What Manchester expected to happen in a Soviet nuclear attack revealed by 40-year-old warning

It was the doomsday scenario that thankfully never came to pass. Almost 40 years ago the utter devastation a nuclear attack on Greater Manchester would bring was laid out in graphic and horrifying detail.

"If a one megaton bomb exploded in the air about 8,000 feet above the centre of Manchester it would completely destroy the city centre and would do severe blast damage as far away as Stockport, Ashton, Worsley and Hale," the authors of Emergency Planning and Nuclear War in Greater Manchester wrote.

"At least 300,000 people (about 11% of Greater Manchester's population) would be instantly killed by blast effects, and perhaps twice that number would be seriously injured. The risk of injury from flying glass and other debris would extend for about 12 miles (e.g. to Wilmslow, Marple Bridge, Stalybridge, Rochdale, Bolton, Tyldesley and Lymm.)"

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Anyone caught out in the open when the blast occurred, which could perhaps be up to 200,000 people, would receive third degree burns - 'even as far as Swinton, Stretford, Withington, Audenshaw, Failsworth and Prestwich'. Thousands more would be blinded.

And that was the best case scenario. More likely Manchester would be hit several nukes at once. In 1982 the organisation Scientists Against Nuclear Arms, looked at the effects of seven one-megaton bombs dropped on the airport, Burtonwood airbase, Beswick, Old Trafford and Bolton.

If that happened about 1.4 million people would be killed or seriously injured, and about 1 million would be affected by radiation, most of whom would die within two months. "In total 2.6 million of Greater Manchester's 2.8 million people