Surviving nuclear war in UK - estate agent map of safest places outside blast zones

Location is everything, estate agents always say, and with tensions over Ukraine threatening to spill over into a wider conflict one quick-thinking real estate broker has identified the sites furthest from potential blast zones

After Russian president Vladimir Putin’s chilling hint that any intervention in the invasion of Ukraine from the NATO powers would result in retaliation on a scale “never seen in history,” some Brits are beginning to worry about the prospect of a nuclear conflict.

At present, that doesn’t look too likely, but it does’t hurt to plan ahead. An estate agent has produced a map to advise house buyers which areas will be furthest from any potential target zones.

In the unlikely event of a Russian nuclear strike, the most likely targets will be naval bases and RAF airfields. It would only be in any potential second wave of strikes that population centres would be directly targeted.

However, with military facilities scattered widely over the country, finding somewhere that isn’t within the blast range of a nuclear warhead is something of a challenge.

Real estate specialists' EMoov’s map offers a few hints for worried homebuyers, with Skegness, Weymouth and Margate looking like the safest locations in the event of a major escalation between Russia and NATO.

Weymouth is the most expensive “nuclear shelter,” with the average sale price in the past year for a house in the area estimated at £292,289.

Margate is a shade more affordable, with average prices around £287,524, but the biggest “bang for your buck” in the event of a nuclear conflict is Skegness, where the average sale price of a house over the last year. was £191,778

Cold War-era government documents identified over a hundred locations in the UK that could be targeted by Soviet missiles in the event of a “general war”.

First Strike targets would have been the 23 RAF bases, 14 USAF bases, 10 radar stations, eight military command centres and 13 Royal Navy bases on the UK mainland

But population centres that Edward Health’s government believed were under threat included include Central London, Edinburgh, Teesside, Leicester, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull, York, Dover, Cambridge, Maidstone, Huddersfield, Wolverhampton, Coventry and Sheffield.

Sheffield was of course the location for Mick Jackson’s terrifying nuclear bomb docudrama Threads, which terrified an entire generation when it was first aired in 1984.

Threads, which was described as "a film which comes closest to representing the full horror of nuclear war and its aftermath, as well as the catastrophic impact that the event would have on human culture,” showed Sheffield being devastated by a missile aimed at RAF Finningley, some 17 miles from the city centre.

The film ends with the UK plunged into a new Dark Age, with Brits living in barbaric squalor.

Jackson’s worst-case scenario remains extremely unlikely, but it’s an important reminder that the destructive power of nuclear weapons makes them too dangerous for any rational government to use.

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