Cold War officials predicted how Britons would psychologically cope after a nuclear attack

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historyWellcome Collection1981 · United Kingdom

Cold War officials predicted how Britons would psychologically cope after a nuclear attack

the gist

In 1981 the British Home Office commissioned classified research into how ordinary people would react to a nuclear attack, a question barely studied until then. Researchers drew on the Blitz, the 1957 Windscale accident and the 1977 New York blackout to predict that many people would deny the danger until they saw explosions, and that most survivors would suffer a 'disaster syndrome' of anxiety and depression. They also argued that panic was rare when people felt informed, and that official secrecy could create the panic it sought to prevent. The reports even singled out psychopaths as likely to cope well, and recommended they might be recruited after a strike. Controversy within the department led to the reports being shelved.

so what

It reveals how Cold War planners thought about civilian psychology, and why trust and information matter in any emergency.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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