The RAF Accepts Its First Atom Bomb

[ColinB]

On 7th November 1953, three months after the detonation of the first Russian H-bomb, the first British atom bomb was issued to the RAF at Wittering It was 5 feet in diameter, 24 feet long, weighed 10,000lbs and was called Blue Danube. Its size was determined by current technology and the V-bombers bomb-bays were designed to carry it. It was planned to manufacture 20 more before the end of 1954.
We did not have any current aircraft capable of carrying this monster until the Valiant entered operational service with 138 Squadron in 1955/56.
This raises a number of questions about its inception. Which unit at Wittering accepted the first weapon? Was there a secure unit on site? Were the other 20 also stored there? Who flew the first aircraft armed with an active weapon? Were difficulties experienced in loading it into operational aircraft? I understand the weapons originally issued did not have their bomb casings tested until 1956 at Maralinga. Were the squadrons flying with untested units?
There must be some people personally involved at all levels in this fascinating period who are still out there.

[tornadoken]

WIP, Brian Burnell's site: nuclear-weapons.info (http://www.nuclear-weapons.info/vw.htm)

Blue Danube had many limitations and was phased out of production after Sandys did the US 3/57 and 8/58 Collaboration Agreements. Wynn, a deliberately hard read to get past censors, has: "RAF had an atomic bombing capability from July,1955...with the conjunction of BC Armament School, No.1321 Flight and No.138 Sqdn. at Wittering" so "had an emergency arisen in mid-1955, (BD) could have been deployed operationally" (P.98). First live drop, by 49 Sqdn as Trials Unit, was 11/10/56; 138 Sqdn/Valiant with 8 Bombs then became atomic-operational with Sqdn, not instructor, personnel, and with Approved tools and manuals, progressively through 1957. 83 Sqdn Vulcan 1/Waddington from 21/5/57, 10 Sqdn Victor 1/Cottesmore from 1/5/58. They shared (Burnell: 20, me: 24) Bombs to 8/60. 15 Sqdn/Victor 1 shared Cottesmore's 8, and 49 Sqdn Valiant/Wittering took Waddington's 8 from 21/10/58 after 83 Sqdn took US Mk.5.

Bombs were held at Supplementary Storage Areas on the RAF Stations, and at 94MU/Barnham and 92MU/Faldingworth. For more, find Wynn.

[Tim McLelland]

... but beware that some of the info in the Wynn book isn't strictly accurate...

[Blacksheep]

Were the squadrons flying with untested units?Except at the test range the weapons were never flown. Aircraft on QRA were loaded with live weapons but would only have flown in the event of war.

It was 5 feet in diameter, 24 feet long, weighed 10,000lbs and was called Blue DanubeYellow Sun was no shrinking violet either, but the WE177s were no bigger than a 1,000 pounder.

[814man]

Quote
"Bombs were held at Supplementary Storage Areas on the RAF Stations, and at 94MU/Barnham and 92MU/Faldingworth."

For anyone who wants to see what these, and some of the other storage sites look like now, (well in 2000/01 to be precise) see here.
Flickr: 814man's Photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sd814)
Pictures were taken by me to record the closure of the ASU Unit at Wittering and the ending of the RAF full time involvement with nuclear weapons, as part of a joint project with English Heritage and Air Historical Branch.

[phil gollin]

Quote :

... but beware that some of the info in the Wynn book isn't strictly accurate...

unquote


I hope that those inaccuracies are due to OPSEC reasons not actual errors ???????

.

[forget]

I posted this earlier on the 'Did you fly the Vulcan' thread. It may be of interest here. 1964.

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1964/1964%20-%200386.html

[Tim McLelland]

Not sure what the reasons for the various mistakes are but errerors are certainly there. Guess it's inevitable with a book that relies on so many documents, some of which doubtless conflict with each other.

814man you have some brilliant images there!

Blacksheep, I must find-out some more about Shrinking Violet...:)

[Blacksheep]

I must find-out some more about Shrinking Violet...Oh good; somebody noticed. Try asking around down the club ;)

While you're at it, ask Jones about the green, green grass of home. :}

[Tim McLelland]

Think I read something about it in the local Herald recently. Love that orange paper they use...

[4Greens]

When did the Royal Navy get its first nuke?

