“Coexist” With This, Filthy Hippies

The GFY Sticker

Do you hate those idiotic “Coexist” bumper stickers? The ones that spell the word out using the Islamic crescent, the yin-yang, the Magen David, and the Cross as letters? God knows I do. The presence of one of those things on a car is a guarantee that the person who put it there is a gormless, trend-following liberal tool who in a just world would be staring forlornly through the barbed-wire fence of a concentration camp instead of sashaying around town in their cute little car spreading the brazenly nonsensical idea that people with diametrically-opposed and fundamentally-incompatible worldviews can somehow live side by side in peace.

Anyway, if you hate them (the stickers, not the liberal tools) like I do, then fight back! Buy one of my handy-dandy, patented GFY bumper stickers, pictured above. Printed in the same hippie-blue shade as the Coexist sticker, this baby will tell the world that the driver of your car is a person who lives in the Real World and not some overgrown adolescent who can’t distinguish between the World As They Wish It To Be and the World As It Is.

No joke.  To get your sticker, send check or money order for $5.00 (plus $2.50 postage and handling) in U.S. funds to:

GFY STICKER

Cheap Disposable Entertainment

P.O. Box 14134

Arlington TX 76094-4134

Texas residents please add 69 cents for sales tax. Please make checks/money orders payable to Henderson Lewis Company LLC.

Do your part to fight the liberal scum that infest our streets. Buy your GFY sticker today.

JFK 2011

20-N 2011

IN MEMORIAM

Generalísimo Francisco Franco
(1892-1975)

Jefe del Estado Español
1936-1975

Héroe de la guerra contra el comunismo

Ahora despreciado por su propio pueblo
siempre alabados por los hombres libres y cristianos de todas partes

¡Presente!

Occupy My Big Black Dick

Some Thoughts on the Passing of Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Steve Jobs is dead.

I’m saddened. Besides the grief his family and loved ones must feel, his death brings a loss to the world. He was a true innovator. Apple products and the technologies derived from them have reordered our way of living. While Jobs did not invent either the personal computer or the graphical interface operating system, the PCs and personal digital devices he created implement these in a way that has had an impact on society equal to that of the automobile, telephone, and antibiotic drugs. I used Apple products exclusively throughout my thirty years as a graphic designer and illustrator, and (although I am a Windows user now) it is safe to say that I would not have had a career as a professional artist without Mr. Jobs and his magic computer machines.

And yet…

I have always had mixed feeling about the Apple Revolution. While Apple PCs and devices have led the way to our current world of interconnectedness and immediacy, I wonder if this has been entirely for the good. Think about it: Apple products put the Internet, texting, entertainment downloading, social media, and many other things at our fingertips. As a result, the world has become more convenient and more connected. But has it become better? Have Apple’s wares helped us to become more free, more kind-hearted? Have they helped us to be better people?

One can make a good case that they have not. The world of chatrooms, comments threads, kitty-cat pictures, and Facebook pages is a bright, fun place when looked at out of the corner of one’s eye. Repeated viewing — especially up close –  will, however,  reveal the darker side of the Information Age. We are more connected to one another than ever before — and the ugliness that lurks within the human heart is more openly displayed. We can each design and create more easily than ever before — but few would argue that our world has become better-designed or more beautiful than it was pre-Apple. And the personalization of computing has put unlimited knowledge at the fingertips of every man — and knowledge is, they say, power.

But while the Mac, iPhone, and iPad have given us power, they have also taken it away. With them we have access to essentially unlimited knowledge of the world around us; the world around us. And with them, the world around us now has access to essentially unlimited knowledge about each of us. From one point of view, the iPhone and iPad are powerful tools for communication, education and entertainment. From another, they are the most powerful intelligence-gathering tools ever devised. Thanks to Steve Jobs and the iWorld he has created, the Powers That Be no longer have to gather intelligence on you and me. We build our own dossiers now!

Is that a good thing?

