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."

Comments

Re:Linux users need not apply

[taskforce]

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.

Seattle Cold War Civil Defense Manual

[H0NGK0NGPH00EY]

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.

Probably economic liquidation

[AngusH]

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.

Re:Linux users need not apply

[IgnoramusMaximus]

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.

Britain had the best post-nuke TV specials

[ashitaka]

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.

Re:Poland did that too

[Anonymous Coward]

Daily Telegraph article link, contains the map.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/11/26/war26.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/11/26/ ixportal.html

Re:Linux users need not apply

[mormop]

You can also go here:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.htm l

and download the essential codecs package.

Un-bunzip it and copy the contents of the resulting folder into /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).

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.