While the 70's & early 80s RAF certainly had a great number of very capable aircraft, didn't the Falklands War reveal that there was a severe lack of weaponry to hang off pylons? Wasn't it the case that the Black Buck raids required every single available 1,000 lb iron bomb in the RAF's inventory? And that the the USA supplied the modern sidewinders - while presumably the Phantom QRAs were still using the old models?
Apart from the nuclear capability, could the RAF of that period have fought a sustained conventional war (unlikely though that prospect would have been), with such small stocks of modern conventional weapons?