Apple’s logo is an apple with a bite — byte, get it? — taken out of it. While this means nothing of itself, I have always wondered why so few people associate the logo with the Biblical story it brings to mind. It was, after all, by means of an apple that man became an enemy of God.

And the Forbidden Fruit was not the company’s original logo. The first design was much more interesting from an esoteric viewpoint. It depicts Isaac Newton (Freemason and astrologer) sitting under a tree with an apple dangling above his head. The apple, as we all know, is about to fall, and its impact will enlighten (illuminate) Newton and the rest of the world. The motto on the original logo reads “A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone.”

The original price of Apple I was $666.66. No, really.

Steve Jobs got everything he wanted. He also died awfully young. That sort of life occasionally happens here on poor old planet Earth, and I suppose it’s something to be celebrated. But I can’t help but be reminded of another story when I read the amazing tale of the late Mr. Jobs. And as Apple products become more and more central to our lives, I can’t help but wonder if there might have been something more than a shrewd mind behind the company’s rise. It’s a long, long way from the obscurity of a garage to the most valuable company in the world. History is full of men who were willing to deal with the Devil to gain such false success.

But there is absolutely no reason to think the late founder of Apple Computer was one such man. Rest in peace, Steve Jobs — and thanks for the great computers.

322

Some folks who are serious about space colonization are upset by this video. The gist of their fear is that we aren’t going to establish humanity off-world before the Green freaks, eco-nuts, and Luddites drag us down into a new Dark Age.

Sadly, the Dark Age we all fear has to come before we can open the frontier.

This is a world at war. The forces of Good (God, order, duty, love) are fighting the forces of Evil (Satan, chaos, liberty, self-worship). The Good Guys go by many different names. I call the bad guys the Revolution. Today, the Revolution holds power around the world. We can’t hope to fight it; the Revolutionary Vanguard have the metaphorical Maxim gun, and we have not. It’s called State power, and the enlightened ones have no qualms about using it to further the Great Work. This, as the video notes, is the establishment of a techno-utopia for the Revolutionary Vanguard, and the scouring of the rest of humanity from the face of Mother Earth. The Revolution’s ultimate goal:  the enlightened few, walking alone and in silence among the unspoiled beauty of a depopulated world. Heaven will be a Place on on Earth. They Will have Gotten Themselves Back to the Garden. These eternal Mandarins will eat freely of the digital trees of a technocommunist Paradise, their lives extended to the maximum by technological means, their humanity — and the hole in their souls they cannot plug with all their orgasms, hedonism, and soma — genetically engineered away. This is C.S. Lewis’ “Abolition of Man”: they will do away with humanity — their own included — to build by the wisdom of Solomon the new Temple of Hiram Abiff, incarnate the goddess Liberty upon the Holy of Holies, and by so doing realize the promise of Genesis 3:22.

They've never hidden their purpose.It's right there in plain sight for those who can see it.

Fortunately, they can’t succeed. The Revolution is contrary to human nature and the teleology of the Universe, not to mention the Will of You Know Who, and it cannot endure. Its foundation is chaos, the state of absolute individual liberty, Do What Thou Wilt — a basis of sand.  Their attempts to “immanentize the Eschaton” have instead created  Hell on Earth, one that has gotten hotter each day since 1789. (This is the true global warming).

And it won’t last. The global technocratic system is already starting to come apart — and once it does, the Revolution’s rod of power — the State Almighty — shatters. The ability of the enlightened few to enact their utopian schemes will crumble. Things will fall apart; the center will not hold. “I have seen the Future, brother — it is murder.”

And then? Order will return, as it always does — and an order based not upon the sullen ideology of the Revolution, but upon the organic structure of human life: the family, writ large as the Tribe. The Tribes will return, they will scour the scum of the Revolution from the world, they will enshrine the natural social order in the courts of law, and, in time, they will resurrect the Empire amid the ruins of the old. As in A.D. 800, a new King of the Franks will someday kneel on the porphyry. In time, his Empire will send forth caravels of its own, this time to the stars.

