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Another cheap and nasty 'civil defence' ploy

Steven Walker doesn't feel the government is telling the whole truth about its new emergency text messages

We heard last week that the government is testing a new system for alerting the public to imminent civil emergency by text.

One of the first sites for the system, which will involve sending a text to residents in threatened locations, is in the village of Leiston in Suffolk.

That's Leiston right next to the site of two nuclear reactors at Sizewell and where a third will be built soon.

Coincidence? The official version is that Leiston is in a particularly difficult area for telecommunications and mobile phone signals - hence the rationale to stage a test alert there.

But dig a little deeper and there is another explanation that the government would not relish being spread about.

Apart from the obvious risk in relying on mobile phone text messages in a retirement area where lots of elderly people do not own a mobile phone - hence the mobile phone companies' failure to improve their signal coverage - it starts to look like a cheap and nasty way to try to appear to have citizens near to vulnerable sites given some kind of protection.

Logically there must be a risk that, first, these nuclear power plants may be subject to a Fukushima-type accident that could cause a massive radiation leak or, second, that the risk of Sizewell being targeted by terrorists and them succeeding in causing dangerous damage must be high.

This is all reminiscent of Britain's so-called preparations for nuclear war in the 1970s, which Duncan Campbell exposed in his seminal text War Plan UK - the Truth About Civil Defence in Britain.

Campbell exposed the shambolic and amateurish nature of Britain's civil defence at a time when the public were still being peddled the old lie about the threat of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

Campbell had form as a thorn in the side of the Establishment. He was one of three people charged under the Official Secrets Act 1911 in the notorious ABC Trial of 1978, when state secrets were disclosed by a soldier to two journalists who published classified information about state surveillance and the Secret Intelligence Service.

Campbell and the others received non-custodial sentences after their trial descended into farce, but he continued his career as an investigative journalist on the New Statesman magazine.

War Plan UK was a forensic, detailed exposé of the way the monarchy, Cabinet and senior military establishment would be secured in secret underground bunkers dictating a form of martial law when, it was clear in the official leaked documents, civil order would quickly break down after a nuclear strike.

Planners assumed that most of the infrastructure of transport, food and water supplies would be rendered dysfunctional causing widespread chaos, looting and violent disorder in what remained of the population.

The paradox eloquently spelled out by Campbell was that the British government had to encourage a sense of civil defence against foreign attack, even though by doing so they undermined the argument that Britain's own submarine-based nuclear deterrent would prevent such an attack in the first place.

Why have civil defence if the deterrent is 100 per cent effective? The answer of course was that civil defence was a deception and its only purpose was to safeguard the Establishment and elite.

It came as a huge embarrassment to the Thatcher government when "operation hard rock," scheduled for 1982 as a full-scale civil defence rehearsal for a nuclear attack, was abandoned because too few local authorities agreed to participate.

But the government had to justify its own nuclear weapons programme.

At the time this was being upgraded from Polaris to Trident missiles. The government also needed to satisfy US demands to allow Washington to use Britain as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" where US airbases could be established on the sites of old World War II airfields in East Anglia. These airbases were in effect the US front line for its own self-defence, with Britain regarded as an "expendable asset," from where nuclear-armed bombers could reach enemy territory very quickly.

The pretence was that the bases were here to protect Britain - when in truth they made Britain more of a target for any Soviet nuclear strike.

The concept of a non-nuclear armed, pacifist defence policy as advocated by Campbell, CND, the Communist Party and many others was unthinkable to mainstream politicians of all parties as the threat of attack was deliberately exaggerated while equally the prospect of survival was exaggerated.

Former US president Dwight Eisenhower had foreseen such a future in his famous farewell speech in 1961. He had warned the US public that the greatest threat to world peace was the "military industrial complex" - a term he coined to describe the nexus of corrupt politicians, arms producers and bribed civil servants whose sole purpose was to maintain an arms industry that generated massive profits, jobs and the capacity for the US to project its power anywhere in the world wherever its own political and economic interests could be strengthened.

As Karl Marx ruefully observed, "history has a habit of repeating itself." And so we can observe 30 years after War Plan UK was published the British government in collusion with the US military industrial complex is still peddling the myth of civil defence at the same time as going to war on any pretext - and watching with indifference as nuclear weapons proliferation increases.

 

Steven Walker is a former researcher on War Plan UK - the Truth About Civil Defence in Britain.

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