Are we ready for war? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers tackle a grim question that, until recently, few had thought to consider. • Britain is closer to nuclear war than you think. This is how it will unfold• This generation of Britons couldn’t handle the death toll of a modern war• Russia is aiming to control the UK. It would tear society apart• Britain’s tanks would be eviscerated in a war with Russia. Here’s how to fix them• Three ways the UK could finance a war

Are we ready for war? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers tackle a grim question that, until recently, few had thought to consider.

• Britain is closer to nuclear war than you think. This is how it will unfold• This generation of Britons couldn’t handle the death toll of a modern war• Russia is aiming to control the UK. It would tear society apart• Britain’s tanks would be eviscerated in a war with Russia. Here’s how to fix them• Three ways the UK could finance a war

Ray Mears wrote in this paper that it takes a lot more than a 72-hour grab bag to be ready for war. He was right. It takes an entirely different mindset – and systems, stockpiles and thorough preparation by the whole span of society.

Unfortunately, Britain does not currently appear to have any of those things. We have a website with advice (including, of course, the omnipresent grab bag) but a close reading makes it plain that in a crisis, you’re on your own.

That’s the key difference between the UK and the countries that take civil defence seriously.

Britain has a Resilience Action Plan that points specifically at Sweden and Japan as countries it wants to emulate.

Sweden and Japan give out guidance in booklets. The UK has a website (which is fine as long as the first things that fall over in a crisis aren’t the internet and power).

But the big difference between the UK advice and that of Sweden and Japan is that both countries explain what support the state will give – organised shelter, evacuation, where to find reliable information, and so on. The UK has none of that in its advice, apparently because it just doesn’t exist.

The Resilience Action Plan rightly emphasises the role of civil society in planning for and responding to major emergencies. But unlike in other countries – like the perennial poster child for preparedness, Finland – that’s treated as a substitute for government action, not a force multiplier for it.

Wishful thinking extends to the UK’s emergency alert system. It is entirely dependent on people having a mobile phone signal (not wifi) – so if the phone networks themselves have been attacked or damaged, the system just won’t work. (The system was tested in September 2025. In my own village, about half the houses had a strong enough signal to receive it promptly, with everybody else’s phones going off at random over the next two days.) But even if the Government could communicate with everybody in a crisis, there is the issue of how little it could actually say.

Countries that take civil defence seriously think about what is required for people to survive, and the economy and society to continue to function, while either an external enemy or a natural disaster is working hard to stop them from doing so.

The UK used to have a system for this. But at the end of the Cold War, Britain rushed to disband all of the organisations, capabilities and stockpiles that made it up. When researching for my book, Who Will Defend Europe?, I was astonished to find how swift that process had been.

By the middle of the 1990s, the Home Office had abandoned the entire concept of civil defence, and in just five years, the UK had gone from being well prepared to having no evident preparations at all. Police and fire services and critical utilities like water and telecommunications were no longer obliged to maintain training and reserve capacity for the country being under attack, emergency food stockpiles were sold off and backup regional government offices were closed down and abandoned. Successive British governments decided that there would never be war again – or if there was, it would be somebody else’s problem.

Now, though, the National Security Strategy warns us that “For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario.”

Nobody is suggesting the UK is at imminent risk of a land invasion like Europe’s front-line states. But Russia and others have been investing heavily in striking from the air and sea at vast distances, and the UK is, in relative terms, practically undefended against such an attack.

Russia’s ongoing attempts to make Ukrainian cities unliveable have focused minds on making the UK’s critical infrastructure less vulnerable. And it’s not just the direct threat of military attack. Most of northern Europe has by now experienced sabotage, arson and assassinations courtesy of Russia.

The UK’s Strategic Defence Review laid out aspirations for what the UK needed to be ready to withstand today’s threats. But its drafters reported “no enthusiasm for MOD to lead the discussion on what is needed for resilience”.

That reflects a broader reluctance across government to tackle the thankless task of explaining to the population the sacrifices they will have to make to preserve the rights and freedoms they take for granted.

Documents like the Resilience Action Plan lay out what should happen in theory, but as with defence overall, there’s little indication that the Government believes its own published strategies – because if it did, it would surely be acting on them.

Doing something would cost money, of course. A significant part of readiness consists of maintaining very large stocks of very boring things that may never be used. That includes capacity in healthcare, including simple measures like the availability of hospital beds in an emergency. And there is the UK’s current situation in a nutshell: the NHS is widely assessed to have no capacity to cope with a major crisis because it is already in one.

But efforts by Nato to get countries like the UK to spend more on protecting their citizens can only go so far when the countries themselves are unwilling.

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The most recent Nato summit asked members to spend 1.5 per cent of GDP on domestic resilience and the defence industrial base, as part of their overall 5 per cent spending on “core defence requirements”. But after repeated questioning, Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones confirmed in January that the Government considers it can claim it has met its Nato commitment without actually making any additional investments at all.

After watching the refusal of successive British governments to get to grips with the problem, more and more defence insiders think the only thing that will force change is a disaster. Mass casualties, or a sustained national power outage, would focus minds on how unprotected the country is. Until then, it seems, a website telling citizens to look after themselves is a helpfully affordable alternative to actually having a civil defence system and plan to keep people alive.

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