The way home does not go around the Dark Age. It goes through its center, and out the other side.

Bruce Lewis: Enemy of the People

Je ne regrette rien

Still Falling

I’m going to tell you my 9/11 story at the end of this post. It’s not exciting, nor is it poignant. It is, I suspect, a lot like your own 9/11 story.

I’m also not going to pontificate on the significance of 9/11. We all know what happened, who caused it, and why. We know about the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, the heroes that took down UAL Flight 93. We know about the three thousand — the fallen.

What I will say is this: to me, those airplanes are still falling, those buildings are still falling, those people are still falling. They will always be falling, forever falling in my mind. And we are falling along with them, still falling, ten years later.

At the time, I was stupid enough to hope that losing three thousand Americans to a sneak attack by the Muzis would be the catalyst that would reignite the American Spirit. I thought it was our Pearl Harbor. I thought that we as a nation would finally sweep aside the bullshit, the weasel words, the lies, and the ideas behind the lies, and deal with reality as it exists. I thought were finally going to shrug away the spiritual rot of the past fifty years and cure ourselves of our cultural and political madness.

I wanted to be part of this rebirth. For this reason, I began electronically publishing in 2002 a series of original color propaganda posters intended to commemorate the attacks of September 11. I thought my posters, put out to the world at large via the Internet, might play some small part in reawakening the America I remember from my childhood, the America of old war movies and quiet resolve.

I was a fool. The rot goes too deep. We never woke up. In fact, over the decade that has passed since the attacks, the madness has grown far, far worse.

I no longer have hope for this country. My hope now lies in the slim chance that enough of the Good Guys will survive the inevitable collapse of this country to begin the rebuilding of the West. I may have a part to play in all that, Deo volente, but you won’t read about it here.

Ten years have passed since 9/11. Ten years of war, of cameras everywhere, of TSA goons, of creeping sharia. Ten years of bad presidents, of growing rancor, of flash mobs and Tea Parties. The building is coming down, the fire is licking at our backs. We are falling, falling like that poor guy from Windows of the World fell on that sunny Tuesday in 2001, and no one and nothing will stop us. And may God help us when we hit bottom.

I have given up on America, and on creating posters. It was a stupid idea. Nevertheless, I hereby present to you for your amusement a gallery of the annual 9/11 posters I did for which I still have files. May the pathetic naivete that oozes from each one provide you with a sad smile on this saddest of days.

 

Oh yes: my 9/11 story. I was at home here in Tarrant County. I watched it on TV like everyone else. A few weeks later, I was in New York on business. I was walking through Tompkins Square Park with a New Yorker friend of mine. “Something’s burning, maybe a garbage Dumpster,” I told her. “It stinks like burnt wiring and rotten meat.” I sniffed the cold air.

‘It’s not a Dumpster,” she said. “That’s the World Trade Center you’re breathing.”

Hiroshima 6 August 1945

“After Biak the enemy withdrew to deep caverns. Rooting them out became a bloody business which reached its ultimate horrors in the last months of the war. You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan’s home islands – a staggering number of Americans but millions more of Japanese – and you thank God for the atomic bomb.”

William Manchester
Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
1980

World War “Threads”: The Nuclear War of 1988 as depicted in Britain’s most infamous TV movie

The Global Nuclear War between East and West began twenty-three years ago today, on Thursday, May 26, 1988, at 8:30 a.m. GMT. It started with a single Soviet nuclear missile detonated over the North Sea. The electromagnetic pulse from that blast blew out the phones and electrical power across northern Europe and brought Britain’s days as a technological society to an end.

The 210 megatons of nuclear warheads that fell upon the island seven minutes later finished off everything else.

And it was the same all over the world. No hiding place: by the end of the day, the former citizens of Europe, the Soviet Union, the United States, and probably China and Japan had all been reduced to scattered individuals and small groups, buried, burned, punctured by flying debris, each hiding from the radiation and trying to survive in a new world of ashes and bones.

