It was cold and grey but the teikiya, or outdoor market, was in full swing. Twice a month, the street vendors converge on Mon-naka, setting up their booths on the broad footpath that stretches from the Mitsubishi Bank east for several blocks past the Tomioka Hachiman shrine. The first booth usually sells Brother sewing machines, with a hawker proclaiming the wonders of home sewing. Down the line there are booths selling hard rock sweets, dumplings with octopus in them (takoyaki), round monaka full of sweet bean paste, fried noodles, underwear apparently targeted at women over sixty, plastic toys and masks, wind chimes, barbecued chicken (yakitori), pottery, pirated tapes and CDs, potted plants, and cut flowers. These vendors turn up on the 22nd of each month, and when they do, the elderly residents come out to browse. Bent backs and canes are the mode of the day, and it can be a nerve-racking task to walk that side of the street. The confusion and congestion is compounded by store owners putting their own pavement booths out, competing with the teikiya.
The broadcasts started soon after 3 p.m. There were 111 public address loudspeakers in Koto ward, and three of them ran the length of the teikiya. Simultaneously the loudspeakers switched from the somewhat irritating low-level muzak that they usually emitted to the calm voice of a woman telling everyone to go home. That was all. Over and over again in a very calm voice she said everyone must go home and all businesses should close: there was an emergency. People stopped and just looked at each other. An old woman began to weep. In the sushi-ya the owner switched the television channel to NHK, the national broadcaster. A grave young woman said that China was threatening Japan with a nuclear strike. People should listen to their local officials and do what they were told.
Just before the public broadcasts began, the chief of Koto's Ward Disaster Preparation Committee had sent a message to local volunteers via the ward's additional network of 533 PA speakers situated in the homes of volunteers. He called them up to take the initiative in helping their neighbours. `If they ask why, tell them that China has threatened to bomb us.' The emergency always talked about and prepared for was an earthquake. 1 September, the day of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 that devastated Tokyo, was set aside for the good citizens of Koto, indeed Japan, to practise what to do after a big earthquake. On 6 August 1945 the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later it was Nagasaki's turn. But there was not a 6 August day set aside to practise what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. The Japanese government did not have a plan as such for dealing with the bomb. The only disaster Koto was even partially equipped to deal with was an earthquake: local officials had to harness earthquake emergency procedures using the ward-wide PA system.
Koto had a problem with the emergency that gripped it that Thursday afternoon and it did not know quite what to do.
The County Emergency Centre for Kent (pop. 1, 500,000) is located in the basement under the canteen for the county offices on Sandling Road in central Maidstone. It is an unprepossessing accumulation of rooms that was adapted during the Cold War. But given the crisis that was to unfold many had cause to give thanks for that. The centre was designed primarily to protect its inhabitants from the worst effects of radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. Only 1 per cent of the radiation at street level could penetrate the bunker, or so its designers hoped. Structurally, however, the facility itself could only withstand the excessive atmospheric pressures created by a nuclear explosion of 1 lb per square inch (p.s.i.). A 1 megaton Chinese bomb would create an overpressure of 126 p.s.i. 0.5 nautical miles from the point of detonation. Implicitly, the designers of the bunker had therefore assumed that if Maidstone itself were a target then to preserve a local government presence was pointless when all the population was destroyed. Indeed, at just over a mile from point of detonation, a 1 megaton bomb produces an overpressure of 10 p.s.i. overpressure powerful enough to uproot all trees, destroy all houses, and shred most high-rise buildings. It was just such a bomb that a Xinhua report had said would be launched at the south-east of England.
The emergency centre had been designed to support forty-eight people for a month. It had an oil-fired generator to provide electricity, a tank of fresh water, food stores, accommodation for sixteen to sleep at any one time, and a warren of rooms crammed full of telephones — their cords hanging from points in the ceiling — arranged on long tables. The telephone was part of a network maintained by the government and was quite separate from the civilian telephone network owned and operated by British Telecom. In one room of the bunker was a green box, about the size of a refrigerator. Manufactured by Rainford Secure Systems of St Helens, near Liverpool, this was the telephone switching gear and it was meant to be impervious to the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. The equipment would have to be sturdy because a 1 megaton nuclear weapon exploding at ground level generated 100,000,000,000 joules of energy. A fraction of a joule was enough to damage most modern electronic equipment; 1 joule was enough to render a telephone, or hospital life-support system, useless. Such widespread and indiscriminate damage to all electrical and electronic equipment could be expected within a radius of 10 to 20 kilometres from the point of impact of the Chinese bomb. The Kent local government's ability to communicate with the Cabinet Office Emergency Committee in London would depend crucially on just how good Rainford Secure Systems' shielding of the telephone switch gear really was.
By the time senior officials from the county council and the emergency services had been summoned to the emergency centre — just after 9 a.m. — they all knew why they were there. Since 7 a.m. the BBC and its commercial competitors had been broadcasting news of the Chinese threat. Although it would not be until 10 a.m. that the BBC began broadcasting its `What to do in the event of a nuclear attack' television and radio programmes, many Kent citizens had decided the threat was all too real and had begun to flee the south-east. The roads had become congested, especially main motorways — the M20 to Folkestone and Dover, and the M2 to Ramsgate and Dover — and the faster A roads leading north to the M25 orbital motorway that circled London and provided access to Gatwick and Heathrow airports. Chokepoints, such as the entrance to the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone, and the entrances to cross-Channel ferries at Ramsgate, Dover, and Folkestone were also very crowded with people fleeing. One of the first decisions the Emergency Committee had to take was whether to permit large-scale self-evacuation (and the attendant chaos on the roads that might bring) or attempt to keep the civilian population in their homes. One of the advantages of the timing of the warning was that most bread winners had not gone to work, so families were not dispersed. But to an extent the actions of people had pre-empted the discussion: self-evacuation was already taking place, and there was a spirited discussion between the police and the county council. The representative of the Chief Constable for Kent said he was sure his officers could control the situation and keep the roads clear for emergency use. The County Emergency Planning Officer disagreed. As the county was unable to guarantee personal safety the police should not hinder anyone's attempt to leave, rather they should ensure the roads were kept open. In addition, in the absence of emergency powers being enacted, while the police might close roads and maintain public order the legality of their restricting movement was judged extremely dubious. The county should, however, use local radio to send the message that people were likely to be safer in a properly constructed shelter in their houses than in a car if a bomb was detonated. The County Chief Executive came down on the side of his County Emergency Planning Officer and it was decided that the Chief Executive and the County Emergency Planning Officer would make themselves available for radio interviews after the meeting to explain the benefits of staying put.