Although considerable effort still went into secret construction of military citadels under London, the solution was to disperse the machinery of government into small pieces in the provinces, where there would be a greater chance of survival.
[2] Experiments along these lines had taken place during the Second World War, when a system of regional commissioners existed and key departments were moved out of London to Bath, Harrogate and Cheltenham, among others.
[citation needed] The Civil Defence Corps was revived in 1948 by Act of Parliament, and the next year it was decided to construct a network of two-storey, hardened war rooms built on government sites and with concrete walls ranging from five to seven feet thick.
The war rooms were built too close to major population centres, and with a staff of only 45, were insufficient for the dispersed network that civil defence planners then thought would be required.
The RSGs entered public consciousness: evidently, the government was spending large amounts of taxpayers' money to protect itself while doing nothing for the mass of the population who faced annihilation in a nuclear war.
Use of the following extant buildings was proposed: Plans on this scale proved over-ambitious, and some of these SRCs (Devizes, Elvaston, Worcester) never had protected accommodation built.
Soon after becoming prime minister in 1964, Harold Wilson vetoed the building the new RSGs which the Home Office wanted and for which detailed estimates existed.
Regional seats of government would not now be hardened structures and would be established as soon as possible after attack, under prearranged plans at locations that would be selected in the light of circumstances.
A review in 1980 called for the network to be recast as Regional Government Headquarters (RGHQ), which would be equipped with up-to-date communications and either based on the existing SRCs or housed in completely new accommodation.
The final shape of secret dispersed regional government in the UK was: By 1992, the end of the Cold War, brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union, meant this network was now a luxury.