Or so goes the internal chronology of Threads – a television play about nuclear war written by Barry Hines, directed and produced by Mick Jackson, and broadcast by BBC Two on September 23, 1984. A harrowing 110-minute rollercoaster ride through World War III and its aftermath, Threads was both shocking and controversial to telly audiences in early-1980s Britain, and remains controversial to this day. Over the past two and one-half decades, the film’s bleak and unrelenting narrative, brutal tone, and lo-fi documentary look have made it a legend among nuke-film fans, yet time has not dulled its blunt impact and haunting imagery. In many ways, to many people, Threads remains perhaps the most infamous made-for-TV film ever created.

But this is no The Day After, no slick ABC all-American apocalypse. This is a stripped-down, no-name, Brit-bleak vision of the Big One. You ain’t sitting in a basement with John Lithgow and Flounder from Animal House when you watch Threads, and perky JoBeth Williams isn’t going to show up in her spotless nurse’s whites to soothe Jason Robards’ radiation-fevered brow. Neither is it the jazz-cool, Brylcreem-and-Buicks suburban version of atomic warfare so familiar to Twilight Zone fans and connoisseurs of obscure Ray Milland movies. (Milland’s self-starring, self-directed Panic In Year Zero! [American International Pictures, 1962] is perhaps the coolest version of nuclear holocaust ever realized on film.) No, this is a very English Armageddon, set in the British Leyland era, a shite-brown, shabby, worn, Are You Being Served? Apocalypse.

Steve Guttenberg: Super Jew

The cast of Threads is also remarkable for its lack of cosmetic appeal. Unlike The Day After, there’s no shirtless, strapping, Steve Guttenberg Superjew viewpoint character by which one may watch the last days unfold. Threads stars a cast of (then-) unknowns, a parade of bony noses, flabby arms, patchy skin, and cheap-looking, drab clothes typical of ordinary Britons of the day. Actress Karen Meagher (familiar to modern viewers as the WWII version of Lou from Civvy Street) is made to look simply horrid as saggy, weepy main character Ruth Beckett; fiancée Jimmy Kemp (then-unknown Reece Dinsdale, late of  Coronation Street) gets his kit straight off the rack from the Git Shoppe at John Lewis. The other  characters range in appearance from Upper-Middle Sweaterclass down to Pub Slut Minidress. All pre-attack, of course; after, it’s bandages  and moldy blankets all ‘round, I’m afraid.

This labor of this spider was exploited for the sake of entertainment

The message of the film – and the reason it’s named Threads– is that our modern technological society can be imagined as a thin tissue of mutually-supporting connections, symbolized by a spiderweb stretched across a black abyss in the title sequence. (A garden spider [uncredited] spins the web as we are told this by the Narrator.) Tear a thread or two of the web here or there, no big deal. Blow a hole in the web, say with a Russian two-megaton nuclear warhead, and everything goes to pieces. Hines’ moral: civil defense is pointless. Even a limited nuclear war, says he, would wreck the web of threads and send us back to the horrid old Middle Ages. If war does come, Threads tells us, don’t bother protecting or surviving; instead, curse God and die.

OK, political content received. On with the show.

Two Sheffieldian kids doin' the best they can

The central plot is a little ditty ‘bout Jimmy and Ruth, two Yorkshire kids growin’ up in the heartland of Sheffield. Laborer Jimmy works in a joinery, joining things. Bourgeois Ruth has some unspecified office job. Ruth debutante back seat of Jimmy’s car, gets pregnant, and they decide to get married and have the baby. But changes come around real soon, make them women and men – changes in the form of an East-West nuclear crisis. In the spring of 1988 (I assume it is 1988; the on-air captions of days and dates of events in the story are correct for that year), Iran’s government is overthrown. Civil war between the communist parties and pro-Western groups breaks out. The Reds accuse Uncle Sam of another Mosaddegh-style covert coup and invade northeastern Iran to “restore order”. The U.S. counters by airdropping rapid deployment forces into west-central Iran. As Jimmy and Ruth buy a flat and start scraping off the wallpaper in the baby’s room, the confrontation develops. The Bible Belt does not come and save their souls. April turns to May, troops mass along the inter-German frontier, a U.S. submarine goes missing, and rioting and looting start. Finally, the U.S. president issues an ultimatum to the Soviets: quit Iran, Or Else.

