Is Britain really prepared for the rising nuclear threat?

A new film depicts a US president with just minutes to react to a missile attack. Defence analyst Francis Tusa argues it’s not such a fanciful idea and that the UK has work to do

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In the new Kathryn Bigelow film, A House of Dynamite, a US president has 18 minutes to decide whether a missile heading towards the United States is a nuclear threat, and what he should authorise as retaliation.

But the scenario can no longer be dismissed as unlikely. With near-nightly Russian ballistic missile attacks on Ukraine, as well as missiles being fired from Iran and Yemen against Israel, attacks are no longer unthinkable - they are the new normal.

A whole range of doctrine and behaviour which was developed during the Cold War, and subsequently forgotten after 1990, has had to be rediscovered by governments all over Europe - but especially in those nuclear-armed capitals of London and Paris. If you are the Netherlands and a nuclear missile is heading your way, there is little you can do, and nothing in retaliation - a British prime minister or a French president has a momentous decision to make, just like the fictional US president in the film.

When thinking about what the events depicted in A House of Dynamite might mean for the UK, one thing is different - the PM at the time will not have 18 minutes or so, but a fraction of that. A (nuclear-armed) ballistic missile fired from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad would reach London in about six minutes — maybe 10 minutes-plus if fired from Russia proper. Time will not be on any PM’s side. The clock is ticking for a decision...

If a ballistic missile were to be fired against the UK, the first warnings would come from either US space-based missile launch satellites, the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS), or more likely from the US Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar network at RAF Fylingdales in Yorkshire. The RAF Fylingdales radars operate 24/7, and can cover out to western Russia.