Four-minute warning

The four-minute warning was a public alert system conceived by the British Government during the Cold War and operated between 1953 and 1992. The name derived from the approximate length of time from the point at which a Soviet nuclear missile attack against the United Kingdom could be confirmed and the impact of those missiles on their targets. The population was to be notified by means of air raid sirens, television and radio, and urged to seek cover immediately. In practice, the warning would have been more likely three minutes or less.

Basic details
The warning would be initiated by the detection of inbound missiles and aircraft targeted at the United Kingdom. Early in the Cold War, Jodrell Bank was used to detect and track incoming missiles alongside its astronomical research remit. From 1958 to 1963, the radio telescope was used to give early warning of a Soviet attack. Plainclothes Royal Air Force officers even worked alongside scientists, engineers and undergraduates with only the director, Bernard Lovell, and the Air Ministry knowing who they were. Lovell was angry at this arrangement, saying:

"It was known only to a very few people that I had been approached by the Chief of the Air Staff, who told me we had the only instrument in the world that could detect a Soviet missile. I simply wanted to do research, but events wouldn't allow me to."

Throughout the Cold War, there was a conflict between the RAF and the Home Office over who was in charge of the warning system. This was not for any practical or technical reason, but more a case of who would receive blame if a false alarm was given or an attack occurred without warning (which could have been as little as thirty seconds from launch to impact on a target). By the 1980s, the warning would be given on the orders of a Warning Officer from the Home Office stationed at RAF High Wycombe.

From the early 1960s, initial detection of attack would be provided primarily by the RAF BMEWS station at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. There, powerful radars would track the inbound missiles and allow confirmation of targets. In later years the first indication of any imminent attack would likely come from infrared detectors aboard the United States Defense Support Program (DSP's) satellites. However, BMEWS would still play an important role in tracking and confirming the destination of any launches.

The British government was not the main beneficiary of BMEWS, given that it would only receive what Solly Zuckerman described in 1960 as "no more than 5 minutes warning time" of an attack. The United States was the United Kingdom's most important military and technological partner, however, and its Strategic Air Command would have thirty minutes warning from the Fylingdales station.

UKWMO and the ROC
It was the responsibility of the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation (UKWMO) at the United Kingdom Regional Air Operations Centre (UK RAOC) located at the Strike Command Operations Centre at High Wycombe to alert the nation to an imminent air attack. Once an alert was initiated the national and local television and radio networks would break into transmissions and broadcast a warning (rather, the warning message would be transmitted from an emergency studio in BBC Broadcasting House in London). Simultaneously the national air raid siren system would be brought into service. A system, which used the same frequency on normal telephone lines as the peacetime speaking clock, was employed for this whereby a key switch activation alerted 250 national Carrier Control Points or CCPs present in police stations across the country. In turn the CCPs would, via a signal carried along ordinary phone lines, cause 7,000 powered sirens to start-up. In rural areas, around 11,000 hand powered sirens would be operated by postmasters, rural police officers, or Royal Observer Corps personnel (even parish priests, publicans, magistrates, subpostmasters or private citizens could be involved in some remote rural areas).

Linked into the system were the twenty five Royal Observer Corps (ROC) group controls, also with direct links to the carrier control points. In the event of subsequent radioactive fallout, local fallout warnings could be generated from the group controls on a very localised basis over the same carrier wave system.

The national warning system saw many changes over the years. During the 1960s and 1970s, much of the local authority civil defence planning in the United Kingdom became outdated, although the WB400/WB600 warning system was maintained and kept serviceable along with updating of ROC instrumentation and communications. The system's main problem was that many of the telephone lines it needed had to be manually switched in times of pre-war tension by Post Office telephone engineers. Additionally, the links were not hardened against the effects of EMP. In the late 1970s and early 1980s heightened fears and tensions led to a resumption of contingency planning and the upgrading of many systems. The outdated WB400/WB600 systems were replaced with brand new WB1400 equipment, communications links were made permanent and hardened against EMP disruption.

Sirens
The national siren system left over from World War II had always retained a secondary role of "general warning", particularly for imminent flooding. In some towns, they were also used to summon part time firemen. However, a telephone based system was found to be generally more appropriate in this scenario and cheaper in most parts of the country. Additionally the Government retains an ability to break into local and national television and radio for purposes of alerting the general public. Indeed, the government has the legal power to take over editorial control of the BBC during a national emergency under the BBC Charter and the Broadcasting Act 1980.

By the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the national siren system was largely dismantled. The British Government cited the increasing use of double glazed windows, which make sirens harder to hear, and the reduced likelihood of air attack as reasons to eliminate the siren system in most parts of the country. Some coastal areas still retain and regularly test the sirens as part of the flood warning defences. Also, Broadmoor Hospital retains its siren to warn of escaped inmates, which is tested every Monday morning at 10am. Carstairs Hospital also retain their sirens and are tested on a monthly basis.

Sample script
The following is a script that would have been broadcast in the event of an attack, available from the BBC. It was recorded by Peter Donaldson, chief continuity announcer for BBC Radio 4:

Cultural impact
The cold war and the fear of nuclear attack permeated pop culture up until the 1990s. Examples include the song 'Four Minute Warning' by the British punk band Chaos UK (EP 'Burning Britain', 1982), the poem 'Your Attention Please' by Peter Porter, as well as the name of a solo song by Take That singer, Mark Owen, "Four Minutes" by Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame) on his 1987 solo album Radio K.A.O.S.. John Paul Jones has a song entitled "4-Minute Warning" on the 1988 Brian Eno album Music for Films III, the 2008 Madonna track "4 Minutes" and the name of a 2008 Radiohead song, on the second disc of their album In Rainbows.

The four minute warning was a central plot and narrative device in dramas (both on stage and screen) and novels, often being the motor force of plays, films, novels and cartoon strips. The BBC drama Threads, about how society decays after a nuclear holocaust, which focuses on an attack on Sheffield. The War Game also portrays the four minute warning, pointing out the warning period could be even less. The narrator, Michael Aspel, says it could even be two minutes between issuing the warning and impact on a target. The film adaptation of Raymond Briggs's satirical and blackly comic cartoon strip, When the Wind Blows, has the warning message as part of the script, which triggers arguing between Jim and Hilda Bloggs. Although this is not Peter Donaldson's pre-recorded warning (which was not available on grounds of national security and for copyright reasons), this was a fictional announcement written on grounds of artistic licence. It was read by Robin Houston, a voiceover artist who was known in London as a newsreader for Thames Television (who played the role of newsreader in the film).

The adult humour comic Viz ran a photo strip in its issue 107 called "Four Minutes to Fall in Love", where a boyfriend and girlfriend cram a whole relationship into the four minutes before a nuclear attack. The Four Minute Warning had become the inspiration for many jokes and sketches in comedy programmes in Britain, in the same way that the Emergency Broadcast System had in the United States (see nuclear weapons in popular culture). In one episode of Only Fools and Horses, "The Russians Are Coming," Delboy and Rodney Trotter sell fallout shelter kits and have an attack drill. Driving towards their shelter, they are stopped by the police for speeding and asked: "You just heard the four minute warning?" After being sent on their way, Rodney points out: "We died forty-five seconds ago." Around the same time, a sketch on the BBC Scotland programme Naked Video had a mock announcement warning of an attack with a punchline of "...except for viewers in Scotland."