Else.

There is a second storyline in Threads: the tale of Clive Sutton (Harry Beety), the chief executive officer of the city of Sheffield. Sutton, a mild-mannered, flower-loving, middle-aged family man, is also the city’s wartime Emergency Controller, a sort of dictator-designate who in time of emergency can be granted essentially absolute power by London.  Sutton serves as Hines’ proxy for Britain’s ‘80s civil defense program: we see him struggle to assemble a working emergency committee from within Sheffield’s peacetime bureaucracy, desperately attempt to assemble necessary resources, and establish a makeshift subterranean headquarters beneath city hall. The trouble he experiences in doing so, and the pathetic helplessness of Sutton and his team to help the city’s population survive in the post-attack world, are again meant to portray civil defense efforts as a pointless waste of time and money. Nevertheless, the film’s triumphant ending shows Sutton, his family, and his team surviving the war and emerging from their underground bunkers ready to help Britain rebuild.

Just kidding. They all die horribly, as does most of the UK’s population. The last we see of Jimmy he is (spoilers!) running through the ruins of the city in a desperate attempt to find Ruth. Sutton & Co. suffocate to death in the bunker. Ruth’s parents and grandmother die in their basement and are eaten by rats, dogs, and maggots (uncredited).  Jimmy’s little brother is roasted into something that looks suspiciously like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when Sheffield gets it, and his folks die choking on their own vomit courtesy of fallout. Only Allison Kemp, Jimmy’s cute younger sister (played by Jane Hazlegrove, now better known as lesbo nurse “Dixie” Dixon on Casuality), is seen to have survived the attack: she makes her farewell appearance as part of a hungry mob locked in a civilian detention camp. It’s like The Sound of Music, only the Nazis win and nobody sings “Edelweiss” at the end.

***

Codename: Operation Fuck Subtlety

Unlike many fictional World War IIIs, the 1988 war depicted in Threads is a fairly accurate portrayal of what really would have happened if the U.S. /NATO and the USSR/Warsaw Pact had ever gone at it proper. In your standard Hollywood thriller scenario à la mode Tom Clancy, the Soviets build up big forces on the frontier, the Allies respond in kind, the Reds attack with conventional weapons along a broad front, and the NATO forces fight a holding action, trading space for time until reinforcements from the U.S. arrive and the tide can be turned. Nuclear weapons, if used, appear only as a terrible last resort (if used by NATO) or a dire warning (if used by the Warsaw Pact).

We know now from captured documents what would really have happened. The Soviets had no intention of allowing NATO forces to fight a delaying action until superior forces could be brought to bear in Europe, nor did they intend to let the Allies blunt their attacks with single, small nuclear attacks. Instead, their real plan was to simply nuke the living shit out of everything in western Europe on day one of the war – every airfield, ammo dump, tank formation, fuel depot, port, harbor, and headquarters – and then roll over the rubble in sealed tanks. Nine days later Soviet forces would be crunching their way over the ruins of Lyon, and, a few days after that, the old hammer and sickle would be flapping from Vladivostok to the shores of the English Channel. All glory to the union of worker-peasant-intellectual proletarians!

Fook, Jimmay, tha've doon eht!

