Cold War 'war book' released

Cold War 'war book' released

news.bbc.co.uk

The Government War Book, used during the Cold War, set out in great detail exactly what would happen in the days before nuclear weapons were fired.

What was once the most secret of all British government documents has been released in full.

During the Cold War, civil servants used to rehearse the end of the world - what would happen if deterrence failed and nuclear war became inevitable.

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This is a video broadcast about what was once the most top secret document in Britain. It deals with what would have happened in the eventuality of nuclear armageddon during the cold war. Who would have got access to the bunkers, what provisions were made, the expected fall out and so on and so forth.

Interesting stuff recent released under the FOIA.

news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

Having had a good look through the national archives web site ( national archives ) I am not sure if these are going to be online.

What I did find was that these will be included in CAB 175 if you do the browse from here option you can see the indvidual paper references.

The documents online part of the web site comes up with lots of hits for CAB 175 but using a power search as below I get nothing (CAB 175 Search Documents Online).

The only other place I can see them being is within the Cabinet Papers Archive but again I cannot find anything.

Damm wish I lived in London and could nip to Kew Gardens.

Some of this information has been out for a while, some books on the subject would be The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War by Peter Hennessy and from the 80's War Plan UK by Duncan Campbell. The second book is excellent but has been out of print for a few years, so can be quite expensive (I was lucky and got a mint copy from ebay 5 years ago for £10 and have now been told it is worth close to a £100 but I aint selling).

Hopefully the online archives will be updated soon with this information before the goverment does another u-turn and re-classifes it.

reply to post by trinityschild


Thanks for those links, more interesting stuff to review.

I cant see this being re-classified, but you never know.

The only reason I said that was I think in the Whitehall book above Peter Hessney talks about how they unclassifed certain parts of it and then after a few weeks reclassifed it.

Hopefully it will stay in the public domain for a while now.

What I really wish is that they would release the Square Leg/Abel Archer Exercise notes from the early 1980's that would be a gold mine of information.

This is quite a good pdf from the mid 1970s Scenario is a bit far fetched (West Germany invades East Germany) but still quite intresting (quality is pretty rubbish but hey what can you do) THE CIVIL DEFENSE COUNTERPART TO A 1973 NUCLEAR WAR SCENARIO I think it is from the US Milt. but I could be wrong.

A very interesting development.

Although going from the size of the file shown in Prof Hennessey's interview, this is not the full GWB - Prof Hennessey's file doesn't appear to include the highly classified 'Volume 3 of the GWB', which contains precise details of the then new concept for the dispersal of Central Government (not to be confused with the dispersal of Regional Government).

This new concept abandoned the old idea, mentioned in Hennessey's book 'The Secret State', of the evacuation of 3,700 Whitehall staff to a purpose-built undergound wartime facility at Corsham, Wiltshire - codename BURLINGTON; TURNSTILE; etc.

Instead, 1,200 Central Government staff would have split into a small number of Groups and dispersed to highly classified locations across the UK.

According to the Cabinet Office, these locations remain highly classified to this day.



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