Jolted awake by the terrifying shrieking sound emitted by your mobile phone, you sit up and snatch it from your bedside table and see the words ‘NUCLEAR MISSILE THREAT INBOUND’.
After weeks of chilling brinkmanship between Nato and Russia, President Putin has done the unthinkable and unleashed a deadly volley of intercontinental ballistic warheads which will smash into Britain at 9,000mph.
The pandemonium in the street outside signals that your neighbours have also received the message sent by the Home Office to every phone in the UK. It arrives only three minutes before the nukes wreak unimaginable devastation on their targets.
That’s less time than it takes to boil a kettle but, as panic-stricken as you and your loved ones are, you know that you can reach the safety of your own nuclear bunker before the warheads hit.
Providing that you have one, of course. And with Putin sabre-rattling ever more loudly in response to Joe Biden authorising Ukraine to use long-range Western weapons against Russia, now could be the time to think about building your own shelter lest this cataclysmic scenario actually unfolds.
It doesn’t have to set you back thousands of pounds. Indeed, if you follow the advice in a remarkable publication called Nuclear War Survival Skills it could cost you virtually nothing – relying on, as it does, objects commonly found around the home, with your internal doors, shower curtains and bedsheets among them.
The only expenditure might be around £20 for a shovel and £25 for a pick-axe (if you don’t have these tools already), £20 for a roll of 25m x 4m plastic sheeting and around £7 for a few broom handles.
It might seem incredible that you could buy yourself protection from nuclear armageddon for as little as £72 – but this civil defence manual has impeccable credentials. First published in 1979, it was written by American inventor Cresson Kearny, a mentor to Steven Harris, an electrical and chemical engineer who has been keeping it updated and in circulation since Kearny’s death in 2003. ‘Cresson was a dear friend and I promised that his book would not die with him and I would make it freely available to the world,’ Mr Harris told the Mail.
A study by the University of Warwick two years ago found that there is ‘scant evidence that the UK has made comprehensive plans to deal with a nuclear strike
‘The physics of radiation have not changed, nor will they ever change, so the book is as relevant today as it was when they exploded the first atomic bombs in the 1940s.’
The book was originally printed on water-resistant paper to keep it dry in a damp bunker – a precaution typical of Kearny, a civil engineer and geologist who devoted himself to increasing the combat effectiveness of US troops during the Second World War and came up with such innovations as the plastic bags used to protect rifles and keep them afloat during the D-Day landings.
In 1964, he was employed by America’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory – which produced the uranium used for the Little Boy bomb detonated over Hiroshima in 1945 – to find ways of helping the American public survive a nuclear attack.
And he argued against the common, fatalistic view that there’s no point in even trying to survive a nuke because doing so is impossible and, even if you did, life in the resulting nuclear winter would be unbearable.
Not true, insists Kearny. Yes, anyone directly at ‘ground zero’, the point where the device explodes, would be vaporised. But he pointed out that some Nagasaki residents hiding inside shelters built for conventional bombing raids survived uninjured in 1945, even though they were only a third of a mile from the nuclear explosion.
Meanwhile, the danger of radiation sickness lessens as the ‘dose rate’, the amount received per hour, decreases over time. And Kearny suggested that, within just two weeks of a detonation, the occupants of most shelters could safely stop using them, or at least leave them for an increasing number of hours each day.
The case for building your own shelter might therefore seem convincing, especially given the apparent dearth of official planning for such an attack. A study by the University of Warwick two years ago found that there is ‘scant evidence that the UK has made comprehensive plans to deal with a nuclear strike.
We appear much less prepared than we were back in the 1960s.’ Kearny’s ingenious shelters were even tested in the field – exposed to many different types of radiation and even nuclear explosions before the introduction of the Test Ban Treaty in 1963.
To ensure they were easy to build, Kearny recruited ordinary American families through newspaper adverts and gave them instructions on how to construct their own bunkers, demonstrating that most could be built in less than 48 hours even by people with no specialist DIY knowledge.
While the book suggests several types of shelter, the simplest for anyone with a garden is to stake out then dig a rectangular trench 4.5ft deep and 3ft wide. Correctly measured, this should offer you and your family enough space to sit on the ground with your knees tucked into your chests.
The length of the trench depends on how many people will be using it. Allow 30 inches per person – or 2.5ft – plus another 10 inches. A family of four, therefore, would need a trench just under 11ft long. Cosy, for sure – but better than being outside.
