LONDON — Fancy losing sleep tonight? Just read the U.K. government’s list of all the massive threats it believes are currently facing the U.K.
The U.K. government’s National Risk Register, unveiled Thursday by Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden, sets out key vulnerabilities and threats to the country. And it reveals previously classified information about the U.K. government’s thinking in a bid to encourage firms to up their mitigation strategies.
The register details a total of 89 risks that meet the threshold of potentially having a “substantial impact on the U.K.’s safety, security and/or critical systems at a national level.”
The threat posed to European gas supplies by Russia since its invasion of Ukraine is listed in the register for the first time.
The cheery document states that the “reasonable worst case scenario assumes that war, political upheaval or a more benign cause would significantly disrupt global oil supply, resulting in much higher global prices.”
Artificial intelligence is meanwhile listed as one of four distinct “chronic threats” for the first time — alongside the threats posed by climate change, antimicrobial resistance and serious organized crime.
The government says that while AI systems “present many opportunities,” there are a “range of potential risks and there is uncertainty about its transformative impact.”
Also making its doom-list debut are undersea telecommunications cables, which the government warns are vulnerable to attack. And the report also touches on the remote — but potentially damaging — threat of drone attacks on U.K. infrastructure.
Just to lighten the mood, the document flags a “significant” chance — meaning a probability of between 5 and 25 percent that it will actually happen — of a “nuclear miscalculation not involving the U.K.”
That refers to the risk a state will mistakenly understand the intentions of another country and respond by launching nuclear weapons.
If this happened, the report warns that the “impacts in the affected region would be catastrophic, particularly in terms of casualties and fatalities” — while also leading to famine, hugely increased migration, and a dramatic increase in food prices across the rest of the world.
“The first duty of government is to keep people safe,” Dowden told Sky News Thursday as he unveiled the plan.
He’s currently filling in for his boss Rishi Sunak, who is off to Disneyland California as Brits contemplate their own doom.