It gives a never-before-seen insight into Ireland’s planning for nuclear attack. It publishes for the first time a number of documents outlining official planning for the state’s transition to World War III. The recently published latest volume in the series, DIFP X, covers 1951 to 1957. That terror is a familiar theme to readers of the post-1945 volumes of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy.
O’Higgins bluntly wrote to Minister for Defence General Seán MacEoin that ‘the next war may involve the stark issue of our survival as a nation’.įear of a Third World War haunted Cold War Irish foreign policy. (RTÉ Stills Library) In 1955, aware of the contamination and destruction that a nuclear attack on Dublin would bring, Minister for Health T.F. O’Higgins, were the driving force in the second Inter-Party Government pushing emergency planning forward. At the height of the Cold War it was thought that the Soviet Union had at least four targets for nuclear weapons on the island of Ireland, including Dublin, Shannon, Derry and Belfast.Ībove: General Seán MacEoin, minister for defence-he and the minister for health, T.F. One ten-megaton bomb could incapacitate Ireland. The weapon dropped on Hiroshima was, by contrast, a mere fifteen kilotons. Dublin would cease to exist, casualties would be horrendous and, depending on wind direction, radioactive fallout could spread across the entire country.Ī ten-megaton bomb was the equivalent of ten million tons of TNT. The greater Dublin area in the mid-1950s had a population close to 850,000 out of a total national population of 2.8 million.
All within a three-and-a-half-mile radius of central Dublin would be consumed in a nuclear mushroom cloud. South to Dundrum, west to the Phoenix Park and north to Santry was labelled ‘total destruction’. A 1958 Department of Defence map showed concentric circles of devastation moving out from a notional city centre ‘ground burst’. The impact of a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb on Dublin would be cataclysmic. Published in 20th-century / Contemporary History, Features, Issue 1 (January/February 2017), Volume 25ĭOCUMENTS OUTLINING OFFICIAL PLANNING FOR THE STATE’S TRANSITION TO WORLD WAR III Envisaging the unthinkable: planning for Armageddon in 1950s Ireland
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