Nuclear Weapons
This website is intended to be a source of reliable material never before catalogued in one place. Almost all will be based on research in archived official documents now declassified after the end of the Cold War and assistance provided by other researchers, for who's help and encouragement I am grateful; especially Dr Richard Moore of the Mountbatten Centre for International Studies at the University of Southampton, Alex Wellerstein of the History of Science Department at Harvard University, and Chris Gibson. Without their generous help and encouragement, and the encouragement offered by Professor Jack Harris MBE, FRS, a former editor of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, this website would not exist. Thanks are also extended to the helpful staff at The National Archives, London; and for The National Archives permission to use my photographs of their copyright material. Thanks to their generosity, in most cases readers can see the original source material at footnote. Re-users should assiduously attribute the copyright of those documents to The National Archives.
Thus far, only the
V to W section is completed. There does seem to be quite a lot on
WE177.
The discussion of the use of primaries and secondaries of the same basic design in different warheads, and the different test phillosophy to that of the US, flys in the face of the opinion of those commentators who insist that WE177 must have been a copy of a US design.
In the early 1990's some writers asserted that the WE.177A design was based on the US B57 bomb,9 which was of a similar size, weight, yield and purpose, and that speculation has been widely repeated elsewhere. The B57 also functioned as a NDB, and it used the W-44 Tsetse/Tony boosted fission warhead rejected by the British for their RE.179 primary. It is also true that the British had access to its design and planned to manufacture it in the UK for various purposes. However, since the early 1990's, many secret files have been declassified, and these make it clear that the claims about a common design were merely speculation and wrong.
Some writers made the assertion9 that because the British conducted so few full-scale nuclear tests, WE.177 was unlikely to be an indigenous design. That it must, by a curious extension of that logic, be an American design, the closest being the B57, while failing to understand that the WE.177 fission element was one of a 'family' of designs, deliberately similar, intended to produce a 'common design', usable with only minor changes, in a variety of applications from Skybolt, Polaris, Blue Water and WE.177. As it indeed was, and so a single series of only four full-scale underground nuclear tests were necessary, plus one failed test.10,11 There were four other [nuclear] 'effects' tests conducted in the US, and numerous non-nuclear 'scaled' tests in the UK. Hardly a small testing programme for a single fission device. In fairness to those writers, it may not have been so apparent then as now, after numerous declassifications of archived documents.
Such speculation also fails to take into account the cultural and financial differences between the US and British nuclear programmes. The early US programme was over-reliant on full-scale testing because of the extreme urgency attached to its very large programme.