Defence secretary Wes Streeting has said that Britain must be ready for war in 1,000 days as the government tells Britons to stock up with tinned food and bottles of water.
Writing in The Telegraph, Mr Streeting warns Britain’s adversaries could be ready to attack the UK in 2030.
He wrote: “Our adversaries’ willingness to harm us is not new. What has changed is there capacity. By 2030 their force strength and war economy could put them in a position to attack.
“That gives us a little over 1,000 days to complete our mission: to be ready with our allies to fight and win.”
Referencing the potential of Russian aggression, he added: ‘To prevent the worst, we have to prepare for it”.
His comments come amid a government campaign to ready Britons for a potential break-down in essential services.
Every Briton is being urged to stock up to nine litres of bottle water and three days’ worth of food to ensure that they can survive a weather, cyber or other critical emergency.
Mr Streeting has said the Britain should be ready for “state-sponsored terrorism” from Russia.
Explaining the ‘Be Ready’ campaign, he said: “In the face of those threats, which are not hypothetical but real, and not somewhere else but increasingly here, we have to step up and take seriously our national resilience as well as our national defence.
“It’s really important that we ask households and businesses are they prepared?”.
People have also been told to keep a supply of blankets, cash, a first-aid kit, a torch with batteries, and a wind-up FM radio.
Prime minister Andy Burnham has also advised people to stock up on food and water in case of emergencies. He told the BBC: “It’s not about panicking...It’s about just taking sensible measures to have enough in the house to tide you over should there be a difficult situation”.
Earlier this month, MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum called for a “whole-of-society effort” to face threats to national infrastructure, warning that hacks could disable banking services, drones could disrupt flights, and cyber attacks on hospitals could have an adverse impact on health treatment.
Asked whether Britain would be able to get back to a less fractious time, Sir Ken said: “Our planning assumption is not that this is a temporary blip and we will all be back to normal by next Christmas.
“We are planning on the basis that, in effect, the period of comparative geopolitical stability following the end of the Cold War has sadly ended and we are back in a more contested era now. We are planning on the basis that these risks will endure.”
