There Will Still Be No Fighting In the War Book (Part 2)

 

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 paper the UK was surprisingly well equipped to administer the journey to Armageddon.

BURLINGTON (Crown Copyright)

On the other hand though the simple challenge of geography meant that much of this work may well have been in vain . Most of the likely Soviet targets in any nuclear attack would have been either the UK and NATOs own nuclear infrastructure, or major cities. The relatively small size of the UK and the highly concentrated nature of its population in certain areas meant that in any attack, tens of millions would be killed. In the 1980s serious attention was paid to whether to evacuate populations out of likely wartime targets. This was born out of concern in 1984 that the public were losing faith in the government. In an extraordinary memo to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the mid 1980s it was noted that this study:

“Originated in concern about the implications of current civil defence policy for a period of conventional war which might lead to nuclear war. It was considered that the public might be extremely apprehensive about the prospects of escalation to nuclear war and if they saw no hope of survival might no longer continue to support Government policies”.

Having set this out, the memo to the PM goes on to note that in terms of the threat to the population:

“nuclear blast would pose a far greater threat to the population than radioactive fallout in the event of nuclear attack; that present policies directed at radiation fallout could not offer the public any substantial degree of protection; that the evacuation options considered by the study do not offer a viable solution and the cost of shelter options offering significant protection against blast are very high.”

In other words, by the end of the Cold War the British Government had accepted that it both had the means to fight and survive a war with its own apparatus of state, while also officially accepting that it was completely and utterly impractical to save, evacuate or shelter the population from the same fate. The only conclusion one could reasonably draw is that nuclear war would be so terrible, that the only option would be to not fight it in the first place and rely on the power of deterrence.

By 1991 these discussions were all academic, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, all of the old assumptions quickly got thrown away. There is a lengthy series of archive files in Kew which walk through the decisions to disband the apparatus of the War Book and the means to mobilise the state. In March 1991, based on JIC assessments about the likelihood of conflict, the Government took the decision to draw down planning readiness, moving away from a ’60-30-60’ plan of 60 days tension, 30 days conventional conflict and the need for 60 days of stockpiles post nuclear strike before rebuilding could begin to one of assuming that at least seven days’ notice would be given in the worst case, and at least three months for most other cases. One of the key judgements reached in 1991 was that for Russia to return to its former strategic capability:

“would involve Russia reestablishing for itself the predominant position previously held by the Warsaw Pact over NATO.  Warning time of completion of such a programme in 1991 would be 3-6 months, extending to some years by 1995”.

By the mid-1990s even these plans had been replaced, with the Home Office taking the decision to essentially scrap the entirety of civil defence. By 1996 the UK had in the space of just five years gone from having one of the best prepared plans in NATO for transition to war and continuity of government and state to having none. The Royal Observer Corps had been disbanded, all Police and Fire Service wartime training abandoned, and the entire network of Regional Seats of Government shut down. Even emergency feeding and food stockpiles were abandoned, getting rid of the food stores by selling them off, while utility companies were freed of their obligations to plan for the worst – for example ending the construction programme of nuclear bunkers for water companies and scrapping large parts of the BT wartime network. To read the files of the 1990s is a heart-rending experience as careful knowledge and experience, built up over 50 years was tossed away within the space of a financial year to save a few million pounds.

At the same time the Armed Forces were also running down their capabilities and stockpiles on the assumption that peace had broken out. In 1994 the MOD agreed that it would continue to provide forces to defend Key Points, now revised into four categories:

Super Priority Key Points Type 1: Installations or facilities such as Command & Control systems, communication facilities, the bases of strategic missile carrying submarines, which at any time are of outstanding significance to the successful implementation of the National Retaliatory War Plan (Comment – intriguingly not NATO!)

Type 1 (Nuclear): Installations in support of nuclear operations such as early warning air defence systems, communication systems, storage sites and units, without which the UK and NATO could not receive warning of an imminent nuclear attack, or the loss of which would, at any time, impede undertaking of nuclear operations.

