Brits were ready for very short defense in Cold War

Daily Mail:

British defences were so perilously low during the Cold War that the RAF's ammunition would have lasted for only two days if the Soviets had decided to launch an attack, official files reveal today.

The RAF's Phantom jets had enough firepower to defend the country for just two waves of attacks from Leonid Brezhnev's bombers.

And if enemy planes had slipped through, air defence missile batteries protecting key strategic targets could have been fired only twice before they, too, ran out of ammunition.

At sea, the Navy would have been no match for the threat posed by enemy submarines and on land the Army was so stretched that even when fully mobilised it would have been unable to cope with a wide-scale campaign of sabotage and subversion from the might of the Soviet special forces.

When he learned about Britain's inability to defend itself, the then Prime Minister James Callaghan described it as a 'scandal' and called for heads to roll.

'Heaven help us if there is a war!', he scrawled on the side of a classified document released today by the National Archives under the rule which requires government files to be made available for public inspection after 30 years.

...

I suspect other European governments were in the same bind. Fortunately, the Soviets were not much better off and Ronald Reagan exposed them. It does expose the foolishness of socialism that puts vote buying ahead of national defense.