What if Putin DID push the button and nuke London?

On Tuesday, Russia conducted a training exercise for a massive nuclear strike against the West, with ballistic and cruise missiles deployed from land and sea.

In a video message to his generals, Vladimir Putin claimed his country’s nuclear arsenal – the largest in the world – would be used only as an ‘extremely exceptional measure’.

Yet since his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the despot has consistently threatened to deploy this fearsome weaponry, and as the long and bloody war grinds into a stalemate, the spectre of a nuclear holocaust has never felt closer. So what might happen if Putin pushed the button – and dropped a nuclear bomb on London?

Monday, January 20, 2025

7.30am: From his nuclear bunker deep inside the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin gives the order.

Six hundred miles north of Moscow, engineers working at Site 16 – the nuclear facility within the Plesetsk Cosmodrome – leap into action. It will take them exactly 30 minutes from receiving the order to launching a nuclear warhead.

7.40am: Nato satellites detect a flurry of activity at the Plesetsk base. Member states are placed on high alert.

7.50am: The Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defence urgently try to contact their Russian counterparts – but their calls go unanswered. Something is seriously wrong.

8am: A Yars intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) equipped with a nuclear warhead – with a range of 7,500 miles – is launched, soaring into the sky.

The onboard navigation system – accurate to within a yard – is set to Trafalgar Square, London. The hypersonic weapon is travelling at over 9,000 mph. It cannot be stopped.

8.01am: In London, Tube carriages are packed and the roads are busy in rush hour. None of the commuters has the faintest suspicion that in just five minutes, much of the capital will be obliterated.

8.02am: Nato early-warning systems stationed across the Baltic States detect the presence of an unidentified flying object hurtling towards the UK. On satellite phones via a secure line reserved for this scenario, governments are warned of an impending attack.

8.03am: Nato raises the threat level to the UK from ‘credible’ to ‘likely’ and Britain’s Ministry of Defence restricts access to ‘base transceiver stations’, preventing domestic mobile phones from sending messages.

8.04am: The Home Office sends a signal to every device with a SIM card in the UK warning of the imminent threat: ‘BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK SHELTER.’

The UK’s air defence system, Sky Sabre, is powerless to protect London. Its ‘Common Anti-Air Modular Missiles’ travel at 2,300 mph but are effective only against fighter jets, drones and certain laser-guided missiles.

Even the world’s most effective anti-ballistic-missile system, the US’s ‘Ground-Based Midcourse Defense’, is thought to be over a decade away from true reliability in the face of an ICBM.

8.05am: Confusion seizes the city. Londoners wonder where the missile is headed and if they should – or can – flee. Some are sure the message is a mistake.

The Prime Minister, along with his closest advisers and immediate family, is evacuated from his private office in No 10 and taken to a nuclear shelter beneath Whitehall known as Pindar. Built during the Cold War, the bunker takes its name from the only house left standing when Alexander the Great razed the city of Thebes in 335 BC.

8.06am: All radio and TV broadcasts cease and stations instead carry a recorded warning to take shelter. Confusion changes to panic. Tens of thousands of Londoners rush to take shelter in Tube stations. The first deaths occur as children and the elderly are crushed in the stampede.

Others stand in the open, staring in awe at the bright dot that has appeared in the sky to the east. A mother with two young children collapses on the pavement, cradles her loved ones and closes her eyes.

8.08am: Impact. The warhead detonates in Trafalgar Square. It has a yield of 800 kilotons – equivalent to 800,000 tons of TNT and more than 50 times the strength of the ‘Little Boy’ bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

A huge white flash, brighter than the Sun, explodes over the West End. It can be seen hundreds of miles away, as far north as Edinburgh and as far south as Paris.

Anyone within the M25 experiences flash blindness. For many, this will last just a few hours. Others will be blinded for life, the ‘atomic flash’ having burnt through their retinas.

Those wearing glasses suffer unimaginable pain because the lenses magnify the flash.

Less than two seconds later, a second flash as light trapped behind the blast’s shockwave escapes.

Within ten seconds, a fireball a mile across balloons in every direction. At several thousand degrees Celsius – hotter than the surface of the Sun – it vaporises everything within its path.

Nelson’s Column, the four lions at its base, and the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields are gone in a millisecond. In their place, a crater measuring 600 ft across and 150 ft deep, like the gateway to hell itself, stretches between where the National Gallery and Admiralty Arch once stood.

The Houses of Parliament, the London Eye and half of Mayfair simply cease to exist – reduced to dust and smog. People are obliterated in their tens of thousands.

The pressure wave – an unstoppable battering ram of compressed air travelling at almost 800 mph, faster than the speed of sound – roars through the capital. Anyone within seven miles who hasn’t been immediately killed will have their eardrums burst.

8.09am: One minute after impact, the ‘Heavy Blast radius’ stretches a mile and a quarter from Ground Zero. Within this radius, fatalities are 100 per cent. Even buildings made from reinforced concrete are destroyed, stripped to their foundations, exposing ugly twisted metal.

The so-called ‘Moderate Blast radius’ reaches three miles from Trafalgar Square, as far as Kensington, Camden and Whitechapel. Within this zone, most residential buildings have collapsed; thousands of electrical fires break out in those left standing.

The ‘Light Blast radius’ stretches seven miles, as far as Brentford, Stratford, Wood Green and Wimbledon. Windows have smashed, impaling some of those who were looking out to investigate the mysterious bright flash.

8.10am: Fires are raging across the capital. Half a million Londoners are dead.

8.11am: In a state of shock, the PM considers from the Pindar whether or not to retaliate against Russia, knowing that to launch a counterstrike would mean certain death for countless millions – but not to do so would be a failure of his duty. Communication lines to Washington are downed.

