The threat of nuclear war pervaded the 1980s – and newly released British Cabinet documents reveal what plans the government made should World War Three have been declared.
AS the sun rises over London, it reveals a city scarred and bloodied beyond recognition. It is March 1983, and for days Soviet bombs have rained down on Britain’s capital.
Thousands of houses lie shattered and abandoned. Broken bodies litter the streets. The air hangs heavy with dread.
Downing Street has been obliterated and Buckingham Palace stands smouldering. The Queen, who broadcast so movingly to the nation a few days ago, has not been seen for days.
Despite calls for her to be evacuated to Balmoral, she refused to leave the capital, insisting that like her father George VI during World War II, she would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of London.
QUEEN’S SPEECH: The speech she never had to deliver
But even as Britain burns, a much bigger horror is unfolding far away to the east.
Above the cities of the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellites, nuclear mushroom clouds are rising. Faced with defeat on the battlefield, the West has fallen back on its last hope: a nuclear attack on the Communist Empire itself.
It sounds like something from a science fiction film. But this terrifying scenario comes from newly-declassified government documents, released earlier this week by the UK’s National Archives agency under the country’s Thirty Year Rule.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in 1982. (AP Photo/File)
The exercise, conducted by Whitehall planners in March 1983 and codenamed Wintex-Cimex 83, was a war game like no other. For it envisaged the greatest nightmare of them all: a nuclear war between East and West.
Yesterday’s release of the Wintex-Cimex files is a chilling reminder of the awful threat that for almost half a century hung over life in Britain.
By 1983, the Cold War had been a reality for four decades. Most people simply took it for granted, and anyone born after 1945 had become used to life in the shadow of the bomb.
Yet as the top secret files remind us, nuclear war seemed more likely in 1983 than at almost any other moment in our post-war history.
Yuri Andropov. Picture: Yes External
Tellingly, the Whitehall scenario opens with the advent of a new hard-line Soviet leader, which provokes escalating tension between East and West.
In reality, this is exactly what happened.
In November 1982, the former KGB chief Yuri Andropov had become leader of the Soviet Union. Andropov’s rhetoric, described by Britain’s ambassador to Moscow as “profoundly disturbing”, only increased the hostility between Moscow and Washington.
Four months later, President Ronald Reagan publicly condemned the USSR as an “evil empire”.
Both Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were committed to building up the West’s defences as a deterrent against Soviet attack. But when Mrs Thatcher agreed to install Cruise missiles at U.S. air bases in Britain, she provoked a fierce reaction.
Meanwhile, a Whitehall briefing, prepared in case Labour’s Michael Foot or the Social Democratic Party’s Roy Jenkins won the 1983 election, tells the new PM about the facilities for launching a nuclear attack from 10 Downing Street. The new Prime Minister would have had to nominate three “nuclear deputies” to make the crucial decision – whether or not to press the button – in case he were killed or incapacitated in a Soviet bombing.
Chillingly, the PM also had to write sealed instructions which would have been opened by Britain’s nuclear submarine commanders if the country itself were destroyed in a nuclear holocaust.
The most frightening documents, though, are the details of the Wintex-Cimex war game, which explored in painstaking detail what would happen if the worst happened and World War III broke out.
In the Whitehall scenario, the Soviet bloc – codenamed, as always in these exercises, ‘Orange’ – launches a devastating invasion of Britain’s allies in Scandinavia, West Germany and Italy.
As the country moves onto a war footing, thousands of people stream out of the major cities, fleeing to the supposed sanctuary of the Welsh hills and the West Country.
There is chaos on the motorways and at the railway stations; supermarkets run out of basic supplies; and demonstrators battle with the police outside major embassies and American air bases.
As the scenario unfolds, the press worries about the safety of Prince William, then just nine months old. “Keep him safe, Charlie!” one imaginary headline tells the Prince of Wales. “We will be needing him!”
Extraordinarily, the exercise also contains the texts of televised addresses that might have been delivered by the Queen and Mrs Thatcher.
The Queen says: “Now this madness of war is once more spreading through the world and our brave country must again prepare itself to survive against great odds.
“The enemy is not the soldier with his rifle nor even the airman prowling the skies above our cities and towns, but the deadly power of abused technology.”
Margaret Thatcher’s words, by contrast, are stark. “We wanted peace and strove to achieve it” she says grimly. “We are the victims of an unprovoked attack and, with our allies, we will fight back.”
Yet the reality is that if world war had broken out in 1983, no amount of soaring rhetoric could have saved Britain from devastation. Even if the Communists had limited themselves to conventional and chemical weapons – as the Whitehall war game imagines – millions of people would almost certainly have been killed.
It is frighteningly revealing that, as in the previous Whitehall scenario conducted two years earlier, the war game predicts that NATO would use nuclear weapons first.
At the time, the Soviet Union held an enormous advantage in tank and troop numbers, and experts thought it would be almost impossible to stop them charging through West Germany, rolling across the Rhine and slashing through France towards the English Channel.
