Help! We're Going to Die

In the next few weeks a leaflet on surviving a terrorist attack will be dropping through the letter box of every home in the country, quickly followed by another seven leaflets offering two pizzas for the price of one. Then in millions of homes across the country this vital document will be placed next to the phone for a few days, then tucked on the kitchen shelf with that letter from school, and finally put away in the drawer with the balloon pump and those old batteries that haven't been thrown out because you're not sure if they're dead or not.

The leaflet explains what precautions you can take to increase your chances of surviving a major terrorist attack. "Move to the Hebrides" was crossed out of the first draft. But it does recommend that you have a torch handy, some tinned food and enough bottled water to last you the weeks you may have to spend hiding in the cellar. You might also consider packing A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, because you're not going to finish it in any other circumstances.

Under the section entitled "The bleedin' obvious," it tells you to pack matches with your candles and a tin-opener with your tinned food. It also advises you to keep a list of useful phone numbers handy, though it's thought the Samaritans will be turning on the answerphone. A battery-operated radio is also recommended in order that you can keep up to date with the crisis, although different radio stations will convey the news in different ways. On Radio 4, a Home Office spokesman telling listeners that the whole of London is on fire will never get to the end of his sentence because John Humphrys will keep interrupting him. Capital Gold will bring you those classic nuclear scares of the 70s and 80s, while Radio 1 will announce: "Celeb gossip update; and Ant and Dec were just some of the stars who had to take cover when the whole of London was destroyed by terrorist attacks [sudden sound effect of electronic raspberry], massive bombs went off all over the capital [Crowd goes 'Boo!'] and germ warfare has been unleashed on the city [comedy sound effect of lots of people sneezing]."

When deciding whether or not to go ahead with a national campaign such as this, the government has to find the balance between ensuring that people are prepared and informed and the risk of creating panic in the general population. Some critics fear this leaflet entitled "Help! Help! We're all going to die!" may not have got the balance exactly right. The bit about trying to get near a radiator if a building has collapsed on top of you does not leave you smugly thinking: "Well, I'm going to be all right because I've taken the trouble to check where all the radiators are..." And I don't want to be alarmist or anything, but what if al-Qaida breaks into the warehouse where all the leaflets are stored and contaminates them with ricin before they're individually delivered to every home in the country?

Given that people will generally do the opposite of what any government tells them, perhaps the leaflet's advice should be to panic; to tell Dolores in data processing that you love her and then loot Dixons. But the general thrust of the pamphlet is that if there does happen to be a major terrorist attack, old chap, just stay in your house and watch television. "That's money well spent," they're saying at the Home Office, "millions of pounds to tell people to sit in their houses watching television."

They've been very gratified to see the large numbers of families across the country already practising this on a regular basis. Dummy runs are an important part of being prepared and last year the government itself conducted an exercise to practise exactly what they would do if a hostile dictatorship possessed weapons of mass destruction. For the purposes of this rehearsal, the country in question was Iraq and the practice bombing, invasion and occupation was conducted exactly as if there had been a genuine threat. Unfortunately, soon after this exercise the threat of a terrorist attack in Britain actually seemed to increase rather than diminish.

Before the leaflets are finally delivered to every home in the land, a few adjustments have been made to the copy being pushed through the letter box of 10 Downing Street. After the bit about what you can do to reduce being a victim of a terrorist attack, it says: "Don't bomb Arab civilians on the basis of invented evidence. Don't ally yourself with a US government with a disastrous Middle East policy and make sure you've got lots of bottled water under the stairs." "Oh well," says the householder brightly, "one out of three's not bad."