Snacks for Armageddon: Your Favourite 1980s Crisps Played a Grisly Role in Nuclear War Planning

Few foods evoke 1980s nostalgia better than crisps and packets of savoury snacks. Be it a bag of Salt & Shake crisps snaffled on the school run, a packet of Monster Munch scoffed at the office or a bag of Scampi Fries polished off with a pint at the pub on a Friday night, one taste of those salty treats and memories of the eighties come flooding back for those who were there. Crisps and snacks were the ultimate convenience food for the fast-paced Yuppie era, allowing those in a hurry to grab and quickly scoff a bag of Frazzles before getting back to their Filofax. Teens could scarf down a bag of Chipsticks and then hotfoot it back to their game of Pacman; busy mums could gobble some Quavers while bending and stretching along to their Jane Fonda workout tape. In short, crisps and snacks were handy to have in an emergency, a fact that did not go unnoticed by nuclear war planners at the height of the Cold War...

In 1983, local government officials drawing up war plans for Lancashire came up with a diabolically tasty plan to requisition a nearby crisp and snack factory if nuclear conflict had threatened, taking control of all the raw ingredients and packaged food products inside in anticipation of the bombs dropping. Then, following the attack, with the Lancashire landscape burned to a crisp, scorched packets of potato crisps would be distributed to survivors in return for forced labour and good behaviour. 

The unhappy snack firm at the epicentre of this macabre plan was the Smiths Crisps Company, which in the 1980s operated a huge manufacturing plant in the industrial town of Fleetwood, employing nearly 200 people and churning out a minimum of 2.5 million packets of the UK's most popular snacks every week, or 130 million each year. The factory was a mammoth place, being the nucleus of snack production for the Smiths company and home to the largest ever (as of 1973) steel spiral elevator, used to carry thousands of bags of crisps between floors. The location of this manufacturing monolith was very appropriate for a company that would have been doomed if nuclear war had broken out, for it stood in pride of place on Copse Road: a harassed government official quickly scanning their war plans might easily misread the directions and send their requisitioning teams scurrying off to nonexistent Corpse Road. 

Inside the Smiths factory, with the world's largest steel spiral elevator.

Away from the world of nuclear war, the Smiths Crisps Company was an icon of 1980s food culture, producing an impressive array of products that many people remember with fondness and, in some cases, still enjoy today. Among the firm's most popular snacks were: 

• Quavers
• Chipsticks
• Frazzles
• Monster Munch
• Salt & Shake Crisps
• French Fries
• Tomato Snaps
• Scampi Fries
• Squares
• Savoury Cheese Moments
• Traditional potato crisps, with flavours ranging from the family favourite Cheese and Onion to the bizarre, like Hamburger and Bovril. 

Smiths were masters of TV advertisement, bombarding the ad breaks of Saturday morning cartoons with their cute and cuddly Monster Munch Monsters, giant furry characters who would spend their thirty second ad slots trying to outwit their friends and claim the most bags of snacks for themselves. Young fans of the 'Biggest Snack Pennies Can Buy' could beg their parents to let them join the Monster Munchers Club. Members recieved a gift pack containing a membership card, pen, storybook and story cassette tape, as well as a brightly coloured badge with which to adorn their school satchel. Elsewhere, impossibly catchy jingles were used to promote the Smiths brand. The most famous of these was the brilliantly memorable earworm crooned by the animated Singing Spuds, who stubbornly refused to be made into inadequate potato products, because, as they insisted, 'We want to be Smiths Crisps!' 

Bags of Smiths Crisps were so good, the company boasted, that every potato wanted to be in one; by the mid-1980s, thanks to their top notch advertising campaigns, every consumer wanted to buy one. Among the top echelons of the Smiths Crisps Company's biggest fans were Lancashire County Council's top civil servants. Perhaps, as they scribbled down their plans for a wartime takeover of the Smiths factory back in 1983, they did so using their complementary Monster Munchers Club pens, while proudly sporting their membership badges. 

Let's suppose that the worst had come to the very worst and nuclear war had broken out during the 1980s. Had this been the case, the period before nuclear attack – perhaps a brief spell of conventional warfare, or simply a time of agonising global tensions – would have seen local government officials scrambling to get as much emergency food stockpiled and guarded as possible, as though they were packing up a picnic for a day out in Hell. In the Council's woefully fanciful idea of how this requisitioning would take place, the 200-strong staff of the Smiths Crisps factory in Fleetwood would be calmly ordered to abandon their production lines and warehouses by the police or military personel. The staff, of course, would unquestioningly comply with orders and trot off merrily home to await the coming apocalypse. Would this scenario play out in reality? Of course not.

The Lancashire War Plan, and all other county war plans produced in the UK, for that matter, failed to take into account basic human fear and desperation, and how these instinctive emotions would fight against the best laid civil defence plans. Remember that the requisitioning of food factories would occur during a terrifying period of pre-war panic buying, with friends and neighbours turning against one another in a fierce fight to lay in food and other survival supplies for their own families. Is it realistic that Smiths employees would simply hand over the 2.5 million packets of snacks in their factory to the authorities without a fight? The final days of peace on Earth could well bear witness to human beings fighting to the death over the last packet of Chipsticks. In another scenario, the requisitioning teams might have arrived at the Smiths factory riled up and ready for a gun-point confrontation, only to find the warehouse shelves already stripped by looting employees. (Although it's almost certain that thousands of bags of Bovril crisps would remain untaken. Nobody would be that desperate, even in nuclear war.)

Bovril crisps: available in plentiful supply after a nuclear apocalypse.

