FOR decades exercises have been carried out to ensure the emergency services are prepared to cope with a major disaster.

From air crashes and bombs to nuclear incidents, scenarios were devised and played out, often with the help of volunteers posing as casualties with realistic injuries.

Some exercises were part of the country's civil defence when the threat of a nuclear war was very real - an age when teachers drilled pupils to take shelter under their desks and children grew up with knowledge of the four-minute warning.

Often the emergency services being tested had no warning, including one 1981 mock disaster featured here involving an aircraft that had supposedly crashed at Hullavington, littering the airfield with debris and casualties.