In the 1980s, you could buy a creepy doomsday prepping magazine offering detailed advice about how to prepare for nuclear war – it makes for timely, fascinating and occasionally morbid reading.
If you were to browse a British newsstand in the early 1980s, you might have discovered a rather unusual magazine.
Called Protect & Survive Monthly or “PSM”, it aimed to teach people how to survive the almost unthinkable – nuclear war.
“How many citizens would know what to do to protect their own lives and loved ones?,” wrote editor Colin Bruce Sibley in the maiden issue. And how many, he asked, would look dumbfounded to the skies, “waiting for a ‘convenient’ bomb to explode above their head and blast them into eternity?”
PSM’s name referenced a contemporaneous, but unconnected, government information campaign (Protect and Survive) to teach British citizens the basics of survival during nuclear Armageddon. The pamphlets and videos distributed by authorities are famous – but the similarly titled independent magazine has faded into obscurity.
In light of the nuclear threats coming out of the US and North Korea in recent weeks, reading the creepy doomsday prepping magazine in 2017 is an intriguing but chilling experience, including topics such as nuclear shelter construction, the burial of loved ones, cannibalism, and even the difficulties of dealing with packs of wild rats.