The Secret State
This exhibition has now finished
A chilling behind-the-scenes picture of the corridors of power at a time when the world teetered on the brink of disaster, this exhibition looed at different aspects of government processes in the Cold War.
Intelligence
Intelligence was central to the Cold War. It provided a window through which western nations could view their counterparts on the other side of the Iron Curtain. This intelligence fashioned the hopes and fears of successive British Prime Ministers, Cabinets, senior civil servants and military chiefs.
The Soviet Union was an immensely difficult target for British Secret Services to penetrate. What kind of picture of these closed, tightly controlled societies and economies was pieced together? Their secrets were tough to acquire, but what about the most crucial mystery of all - the intentions of successive Soviet leaderships towards the West?
British intelligence operations are still under wraps, but from the targets they set themselves we can glean an idea of the type and scope of the constant Cold War secret service preoccupations. Whitehall's Joint Intelligence Committee drew up two key lists - red and amber. If the red list indicators lit up as the intelligence flowed in, the Soviet Union might be about to launch a sudden and unexpected pre-emptive attack against the UK and its NATO allies. The amber indicators would pick up on a larger slower build up to a soviet westward thrust that could trigger World War III.
The Bomb
The nuclear threat is what gave the Cold War its underlying menace. Unlike the two total wars of the twentieth century- The Great War and World War II- a third world war would have left warring societies on both sides ruined perhaps beyond repair due to the destructive power unleashed by the atomic bomb.
Within days of the first atomic bombs falling on Japan the new British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee sent a top-secret memo to cabinet colleagues on the Atomic Energy Committee. Attlee believed that to remain a great power, Britain needed to posses the ultimate weapon. Deterrence was the only protection for London, he argued, Britain required the capability to destroy the great cities of the enemy.
The British atomic bomb was developed in immense secrecy. When Winston Churchill returned to 10 Downing Street in 1951 he was amazed how Attlee had concealed the considerable cost of the bomb from Parliament and the British people. Churchill was in power during November 1953 when the first British atomic bomb- the vast Blue Danube- was delivered to the Royal Air Force. It had been designed and built in exceptionally difficult circumstances. In 1946, the Americans had stopped sharing their nuclear know-how with their wartime atomic ally leaving Britain to develop the bomb alone.
In 1954 Churchill and his ministers had to decide whether Britain could - or should - go to the next stage in the nuclear arms race by designing and making the awesome hydrogen bomb which could produce yields over 1000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb.
Each generation of politicians has come up with a rationale explaining why Britain has to become or remain a nuclear power. The old files talk- they tell us of the reasons debated in private by each government's inner nuclear circle. What factors persuaded Attlee and Churchill of the importance of being nuclear? How did Macmillan persuade his Cabinet to keep Britain nuclear-tipped even after the UK could not keep up with the technology and was dependent - once atomic collaboration was restored in 1958 - on US kit and knowledge? Every government since 1947 has, in Ernest Bevin's words, felt the need to keep a 'bloody union jack on top of the bomb'.
Defence of the Realm
Russian intelligence made a substantial and sustained effort to penetrate Britain's secret state. Whitehall made great efforts to keep them out and to unearth the Soviet moles already at work in the most sensitive political, intelligence and atomic areas.
The Communist Party of Great Britain was thoroughly penetrated by the British secret services. Did British intelligence think its members were a potential fifth column for Stalin and his successors in a future war - making Britain vulnerable to sabotage and subversion? What would have happened to members of the British Communist Party if war had actually broken out? Was the 'enemy within' real or imaginary?
No-one really knew until MI5 papers and other secret documents reached The National Archives. How far was this internal threat included as part of the ultra secret transition-to-war exercise Whitehall ran? How big a danger did the planners think peace protesters were, especially once the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was formed in 1958? What did MI5 tell Harold Macmillan when he asked how far the communists were influencing CND and other peace groups?
If it had happened
Bunker sleeping quarters
After the end of World War II Whitehall began planning for what a third world war would do to Britain if it came. In comparison to Hitler's blitz, a nuclear war would not just have been far more destructive. It would have left Britain broken backed and strewn with dead and dying.
By the mid 1950s it was privately conceded that a thermonuclear assault on Britain with the vastly destructive hydrogen bombs would produce horrific consequences beyond anyone's imagination. Yet imagine was what Whitehall planners had to do.
In 1955 every cabinet minister was given a personal copy of the Top Secret 'Strath Report' which detailed in graphic terms what 10 Soviet H-bombs would do to the UK. Their combined explosive power would be equivalent to all the allied bombs dropped on Germany, Italy and occupied France during World War II. Twelve million people would be incinerated in the first few seconds with another four million seriously injured, even before the radiation clouds had made their poisonous way across the country. The report was so sensitive that it was kept away from the British public until it reached The National Archives in 2002.
What could be done to protect the British people if World War III broke out? Could any credible civil defence be provided? Could the UK afford to build the bomb and to build shelters? Successive governments decided the answer was 'no!' Would any government be capable of providing food, water and shelter or maintaining law and order after the bombs had dropped? At what point would the remaining British society completely breakdown amid the smoking ruins of a once advanced society made primitive in a matter of hours?
Whitehall drew up secret plans to break up the UK into 12 self contained mini kingdoms run from underground bunker by politicians, the military and the police dispensing absolute and rough justice. An emergency law - never seen until it reached The National Archives - would have been rushed through parliament in the last hours of peace to give each regional commissioner (a cabinet minister not despatched with the Prime Minister to the ultimate bunker) complete power over the life, death and property of every surviving British citizen.
Would any of theses plans have worked? The planners had no idea. And, had it happened would they have gone to their bunkers leaving their families and friends above ground at the mercy of the heat, blast and radiation? What would YOU have done?
Preparing for the worst
Bunker living quarters
What would happen if the war came either as a bolt-from-the-blue or after a gradual build up of international tension? How would a British Prime Minister have launched nuclear retaliation once the Russian bombs had dropped or were about to? What would happen if the Prime Minister was wiped out before he could give the order to attack? These drills were the most secret of the Cold War.
The small number of people who knew about the secret nuclear release procedures believed they would have to take the secrets to their graves. Yet here, in The National Archives, are those very 'end of the world' drills for the era when the British bomb was carried by the RAF's V-Force.
The ultimate decision, which could have involved the destruction of Soviet society and the death of millions, was shrouded in secrecy. What needed to be done before the small, emergency cabinet was rushed out of London to a secret location from where, had they made it in time, retaliation would have been authorised?
Where was this ultra secret bunker (code named Turnstile)? Who would have gone there with the Prime Minister and the war cabinet to support and advise them? Most of the officials and military intelligence officers had no idea, until a Ministry of Defence war book reached The National Archives more than 10 years after the Cold War ended. What does this bunker look like now?
If the Soviet Union had launched a nuclear attack against the UK and you were the Prime Minister with your finger on the button would YOU have retaliated?
