The Wartime Broadcasting Service was an emergency service of the BBC intended to broadcast for over about three months after a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom, or if conventional bombing, missiles and/or shelling destroyed peacetime BBC transmitters, but it never was needed to go on air. By the end of the 1950s all then existing BBC TV and radio transmitters had been fitted with both emergency diesel generators and atomic fallout protection. It was scrapped in 1993, the transmitters were sold off and Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker became a Cold War museum.
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| - The Wartime Broadcasting Service was an emergency service of the BBC intended to broadcast for over about three months after a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom, or if conventional bombing, missiles and/or shelling destroyed peacetime BBC transmitters, but it never was needed to go on air. By the end of the 1950s all then existing BBC TV and radio transmitters had been fitted with both emergency diesel generators and atomic fallout protection. It was scrapped in 1993, the transmitters were sold off and Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker became a Cold War museum.
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| - The Wartime Broadcasting Service was an emergency service of the BBC intended to broadcast for over about three months after a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom, or if conventional bombing, missiles and/or shelling destroyed peacetime BBC transmitters, but it never was needed to go on air. By the end of the 1950s all then existing BBC TV and radio transmitters had been fitted with both emergency diesel generators and atomic fallout protection. After reseving the goverment emergency take over order both the BBC and ITV were to suspend normal TV and local radio programs, broadcast the frequencies for the Wartime Broadcasting Service and go off-air an hour later (with television used only to broadcast Protect and Survive public information films, but it would become unavailable after an attack due to the system's high susceptibility to Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) damage, but several parts of the radio network would have probably survived if it was not directly hit. All independent radio stations would also transmit this service under a goverment joint broadcasting order. The plan was original for a studio in Wood Norton, Worcestershire, to keep at least some of the BBC operational after Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe had bombed out all the major cities. Kelvedon Hatch emergency broadcast tower and the near by Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker in Essex was given this in the early 1950s to the 1980s. The four-minute warning itself was to have been injected from a special underground studio beneath BBC Broadcasting House in central London. It would have been broadcast nationally on all television and radio stations when a coded signal from RAF High Wycombe was given. The emergency broadcasters would have tried to cope after a nuclear strike by installing 54 low-powered transmitters for standard usage, backed up by the remnants of the old peace time transmitters. They would have keep what remained of the main transmitter network in reserve so as to conserve resources and stop Soviet bombers used them to home in on urban and communication targets. It was scrapped in 1993, the transmitters were sold off and Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker became a Cold War museum.
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