[Blacksheep]

That depends upon how you look at it. They used one to sink the Prinz Eugen, but that was just testing... ;)

[tornadoken]

4Greens: See: R.Moore, RN and Nuclear Weapons,Harwood,2001. P190: Scimitar/Sea Vixen FAW.2 were store-cleared August,1960 for catapult launch, not arrested landing. 3 Red Beard Mk.1 were loaned in 1960, and 5 assigned in 1962 for “emergency use only”. Red Beard Mk.2(RN) went to sea on Ark, Buccaneer S.1, 19/2/63.
E.J.Grove,Vanguard to Trident, Bodley Head,1987,P.384 has “2 doz. or so” Mk.57/NDB on Sea King/Lynx HAS.2/3, 1969-11/91.

[4Greens]

Tornadoken, thanks for that will check.

[Blacksheep]

I was under the impression that from the late sixties the RN had quite a few WE177s for use as helicopter-delivered nuclear depth charges?

[bri21]

4Greens & Tornadoken I'd be inclined to accept the account by Richard Moore as the most accurate. Have collaborated with him and am confident he is about right.

The first RB's deployed to sea aboard modernised HMS Victorious. Don't have a date readily to hand.

The other ref was published a long, long time ago when there was no info in the public domain on this topic other than disinfo and speculation. Dr Eric Groves is a distinguished academic, but on this ocassion he got it wrong. Neither Sea King nor naval Lynx ever carried the US B57 bomb. Only WE.177A. Lots of PRO material supports that. The Navy were unwilling to agree to carry US weapons custodians on HM Ships. Lots of evidence for that. Another factor was that the US weapon could only be used in area in support of NATO, whereas RN ships were expected to deploy worldwide at no-notice, as with the Falklands campaign.

RAF Nimrods did carry the B57. These were stored under USMC guard at RAF St Mawgan, Cornwall, where weapons were also stored for Dutch Navy MPA. Another weapons store for RAF Nimrods was at Signorella, Sicily. See here nuclear-weapons.info (http://www.nuclear-weapons.info/vw.htm#_note-808) (WE.176 footnote 8) and http://nuclear-weapons.info/images/tna-defe24-691e28_06.JPG

Enough for now ... :mad:

[bri21]

Blacksheep:

43 actually old chap. Another 20 were handed over to the RAF with the RN Buccs, but the weapons were completely interchangable.

Not many people kno this, but the RAF never wanted WE.177A. They fought tooth and nail for a much bigger yield of approx 200 kt. It was down to the NATO assigned targets for TSR2. RAF said these targets needed a bigger bomb, but politicos said no. Culprit was SuperMac who limited them to 10 kt, and the Navy were happy with that, but the RAF began to study stick-bombing with up to four WE.177A on TSR2.

Sourced from recently declassified PRO documents.

[bri21]

4Greens & Tornadoken I'd be inclined to accept the account by Richard Moore as the most accurate. Have collaborated with him and am confident he is about right.

The first RB's deployed to sea aboard modernised HMS Victorious. Don't have a date readily to hand.

The other ref was published a long, long time ago when there was no info in the public domain on this topic other than disinfo and speculation. Dr Eric Groves is a distinguished academic, but on this ocassion he got it wrong. Neither Sea King nor naval Lynx ever carried the US B57 bomb. Only WE.177A. Lots of PRO material supports that. The Navy were unwilling to agree to carry US weapons custodians on HM Ships. Lots of evidence for that. Another factor was that the US weapon could only be used in area in support of NATO, whereas RN ships were expected to deploy worldwide at no-notice, as with the Falklands campaign.

RAF Nimrods did carry the B57. These were stored under USMC guard at RAF St Mawgan, Cornwall, where weapons were also stored for Dutch Navy MPA. Another weapons store for RAF Nimrods was at Signorella, Sicily. See here nuclear-weapons.info (http://www.nuclear-weapons.info/vw.htm#_note-808) and http://nuclear-weapons.info/images/tna-defe24-691e28_06.JPG

Enough for now ... :mad:

[ColinB]

