Warning signs of Russia-Nato war are multiplying. Britain must rearm
The prospect of war may seem like fiction, but Vladimir Putin is making his hostile intentions increasingly clear
Before the First World War, there was a trend for ‘invasion fiction’, like Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, which became a 1979 film. In another book, The Invasion of 1910, 200,000 German soldiers launched a surprise landing on England’s east coast. Serialised by the Daily Mail, its author was persuaded to send the enemy army on a route through places with a large number of the newspaper’s readers. It sold more than a million copies.
These works of fiction were designed to entertain but also to warn about the threat of war. While there was no invasion, a generation of young men were slaughtered in a conflict like none other before it.
Sky’s new fictional-scenario docudrama The Wargame – featuring Michael Gove as Prime Minister, Nicola Sturgeon as his deputy, and Jim Murphy as Foreign Secretary – performs a similar function, as they try to deal with what looks like a Russian attack.
The threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s regime may seem distant, but so too did the idea of war to many in Edwardian Britain.
READ MORE: Why everyone must read near-apocalyptic warning from Nato chief about war with Putin's Russia
Russia attack on Nato ‘in the coming months’?
As Russian missiles and drones continued to pound Ukraine yesterday, Poland, a Nato member, said a Russian military helicopter had briefly violated its airspace, seemingly testing “the readiness of our air defence”. Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski also said a fire at a satellite station had been caused by an “act of sabotage" that appeared to fit what he described as a “new Russian doctrine of attack”.
Furthermore, a report by Denmark’s defence intelligence service warned Russia was likely to intensify ‘hybrid warfare’ against the West, with a “low but growing risk” of a limited military attack against one or more Nato countries, possibly “in the coming months”, Reuters reported. Intelligence chief Thomas Ahrenkiel said: "The aim is not to take over the country, but to divide Nato.”
This is why Britain must rearm and stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies. It is through military strength and unity that Putin will be dissuaded from an act of monumental folly that might well plunge the world into a very real war – and, make no mistake, it would be one like no other.
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