World War 3: Fears for nuclear attack on 200 locations in UK within 48 hours exposed – Express.co.uk

The warning came as part of a BBC Panorama special, dubbed If The Bomb Drops broadcast on March 10, 1980, featuring a young Jeremy Paxman. It came at a time of heightened tensions in the Cold War as the Nuclear Arms Race was heating up and, on Christmas Day in 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan as part of the Afghan War, in which the US and the United Kingdom backed the opposition. This escalation in conflict between the East and West during a proxy war, sparked fears a full-scale World War 3 situation was imminent and the British Government began planning on how it would mitigate the effects of a nuclear attack, with the release of information broadcasts such as Protect and Survive.

During the BBC footage, seen by millions of Britons, Colonel Jonathan Alford, former deputy director at the Institute of Strategic Studies, said: It seems the Russians do not accept the mutual part of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).

Because what MAD meant was, as a theory, that you, in a sense, took no defensive measures, you accepted that you remained absolutely vulnerable to his attack.

Then, there would be an element of stability, because if he had enough weapons to attack you, and you had enough weapons to attack him, there was a deterrent mechanism at work.

The trouble is, the Russians didnt seem to accept this part of the doctrine and so they have developed a substantial civil defence programme.

They clearly think they might come to the point of a strategic nuclear exchange and then, if that was so, they want to lose less badly than the US.

Colonel Alford, who passed away in 1986, went on to reveal what an attack from the Soviet Union on Britain may look like.

He added: I think they would be looking at something like 200 targets in the UK and allocating nearly as many as 400 weapons to the destruction of those targets, given that they wont all go off or work.

If I took a map of the UK and put pins in all the military targets I think they would be interested in, there would not be many parts of the UK left."

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He continued: If youre basing your planning on the assumption that you will get three weeks warning, I think thats a grave mistake.

Given the readiness of modern weapons, for example, one could imagine a nuclear exchange taking place within 48 to 72 hours.

It certainly isnt going to take more than 48 to 72 hours to start the Soviet divisions in East Germany rolling westwards.

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World War 3: Fears for nuclear attack on 200 locations in UK within 48 hours exposed - Express.co.uk