Civil servants prepared 'Queen's speech' for outbreak of World War Three "Not for a single moment did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall to me," it continues. The Queen was also to speak of her fears for her son Prince Andrew, who was a Royal Navy pilot at the time. "My husband and I share with families up and down the land the fear we feel for sons and daughters, husbands and brothers who have left our side to serve their country," she would say. The speech, contained in secret files released by the National Archives today under the new 20-year rule, is a reminder of how seriously the possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was taken at the highest levels of Government in the early Eighties. It was one of the key elements of the carefully timetabled march to war documented in the exercise, beginning with a "new hard-line leadership" coming to power in 1982, a clear reference to Yuri Andropov's election as Soviet leader the previous November. The documents from the war game in March 1983 carefully avoided any explicit reference to the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact powers, instead referring to the aggressor as "Orange." The progress of the war was detailed in a series of fictional newspaper reports, including one carrying a picture of Prince William - who was nine months old at the time - at his christening under the headline: "Keep him safe Charlie, we will be needing him!" The exercise concluded with Britain announcing it was about to use its nuclear weapons against enemy military targets and the "Orange" leader asking for peace talks. The war game was carried out at the height of the Cold War when there were genuine fears that tensions between the US and the Soviet Union would lead to a nuclear attack. The bi-annual Nato exercises were cancelled in 1990 as changes in the former Eastern Bloc made the situation increasingly unrealistic. Buckingham Palace said it could not comment on whether the Queen had seen the speech, adding that she regularly received a "significant number" of government papers. Another file reveals that Cold War-era British prime ministers were faced with a key decision the moment they took office: who should take over the running of the country if they were killed in a Soviet nuclear strike. Freshly-appointed prime ministers were asked to nominate up to three senior ministers as "nuclear deputies" to be given the authority to make decisions about using atomic weapons if the premier "should not be available." The new prime ministers also had to write secret instructions telling commanders of the Polaris nuclear submarines what to do if Britain was obliterated and they were left as the sole surviving remnant of the state. Details of the first briefing given to incoming premiers are revealed in secret documents prepared before the 1983 general election, in case Labour or the SDP-Liberal Alliance had defeated Margaret Thatcher. The documents also recount how all the locks on US nuclear weapons based in Britain had to be changed after an RAF technician discovered that his launch key also fitted in the slot reserved for an American operator. 'This solemn and awful duty': the Queen's wartime broadcast in full