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UK Cold War Era Nuclear War Plans Revealed
NicerGuy writes "The BBC reports that documents from 1975, recently released by the National Archives, detail in part the UK's plan in the event of nuclear strikes during the Cold War. An audio download of the prepared radio broadcast is available. Several other topics are covered." From the article: "Further documents released this week reveal that two pandas in London Zoo sparked fears a diplomatic rift could flare up between Britain and China in the 1970s."
Probably a more accurate version of how the British government's "plans" would be followed after a nuclear exchange.
It's an awesome move, too!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
Sorry; forgot to mention in previous post that there is a version of Realplayer for Linux, so Linux users http://www.real.com/linux?pcode=rn&src=freeplayer_ partner&opage=freeplayer_partner can apply.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
In fact Linux users can use Vsound http://www.zorg.org/vsound/index.shtml to save real player stream as a wav file, which I don't think Windows users can.
Here's a little self-plug for something somewhat related that I scanned. A "Civil Defense Manual" for Seattle from 1951. Check it out, there's some unintentionally amusing stuff in there.
Do not read this sig.
The panda issue is separate from the nuke issue. That article is a summary of all the documents that were recently declassified by the Brits, and not all of them have to do with nuclear war plans.
Liquidation probably refers to the unfortunate state that the British economy had reached in the 1970s.
In addition to facing a nuclear threat (vaporization) there was a serious possibility that the country might collapse economically (liquidation).
Eventually the government got support from the IMF.
Of course the Soviet Union might have taken advantage of the situation if an economic collapse did happen in which case you might have had both sequentially.
Lots of different government papers got released at the same time, so it tends to get reported together.
Dude, mplayer is your friend. It is capable of using native Win32 codecs (included on many sites as a tarball) and it will play just about any format known to man. There are also plugins for Firefox which allow you to start mplayer by clicking on them funky Windows Media Player "only" links.
America gave us "The Day After" which came off as an Irwin Allen disaster flick.
Britain gave us "Threads" which scared you shitless.
Also "When the Wind Blows" should be mentioned.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Note that the pandas and the plans for possible nuclear war are two separate topics, both of which came to light from what amounts to declassified cabinet papers.
The article is about some of the interesting tidbits from this archival release which are by and large unrelated to eachother.
...the nuclear threat is still there
Hmmm...yes and no. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and her 'satellite states', the threat for MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) has virtually disappeared. I mean, twenty years ago the image of thousands of ICBMs crossing each other in opposite directions was palpable, while now it almost sounds like the hysterical folly of Cold War doomsayers. The missiles are still there, but the Politburo has gone the way of the dodo, along with the itchy-trigger-finger military antagonism it fed back and forth with Washington, and I'm sure we all hope that the missiles in the plains beyond the Urals, along with those in South Dakota, rot in their freaking silos.
The image that sounds more feasible today is the suicide backpack nuker blowing a crater in the middle of an urban area, a couple of missiles lobbied from North Korea into Tokyo, or twin nukes blowing up in Delhi and Islamabad.
By the way, does anybody know if SAC (Strategic Air Command) is still flying its' B-52 bombers in circles around the perimeter of the Artic Circle, just in case?
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
That stuff about Pandas, Beer or Europe are nothing to do with the nuclear stuff, it's just that everything from 1975 has been declassified after 30 years so everything comes out at once, that article is rather confused as it's a summery rather than soley about civil defence.
if the education system has only been decimated, that's not so bad
i would settle for a technical education system which is 90% as good as the old soviet system.
ok with a bit more money for equipment.
perhaps you meant 'almost completely destroyed' rather than decimated.
Daily Telegraph article link, contains the map.
e ws/2005/11/26/war26.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/11/26/ ixportal.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Why must everyone keep saying that you can't use realplayer stuff (embedded or not) in Linux?
https://player.helixcommunity.org/
Not only does it work perfectly, standalone and as a plugin, it's better than the Windows Real* players.
And, if you don't want to use the plugin, you could just view the html of the page and get the link to it, then open it in a standalone player... mplayer, realplayer, vlc.. etc.
dude, that doesn't work on my 64 bit machine...
The War Game made in 1966 by the BBC shows what would have happened and have been done in the event of a soviet nuclear attack, although it was banned from TV for being too graphic. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059894/ You can probably get it on bit torrent somewhere if you want to watch it.
Rock is Dead! Long live Paper and Scissors!!
You can also go here:
m l
/usr/lib/win32 (you may have to create it depending on your distro) and all of a sudden you can play wmp files in mplayer and several other media palyers on Linux (not encoded ones but DVD Jon's got a fix for that i hear).
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.ht
and download the essential codecs package.
Un-bunzip it and copy the contents of the resulting folder into
If you put mozilla and mozplugger on you can then play embedded media (make sure that konqueror is set for the plugins dirs).
Sadly, the BBC is still using closed formats but they do have a fully open audio/video codec in development that they will hopefully use in future.
BTW No, I don't work for the BBC but they are one of the few organisations in Britain worth caring about.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Torrent
http://www.torrentreactor.net/view.php?id=5080210
Fortunately in this case the stream can be played with
u dio/9012da6800315e8/nb/09012da68003170d_16x9_nb.ra
mplayer rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/news/media/avdb/news_web/a
without the need for any evil binary-only dlls.