LONDON.- “Even the safest room in your home is not safe enough.”

This grave warning was issued in “Protect and Survive,” a pamphlet produced by the British government during the Cold War to advise civilians on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.

About 30 pages long and part of a broader information campaign of the same name, the pamphlet was made publicly available in 1980. It advised on how to prepare a home fallout room and what essentials to bring (water, food and warm clothes — and, it noted, “don’t forget to take this booklet”).

The pamphlet is displayed in two museum exhibits in the United Kingdom this fall that use the Cold War to examine, in part, how conflicts affect civilians. According to the exhibit curators, neither show was intended to be tied to current events like the war in Ukraine or the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. But they may inevitably be viewed through that lens.

“Cold War Scotland,” running at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until Jan. 26, examines how the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union influenced Scots. During this time, tensions between the two nations grew, nuclear power and weapons proliferated, and Scotland played host to an increasing American military presence, visible in sites such as a submarine base on the Holy Loch in Argyll.

“It surprises people when we talk about Scotland being a front line in the Cold War,” said Meredith Greiling, the principal curator of technology at National Museums Scotland, a consortium of institutions that includes the museum hosting “Cold War Scotland.” But because of its geography and topography, she said, after World War II and the creation of NATO, “Scotland becomes this really crucial strategic location for looking and listening east.”

The exhibit, which opened in July, came out of a larger research project by National Museums Scotland and the University of Stirling called “Materialising the Cold War,” an effort to explore how the Cold War is represented in museums. The project began in 2021, before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, but given the subject matter, “it’s hard to not see the connection,” said Sarah Harper, a research fellow for National Museums Scotland. She added that “we’re trying to focus on the historic side, but obviously there’s going to be some links.”

Upon entering “Cold War Scotland,” visitors see a video screen featuring newsreel footage and clips of leaders like Winston Churchill. On the walls on either side of it are projections that include George Orwell’s prediction in a 1945 magazine essay that a nuclear-armed world would create “a peace that is no peace.” Slogans from antinuclear groups are displayed at parts of the exhibit: “Waste Not War Not,” “Nuclear Showers No Thanks!” and “Cats Against the Bomb.”

Other parts of the exhibit seem designed to unsettle: a camouflage suit equipped with a gas mask; a map of Scotland that’s hand-painted to show likely targets of nuclear attack and the patterns of expected radiation exposure if those sites were hit; and a look at a U.K.-wide alert system that would give just a four-minute warning of an attack.

Visitors can learn about Scots who volunteered for civilian units, like the Royal Observer Corps — which would monitor for attacks from underground posts — and those who joined the military. For instance, in a video testimonial, Isabel Jackson, from the town of Kilwinning, explains how she became a switchboard operator in the Women’s Royal Army Corps after seeing an ad in a magazine, and was eventually stationed in Germany. She also describes the “daunting” task of studying pictures of known KGB associates. “To me, at 19 years of age, I had no clue what that was,” she recalled.

Other Scots demonstrated against nuclear weapons. Kristin Barrett, a lifelong activist who is also featured in the exhibit, carried buttons and leaflets in a stroller. She was part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a protest group that produced one of many parodies of “Protect and Survive,” the government-issued pamphlet. One of the group’s parody postcards, also on display, shows a skeleton reading the “Protect and Survive” pamphlet and asks: “Have you ever wished you were better informed?”

The group’s response was part of a wider backlash to campaigns like “Protect and Survive,” noted Harper, the research fellow, because, she said, some felt that “it’s futile trying to survive these devastating attacks, the power of the weapons would just make it futile.”

Harper said that, at the time, films and other depictions of nuclear attacks in popular culture contributed to people’s fear, as they “would have been terrified by the gruesome scenes of devastation.”

The knowledge of what a nuclear attack could do, said Greiling, the curator, was “terrifying” for Scottish people, and likely influenced them to mobilize. “Whether that was mobilized to join the military, whether that was mobilized to join one of these voluntary organizations, or indeed mobilized to protest against it,” she said.

How people become mobilized, and why, is part of the focus of “War and the Mind” at the Imperial War Museum London, running from Friday through April 27. The exhibit will examine the psychological elements of conflicts, including how they are started, how people act while they’re happening and how governments seek to influence citizens’ behaviors — tracing these threads from World War I to the war in Afghanistan.

“Psychological factors characterize the very nature of war,” said Laura Clouting, the lead curator of the exhibit and a senior curator at the Imperial War Museums. “And that’s everything from solidarity to division, from morality to brutality.”

The show will feature more than 150 items, mostly from the museum’s own collection, reflecting some of these themes, including recruitment posters, letters and items like amphetamine tablets like those commonly issued to intelligence agents to help fight the mental effects of exhaustion, but which often came with dangerous side effects.

It will also include antiwar posters, like one from the Iraq War era with a picture of the then Prime Minister Tony Blair and the slogan “Make Tea Not War.”

“War and the Mind” will also display the “Protect and Survive” pamphlet as an example of how the government used practical advice to reassure people about nuclear attacks. “Perhaps the whole thing, arguably, is a psychological exercise in making people feel safe, when in reality they may have been obliterated,” Clouting said.

She added that it’s a common theme in war that if governments can convince people “that there’s a purpose, that they have a job to do, that can really help with those feelings of everything being out of control.”

The “War and the Mind” exhibit is also not tied to current events, but Clouting said that it’s “eternally relevant” to look at how “ways of acting, ways of believing, ways of perceiving come to influence war.”

The importance of perception may be evident in how nuclear weapons are viewed today. The fear is arguably “not something that we feel to the same intensity,” Clouting said, though there are still thousands of nuclear weapons, along with an increasingly complex set of threats. It’s “about how things have been framed,” she said.

So as “Protect and Survive” would tell you: “Keep this booklet handy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.