Two Tribes
If you pay any attention at all to the warning posters at railways stations these days, you’d think that a beardy nutter with a lighter and a wonky sole on one of his trainers is all that’s needed to bring about loss of life on a hitherto unknown scale. The very same authorities that are sounding dire warnings of some nutter putting “mental” into “fundamental” were thirty years back noticeably more reticent about giving the public meaningful advice as to how to avoid getting irradiated by several hundred megatons of SS-20 payload which were pointing at our cities, towns and WMD sites at RAF Greenham Common.

Back when the Soviet Union was getting through premiers at a rate roughly comparable to the rate at which I got through Airfix kits, the Nine O’Clock News seemed to feature an endless parade of pictures of decrepit old men tagged with the word “hardline” who were in control of our destines. This worried ten year old me for two reasons, firstly my grandmother was equally as decrepit and old as the likes of Andropov and Reagan, yet each and every time a picture of either was on television, she’d announce to all present that Bing Crosby was on the box again. Secondly, I really didn’t like the sound of the word “hardline”.

Having sat through the horrific docu-drama of the day which featured Sheffield being nuked, I resolved to formulate my own plan for survival in event of the imminent nuclear catastrophe as simply leaning a spare door against a wall, lining it with sandbags and stocking it with six weeks of canned food might be difficult to accomplish within the given four minutes. Or was it three? I needed somewhere sturdy to shelter. As luck would have it, a short distance from my house there was a large underpass that was ran underneath the nearby A12 and thanks to the bollards at either end, it was closed to road traffic. Despite the underpass being covered in badly scrawled graffiti and smelling like a urinal, it looked sturdy enough not to collapse in event of a nuke falling on our nearest town, which lay three miles away.

After deciding on a shelter site, I took my BMX out of the shed and timed how long it would take me to ride from my house to the underpass. The results weren’t promising, none of the six practice runs I did that Sunday afternoon took anything less than four minutes and twenty seconds. I needed to find time somewhere. I figured that when the sirens sounded, David Finnan would be overcome by fear, religion and the resulting diarrhoea and thus wouldn’t come out of his house to beat me up if he saw me cycling down his road without permission, so I tried a couple more highly risky practice runs taking a short cut past his house, narrowly avoiding a beating on each occasion. Best time was three minutes, thirty eight seconds, which left me twenty two seconds after the sounding of the air raid siren for me to retrieve my bike from the shed and grab my survival kit. I would be safe.

Being ten years old, I put a lot of thought into what should go into the green canvas rucksack that would guarantee my survival, so I filled it with enough rations to get me through until the background radiation died down, together with one or two luxury items to help while away the hours and a deadly weapon to assist me fighting off the starving, radioactive hordes.

A year or so later, a bloke called Gorbachev rocked up announcing that he and his Soviet pals actually wanted to be mates with us after all. A big wall covered in barbed wire came down and a bloke called Yeltsin decided that there would be no more Soviet Union. Reagan spent his final years insisting that each face on the television was Bing Crosby and all the missiles were aimed at the north pole in the event of a careless trigger finger and that was that.

Not too long ago, whilst helping my parents move house I found myself in back in the dusty shed. It wasn't long before I shifted a pile of old tarpaulins and located the dusty green canvas rucksack and curiously rummaged through the contents. My cursory inspection of the decade old survival kit revealed the following contents:

2x bottles of raspberry flavour Panda Pops, with a sell by date of the 15th March 1985
4x packets of Smith’s Salt n’ Shake, sell by the 31st October 1984
1x tube of Trebor Refreshers, sell by date obscured by mildew
1x imitation Swiss Army knife with a blunt blade and missing toothpick and tweezers
2x Bananaman plasters
And finally, four pages hastily ripped from July 1984’s issue of Fiesta Magazine, sourced from the pile of similar publications I discovered underneath my older brother’s mattress.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Fri 15 Jun 2012, 14:15, 12 replies)

Ha ha
Brilliant!
(Smale is stuffed, Fri 15 Jun 2012, 14:57, closed)

As a cold war kid I really enjoyed this
Have a *click*.
( Scrumper, Fri 15 Jun 2012, 15:45, closed)

:D

( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Fri 15 Jun 2012, 18:06, closed)

Excellent. Click.

( Fucking hell Jeff I am not a robot, Fri 15 Jun 2012, 18:10, closed)

Excellent. All the major food groups covered, and "mental" stimulation to boot...
(Dolly_Diva Dolly_Diva knows what you did..., Fri 15 Jun 2012, 18:27, closed)

which bit of the a12?
this is important.
( janet aylia y'all motherfuckers need jesus, Fri 15 Jun 2012, 21:01, closed)

Top knotch preparedness!

( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Sat 16 Jun 2012, 1:21, closed)

Come off it
The SS-20 had a yield of 450kt (3x 150kt MIRVs), and was a surgical strike weapon, so your claim that you were in danger of "getting irradiated by several hundred megatons" is somewhat overblown.
(thefuckestuppest cheapened this, on, Mon 18 Jun 2012, 17:58, closed)

Depends if more than one missle were used...I lived in East Anglia remember
If memory serves, there were a lot of nice juicy targets there in 1984.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Wed 20 Jun 2012, 10:04, closed)

This is true, but you'd need 1,000 MIRVs to get to hundreds of megatons.
(thefuckestuppest cheapened this, on, Wed 20 Jun 2012, 15:36, closed)

or "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb".
Whether it was SS-20s, SS-18s or whatever, the megatonnage would likely be a moot point. Artistic license overrules.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Wed 20 Jun 2012, 22:29, closed)

Superb
Have a click.
(Phudbree oh man, the Doric Yorick, Wed 20 Jun 2012, 18:23, closed)