After the Depression, the struggle to recover from it in the 1930s and WWII we, as a nation, were broke when the GEN 75 discussions concerning the building of a UK Atomic Bomb took place in 1945/6.
The powerful arguments concerning the apportioning of major units of man-power and resources, the use of 5% of the nations electricity supplies to drive the gaseous diffusion plant and the need to acquire large quantities of uranium had great momentum until Ernest Bevin famously stated “That won’t do at all….we’ve got to have this…..I don’t mind for myself, but I don’t want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State of the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We’ve got to have this thing over here no matter what it costs….We’ve got to have the Bloody Union Jack on top of it” and he took the day.
The subsequent scramble by the Civil Servants who ran our project to put together enough plutonium to enable the testing at Monte Bello Island on 3rd October 1952 of our first atomic device was one of the last demonstrations of our industrial might but at a great and damaging cost.
The financial cost of the atomic energy program in the period 1946 to 1952 was £104.7 million (mostly concealed in the budget statements) and there was a major re-direction of supplies, construction materials, building personnel, key scientists and technicians to build Harwell, Risley, Calder Hall, Aldermaston, Windscale and Dounreay. This investment was made at a time when the country really needed to apply all of its resources in re-building a war-torn and ravaged country.
Was it really worth such a price in such parlous times to “get a seat at the top table”?
It seems to me that such a great sacrifice resulting in one gigantic, untested and unusable device being sent by lorry to a concrete hut at RAF Wittering on 7th November 1953 (the first operational aircraft did not arrive at Wittering until July 1956) was not our finest hour.
It was known that we would need to manufacture H-bombs to maintain our posture but we continued to build 58 Blue Danubes at the 10Kton level. I understand they were to be used to bomb Russian airfields, so we were considering pre-emptive air strikes even in the mid-1950s
Having said all of that I do understand that the RAF people involved in the handling of the first bombs in whatever capacity must have been the brightest and the best and it is their story I am trying to bring to light.

[bri21]

:=I don't think that political posturing is the best way to get their co-operation. What you have to remember is that everyone has their political prejudices. Not all will read your pre-prepared agenda and will want to help you make the facts fit your version of events. Respectable researchers try to do it the other way around.

On the narrower topic of Ernest Bevin .... the quote you attribute is not found in any printed record of those Cabinet committees, and I have searched diligently for them, and read the boring lot.

Where they are found is in the verbal recollections of an aging civil servant, recorded fifty years after the event by an academic. The civil servant did not record this material in writing at the time, or at any later time. While I have great respect for Professor Peter Hennessy, he himself would be the first to acknowledge that his writings on this event were no more that a populist political polemic for a newspaper.

As for the old man's recollections of fifty years ago, try thinking of it in this way. An identification by an old man at a police ID parade held fifty years after the event would be abolutely worthless as reliable evidence in any courtroom.

BTW. You rather give away the game you play by confusing Blue Danube with an H-bomb in the same sentence. Then you refer to 'one gigantic device sent by lorry to a concrete hut ...' Well ... it was not one gigantic device, nor was it sent by lorry in that condition. It does seem that the source material freely available at the PRO has not been read by you. Had you done that first your elementary mistakes would not have appeared here. And there is a broader point to this. How can you seriously expect those like me who worked painstakingly on this device to design it, to keep you safe from it, yet have it available for use if needed, ever trust a person who fails to research properly, and gets his facts so wrong? Had I and my many colleagues been so lax in our standards you might well be buried under a heap of self-inflicted radioactive ash.

[Yellow Sun]

I understand they were to be used to bomb Russian airfields, so we were considering pre-emptive air strikes even in the mid-1950s


I very much doubt that at that time we had sufficient intelligence to identify counterforce targets with any reasonable level of confidence. The only "realistic" and credible national strategy was countervalue, i.e. population and manufacturing. In later years, when integrated into the SACEUR Plan, what you say is closer to the mark; in terms of targeting but not timing; even then the national plan would have still relied upon a countervalue threat.

YS

[tornadoken]

ColinB: Was it really worth such a price. You have placed this Q in its correct historical context, not from hindsight or from a CND stand. Proper Q.

