23 JULY

CHURCHILL SUGGESTS THREATENING NUCLEAR ATTACKS ON RUSSIAN CITIES

[ 23 July 1945 ]

Prime Minister Winston Churchill had just been informed of the first successful American testing of an atomic bomb in New Mexico when on 23 July 1945, while having lunch with his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden and three leading Chiefs of Staff, he suddenly suggested threatening nuclear attacks on Russian cities. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke remarked in his diaries that Churchill seemed ‘completely carried away’ and ‘pushing his chin out and scowling,’ boasted ‘now we could say that if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Kharkov, Sebastopol etc etc.’¹

SHELL PRESSURES BRITAIN TO BACK A COUP IN OMAN

[ 23 July 1970 ]

On 23 July 1970, the British government backed a coup in Oman to install the Sultan’s son, Qaboos, after they became increasingly worried of ‘loosing’ the oil rich Dhofar province of Oman to a popular insurgency by leftist rebels.

MI6 HEAD EXPLAINS THE NEED TO DECEIVE THE PUBLIC OVER IRAQ WMD

[ 23 July 2002 }

On returning from Washington on 23 July 2002, the MI6 head, Richard Dearlove, was summoned by Blair to join a hastily arranged meeting in the Prime Minister’s office with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon,  Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson, Chief of the Joint Intelligence Committee John Scarlett and Chief of the Decence Staff Admiral Mike Boyce.

THE UK ADMITS IT HAS PERSONNEL IN SAUDI ARABIA IN THE TARGETING ROOMS, IMPLICATING ITSELF IN WAR CRIMES

[ 23 July 2018 ]

On 23 July 2018, Alistair Burt, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, in a carefully crafted and considered response to a question from Labour MP Keith Vaz, admitted that British military personnel in Saudi Arabia did have ‘access’ to the ‘targeting rooms’ directing Saudi air strikes against Yemen.  It was a frank admission of Britain’s involvement in Saudi Arabia’s unsanctioned and illegal bombing of the country, which since 2015 had directly caused the deaths of over 10,000 Yemenis, most of them civilians, and which, together with a naval blockade, soon created what the UN declared was the ‘world’s worst humanitarian crisis,’ with over 8 million people facing famine. There was not a single article in the UK’s mainstream press, in the following days, mentioning the shocking revelation.²

FOOTNOTES

1. Winston Churchill cited in Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939-45, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001, p. 709.
2. Yemen – Military Intervention. Written Question – 163751 accessed online – https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-question/Commons/2018-07-13/163751/

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