U.K. practises for N-war

Press, 3 November 1981, Page 8

U.K. practises for N-war

NZPA London Britain took to the bunkers on Sunday in a meticulously, planned exercise to monitor the effects of a hypothetical nuclear attack. Eight thousand people swarmed into 872 belowground concrete bunker monitoring posts in the nine-hour Exercise Warmon. The posts, manned by members of the Royal Observer Corps, reported to 25 group control centres, which passed on “fall-out . data” to five sector controls manned by the Warning and Monitoring Organisation. The exercise was one of a series. Patrick Mayhew, Home Office Minister responsible for civil defence, who visited observation posts in the Maidstone Urea, said afterwards: “Millions of lives could be saved in the unlikely event of a nuclear attack."

Ken Ward, the Warning and Monitoring Organisation's metropolitan sector controller said the object of the exercise was to gather as much information after an

attack as possible to warn the public. The organisation and the R.O.C. practised receiving fall-out warning data and weather reports and then communicated them to local authorities and the armed services. The exercise came at the end of United Nations Disarmament Week and a group of 12 demonstrators from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s Hornsey branch in north London occupied the trap-door entrance to one of the bunkers in Alexandra Park, Haringey, prevented the R.O.C. using it. The R.O.C. had to carry on their operation from another bunker. A disarmament resolution has, meanwhile, been sent to the Defence Secretary (Mr John Nott).

It resolves to keep the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament going until Britain is "safe from the danger of nuclear war.”

Oh Saturday night. C.N.D. groups throughout the country marked the end of the disarmament week by lighting beacons and setting off rockets and flares.