You will be covering your trench with a ‘roof’ made of internal doors laid over the top. These can be taken from inside your home or bought from a hardware shop in advance. Allow for one door per person.
The case for building your own shelter might therefore seem convincing, especially given the apparent dearth of official planning for such an attack
These will then be covered with plastic sheeting to keep the rain out, then a 2ft-thick mound of earth to absorb radiation fall-out.
The internal walls must also be lined with plastic sheeting, such as shower curtains, to avoid the earth drying out and crumbling, risking the shelter’s stability. The sheeting will be held up with poles, such as broom handles, stuck into the ground.
You will, of course, need an entrance shaft at one end and you should ideally dig a small ventilation hole at the other.
All this might sound rudimentary. But soil is very effective at blocking gamma rays – radiation falling by half for every 3.6 inches of dirt it passes through. A person safely inside this sort of shelter experiences 250 times less radiation than they do outside. And as a bonus, a thick layer of earth over your head will absorb a surprising amount of heat from any fires.
Where to install your shelter? Wherever practical, pick a site that is at least 50ft from any buildings or trees which might get blown on to your shelter or catch fire, trapping you inside. Avoid even a lone tree so that you’re not digging through roots. Now you are ready to make a start…
After measuring the space and clearing away any grass and weeds, start digging the trench, placing the excavated earth along both sides, at least 3ft from the edge. The sides of the trench should slope slightly inwards to avoid the walls collapsing.
Near one end of the trench, dig an entrance hole. Ideally this will include a step to help you get in and out of your shelter. You can lay a wooden board, if you have one, to secure and level the step.
Cover the entrance with a canopy made from plastic sheeting, propped up by broom handles. You can tether the sheeting to the ground by using tent pegs or a wooden stake.
At the other end of the trench, dig another, smaller hole to help air to circulate in the shelter and cover this in the same way, with a tethered plastic sheet supported by one or more broom handles.
It is crucial, of course, to ensure that you have enough oxygen – while simultaneously protecting the entrance and ventilation shafts from both radioactive fall-out and rainwater.
Now it’s time to cover the walls of your shelter. Take broom handles and run them vertically at intervals along the length of the trench.
Then string plastic bin bags or other water-resistant materials such as shower curtains along the broom handles to cover the walls. It is best to leave these coverings hanging an inch or so above the floor of the shelter, to lessen the chances of them being pulled down and getting wet.
Now lay your ‘roof’ of wooden doors. This must not be perfectly flat as rainwater will have nowhere to run off and your shelter could collapse on top of you.
Instead, it’s vital that your roof slopes slightly from one side of the trench to the other.
To achieve this, take some bedsheets or pillowcases and fill them with a little earth, perhaps by using a garden trowel.
Then shape the filled sheets into rudimentary sandbags about three inches high and three inches deep: roughly the size and shape of draught excluders. Run these down one side of the edge of your trench, making that side a few inches higher than the other.
Lay the doors carefully in place, then cover them with a sheet of rainproof material, such as a tarpaulin, to keep them dry.
Using a spade, cover the doors and plastic with the earth you excavated while digging the trench. This mound must be at least two feet deep.
You might want to dig small ditches around the completed shelter as further drainage.
While earth-covered shelters provide the most effective protection against radiation and require less effort to build than others, it’s also possible to erect a shelter within your basement if you have one.
The walls can be formed by wardrobes, wooden boxes or bin bags – filled with earth to provide the necessary protection against radiation. As with the outdoor shelters, you can add a roof of doors or any other large pieces of wood, on top of which you can pile more earth.
Whatever shelter you build for yourself, you’ll need to think about such practicalities as toilet facilities. Five-gallon plastic buckets –about 20 litres – lined with plastic bags are ideal.
If you don’t have a lid, you can stretch another plastic bag across the top and through this you can poke a garden hose stretching to the outside world to vent away the pong.
Of course, all this might seem rather redundant if you live in a flat without a basement or in a house with a tiny garden. But don’t give up hope.
If you don’t have any outside space, Steven Harris suggests researching possible locations to excavate a shelter, long before it might be needed.
This might be a park or even a local football pitch. Of course, digging up the flowerbeds or going at the penalty spot with a shovel would not go down well in normal circumstances. But, in the run-up to nuclear war, being shouted at by a park-keeper will be the least of your worries.
Cresson Kearny’s book is available from nuclearwarsurvivalskills.com.