England would not have been spared, of course. Old Blighty would be a radioactive heap within minutes of the first attack, and this is how it (and presumably the other combatant nations) ends up in Threads. Ruth, however, somehow survives; living by her wits, always on the move, she gathers supplies, flees the city, bands together with other refugees, and eventually finds a place among the tattered corps of agricultural workers trying to chip a living out of the scorched, irradiated soil. She gives birth to Jimmy’s child in a stable rude; unlike the arrival of our Lord, however, little Jane’s coming is attended not by ox and ass but by a whimpering and confused guard dog. We get to see her (Ruth, not the dog) chew off the umbilical cord, which one has to admit is pretty hardcore for a TV movie.

The end of Threads? Well, watch it for yourself. I think Hines and Jackson probably exaggerated the effect of nuclear war on humanity for the sake of the film’s rather overt political message (“Yoo cannat wen a nucleah woah!,” as one  minor character helpfully explains), but then again they may have had a point about how delicate the ties that bind our technocracy can be. I mean, look at what happened in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit: the population reverted to savagery literally overnight, the government assuming emergency powers (and collecting the guns of law-abiding citizens), rape, looting, homelessness, hunger. All the Big Easy lacked to become Threadsville, U.S.A. was a dusting of fallout and that incomprehensible Yorks dialect.

One thing is certain, however: you will never forget the final scene of Threads. It is what Stan Lee of Marvel Comics used to call a “Senses-Shattering SHOCK Ending!”. And while World War Threads is and remains the plutonium standard of nuclear war flicks, it can have a real effect on the emotional life of those who survive to its end. As the credits roll on this incredible example of the real World War III – that forty-year war that we stupidly refer to as “cold” — you may feel a bit like a war victim yourself.

_________________________________________________
THREADS (1984)
CHRONOLOGY
1988

Mar 5 Sat

• Civil war in Iran; some NATO air activity over UK

April 24-30

• Coup in Iran

May 2 Mon

• U.S. reconnaissance satellites detect armed convoys entering northern Iran from USSR

May 3 Tue

• Film crew from West German television crew “NDR Film” captures images of Soviet armed convoys entering northern Iran via mountain passes

May 5 Thu
PM

• Images of Soviet incursion broadcast in UK via BBC 1. In Vienna, USSR Foreign Minister defends incursions as a response to a call for help from the legitimate government of Iran, accuses U.S. of fomenting Iranian coup

May 8 Sun
AM

• Soviet armored columns enter Iran; forces “dig in” near Mashad. U.S. calls invasion “threat to peace”

PM

• 1930Z:BBC Radio 2 reports U.S. hints that troops may be deployed to Iran in response to Soviet incursion. UK PM and other global leaders protest incursion, call USSR actions a “serious threat to world peace”

May 10 Tue

• U.S. submarine Los Angeles attacked and sunk while on a reconnaissance mission off the coast of Iran. All 127 aboard lost.

May 11 Wed

• Television news reports from Washington, D.C. refer to a newspaper story citing a “serious incident involving an American warship off the coast of Iran”, relates rumors that a U.S. Navy submarine has disappeared while on routine patrol. Pentagon refuses to confirm that “something very serious has happened”
• U.S. destroyer Callahan collides with, seriously damages Soviet cruiser Kirov in Gulf of Oman

May 12 Thu
AM

• 0800Z: BBC reports Soviet protest of “‘dangerous provocations’ by U.S. warships in the Gulf of Oman”

PM

• U.S. search and rescue vessels discover oil slicks that “could only have come from the missing submarine”.BBC broadcasts speech by U.S. president stating Soviets are “solely responsible for their deaths and for the vessel’s disappearance”, protests “the unprovoked attack on our submarine and the move into Iran” as “the actions of a reckless and warlike power”; warns Soviets “in the clearest possible terms” against “taking the world to the brink of an armed confrontation with incalculable consequences for all mankind”

May 17 Tue
AM

• U.S. begins airdrop of first elements of Rapid Deployment Force/Central Command into western Iran. 10th Abn Div establishes airhead in Esfahan
• UK Home Office notifies regional controllers to implement Emergency Arrangements. City Controllers begin assembling Committees
• U.S. Air Force deploys first B-52 and AWACS aircraft to UK

