[genericpseudo]

The Shipping Forecast is a very significant cultural reference in the UK. It crops up all over the place. Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea. It's as iconic as, I don't know, Thanksgiving football in the US; it's a thing everyone knows about without explanation.

This is from an album which sold over 1.2m copies in the UK; one of the biggest records of the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD8gO8TAr4s

[PaulRobinson]

And the music that runs up against it at night, Sailing Away, equally important reference. The nights I lay there, imagining the storms out there, particularly when depressed and alone, listening to the post-midnight "ceremonies" including the national anthem and lulled off to sleep before the World Service crept onto the airwaves... so many nights. It really is a part of me in some ways.

It's interesting to me just how important BBC Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service), on which it is broadcast, is and has been to our collective culture.

It's now seen in a more middle-class "sniffy" light - Radio 4 listeners are a certain "type", but think what it's given us:

- It's where The Goons became famous: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Seacombe defined a certain age of comedy and inspired Monty Python and others.

- Mornington Crescent is ironically one of the most iconic stations on the London Underground thanks to the game from the R4 show

- All of Churchill's war-time speeches were broadcast there first

- In the event of the death of the Queen, it will be announced first on the 8am Radio 4 news broadcast the following day (I'm not sure that can work in the modern era, but there we are)

- Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave

That's just off the top of my head.

[sandworm101]

>> Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave

It is one of many factors. Shutting down Radio 4 will not send the subs into attack mode. I do laugh every time I read about the "hand written" part. The assumption is that PMs are unable to use typewriters. Anything typed would therefore have been handled by their secretaries/PAs, making them a target. I have this image in my head of a sub captain not being able to read the PM's handwriting. These are embellished protections generated by novelists.

[arethuza]

I'm pretty sure Peter Hennessy was one of the first to report on the nature of Letters of Last Resort and I'd be inclined to believe his account.

Having them handwritten seems entirely appropriate to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hennessy

NB Hennessy is obviously well in with the Navy - he has attended during the Perisher course - maybe an advantage to be being a historian who is also a Peer!

[sandworm101]

Be wary of believing any account when it comes to nuclear weapons procedures. There is much misinformation. Changes happen all the time. Some of the public stories have been adopted strait from fiction. The letters have been the subject of so many spy thrillers they are now more myth than functional.

The very concept of the letters presupposes that sub crews have full control over their missiles, that they can fire them based on instructions in a hand-written letter. That does not mesh with the safeguards surrounding other weapons that require external command/codes prior to launch.

[arethuza]

It's also fairly well documented that UK Trident sub warheads do not have Permissive Action Links - the crews of the subs do indeed have the ability to launch without receiving any codes.

The justification for this is pretty simple - timing. In the event of a launch from a likely enemy (the Soviet Union in the bad old days) there simply wasn't enough time to guarantee that a code be transmitted before weapons bursting.

[dragonwriter]

> The very concept of the letters presupposes that sub crews have full control over their missiles, that they can fire them based on instructions in a hand-written letter. That does not mesh with the safeguards surrounding other weapons that require external command/codes prior to launch.

The whole point of the submarine component of the strategic triad is to be the ultimate guarantor of MAD by presenting the capacity for launching a retaliatory strike in the event of sudden destruction of the highest command authorities (and, potentially, the land-based components of the triad), so it is absolutely plausible that submarines have a looser set of controls than bombers and land-based missiles because otherwise there would be no point in having them.

[arethuza]

And in the case of the UK we don't have a triad - just the 4 Vanguard-class boats.

[zeristor]

And Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

V. Important

[Theodores]

Sailing By, not 'away'...

It is there to pad out the schedule and help people to find Radio 4 on a crowded night-time dial. Same with the National Anthem that follows. Even the 'pips' are there for this type of calibration, a tuning in to a British person's 'Britishness'.

The way that the BBC is deeply woven into the British establishment and armed forces is obvious yet not so obvious. The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service, as per 'Better Call Saul'/'Breaking Bad' some content overlaps but the 'producers' are one and the same.

You should never believe that the BBC is independently funded and free from some capitalist proprietor controlling what you think, it really is an organ of the British military industrial complex. Anyone 'socialist' gets weeded out by the very real 'Room 101'.

Radio 4 is the true voice of establishment, and this differs slightly from the clowns of the day that happen to be in parliament. If you listen carefully then you can glean facts on BBC Radio 4 that are not presented on the TV news or written to paper, an off-hand comment here or there on an odd-hour Radio 4 program sneaks through when the rest of the world are self-censoring themselves during a crisis.

When BBC Radio 4 rolls over and defaults to Number 10 propaganda without being honest, e.g. asserting that Russians are poisoning people in the UK without any 'alleged' or 'suspected' style words to distance fiction from fact, then that is when the folks in the submarine should go for the envelope...

[isostatic]

> The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service

BFBS was established in 1943

The BBC was founded in 1922

Which BBC Room 101 are you asserting is "very real"?

[arethuza]

I believe the original Room 101 was just a meeting room in where Blair had to sit through boring meetings.

[isostatic]

Blair?

Allegedly Orwell named Room 101 after a meeting room in BBC Broadcasting House that no longer exists.

[arethuza]

George Orwell was Eric Blair's pen name.

[dalore]

That's funny, my conservative friends say that the BBC is biased and full of lefties against the government.

[fanf2]

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737

[JdeBP]

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013325 .

[js2]

I grew up in Miami. I can't imagine living more than a few hours drive from the ocean. So I sort of understand. FWIW, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and other island-living Americans probably get it too. :-)

[ksdale]

I grew up very near the Puget Sound in Washington state, and I feel the same way!

I just did a bit of research and discovered that in 2010, 39% of Americans lived in a coastal county. Given that many counties are rather small, especially on the East Coast, I wouldn't be surprised if as many as 50 or 60% of Americans lived within 70 miles of the coast.

[dmd]

> Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea.

In 2010, 123 million Americans, or 39 percent of the nation’s population lived in counties directly on the ocean.

There's only 53 million people living in Britain total.