- Details
-
Published on Saturday, 31 December 2005 10:44
Plans detailing how Britain
would be run during a nuclear war are among files
declassified by the National Archives.
The Prime
Minister and civil s ervants would be moved to an
underground bunker, but there would be no mass
evacuation. Emergency legislation would be passed and
hospitals would be emptied. The announcement to be
played on BBC radio was pre-recorded. Art treasures
from London and Edinburgh would be stored in slate mines
in Wales.
Historian Peter Hennesy
said:
\"These were the Crown Jewels of genuine
official secrecy .. because you didn\'t want the other
side to get your war plans. Also the degree of alarm
for the civilian population, in relatively tranquil
times, that a leakage of this would have produced would
have been extraordinary\".
In the 1970s and
1980s CND revealed a lot of the detail of \"civil
defence\" plans.