Thin Pinstriped Line

  At around 2pm on Monday 5 th November 1984, at the Phoenix Wharf in Rainham, a small port on the river Thames, an MOD delivery van from the Admiralty Research department at Portland drove up to the Russian merchant ship ‘Ikaterina Belashova’, a freighter owned and operated by the Soviet State Shipping Lines. It was unloaded, and a large crate weighing 1.5tonnes was hoisted aboard. The bill of lading simply stated that the cargo was ‘ One Crate, Navigation Buoy’ and was being shipped from the MOD in London to Archangel in the USSR. Shortly afterwards the Belashova slipped her moorings, and began the long journey back to the Barents Sea, returning the navigation buoy that in preceding weeks had been ‘acquired’ by the Royal Navy and become the unwitting star of a diplomatic incident. This article is about Operation KEYSTONE, the formerly TOP-SECRET Royal Navy mission to gather intelligence in the Barents Sea in 1984, and how the Admiralty came into possession of a pair of Soviet na...

  Media reports suggest that the Royal Norwegian Navy may purchase some Type 26 frigates from the UK as part of a wider increase in defence spending. Norway has decided to grow their defence budget and firmly committed sufficient spending to double it in coming years. This will enable the acquisition of additional frigates in the late 2020s and early 2030s to tackle the potential submarine threat from Russia. This is both good news and also poses an interesting challenge as the Royal Navy may be asked to sell one of the hulls under construction direct to Norway to ensure a vessel is in service by 2029. How big of an issue is this? Norway is one of the UK’s most long standing and valued defence partners. There is a trusted relationship stretching back decades and a firm commitment by the UK to the defence of Norway. During the Cold War British personnel regularly trained in the arctic circle, building an ability to survive, operate and fight in the most challenging of cold weather...

  In part one of this article we looked at the existence of the War Book and the levels of planning that the British Government went to during the Cold War to put in place appropriate measures to ensure the survival of the state. In this part we will look at the disbandment of those measures in the 1990s and the challenges facing Government in seeking to reintroduce them today. At the end of the Cold War British Civil Defence measures and the plans for transition to war were both extremely advanced and also utterly inadequate. On the one hand there had been almost 50 years of continuous refinement of WW2 era plans into the atomic and thermonuclear age that ensured that in the event of war, credible plans existed to mobilise the states resources, there were significant stores of equipment and stockpiles of consumables for both military and civilian use and these were administered by a regularly tested government structure at all levels. Should the worst have happened, then on pape...

  According to reports on Sky News, the UK   has no current plans for national defence mobilisation. Despite the enormous changes to the geopolitical situation since 1991, no plans exist for the activation of a ‘whole of state’ effort to prepare the nation for conflict, or mobilise the entire machinery of government in an effort to prepare for war. There are suggestions that the Cabinet Office and MOD are now rethinking this and are beginning to look again at what may be needed to bring this about.   The irony is that until 1991 the UK was actually very well prepared (on paper at least) for the contingency planning required to commence mobilisation through the multi-volume series known as ‘The Government War Book’. This lengthy suite of manuals can best be described as the Microsoft Office paperclip of contingency planning – in the event of a crisis it would ask “It looks like you’re planning to fight global thermonuclear war – do you want my help”? The War Book, as it wa...