Julia McDowall's Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War discusses how Great Britain might have fared in the event of a nuclear war. McDowall reviews a wide range of archival sources to understand various aspects of nuclear defense preparations, including social attitudes, the role of the state, and the impact of political ideology. McDowall blends this in with dark humor, inquisitive research, and a sober appreciation of the devastation a nuclear war would have caused.
The book consists of ten chapters and an epilogue. In the first chapter, “The Family That Feared Tomorrow,” McDowall discusses the deaths of three small children who had been killed by their parents, Elise and Andrew Marshall, in connection with a suicide pact in 1975 (pp. 1–4). McDowall emphasizes the historical tension and anxiety of this period stoked by Western concerns about Cold War crises and Soviet technological advances (p. 1–2). McDowall discusses...