AG百家乐在线官网

By Deborah Haynes, Sky News security and defence editor

The warning from the home secretary at an emergency Cobra meeting is stark.

The prime minister must decide what to do after the Kremlin deployed a large task force of warships, fighter jets and submarines to the North Atlantic.

The whole of the United Kingdom is within range of their missiles.

Russia and the UK are both nuclear-armed powers.

This is the opening scene of a new five-part podcast series from Sky News and Tortoise called The Wargame. It simulates a Russian attack on the UK.

The scenario is described as very low likelihood but high impact.

That means a low chance of it happening but catastrophic consequences if it did.

The other members of our Cobra team are:

Jim Murphy (Labour), a former secretary of state for Scotland, as chancellor.

James Heappey (Conservative), previously the armed forces minister, is the defence secretary.

Baroness Helena Kennedy (Labour), a barrister and expert on human rights law, agreed to become the attorney general.

Lord Mark Sedwill is the national security adviser, a role he held for real from 2017 to 2020.

General Sir Richard Barrons plays the role of Chief of the Defence Staff. He is a former senior commander who was a co-author of a major defence review published last week by the government.

Lieutenant General Sir David Capewell, a former chief of joint operations, reprises his role as the UK's warfighting commander.

Victorian Mackarness, a communications expert, plays the role of Downing Street press secretary.

You might wonder why two news organisations chose to run a wargame.

Let me explain.

When the Cold War ended, successive governments decided to switch funding away from defence and into peacetime priorities such as health, welfare and economic growth.

It was seen as a "peace dividend" following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with politicians and the public gambling on a belief that the threat of war on the homefront was over.

If things did go wrong, the thinking went, the United States, with its vast and powerful armed forces, would still have our back as part of the NATO alliance.

Like most people of my generation - I am 48 - I have a fuzzy memory of the Cold War. 

By contrast, the credible sense of imminent peril is what enabled heavy investment on defence and deterrence to continue long after the guns in the Second World War fell silent.

As an insurance policy, it felt like a bargain compared with the devastating cost of total war.

Experts say Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 should have been the wake-up call for the UK and Europe to take defence and national resilience seriously once more.

But because this country still feels pretty safe, it's perhaps hard to understand why or even whether it matters.

It made me wonder, what if we simulate an emergency and find out how the UK might respond? 

Rob Johnson explains how his scenario was created.

"I had to go away and do a bit of research," he says. 

"What was it like in the Cold War? What capabilities did we have? What were the emergency procedures? What did they look like?"

"Then I looked at how we could create that sensation inside a room. So we chose a bunker. We also mocked up some documents," he says.

"We've created some maps鈥� We've got a Russia team.. We had to ask them: what would Russia do?"

Our imagined Kremlin is led by Keir Giles, an author and Russia expert, who - like the rest of his team - has long experience of playing the "red team" in wargames.

This is "partly because Russia has the initiative, partly because Russia has the tools [and] partly because Russia has the will and the determination to cause damage sometimes in ways that the opposition鈥� doesn't imagine before the game actually starts".

Deciding where to run the game was key.

We wanted to simulate the government's emergency Cobra meeting, chaired by our fictional prime minister and held in a bunker.

We also needed a second room to be a pretend Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) for the military.

Finally, we had to create a Kremlin, where our Russian president would assemble with this team. 

Tortoise Media agreed to turn the basement of their building into the set of The Wargame.

It has a web of corridors that connect to multiple rooms, making the site an ideal venue.

The largest underground room was used for the Cobra (Cabinet Office Briefing Room) crisis meetings, with ministers and top officials positioned around a long table.

A bank of screens lines the wall at one end of the room. Maps can be displayed on the screens.

Crucially, they also provide a video link for the Cobra team to request a call with an imagined US secretary of state as well as the head of the NATO alliance whenever they choose.

James Shield, a producer at Tortoise, asked Professor Phillips O'Brien, the head of international studies at the University of St Andrews, to be our top American diplomat.

Elisabeth Braw, a leading expert on security and defence, plays the NATO chief.

Across a narrow corridor from the Cobra meeting area is a smaller room, which we pretend is the military headquarters.

This is where our chief of joint operations and a team of six advisers, with expertise in defence, security and national resilience, assemble.

At the other end of the basement, along a corridor and through two doors, in another fairly large room, we establish the Russia side.

As the person running the show, Rob is the games master, leading what is known as the white cell.

He has several helpers who must provide new pieces of information to different players as the game progresses - these are known as "injects".

Rob also sits in the main Cobra meeting, taking on the role of chair of the joint intelligence committee, who provides all the intelligence updates.

The game is slightly unusual because the Russian red team knows beforehand the main moves they will make. 

Their primary role is to explain the Kremlin's way of thinking and why it might be taking such actions.

By contrast, the British blue team has no idea what is about to happen and must do the best they can to defend Britain.

To inject a further sense of realism into the three rooms, we mock up news reports to cover moments of drama as they unfold.

Katie Gunning, a former BBC newsreader, is the voice of our pretend British rolling news channel, while Valeriy Akimenko, an expert on Russian state communications, will help us craft imagined Russian state media bulletins.

The Wargame comes at a time when national defence and resilience is back in focus.

The UK and its European allies are expected to agree to a big hike in defence spending to keep Donald Trump on side when they gather for a NATO summit later this month.

Sir Keir Starmer also published a major review of defence last week that said Britain must rebuild its armed forces and get ready for war because the threat of conflict with a nuclear power like Russia or China is real.

Russia denied posing a danger. Its embassy in London said: "Russia poses no threat to the United Kingdom and its people.

"We harbour no aggressive intentions and have no plans to attack Britain. We are not interested in doing so, nor do we need to."

Responding to the review's recommendations, the prime minister said the UK will make more submarines, build more weapons factories and buy more missiles. He also pledged to boost the reserve forces, expand a military cadet force and revive wider national resilience.

But returning the nation to one that is better prepared for war will be expensive and it will require the whole country to play their part.

Whether that happens and how quickly then comes down to choice.

The first two episodes of The Wargame are out now. Two more will be released on 17 June and the final episode will be out on 24 June. Click below to follow The Wargame wherever you get your podcasts.