© Shutterstock.comMan in suit and gas mask
According to the Independent, in 1982, Britain's Home Office ran a war games scenario in which the country was struck by 300 megatons of nuclear weapons over a 16-hour period.
Civil servants, police, firefighters, emergency military personnel and other government officials took part in the war game training exercise, named "Operation Regenerate."
Under Operation Regenerate's planned scenario, war gamers modeled what would happen with multiple UK cities flattened, large stretches of hand uninhabitable and poisoned and millions dead or ill with radiation sickness.
Jane Hogg, a science officer with the Home Office, proposed a novel solution to keeping order in the chaos that would follow a nuclear raid.
"It is... generally accepted that around one percent of the population are psychopaths," Hogg wrote during the war games exercise. "These are the people who could be expected to show no psychological effects in the communities which have suffered the severest losses."
Due to their damaged emotional makeup, she mused, psychopaths would be less likely to suffer the feelings of despair, hopelessness and longing for normalcy that would afflict average citizens.
Hogg suggested that these psychopathic recruits would be "very good in crises" because "they have no feelings for others, nor moral code, and tend to be very intelligent and logical."
Comment: What is the purpose of these War games? If "saving the people" in a post-apocalyptic world is the purpose then conscienceless psychopaths are useless as they won't save anybody, and could not help themselves from destroying everything - including themselves. By definition, psychopaths support themselves at the expense of all others.
According to the BBC, one fellow civil servant replied that he was highly skeptical of this plan.
"I am not at all sure you convince me. I would regard them as dangerous whether or not recruited into post-attack organization," wrote the official.
The scenario never made it into official play during the exercise.
In 1984, the BBC released the award-winning series "Threads," which depicted a nuclear strike on Britain that closely mirrored the scenario proposed in Operation Regenerate.
Here is a series of video's from a British independent journalist Duncan Campbell. He produced a series of videos in 1987 called Secret Society for the BBC. At the time there broadcast was blocked. I think I read somewhere that they have been broadcast on late night BBC programming at some point.
The videos cover secret society's with the British government, Surveillance, Police powers and Britain's defenses. Although some of the information maybe dated, some is still relevant today.
The link below concerns the emergency powers act
[Link]
The full series can be viewed if interested on this link
[Link]