I'm a disasters expert – the UK isn't prepared enough for a nuclear strike
Lucy Easthope, an adviser in emergency management and response, gives Yahoo News insight into how prepared the UK really is for a nuclear strike.
Fears of a nuclear escalation have increased in recent weeks after Russian president Vladimir Putin officially lowered the threshold for Moscow's use of nuclear weapons.
His revisions to his country's nuclear doctrine mean that Russia could carry out a nuclear strike if attacked by a non-nuclear power that has the support of a nuclear state.
This, in theory, puts a number of Western countries at higher risk, including the UK, which has pledged £7.8bn in military support to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Last week, Ukraine was reported to have fired British-supplied Storm Shadow long-range missiles into Russian territory.
It comes after US president Joe Biden officially gave Ukraine the green-light to use US-supplied long-range missiles on Russia, although the UK has remained more tight-lipped over reports of its approval.
Reacting to Russia lowering the bar for a nuclear strike, UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer said he would not be deterred from supporting Ukraine by Putin's "irresponsible rhetoric".
So, where does this leave ordinary people in Britain, and, should the worst happen, how prepared is the UK?
How prepared is the UK for a nuclear strike?
Not enough, says Lucy Easthope, an expert on emergency management and response, member of the Cabinet Office National Risk Assessment Behavioural Science Expert Group and author of When the Dust Settles: Searching for Hope After Disaster.
Easthope has been an adviser for countless disasters over the past two decades, including 9/11, the 2005 London bombings, the Salisbury poisonings, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the COVID-19 pandemic, and draws lessons from these incidents to help prevent future tragedies.
"One of the thing’s Vladimir Putin’s changes did last week was set out new conditions under which Russia would use its nuclear weapons. So he’s made it very clear – as opposed to what has been perhaps us speculating on what he might do," Easthope tells Yahoo News.
"There’s a long history of us, for various reasons, minimising the risk – a game of chicken is a good analogy. One of the things that is important to state is it’s not a waste of time to plan for very serious scenarios because often they will be relevant to other types of incidents.
"I think one of the difficulties is just how rundown our preparedness systems are, and I think we’ve been shown behind the curtain in a sort of Wizard of Oz way with the pandemic.
"It's not like there's really poor pandemic planning here and then great nuclear planning over there. So, we’ve been shown how much central government struggle to fund this one and struggle to live in this state of readiness.
"The preparedness isn’t where it needs to be, we haven't got a great culture of preparedness in the UK, and in fact we are quite far behind a number of other countries."
UK guidance 'muddy'
"The British government and the supporting civil service are quite poor at this sort of communication with their citizens. The radiation emergency guidance issued in September is a little bit muddy because really it’s more written for the risk around a nuclear reactor. It’s taken from long-standing health and safety executive advice for citizens who live near a radiation plant.
"Certainly, with the risk of nuclear attack... I think the way that other countries have gone, shows that the UK probably is missing a trick there with not doing the public awareness they should be doing.
"I am not party to all levels of planning, but there certainly isn’t national support at the moment for local planners to get ready for a nuclear strike, that isn’t what we’re doing today, most of my colleagues for example have been working on flooding this week.
"Our government has now been in power for around 150 days, and it hasn’t done enough off the bat to get going with citizen preparedness. It’s done a lot of gentle fact-finding, but thing about emergencies is, they don’t wait.
"So, we do need a lot more resource going into local planning, whether it’s reusing community assets, reopening places and spaces that people could go to, possibly even reopening bunkers, because they would be useful for other types of scenarios.
"There are things that may help in certain scenarios that would also be relevant for other things like very severe weather – for example a notification to stay inside, a notification to avoid fresh fruit or veg and possibly a lack of access to things like meat and milk [due to radiation].
"I think there are certain ministers and shadow ministers who get how important citizen preparedness is, but the government is allowing itself to be distracted, and this is a very important political issue.
"I’m fairly certain that for anybody who’s gone to a minister this week and asked 'is this a concern', that would have been batted away.
"But our citizen preparedness should be a concern. It doesn’t matter whether it’s nuclear or weather or something else, we are not ready for these threats.
"Also, you can't battle a big threat like this if people are desperately struggling. So the link between this – where everybody's morale, the cost of living, and their ability to come back from a major event like this – are entwined.
Brexit means loss of planning support
"The other thing that has heightened our risk is that we are now outside the EU civil protection mechanism, and that means we have lost a lot of mutual support that we would have had to call on our allies in the event of a major incident.
"I’ve really started to notice its absence while I’m watching other countries either request assistance or expertise in the event of an emergency. We've tried to style it out as a country, but we are we are missing that help.
"I'm not party at official secret level to plans, I know that we’re very good at surveillance. I know that we’re also very good at diplomacy – I think that’s something that’s often underestimated and stays, necessarily, behind closed doors. There’s a lot of work going on to stop this becoming a situation.
"We've lost a lot of our bunkers and places and spaces. So potentially there is discussion about kind of where to go and where you would put your most important people. There will be health discussions, probably for the kind of level of contamination we saw in Chernobyl.
What are other countries doing?
"The Swedish documents provided to citizens have gone quite big on prepping and preparedness, and that is something I would like to see us do better on.
"In Sweden they’ve been asked to plan for no power, very low temperatures – they’ve been given several scenarios, they've been told how to access iodine tablets, and they’ve been given a list of foods to pre-prepare.
"What the Swedish and the Finnish have been told is that making these preparations works for a number of scenarios. The particular advice in their leaflets is pre-prepping tins, access to food with good vitamins in… lots food with vitamin C.
"I’m not going to recommend potassium iodine but it’s certainly what some countries will suggest. A backup generator and hurricane lamps, bottles of water, torches, batteries things like that. That’s not just for nuclear war.
"Quite rightly, the criticism that must come back to us and already has come back in Sweden is, who can afford this and where do you store it? Surely a better message is we look after each other and people who can’t get these things will find a way.
"The problem we've always had in Britain is that people are quite cynical, and they also are quite adamant that help should come. They’re very certain that help should be available from the state. Another thing I think we’re quite likely to see is questioning of the messaging - whether things will be believed.
"It’s obviously been a big theme this week, and it sells, but I think in a world where both children and adults are so frightened at the moment – ‘Nuclear war imminent’ has been on front pages for my entire life.
"Our risk is no greater than it's ever been – as long as the world has had this technology, from Oppenheimer onwards, we’ve had this risk. You cannot go about your daily life raise children, go to the shops, go to the school and worry about this. You can’t allow this to become too distressing."
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