LONDON – The UK would have been divided into 12 regions governed by cabinet ministers wielding draconian powers in the wake of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, according to a secret War Book released for the first time yesterday.
The Cold War document drawn up by the British government more than 40 years ago – and updated until the early 1990s – sets out in immense detail how Britain would have been administered in the event of a devastating nuclear exchange.
The book has been obtained by Whitehall historian Peter Hennessy, who said it showed how civil servants “peered into the abyss” as they contemplated what would need to be done if deterrence failed and nuclear war became a reality. Prof Hennessy, professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary University of London, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The surprise really is the width and magnitude of it – 16 chapters to get the nation from a peacetime footing to a total war footing. It is a remarkable enterprise. It was done by people who had to do it. It must have been one of the most terrible jobs in Whitehall during the Cold War.”
Prof Hennessy said the War Book spelt out in detail plans which were hidden behind coded references in previously-released material. The book sets out scenarios in which an exchange of nuclear weapons might take place, with mock daily briefings from the joint intelligence committee and bulletins from civil defence officials in the home office. Each day, a mock cabinet of civil servants would meet to decide what elements of the emergency plans should be implemented.
One scenario portrayed a possible train of events beginning in September 1968 and involving the Soviet Union landing astronauts on the moon on October 17th as tensions built along the Iron Curtain borders in central Europe.
As Czechoslovakian and Hungarian troops massed on the border with Austria, Soviet fighter planes harassed civil aircraft flying to and from Berlin, causing an American airliner to crash.
In the exercise, Warsaw Pact troops “invaded” Austria, then West Germany, Finland, Turkey, Greece and Italy, then attacked Danish islands. Mock news bulletins suggested the UK population was getting nervous and stocking up on food and materials to build bomb shelters, while the mock cabinet alerted civil servants to man regional bunkers.
The final steps included the removal of art treasures and the introduction of a wartime justice system, before R-hour, on which all nuclear weapons were fired. One of the civil servants involved, David Young, said: “R-hour would be the final release of nuclear weapons. There may have been an earlier tactical use of nuclear weapons but R-hour was [when] everything that’s left goes. – (PA)