Type 2: Support to Operations: Installations or facilities which are either:

1)      Essential to the continuing support of NATO, UN or other operations (such as operational, support or production facilities) Or:

2)     Critical industrial installations or facilities essential to the maintenance of deployed forces and which are part of essential repairs chains, procurement or support programmes.

Type 3: (Essential Civil): Installations, the loss or damage of which, could impair critically the ability to sustain civilian life in periods of crisis or war.

Type 4: (Continuity of Government): Installations or establishments critical to the continuity of Central Government.

This was underpinned by a commitment to provide “a military infrastructure to support Government in crisis and war, including communications”.

In addition to putting these subtly different Key Point requirements in, the MOD spent much of the 1990s trying to work out how to determine what level of notice was required to regenerate the armed forces in the event of a crisis. A constant challenge was balancing off the fact that the Soviet threat had vanished, there was no meaningful threat and the desire to cut defence spending to suit changed economic environments with the fact that there could still be a threat emerging at some stage. By 1994 the MOD settled on a SECRET- UK EYES ALPHA readiness definition to meet the need for a new threat:

READINESS PREPARATION TIME

For contingency forces, equivalent to the time in which designated units can be made ready for operations in theatre:

-          Against a major external threat to the UK: 2 years within a minimum political and military warning time of at least four years:

-          Regeneration plans: capable of being completed within the RPT…

-          To include full mobilisation of Reserves and recruiting necessary to complete the planned order of battle.

-          Including industrial surge, replenishment of stockpiles and equipping units to war scales.  

In other words, even in 1994 the MOD had accepted that it would need four years notice of a threat, and at least two years to prepare for war against an external threat to the UK. This was with the defence industrial base that existed at the time – it is likely that any modern equivalent would require far longer notice.

It is no exaggeration to say that by 1997 the UK no longer had any credible ability to prepare the nation for transition to war, and the war book function was to all intents obsolete. Files in the National Archives beyond this point hint that the War Book and Machinery of Government in War committees limped into the early 21^st Century, but by 2005 had been completely abandoned. One of their last symbolic acts seems to have been the decision to declassify ‘Burlington’ and admit to its existence in 2004 just prior to the FOI act coming into force. What remained instead was a concept of far more localised planning for coping with disasters and emergencies – for example terrorist incidents or weather problems. Institutionally the British Government took the decision that it no longer needed to plan for the worst and made no effort to do so.  

Given this, the news that the British Government is looking to reintroduce the concept of a War Book and planning for war once again, and given the lead times involved and work required, the third and final part of this series will consider what challenges the Government will face in delivering this work in a meaningful timescale.

It is perhaps telling that even back then concerns were being raised about the risks being run to the defence of the UK with the cuts in place and the timelines for reconstitution. In 1993 Vice Admiral Sir Nicholas Hill-Norton, the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, wrote to Admiral Sir Jock Slater, then the Vice Chief of Defence expressing his concerns about home defence and force regeneration in a letter marked ‘PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL’ that can now be viewed in the National Archives. In it he noted:

“I consider that the defence of the Kingdom is our fundamental purpose, and while I am sure that this is done best by layers of defence (and defensive alliances),  we should be prepared (organisationally, equipment and manpower) to fight in the UK. I have no confidence that we as a nation will have the prescience to forecast two or more years in advance (the current assumption) the need to prepare and reconstitute the necessary infrastructure and force levels. Even if we did, there will at the same time be other pressing demands for scarce resources to meet other critical deficiencies. The forces required for home defence will, in large measure, be raised from scratch; the process of identifying what force is required in the anticipated circumstances, and then training, equipping and accommodating the force are all matters that will need to be addressed. In our search for economy and in meeting our requirement to support the Home Office, we have I fear arrived at a solution that should serve very well in peace, but which has serious flaws in military preparedness terms for war, particularly if the  war comes quickly”

Given all that has happened since this point, it would be hard to disagree with the conclusions reached here. A strong argument could be made that the Government has had significantly more than four years warning of the threat, but the military has yet to begin the preparations needed that were identified over 30 years ago to meet it, and where the concerns raised in 1993 remain equally valid and of concern today. There are significant challenges ahead, which will be explored in Part 3 of this series.