It wouldn't have been the end of the world if the Smiths factory had been completely stripped of pre-packaged goods, however, for authorities would still find plenty of useable – if completely unappetising – foodstuffs stowed away and ripe for the taking. Housed in mammoth silos onsite were the raw ingredients used in the making of the UK's favourite snacks. Although in their unprepared state they weren't quite as mouth-watering as the delicacies they'd become after cooking, the raw ingredients would offer substantial nutritional benefits to survivors, thanks largely to being mostly protected from radioactive fallout in their robust metal storage units, provided of course that Fleetwood wasn't subjected to a direct missile hit. Post-attack, the produce could be easily syphoned off into waiting  military trucks – or, in the case of fuel shortages, handcarts – before being distributed among forced labourers in return for toil. Gracing emergency menus would be the following yummy morsels:

• Dehydrated potato – Who remembers the classic Smash TV advert featuring aliens heckling primitive humans because they still ate mashed potatoes made from actual potatoes? The aliens ate their mash in futuristic fashion, reconstituting it from dehydrated potatoes using water from their intergalactic kettles. The Smiths crisps factory also made substantial use of this 'food of tomorrow', with dehydrated potatoes being the basis of French Fries, Squares and Frazzles, among other snacks. Dehydrated potatoes have long held associations with the military, so their significance after a nuclear attack would be nothing new: during the 1950s, strips of carbohydrate-packed dehydrated potato were given to dissatisfied RAF crews, who condemned them as 'totally unpalatable' and 'looking and tasting like soap'. Hardly a ringing endorsement. But flavour wasn't a priority for nuclear war planners, who focused  instead on other qualities. Properly sealed, cans of dehydrated potato could last decades without any preservatives whatsoever. Minimal cooking fuel and water would be required to rehydrate the spuds into edible form, with enormous quantities able to be prepared and dolled out in one go, ideal after the attack when fuel supplies would be almost none existent. Crucially, dehydrated potatoes provide the carbohydrate, potassium and fibre that human beings require for peak performance. After a hearty plate of steaming slop, survivors would be raring to go and ready to scoop up a few more bodies. Scrumptious. 

'For mash get Smash!'

• Corn starch – Obtained from the kernels of corn (maize) grain, corn starch would come in handy in the post-attack world for a multitude of uses. For instance, the revolting stew that would become ubiquitous to a survivor's diet could be thickened and made to be minutely more appetising thanks to corn starch. Meanwhile, corn starch can be used to sooth painful burns, making it particularly useful after a nuclear attack for obvious, gruesome reasons. Unfortunately, a giant stash of corn starch could also pose a dangerous threat, for, if improperly stored and exposed to friction or extreme heat – such as the searing heat of a nuclear fireball – tiny corn starch particles suspended in enclosed spaces can rapidly combust and cause a devastating dust explosion. As if people wouldn't have enough to worry about in the aftermath of a thermonuclear war. 

• Maize flour – Ground from dried maize and corn, maize flour is a staple food the world over. Rich in carbohydrate and dietary fibre, this wonder food can be used to bake bread, thicken soups and to add density to stews, as well as making delicious snacks such as Chipsticks in peacetime. Foods enriched with maize flour are boosted with vital minerals including potassium, magnesium and phosphorus, helping to support bone health, muscle strength and heart function. Even more importantly, maize is a fantastic source of B vitamins, contributing to the normal function of the extremely strained nervous systems of survivors, and also assisting with the formation of new red blood cells. Sufferers of radiation poisoning experience a drop in red blood cell production in the bone marrow, causing fatigue, anemia and shortness of breath. While eating a bag of Chipsticks certainly wouldn't halt the relentless spread of radiation sickness throughout the body, a regular intake of maize flour might help survivors maintain their strength for a little longer, meaning they could work for a litte longer to rebuild the post-apocalyptic society. 

1980s Chipsticks packet

In 1980, three years before Lancashire County Council plotted to pillage the Smiths Fleetwood factory for emergency crisps, the UK national government staged Square Leg, a full scale rehearsal for nuclear war planners. As part of this test of wartime strategy, military bigwigs produced a cheery map of Britain that detailed where Soviet missiles would land during the fictional thermonuclear war. According to the target map, major military sites including RAF Fylingdales and Portsmouth bit the dust beneath thermonuclear ground bursts, while metropolitan centers such as London, Manchester and Birmingham were reduced to radioactive cinders, with multiple weapons bursting over each city. Also scheduled to be obliterated under the mighty wrath of Soviet aggression was... Fleetwood. Exactly what the Kremlin had against a tiny seaside town whose only export worth mentioning is bass, cod and mackerel is unclear. What is clear is that had Square Leg been real, Fleetwood would have found itself swimming with the fishes within milliseconds of the thermonuclear weapon allocated to it detonating. Directly at the centre of the nuclear fireball would be the Smiths crisp factory. With temperatures in the midst of the fireball exceeding those on the surface of the sun, it's safe to say that the crisps and snacks stashed inside the factory would be extremely overcooked. Not to fret, though, because the town residents would be burned to a crisp, too. 

In fact, the only thing half-baked in Fleetwood would be council's clueless notion that nuclear war could be survived thanks to a few packets of crisps. 

Image from War Plan UK, showing Fleetwood among the nuclear targets in Operation Square Leg.

By Rebecca Shaw

Previous articles

Sources

• bbc.co.uk/food
• freerice.com/blog/maize-flour
• healthline.com/nutrition/cornstarch
• hollandandbarret.com/the-health-hub/food-drink/nutrition/health-benefits-of-nutritional-yeast
• Lancashire War Plan 1983, accessed at Lancashire Archives. 
• potatogoodness.com
• War Plan UK, Duncan Campbell. 
• Headline image AI generated.