I’m a nuclear armageddon survivor: Ask me anything

It’s Thanksgiving week in the US, and most of our staff is recovering from food and family rather than a Friday at the office. As such, we’re resurfacing this story of visiting old nuclear bunkers in the UK (you know, in case you need a break from family this weekend). This story originally ran on November 19, 2015, and it appears unchanged below.

Press events are usually decadent affairs of food, drink, and well-dressed executives in up-market hotels. Not this one. A small number of journalists including your correspondent were dumped at dusk in a wet field in the Essex countryside, given blue boilersuits and a small knapsack containing bottle-tops and leaflets, and told to await developments. As most press events don’t ask for disclosure of any medical conditions, nor involve signing a waiver against accidents, those developments were unlikely to be pleasant.

But then, it’s rarely pleasant after a nuclear war. In honour of the launch of Fallout 4, set in the aftermath of virtual atomic conflict, we were about to be taken into an ex-government, ex-secret nuclear bunker and trained to survive the apocalypse. Not the zombie kind, which has of late spawned an entire industry of movies, games, and survival books, but the real thing, which hasn’t.