Keeping a British nuclear Triad

Well if the United Kingdom had room for Thor missile which where not launched from underground silos but instead stored horizontally and erected above ground before firing. Thor missiles were in service with the RAF between 1958 and 1963.

Found this about the Thor missiles in the United kingdom:

The two bases being listed at Grade II are the former RAF North Luffenham in Rutland and RAF Harrington in Northamptonshire. They form part of a chain of cold war sites, some still covered by classified information, many only identified and listed in the past 10 years. The anniversary will also be marked by special events at the York Cold War Bunker, and the cold war tunnels under Dover Castle.

North Luffenham was built as a second world war airbase and selected in 1958 as a main Thor missile site. Harrington was under its command and was armed with Thor missiles in 1959. The missiles were 20 metres long and 2.5 metres in diameter, with a range of 1,500 nautical miles, and 60 were deployed at 20 sites in the east of England under the codename Project Emily. At each base there were specially adapted or newly built hangars to store the missiles, other equipment, fuel, and for maintenance and inspection, protected by earth banks, blast walls, satellite stations, and double wire fences. The missiles were British property, manned by RAF staff trained for the task by the US air force, but the actual nuclear warheads remained under US control.



The Thor missiles could be brought to operational readiness in 15 minutes after receiving the authenticated order to launch, and in October 1962 59 of the 60 missiles were made ready.

- There isn’t enough space for mobile IRBMs in Britain; GLCMs were marginal as it was.
- Silo based missiles (Blue Streak) were planned for RAF Spadeadam initially. However, this issue has been touched upon earlier:

Behold, the HQs of the Thor base clusters:

www.militaryhistories.co.uk/emily

What can we tell about those?
Answer: They are all quite close to the North Sea. Flight time for SLCMs is very, very short and even shorter for some nasty bits of work like the Vodopad. You really, really don’t want to park a substantial portion of your arsenal where they can be neutralised in a strategic knock out blow using tactical weapons. Protecting those sites is going to be expensive and the British defensive capacity has been deliberately worn down since 1957!

- Consider further the 4 minute warning. Actually turning keys and letting missiles fly doesn’t really take a long time - a minute or so. But the other elements of the system really need to be compacted beyond the limit of practicality: The Soviet missiles need to be detected, senior RAF Command notified, they contact the PM and he must instantly make a call. The process that takes a scant 5 minutes for the USA needs to be cut down to 90 seconds.

0000:00 hrs: Detection by RAF Fyllingdales BMEWS
0000:15: Call through to RAF Strike Command United Kingdom Regional Air Operations Centre
0000:30: Call to Secretary of State for Defence
0000:45: He calls the PM
Detection + 1 minute: PM gets the call, under most ideal of circumstances. He needs to make the call on what to do, right there and NOW
0001:15: Hopefully, like the end of Candide, a decision is made if all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Go order sent
0001:30: Launch procedure commences
0002:30: Missiles launched. Yay!

That will give the British IRBMs 90 seconds to get 287.5 miles downrange before the Soviet missiles impact, based on a speed of 11500mph for a Mach 15 IRBM. That may not be enough, depending on what our mates in Moscow pull.

0004:00: Britain gone. Hopefully the X number of IRBMs all get off, hopefully they get clear and hopefully they all work.

What force would be needed? Absolute minimum of 50 missiles, ideally with 3 MIRVs, up to 80-100. Anything at the lower end risks them all being taken out in a preemptive strike (see below) with intense issues on strategic posture.

Is this realistic? You’d need to adopt a virtually instant Launch on Warning strategy, which is problematic in and of itself, and need to have every PM from here to eternity br instantly contactable, not at all indecisive, instantly aware if awoken in the dead of night, not “tired and emotional”, never on holiday, never sick or caught short and never, never more than 1 second away from the decision to launch.

British based missiles have the same type of issue as home based aircraft of Bomber Command after the early 60s in terms of command and control as well as the vulnerability given the geography of the British Isles. Now, there is an option to have a continuous airborne deterrent, but the cost would be utterly eye watering for the British budget level. Unlike the USA and USSR, Britain after 1957 very much takes the view that it is not prepared to pay the price of being a great power, the nuclear age successor to the “price of admiralty”. They wanted and went for minimal deterrence and viewed defence in general as the area to make cuts from to fund domestic political priorities, the mark of a strategically (the atomic weapons meaning) unserious country from the 1950s and 1960s onwards.

Long story short, it isn’t happening due to geography, human and practical limitations, politics and not wanting to pay costs; apart from that, it is all fine and dandy


Now, onto my second bugbear - strategic bombers. That is what they were, not nice conventional bomb trucks. Can we name any country that acquired modern heavy bombers or theatre nuclear strike bombers for absolutely conventional purposes after WW2?

