The British government is dusting off a classified Cold War manual, telling households to stockpile tins and bottled water at home, while state media is putting out articles debating whether the country is mentally prepared for war.
The classified Government War Book is being rewritten for the first time since 2004. The old document set out how ministries would keep food moving, communications open and government itself functioning if conflict reached the homeland.
After the Cold War it was mothballed. It is now being revived as part of a Home Defence Programme that officials say will align military and civilian responses if international hostilities hit the UK mainland.
Households are being told to prepare to go without power, water or the internet. The Cabinet Office checklist is blunt: bottled water, non-perishable food, essential medicines, a first-aid kit, a torch, a power bank, spare batteries and a wind-up or battery radio.
One official, speaking to the Financial Times, insisted the campaign would not be “duck and cover.” “There will be practical advice on things you can do to improve domestic resilience, like having some bottled water and tinned food. It will be common sense, not scaremongering.”
Chief Secretary Darren Jones put the same line to MPs: “The government will do all it can and we are well prepared – but we can all play our part to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. This campaign will help the public to take small but important steps to be prepared in case of emergencies and disruption – be that severe weather or a cyber-attack, which can impact access to power, water, or phone signal.”
The plans are due to be stress-tested in 2027 in Exercise Albiston Shadow, described as the largest home defence drill in decades. Ministers and hundreds of officials will role-play a multi-day crisis built around hybrid attacks – cyber disruption, sabotage, interference and disinformation – rather than tanks on Whitehall. Some home-defence work has reportedly been pulled forward from 2035 toward 2030.
Armed Forces minister Louise Sandher-Jones framed the whole package around Moscow: “Russia is not only a threat to NATO’s eastern flank. It is a direct threat to the UK homeland and these exercises, together with important measures like updating our ‘War Books’, will help prepare us to meet that threat, as well as showing the British public how seriously we are taking it.”
Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton has said the same in plainer language. “In my 35-year career, this is the most dangerous period that I have known.” He added that “the risks and threats to this country are greater than I have known since the Cold War,” that Russia is “probing, challenging, testing our defences,” and that “society and all of us” may have to accept “different choices and different priorities.”
The BBC this week pushed the mood further. “War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?” asked correspondent Allan Little, noting the stockpile drive and the War Book rewrite.
Historian Margaret MacMillan told the BBC: “It’s not the tanks you need to worry about. It’s the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It’s the hacking into systems on which so many things depend.” After 80 years without war on British soil, she said, “I don’t think we are psychologically prepared.”
Retired general Sir Richard Shirreff compared the moment to “those Edwardian summers before 1914, when there was a lot of talk of war but the notion of actually going to war seemed so far-fetched as to be beyond belief.”
That is the version of events ministers talk about in public. It is not the only reading.
In 2025, Professor David Betz of King’s College London, a specialist in modern and unconventional war, argued that Whitehall is hardening the homeland against domesticfracture while using a Russian invasion narrative as political cover.
Pointing to the 2025 National Security Strategy line that Britain must “actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat,” Betz said the apprehension is real – and internal.
“But that’s not external in origin, that’s internal, and that has to do with the way our society is now configured, it is highly fractured.” He described “low trust, highly fractured, and highly politically factionalised which is leading us increasingly inevitably into civil conflict.”
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