Protect and Survive was a British public information campaign on civil defence. The booklet was published in May 1980. It told people what they should do if there was a nuclear war. [1] It was turned into a series of twenty short public information films for television. They were secret but they were leaked to CND and the BBC, who broadcast parts of them on Panorama.[2] They were later described as "the calm, clipped vowels of a male announcer, advising how to build shelters, avoid fallout, and wrap up your dead loved ones in polythene, bury them, and tag their bodies."[3]
People were told they should make a shelter inside their home by blocking off windows and fortifying the outside walls with furniture or bags of earth and sand; create an inner refuge, for example between two doors leaning together in an A-frame, surrounded by more furniture, books and bags of earth. E.P. Thompson published an anti-nuclear pamphlet called Protest and Survive. [4]