The Telegraph: Britain secretly prepares for Russian attack and updates contingency plans

Britain is secretly preparing for a direct military attack on Russia amid fears it is not ready for war. Government officials have been asked to update 20-year-old contingency plans that would put the country on war footing after threats of attack from the Kremlin.

This is reported by The Telegraph.

The secret document will contain an action plan for how the government will respond to a declaration of war, including evacuating the Cabinet and the royal family to bunkers, public broadcasting, and the accumulation of resources.

According to The Telegraph, the updated secret “homeland defense plan” will set out the strategy for the first days after a strike on British soil by a hostile foreign power. It will include scenarios in which Britain is hit by conventional missiles, nuclear warheads or cyberattacks, which were previously considered a limited threat, as the plan was last significantly updated before 2005.

The plan, which will be developed by the Cabinet Officeʼs Resilience Office, will also provide guidance to the Prime Minister and Cabinet on how to run the government in wartime and when they should seek refuge in a bunker in Downing Street or outside London.

British officials are particularly concerned about gas terminals and five operating nuclear power plants, where radioactive materials could leak across the country and cause “significant long-term consequences for safety, health, the environment and the economy”.

Experts also point out that Britain has vulnerabilities, including gas terminals, undersea internet cables, nuclear power plants and key transport hubs. The Cabinet has already worked out a scenario in which a hostile state simultaneously launches missile strikes and conducts cyberattacks against this infrastructure.

The updated plan will consider war strategies for rail and road networks, ships, the postal system and telephone lines. The new contingency plan will address cyber warfare for the first time, which intelligence chiefs say is now one of the most dangerous threats facing the UK.

For example, the director of the British counterintelligence agency MI5 Ken McCallum said in October last year that the number of state threats the agency investigates has increased by 48% in a year and that Russia has stepped up its cyberattacks due to the war in Ukraine.

It is unlikely that the document will be made public for decades to come, if ever, writes The Telegraph.

The plan was modeled after the "War Book", a secret Cold War-era dossier with instructions on how the government should respond to a nuclear attack, which was later published in the National Archives.

The war book contained evacuation plans for the Prime Minister and key Cabinet members, who were to be moved to a bunker in the Cotswolds in the event of a bombing of London. Queen Elizabeth II would escape to safety on the royal yacht.

In this plan, Britain was divided into 12 zones, each to be led by a Cabinet minister, senior military officers, chief constables and judges with special powers. In some cases, food and building materials were to be stockpiled in advance and then issued in limited quantities.

The book said that the BBC would broadcast a social media advert on how to hide from missiles, and that the countryʼs most important works of art would be moved from London to Scotland for security reasons.

What preceded

Russian officials have repeatedly threatened the UK with direct attack over its support for Ukraine, and last month ministers formally identified Russia as a national security threat for the first time.

British ministers believe the country could be outgunned by Russia and its allies in terms of military power on the battlefield, while Britain remains unprepared and poorly protected at home.

A risk assessment published in January this year showed that a successful attack could result in the deaths of civilians and emergency workers, serious damage to the economy, and disruption to key services.

The Ministry of Defence is proposing to create a British equivalent of Israelʼs Iron Dome to protect against missiles. Last month, a senior Royal Air Force officer said that if the Russians had struck Britain on the first night of the war in Ukraine, its air defences would be overwhelmed and the missiles would have destroyed its infrastructure.

The plan is being prepared against the backdrop of ministers preparing to publish the Labour Partyʼs defence review, which will assess the current state of the Armed Forces.

The Defense Department says the review will include options for better defending the country internally, including better missile defenses. It will also look at how prepared the military is for war after years of downsizing.

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