May 18 Wed
AM

• Run on food begins in UK

PM

• USSR moves nuclear weapons into Iran by air

May 19 Thu
AM

• U.S. begins crash reinforcement of 10th Abn Div in Esfahan
• U.S. 84th Airborne Div brought to full combat readiness

PM

• U.S. tactical aircraft begin arriving at RAF Finningley
• Distribution of blankets and supplies to UK shelters begins
• U.S./NATO chiefs assembles in Brusels, accuse USSR of stationing nuclear weapons at Mashad
• UK issues statement of support for U.S. action; UK PM condemns “reckless actions which can only worsen an already grave situation”
• Regional emergency fuel stocks topped
• Large-scale military convoys move into rural areas adjacent to major UK cities
• U.S. delivers quit-Iran ultimatum to USSR; deadline 1200Z May 22
• Telephone and Telex links to Iran severed; borders closed

May 21 Sat

• Warsaw Pact forces mass on the German central frontier
• Large-scale pro-and antiwar protests across UK. Police make arrests due to unrest at events in the North and Midlands
• UK begins crash reinforcement of British forces in Germany.
• The UK Government seizes control of British Airways to facilitate troop movements, stranding thousands of civilian air passengers and refugees at Heathrow and Gatwick airports. Cross-Channel ferries also seized
• Royal Navy begins defensive air and sea patrol of oil drilling installations in North Sea

22 May Sun
AM

• Large-scale CND rally in Sheffield; clashes between right- and left wing protesters leads to riot; police intervene
• Military units begin deployment

PM

• 1200Z NATO ultimatum deadline expires
  
• 1300Z U.S. launches large-scale B-52 strike on Mashad using conventional weapons. Soviet forces defend base with nuclear surface-to-air missile, resulting in loss of many U.S. aircraft
  
• 1400Z U.S. responds by striking Mashad with single tactical nuclear weapon. Soviet base destroyed; exchange stops.

May 23 Mon
AM

• Intense diplomatic effort to mediate U.S.-USSR crisis begins
• UK Foreign Secretary cites lack of news, calls speculation “irresponsible”
• Heavy construction equipment moved out of cities
• U.S. – Soviet navies engage in combat in Middle Eastern waters
• Panic buying of food begins

PM

• Special session of Parliament enacts UK Emergency Powers Act.
• UK PM addresses nation; Government “optimistic” that a settlement is at hand
• Civil disorder, riot, looting begins in UK cities
• DDR erupts in rioting

May 24 Tue
AM

• Civilians begin fleeing UK cities. AA and RAC report heavy congestions on routes to Wales and the West Country
• USSR cuts road, air links to Berlin; offers NATO garrison safe passage
• U.S. Berlin-bound relief convoy turned back by Warsaw Pact forces at Helmstedt border crossing
• Military vehicles moved out of cities
• BBC Emergency Measures official broadcasts begin
• Regional Emergency Controllers directed to begin moving to HQs, assume broad powers to suspend certain peacetime functions and to commandeer resources as needed
• Ambulances moved out of cities
• U.S. aircraft carrier  Kittyhawk sunk by hostile action
• U.S. begins air and naval blockade of Cuba
• Anti-Soviet mass demonstrations in U.S. cities; some Soviet consulates damaged
• Rioting continues in DDR
• Hospitals cleared for expected casualties
• Acting under the Emergency Powers Act, the Government seizes M1, M18, A63 A629, and other motorways and intercity trunk routes as “essential service routes”; lists of affected routes posted outside local regional authority HQs
• All retail motor fuel stations closed. Stocks seized for use by official vehicles only
• Key points guarded
• Known and potential subversives arrested
• Scientists around the world detect evidence of two nuclear explosions in Iran. UK Government refuses to confirm. PM insists “war can be avoided”
• Paris evacuated
• TUC threatens general strike. Union rallies broken up by police after left-right clashes; union leaders arrested
• Important works of art moved out of cities
• Rioting in cities across UK
• Regional Controllers and Emergency Committees move to Emergency Headquarters

