By DOMINIC SANDBROOK
Daily Mail UK
March 1981, and inside 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher is confronting the most terrible dilemma any British Prime Minister has ever faced.
The news could hardly be worse. Across Britain, tens of thousands of terrified people are streaming out of the major cities. Looting is widespread, while every day brings bomb attacks at railway stations and RAF bases.
Abroad, the Red Army has sliced through the West’s defences, using chemical weapons to punch through Nato’s front lines. Yugoslavia has fallen, and West Germany and Norway are on the verge of succumbing.
After four days of Russian air raids, killing hundreds of people in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Southampton, Mrs Thatcher faces the ultimate decision. On her desk is a message from the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, asking for authorisation to launch a nuclear attack across the Iron Curtain.
She tells her colleagues that never before has a British Cabinet faced ‘such a grim choice’.
But there is no alternative — and with the world staring into the nuclear abyss, Mrs Thatcher gives the go-ahead. This may sound like the stuff of fantasy. We all know that there was no World War III in March 1981. But, in fact, this scenario is chillingly realistic.
For far from being dreamt up by some pulp novelist, this was a top secret exercise organised by the Cabinet Office in 1981, to prepare officials for a possible ‘transition to war’.
It remained hidden away in the National Archives until this year, when it was placed in the Public Record Office in Kew under the 30-Year Rule. Most people never knew it existed.
But now, for the first time, the Mail reveals the story of World War III that never was. Every two years, civil servants would take part in an exercise to test Britain’s capacity to deal with outbreak of a new war. (Whether such exercises still take place today, time will tell.)
Their bible was the ‘War Book’, a confidential blueprint that even included plans for a shattered Britain to be run by 12 regional governors in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
Leafing through the documents, you realise how seriously officials took this gigantic war game. It took fully two weeks, with civil servants playing the parts of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers, and one official, Richard Hastie-Smith of the Cabinet Office, even playing the Iron Lady herself.
They spent hours painstakingly working out how war would affect ordinary British families, devoting almost 250 close-typed pages to such issues as petrol rationing, railway timetables, agricultural supplies and medical provision for injured servicemen.
At the heart of the exercise, though, is a truly terrifying dilemma. Every Prime Minister during the Cold War, from Attlee to Thatcher, knew that one day they might be asked to approve a nuclear strike. But had war broken out, as the 1981 exercise envisages, they would have had little choice but to say ‘yes’.
The scenario begins in early March 1981 — which indeed was a period of deepening international tension. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979, East-West relations had reached their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
American anxiety was reflected in the election of the tough-talking Ronald Reagan as President in November 1980, while the Soviet leadership, under the ageing Leonid Brezhnev, were terrified that Nato might launch a surprise attack.
In Britain, Mrs Thatcher had agreed to station cruise missiles at the U.S. base on Greenham Common, much to the fury of Left-wing demonstrators. And behind the Iron Curtain, tension was rising, with Polish dissidents forming the Solidarity union to stand up to their Communist oppressors.