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

Wouldn't that be...

[Phariom]

"Other Cabinet papers showed Harold Wilson was warned in 1975 that Britain's economy faced 'possible wholesale domestic liquidation.'"

...possible wholesale domestic vaporization?

Furthermore, my friends and I play a lot of pen-and-paper role-playing games set in Europe (Call of Cthulhu mainly) and they always accuse me of a "lack of realism" in the manner in which my characters behave. My response to said friends? "They're British. They boil their meat. They drink warm beer. I don't have to explain their unusual behavior; just play the damn game."

I can now add: "They'd let their entire population be atomized in order to wipe out the 'hippie menace.'"

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.