Much as I respect Lt Col Southby-Tailyour, he seems to overlook a couple of fairly important points:
1. The most prominent supporters of the Vulcan raid were Admirals Lewin, Leach and Woodward. This is a matter of public record.
2. CAS (MRAF Sir Michael Beetham) never claimed that the Vulcan would even hit the runway. He is on record as stating that to close the runway he'd have wanted to use at least 25 Vulcan sorties and preferably 50, and he told the Chiefs of Staff this at the time.
3. The runway was used as an emergency landing ground for damaged Argentine FJ (although the first one to try to use it was the victim of a blue-on-blue)
4. Grupo 8 did not conduct fighter sweeps over the Task Force, having moved out of range of the Task Force. Woodward is on record as having said that the SHAR would have been unable to achieve the effect the Vulcan managed, and that while he obviously doesn't know, he suspects that life for the landing force might have been rather more difficult had the Mirage IIIs not taken their ball off to play elsewhere waiting for an opposition that didn't turn up.
5.
Perhaps the RAF of 1982 had not heard Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher's dictum: "The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility."
This'll be the same RAF led by a man who'd won the DFC for being involved in bombing seven shades of the proverbial out of Germany; which contained a number of very senior officers who'd also done the same thing; which had maintained the nuclear deterrent (not a soft and fluffy thing last time I looked) until 1969, and which still had a nuclear QRA role in 1982, will it?