The effects of a nuclear bomb attack on London. Lithographs after Peter Kennard and Peter Gladwin, 1985.

A set of photomontage prints, published by the Greater London Council in 1985, satirising the British Government's civil defence publication 'Protect and survive' (London 1980). The prints contain quotations from 'Protect and survive' which are contrasted with quotations from other, less optimistic, publications, such as O. Greene et al., London after the bomb (Oxford, 1982, which printed some findings of the government's own exercise Operation Square Leg); a report on the likely consequences of a nuclear strike by the Royal College of Nursing; the BMA's report 'The medical effects of nuclear war' (Chichester, 1983); accounts of the Hiroshima bomb, etc. For example, 'Inferno' (no. 11) sets advice from 'Protect and survive', "If you have a home fire extinguisher – keep it handy" against a quotation from 'London after the bomb': "Individual fires may join together to form one huge fire – a fire storm or a conflagration. In a fire-storm, such as those experienced in Dresden, Hamburg, and Hiroshima in the Second World War, hurricane force winds are sucked in by the fire. Temperatures of 1,000C or more can be reached, sufficient to melt glass and some metals. People are incinerated or suffocated. In a conflagration the fires spread outwards until there is nothing left to burn, killing those trapped in houses or too badly injured to escape"