PM

• BBC broadcasts “Action After Warnings”
  
• 2230Z Fire engines moved out of cities

May 26 Thu
AM

• 0800Z BBC broadcasts “Casualties”
  
• Protect and Survive shelter instructions published in newspapers
• Non-essential phones disconnected
• BBC broadcasts “Fallout”
• Bank runs begin
  
• 0830Z [0330 EST] Attack Warning Red sounded. Air Attack Warning sounded. Single Soviet warhead exploded above North Sea. Heavy EMP damage to electrical, communications systems
  
• 0837Z USSR launches first missile salvo. RAF Crewe and other NATO military targets struck. Total attack yield UK = 80MT, immediate blast casualties UK 2.5-9M
• Exchange escalates. Countervalue strikes mounted. Sheffield, other UK industrial centers struck with multiple nuclear weapons. Total attack yield UK = 210MT, global = 3000MT.
  
• 0955Z Fallout from groundburst at Crewe begins to settle around Sheffield

May 29 Sun

• Radiac level in Baslow, Derbyshire reaches 800-1000r/hr

Jun 2 Thu

• UK Government seizes all food stocks

June 5 Sun

• Radiac levels in areas around Sheffield safe for two hours exposure per person per day

June 9 Thu

• Food riots in UK. Looting begins. Food distribution begins in UK

June 11 Sat

• Hospitals overrun by injured and ill
  Daily food ration in UK cut to 1000 kCal/person for manual laborers, 500 otherwise

June 17 Fri

• First epidemic diseases appear in UK
• UK Government issues shoot-to-kill orders for looting
• Able-bodied citizens in Release Band F (Dore and Totley, Abbeydale, Woodseat) ordered to report to Abbeydale Park at 0800Z June 18 for reconstruction duty

June 18 Sat

• 0800Z Able-bodied survivors from Release Band F report to Abbeydale Park for reconstruction duty
• Food becomes common currency
• 20M unburied corpses in UK

June 23 Thu

• Government converts Dore and Totley Tennis Club into detention camp for looters
• Sheffield Emergency HQ excavated; all personnel found dead

June 30 Thu

• UK Government creates special courts of justice with wide-ranging powers. Firing squads instituted for those convicted of capital offenses

July

• Temperatures remain low in Northern Hemisphere
• Deaths from fallout peak
• No electrical power in UK; motor fuel generally unavailable
• Food and water supplies become unreliable in UK
• Registration of refugees begins. General exodus from cities
• Police assign registered refugees to occupied intact housing with space to spare
• Government establishes mass Feeding Centers for registered refugees

September

• UK deaths from direct attack effects = 17-38M
• Widespread cold, hunger appear in UK
• Government directs all resources to agricultural production as basis of national redevelopment
• Environmental effects of war damage plant life; refugees collect diminished harvest mostly by hand due to lack of fuel for agricultural equipment

Winter 1988-1989

• Cold weather, illnesses kill many of the old and young in the UK

1989
March

• Survivors loot grain warehouses

May

• Barter economy established in UK; rats commonly eaten
• Heavy UV from post-attack effects causes widespread skin cancer, cataracts and leukemia among surviving population
• UK harvests reduced due to insect, crop diseases, lack of fertilizers, insecticides, and equipment

1991-1996

• UK population reaches minimum at medieval levels (4-11M)

Spring 1998

• Subsistence agriculture in UK
• Electrical power available; limited basis and coverage
• Education for literacy resumed, but largely ineffective
• Handicrafts (e.g. recovery of thread from cloth) done by children

2001

• Large-scale reclamation of materials from urban ruins
• Coal mining, steam traction resumed in UK
• Looting remains common, punishable by shooting or hanging
• Many among postwar generation of children born dead