That was why the West refused to rule out using nuclear weapons first. Indeed, Whitehall’s unused briefing for a new Prime Minister after the 1983 election reminded him that NATO did not subscribe to the doctrine of “no first use of nuclear weapons”, known by the fitting acronym NOFUN.
Of course it is tempting to dismiss all this as idle fantasy. We know now that World War III never happened. Far from millions of British people being annihilated in a nuclear exchange, the Cold War ended peacefully just six years later with the collapse of the Soviet empire.
But as the example of World War I reminds us, it is all too easy for an uneasy peace to tip over into war.
Only months after the Wintex-Cimex war game, in November 1983, NATO mounted a ten-day exercise called Able Archer, which the Russians mistook as a genuine build-up to war.
In response, Moscow put its nuclear forces on high alert, and for a mercifully brief moment, the world came closer to Armageddon than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/world-news/bigread-what-if-nuclear-war-had-happened-in-europe-in-1983/story-fndir2ev-1226690408726#ixzz2ar03TTZp
IS PUTIN REPEATING ANDROPOV MISTAKE?
White House ‘reconsidering’ Russia summit after Snowden given asylum
US was not given advance notice and is ‘extremely disappointed’ at decision to grant Snowden sanctuary, officials say.
LEFT WING MEDIA OUTLETS CALL EDWARD SNOWDENS TREASONOUS CONDUCT “WHISTLEBLOWING”??
The United States may boycott a planned summit with president Vladimir Putin next month in protest at Russia‘s decision to grant whistleblowerEdward Snowden asylum.
The White House said it was “extremely disappointed” at the decision to give Snowden sanctuary in Russia, adding that a high-profile meeting between Barack Obama and Putin, scheduled for next month, was now being reconsidered.
“It is not just a legal matter,” said Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney. “There is the matter with our relations with Russia.”
“We are extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and private that Mr Snowden be expelled and returned to the United States,” Carney said. “This move by the Russian government undermines a long-standing record of law enforcement co-operation.”
The decision to grant Snowden asylum threatens to cause a diplomatic rift between the US and Russia, undoing recent attempts to heal relations.
Obama was scheduled to travel to Russia in September for at meeting of G20 leaders in St Petersburg. He also planned to meet with Putin for a bilateral summit during the trip in what would have been a sign of improving relations between the two powers.
However, that meeting is now under review. “Obviously this is not a positive development,” Carney said. “We have a wide range of interests with the Russians. We are evaluating the utility of the summit.”
At previous White House briefings, Carney had consistently said that, despite the controversy over Snowden, Obama still “intended” to meet the Russian president.
EDWARD SNOWDEN NOT A “WHISTLEBLOWER” BUT A THIEF OF CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS
Carney said that the US had not been given “any advance notice” of the decision by Russia. He also hinted at concerns that Russia would be able to access state secrets held by the former NSA contractor.
“Let’s be clear, Mr Snowden has been, since he left the United States, in possession of classified material in China and in Russia. Simply the possession of that kind of highly sensitive, classified information outside of secure areas is both a huge risk and a violation. He has been in Russia now for many weeks.”
Carney repeated the position of the Obama administration that Snowden is not a whistleblower. “He is accused of leaking classified information and has been charged with three felony accounts.”
However, reporters pressed the spokesman on the Obama administration’s continued insistence that Snowden is not a whistleblower.
HOW WOULD RUSSIA DEAL WITH ONE OF THEIR OWN LEAKING CLASSIFIED DOC’S TO THE U.S.A & THE WORLD?
Asked by a journalist whether Snowden had actually done the US “a favour”, Carney said unauthorised leaking had done “enormous damage” to US interests. He said: “When you take an oath to protect the secrets of the US, you are bound to protect them, and there are consequences if you don’t.”
LET’S ALL HOPE THE RUSSIANS MAKE THE RIGHT DECISION, AND HAND SNOWDEN BACK TO THE U.S FOR HIS TREACHERY, SO THAT INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS MAY BE RESTORED, AND A REPEAT OF THE ERRORS OF ANDROPOV IN THE 1980’S CAN BE AVOIDED. AT LEAST FOR THE TIME BEING… WATCH THIS SPACE, BIBLE PROPHECY FORETELLS A TIME WHEN ALL NATIONS WILL BE BROUGHT AGAINST JERUSALEM. AND WHO WILL BE BACKING JERUSALEM? IT IS LIKELY THAT THE U.S, BRITAIN, CANADA, SWEDEN, PERHAPS AUSTRALIA, AND A FEW OTHERS WILL TRY TO DEFEND HER, BUT AGAINST THE RISING E.U HEADED BY THE VATICAN, MUCH OF THE MIDDLE EAST WILL BE IN UTTER TURMOIL AND CHAOS WILL END IN ENORMOUS COMBINED ARMED FORCES ADVANCING ON, AND AGAINST THE JEWISH CAPITAL. (See Matthew.24:15-22; Jeremiah.30:7; Daniel.12:1.)
