7 attacks you saw a lot of policemen around in the underground, but all the extra security appears to have subsided now. There is no noticeable security at Piccadilly Circus or Bank at all, other than CCTV.
They say it’s not a question of if…. but when…
People are fairly seasoned to false bomb-alerts and tend to get irritable and frustrated rather than scared.

Now I commute via Waterloo Station, another potential target. I get off the tube at Bank - a good spot to hit if you have a problem with Western capitalism. With the crowded conditions there, there’d be a veritable mayhem if somebody hit at rush hour. Liverpool Street which I sometimes travel to is the same. All it takes is a few guys with a grudge or a fanatical conviction doing some meticulous planning and they could kill an awful lot of people. Particularly if they are prepared to die themselves. For that, I genuinely don’t believe the underground system can be protected.

It is sickening to think that people who actually grew up in England can be prepared to kill there own countrymen! Yet we read of serious plots that were stopped by Scotland Yard every 2-4 months. Media keeps repeating “It is not a question of if, but when”. But we can’t think of that, or we’d all leave London right away. We can just hope that we won’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time.