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A long-standing warning of crisis if not war has been sounded to the citizens of the United Kingdom. The government has urged people to stock up on food, bottled water and first aid supplies to be prepared for cyber attacks, natural disasters or terrorism supported by hostile states. The message of the “Be ready” campaign, under the banner of a “national dialogue on resilience”, was released by the Minister of Defence, Wes Streeting, and featured on the front page of the country’s main newspapers.
The cyber threat and artificial intelligence
Streeting stressed that families and businesses need to be more aware of new risks and prepare to face them. Speaking on the BBC’s “Question Time” program, he explained that the Kingdom faces a greater threat “than we have certainly known for much, if not all, of our lives.” Cyber incidents, he continued, are destined to occur “more and more”, also making explicit reference to the risks linked to the development of artificial intelligence. Words that come in the aftermath of the discovery of security flaws in the Php programming language, the basis of millions of websites around the world, which forced the temporary deactivation of various government digital services in the Kingdom.
The head of Defense in the Labor executive led by Prime Minister Andy Burnham particularly insisted on the threat posed by “increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks” against companies and disruptions to supply chains caused by “hostile state actors or terrorists”.
Supplies for three days and an FM radio
The campaign guidelines, contained in a brochure that can be downloaded online, tell citizens to stock up on enough supplies to survive three days: long-life food, water, a torch, sleeping bags and first aid kits. The government also recommends keeping an FM radio to receive updates in the event of a blackout.
The prime minister himself intervened to confirm the recommendations, according to which “unforeseen events seem to be becoming more and more frequent”. But at the same time Burnham clarified that you shouldn’t make “panic” decisions, such as rushing to stock up at the supermarket: “It’s simply a matter of taking reasonable measures to have enough at home to get by if a difficult situation arises.”
The «war book» and the appeals in Europe
The climate of growing alert in the country has been felt for some time: in recent months, news had come out of the government busy updating its “war book”, the manual that establishes how to respond to external threats both in the military sphere, starting with those attributed to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and in the civil sphere. Moreover, calls to citizens to prepare for the worst have also come from other European countries, including Germany, and from the EU itself. And against the backdrop of these tensions, today there was talk of the first joint air exercise between Great Britain and France in the simulation of a nuclear attack in the Mediterranean.