A fascinating, frightening and sometimes funny window into an all-too recent world – everyday life in Britain in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. There have been many histories of the Cold War: this is the first book to tell the domestic story of day-to-day life on the nuclear home front. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 changed the nature of war forever. The awesome power of the atomic blast and its deadly fallout meant that nowhere was safe: every town, village, street and home in Britain fell under the nuclear shadow, and the threat of annihilation coloured every aspect of ordinary life for the next forty years. As the media reported on the inevitability of approaching conflict with the Soviet Union, the British people were told to prepare for the coming apocalypse.

A fascinating, frightening and sometimes funny window into an all-too recent world – everyday life in Britain in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. There have been many histories of the Cold War: this is the first book to tell the domestic story of day-to-day life on the nuclear home front. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 changed the nature of war forever. The awesome power of the atomic blast and its deadly fallout meant that nowhere was safe: every town, village, street and home in Britain fell under the nuclear shadow, and the threat of annihilation coloured every aspect of ordinary life for the next forty years. As the media reported on the inevitability of approaching conflict with the Soviet Union, the British people were told to prepare for the coming apocalypse.