A bottle of single malt whisky, kept in the bunker is opened by the Defence Secretary.

8:12am: In the North Atlantic, one of Britain’s four nuclear-armed Trident submarines is halfway through its nine-month patrol. The Commander receives a message alerting his crew to the strike on London. They attempt to contact Downing Street via a reserved radio frequency. There is no response.

8.13am: Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) emitted by the blast cause voltage surges, destroying components in electrical devices. As the living try to contact loved ones, mobile phones die.

Calls to 999 either fail or go unanswered.

In Soviet Russia, steam trains were kept in case a nuclear attack caused an electrical outage on the rail network. The UK has no such backstop, meaning all rail transport in and out of London has ceased. The roads are choked. Electric cars within 15 miles fail to start: the electromagnetic pulse has rendered them useless.

8.15am: The city’s major hospitals, including St Thomas’ and Chelsea and Westminster have been destroyed. The nearest working hospitals, in Tunbridge, Crawley and Luton, are placed on high alert and begin to prepare for an influx of patients.

8.20am: Radioactive debris begins to rain down on the capital. Composed of displaced earth, building materials, and even vaporised human flesh, the fallout is lethally radioactive and constitutes a major biohazard. It will fall for at least 24 hours.

Anyone who ventures outside will involuntarily inhale the microscopic plutonium, melting the body from the inside out.

Thirty minutes after exposure, Londoners in Richmond and Wembley begin vomiting, closely followed by explosive diarrhoea and a loss of consciousness. An agonising death is hours away.

8.30am: The cloud of radioactive fallout is travelling northeast on the wind; it will reach as far as Norwich before whatever is left settles in the North Sea. Anyone caught outside in East Anglia will inhale fallout. Over the coming months, they will suffer weight loss, internal bleeding, and hair loss. Many will go on to develop deadly cancers.

8.35am: The capital is a death zone. Anyone still alive above ground within two miles of the point of impact has suffered agonising third-degree burns to their skin. Radiation poisoning will likely kill them within hours.

In the Underground network, chaos has broken out. Most of the entrances have been choked shut by falling debris and rubble.

8.45am: The lights have failed and panic breaks out in the dark. The temperature rises among densely packed bodies and with no water, some older people start to pass out, joining those already trampled on train floors and platforms or fallen on the tracks.

8.50am: The Prime Minister orders the army to seal all routes in and out of the capital, turning the M25 into a perimeter fence to prevent the spread of radioactive people and materials. Army personnel are provided with P2-grade face masks and iodine tablets to stop radioactive iodine binding to the thyroid and killing them.

The Prime Minister gives the ‘shoot-to-kill’ order for anyone who tries to cross the perimeter.

9am: An hour after the blast. The BBC’s Wood Norton nuclear bunker in Worcestershire, which has access to super high-frequency satellites, begins transmission. The message is simple across the UK: ‘Go in. Stay in. Tune in.’

9.15am: With ‘crisis management’ already in operation, the Prime Minister initiates the second part of the government’s ‘emergency response protocol’ to a level 3 ‘Catastrophic Emergency’: Consequence Management’.

Military reservists and police officers from outside the Met begin to coordinate the rescue effort for those trapped in the city. The first step will be to set up tents where Londoners can be cleansed of radioactive particles before being evacuated.

9.30am: From the Wood Norton bunker, the BBC broadcasts old recordings, including Vera Lynn, in an attempt to raise morale. The broadcasts are punctuated every 30 seconds by the command to: ‘Go in. Stay in. Tune in.’

10am: Two hours after the blast. Three-quarters of a million Britons are dead. Over two million are seriously injured. The vast majority will never receive the emergency care they need. The government’s priority is to prevent the spread of radioactive fallout. London is a mausoleum.

10.15am: After more than two hours trying to contact the Prime Minister, Trident has received no response. The Commander walks calmly over to a locked console in the corner of the command room and enters the code.

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He withdraws the ‘letter of last resort’ and opens it. Inside is a simple handwritten message. ‘If Britain is attacked and the Prime Minister cannot be located by this Trident submarine, I authorise a retaliatory strike’. Beneath it is the PM’s signature.

Submariners are called to their attack stations. Many believe it to be another drill. But once in place, the 132-strong crew knows this is for real. The Commander picks up the orange trigger, modelled on the grip of a Colt handgun. He nods towards his crew, shuts his eyes and pulls the trigger.

11am: Communications with Washington have been established by satellite phone. The Prime Minister – knowing he will have the US President’s consent – invokes Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. America launches its own attack on Russia from the South China Sea, striking at strategic targets and nuclear launch sites. Russia fails to retaliate with any further nuclear strikes.

Monday, February 3, 2025

8:00am: It’s exactly two weeks since a nuclear bomb struck London. The capital is deathly quiet except for the careful footsteps of hundreds of soldiers dressed in hazmat suits and the rasping sounds of their respirators. It is three days since Army personnel first entered the capital to search for survivors.

In that time, not a single person within a mile of Ground Zero has been found alive. The vast majority were vaporised on impact. Hundreds of thousands more died on the day of the blast from radiation poisoning.

8:15am: At one of 50 ‘Nightingale’ Hospitals set up in the Home Counties to accommodate survivors, doctors are still treating patients for horrific burns and life-changing injuries.

Up to two million people were caught up in the radiation radius of the bomb, and many will go on to develop fatal cancers as a result.

Scientists disagree about when London will be habitable again – if ever. But one thing is for sure: this once great city, founded by the Romans two millennia ago, is now nothing more than a terrible monument to the darkest day in human history.