Not the USA, Soviet Union, Britain, France or China. They all built bombers for nuclear missions.
Not Australia. We got the F-111 to nuke Jakarta and hit Red Chinese targets from forward bases with the bombs we were supposed to get from Britain.
Who else is there? Egypt, Iraq and Indonesia got Tu-16s.

In the first case, the timing and target reminds me of ‘Who’s Next’ by Tom Lehrer: “Egypt’s going to get one too, just to use on…you know who.” That ambition was ended by 1967.
In the second instance, the Iraqi quest for the bomb kicked off in 1959, before they got their Badgers. We rightly focus a fair bit on the Saddam years, Osirak and all that, but it didn’t simply burst from the ground. The idea was around before.
Indonesia? www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/72corn.pdf Sukarno had big ambitions across the board…

The US use of the B-52, B-1 and B-2 as conventional bomb trucks is a fortunate side effect of having a bomber force around having developed and purchased it for nuclear purposes. RAF use of Vulcans over the Falklands and Valiants over Egypt is the same thing.

Thus, there is no way in heck that the RAF would be interested in or in any way able to afford the B-1, let alone the B-2. They would need to buy it for the nuclear role, which would involve needing to develop their own expensive stand off weapons

As for ALCMs, Skybolt is still in institutional memory. Putting all of Britain’s eggs in a proposed American airborne weapons system isn’t going to occur. Now, even if it did, it would be a terrible strategic option. It puts the British deterrent on subsonic cruise missiles. They are more vulnerable than ballistic missile in the 1980s, when they would be considered. Polaris, which was less than completely optimal, gives the possibility of putting perhaps 96 warheads downrange, fewer with Chevaline. Not enough for effective deterrence and sub effective deterrence is in many ways worse than none at all.

ALCMs off B-52s were a complex issue, but it was one part of an overall force, and not it’s sole component; not even the only weapon on the B-52, what with gravity bombs and SRAMs. For Britain, it would need to be the whole kit and kaboodle.

Extending the life of the V-Force beyond 1972-75 or so is like pushing ordure uphill with a broken wheelbarrow and the wind blowing in your face. The performance isn’t there, the number of planes to accomodate wastage isn’t there, the time and distance to get the buggers airborne and clear of blast effects isn’t there, the money isn’t there and the weapons aren’t there. Other than that, it would be fine.

Talk of RAF use of Vulcans/Victors in a conventional role and/or British acquisition of B-1s is even more difficult and flying in the face of a whole host of realities. Using heavy bombers for conventional jobs is a luxury only the superpowers could afford, even in theory. Black Buck is the exception that does not prove the rule, but is rather just an exception.



Now that I’ve addressed those two issues:

- Some material I posted back in February in one of my Dark Earth threads -

“I've just been doing a bit of research into Blue Streak and have found some interesting materials which correspond to some of the Dark Earth expanded deployment options:

‘The Air Ministry Requirement that appeared was for a maximum range initially of 1,000 to 1,500nm, then for 1,750 to 2,000nm, but finally with a need for a stretch potential to 2,500nm. An early version of the RAF Requirement also considered deployment of Blue Streak in North Africa. The Australians even considered that it could defend them because, before the 1958 Anglo-American Agreement for Cooperation on the Use of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes, there were signs of the UK's nuclear force becoming a Commonwealth one in conjunction with Canada and Australia.”
(Wayne Reynolds, ‘Whatever happened to the Fourth British Empire? The Cold War, Empire Defence and the USA, 1943-57’ in Michael F. Hopkins, Michael D. Kandiah and Gillian Staerck (eds) Cold War Britain 1945-64: New Perspectives (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp.127-140.)

There is also some interesting yet vague mentions of basing in North Africa and Cyprus.’

Senior Chief, a B1 with a roundel indeed looks good.

   Guys

Senior - 

If you base your ICBMs and planes on an island as small as Ascension or Diego Garcia, you're only compounding the problems of basing your planes/ICBMs in the British Isles, namely, having ludicrously short warning times to flush the bombers or the missiles. 

The Canucks and the Aussies have all this wide open space that's far away from population centers you could put your bomber bases and ICBMs in. What you need to have a survivable deterrent is either the ability to move around without the bad guys knowing where you are (Subs) or a long distance from a probable attack vector (Middle of the Canadian Shield, or in North Dakota) for your ICBMs and land based bombers. Don't get me started on why we base our nuclear deterrent anywhere but the middle of the continent. 

Belushi TD