PREPARING FOR ARMAGEDDON
In 1983, in the middle of a very ordinary London housing estate, a van driver called Ben Hayden unloaded his shopping from Sainsbury’s and started building his own fallout shelter. As he did so, armageddon seemed closer than ever. Following the relatively peaceful period of detente in the 1970s, during which diplomatic relations between east and west eased, tensions had again been stirred up by revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Western politics had shifted to the right, with Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in the UK being quickly followed by the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in the US. The pressure was rising to a point that hadn’t been felt since the Cuban missile crisis two decades earlier; for an anxious British public, nuclear confrontation seemed almost inevitable.
When the government announced, in 1980, that the US would deploy Cruise and Pershing missiles on UK soil, the British public’s nuclear worries were brought to a head. “What pushed it to the front of people’s concerns was the plan to install short-range missiles at Greenham Common and Molesworth, and the big demonstrations that the decision provoked,” says Philip Steadman, emeritus professor of Urban and Built Form Studies at UCL. “That made the issue more immediate and personal. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament became the bogeyman of the right, and there was an acrimonious and nervous political atmosphere.”
Ian Sanders, who now hosts the Cold War Conversations podcast, says the threat of nuclear war loomed large in the
