Origins
Protect and Survive had its origins in civil defence leaflets dating back to 1938, titled The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids. These advised the homeowner on what to do in the event of air attack. This evolved as the nature of warfare and geopolitics changed, with the leaflets concurrently updated into Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack in 1963. The leaflets were accompanied by a series of public information films produced in 1964, called Civil Defence Information Bulletins. These films were intended to be broadcast in a state of emergency. Leaflets similar to those prepared briefly appeared in Peter Watkins' controversial BBC docudrama The War Game, in a scene where they were distributed to people's homes.
The fallout radiation advice in Protect and Survive was based on 1960s fallout shelter experiments summarized by Daniel T. Jones of the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch in his report, The Protection Against Fallout Radiation Afforded by Core Shelters in a Typical British House which was published in Protective Structures for Civilian Populations, Proceedings of the Symposium held at Washington, D.C., April 19–23, 1965, by the Subcommittee on Protective Structures, Advisory Committee on Civil Defense, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council. The fallout radiation was represented by measurements of the penetration of cobalt-60 gamma radiation, which has a high mean energy of 1.25 MeV (two gamma rays, 1.17 and 1.33 MeV). This is considerably more penetrating than the mean 0.7 MeV of fallout gamma rays. Therefore, the actual protection given against real nuclear weapon fallout would be far greater than that afforded in the peacetime cobalt-60 shielding measurements.
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