The Wargame: how would Britain respond to a Russian attack?

Explosions rip through a naval base in northern Russia, killing dozens of sailors in an operation the Kremlin claims is linked to the UK. London strongly denies involvement, but Moscow recalls its ambassador and sends a task force of warships, jets and submarines for a “snap exercise” in the North Atlantic, putting the whole of the UK within range of their missiles.

With tensions mounting between the two nuclear-armed powers, the prime minister convenes an emergency Cobra meeting. His defence chief tells the room: “The best outcome is that this is just a show of force. The worst outcome is this is setting a force in order to attack the UK.”

The unfolding crisis is the opening scene of a wargame that simulates a Russian attack on the UK, pitching a fictional British government against an imagined Kremlin. Set in the near future, the drama plays out across a new five-part podcast series by Sky News and Tortoise called The Wargame.

You might wonder why two news organisations, Sky News and Tortoise, 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 home front was over.

If things did go wrong, the thinking went, the US, with its vast and powerful armed forces, would still have Britain’s 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. But for my entire adult life people living in Britain have not generally needed to worry about an existential conflict destroying their everyday lives, so public awareness about what that would mean in reality has unsurprisingly lapsed.

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 is 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? Whatever the outcome, it would at least bring back to life the reality of the threat.

Rob Johnson, who heads the Changing Character of War Centre at the University of Oxford, devised the scenario. He liked the idea of creating a game that could be shared with the public. “I had to go away and do a bit of research,” he said. “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.

“We've created some maps. 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. “Ordinarily when this red team gets together … we run rings around the opposition,” he said. 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 … doesn't imagine before the game actually starts”.

The government’s defence review describes Russia as an immediate and pressing threat.

The Russian 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.”

A year in the making, but recorded in just one day, The Wargame explores the threat that Russia could pose to Britain, its people and everyday life. It also tests the true state of the UK’s defences and national resilience after decades of cost-saving cuts since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The scenario also imagines how the UK’s allies might respond, in particular the US. Would it mobilise to defend Britain in a crisis? What we have created is the kind of wargame that’s genuinely tested inside government.

The main difference is that nothing discussed in this version is classified.

Russia knows our weaknesses – but do you?

The first two episodes of The Wargame are out today on all Sky News platforms. Two more will be released on 17 June and the final episode will be out on 24 June

Photograph by Ben Birchall/Getty Images