ABSTRACT
In the Cold War of the 1980s, Stan Openshaw and his academic colleagues produced original and sophisticated computer models which concluded that the UK government had vastly underestimated casualties and property damage in the event of a nuclear attack. The academics believed that these models would lead to policy acceptance that any military move which might provoke a nuclear attack would be unacceptable as casualties could be in the order of 80%. The threat of nuclear war, it was largely argued, would mean that the UK as a functioning state could come to an end. The chapter shows that an analysis based on emphasising the substantive impacts of nuclear war damage was unknowingly naïve given the discussions in the Home Office on what was necessary for national survival. The boundaries in which state security operates, in times of crisis, operate in the threshold at which ‘logic and praxis blur’.