Truman, mantle of FDR and aware of the wider world, was going to lose Nov.48 Election to isolationist trade barons (see the photo of a paper's headline early on the night, saying he had, held up by a grinning, surprised HST). We liked the Asst.SecState, Dean Acheson (the fellow just as urbane as Eden), but he, too, knew his lot would lose and returned to his law firm in 1947. So, just us, then v.Uncle Joe and his shenanigans. We thought he would have the Bomb by about 1955, so Attlee accepted so too must we, after HST signed on to the MacMahon Act, August,1946, which denied us access to "our" Bomb. Sir W.Penney put his team together from May,1947 - it included his Manhattan colleague, K.Fuchs, Stalin's man.

Ike chose to rescind MacMahon as affecting UK in 1957, and thereafter UK carried loan or adapted US stores. The Official position is that we had earned the right to that special treatment, and on to Joint Target Policy Committees, because we had got stuck in, solo, spending heavily in recognition of the common Threat. Hard, I suggest, for us quiet perusers to gainsay that judgement. It's really not open to proof, for, or against. Staying in the business through 2 generations of SSBN, and now talking of a third, is more of the same: the savings we would take from exit are (merely a few) £billions, and aren't we now blase about those numbers; the risk is of cold draughts if we found ourselves at High Noon, all alone. France, also denied by MacMahon access to Joliot/Curies' Bomb, did it all near-solo, so even more expensively as a GDP %, for the same reason. She chose not to be SIOP-integrated, but to point a tous azimuts. The Bomb is like the wife: hard to live with, harder without.

[Tim McLelland]

I've never heard the notion before that we were ever in the business of considering pre-emptive strikes. Some well-known American characters did of course but I don't think that was something that Britain was ever keen to consider. Given our relative lack of nuclear clout and out geographical position, it would have been suicidal.

I seem to recall quite a lot of surprise when papers emerged post reunification which indicated that the Soviets had certainly considered a pre-emptive strike though.

[phil gollin]

I desparately try not to become a member of a "conspiracy theory" - but I certainly do NOT believe a lot of what is written about the immediate post-war nuclear (or rather then "atomic") relations between the UK and USA.

It is inconceivable to me that the MacMahon Act went through without strong representations from both the British Ambassador to the US and from the British government directly. The idea that Trueman never realised that the Act went directly against the Quebec Agreement is just plain silly.

Likewise the idea that somehow a magic wand was waved in 1958 I also find suspicious (but I can't pin that down to anything).

.

[Dr Jekyll]

As a matter of interest, what kind of target could be destroyed by a 200 KT bomb as opposed to a 10 KT one?

How large a bomb would you need for a typical military airfield for example?

[bri21]

As a matter of interest, what kind of target could be destroyed by a 200 KT bomb as opposed to a 10 KT one?

How large a bomb would you need for a typical military airfield for example?

The short answer is I don't know. Only the target planners would be able to give a sensible answer. We could ask the question a little differently as "why did the RAF need to use 1'000 bombers to raid Cologne? Wouldn't 900 be sufficient?" The answer is self-evident - no one knows, so its no more than a judgement call.

And tactical targets in Europe were determined by SACEUR, not the RAF, and when SACEUR said "these are the targets", the maths determined the yields required.

The RAF requirement for yields up to 200 kt was written up in OR.1177 and OR.1176 in 1960. An upper limit to yield of 200 kt was set by agreement within NATO to set a limit to yield for TNWs. The RAF did get their way eventually, but ten years later in the mid-1970's, with deployment of WE.177C at 190 kt, just within the NATO 200 kt limit.

[ColinB]

Wow! To address this logically
I don't think that political posturing is the best way to get their co-operation. What you have to remember is that everyone has their political prejudices. Not all will read your pre-prepared agenda and will want to help you make the facts fit your version of events. Respectable researchers try to do it the other way around.
I don't know what this means
On the narrower topic of Ernest Bevin .... the quote you attribute is not found in any printed record of those Cabinet committees, and I have searched diligently for them, and read the boring lot.
Where they are found is in the verbal recollections of an aging civil servant, recorded fifty years after the event by an academic. The civil servant did not record this material in writing at the time, or at any later time. While I have great respect for Professor Peter Hennessy, he himself would be the first to acknowledge that his writings on this event were no more that a populist political polemic for a newspaper.
It seems Hennessey also put it in a book Cabinets and the Bomb
Are Cabinet Committee Minutes verbatim?
As for the old man's recollections of fifty years ago, try thinking of it in this way. An identification by an old man at a police ID parade held fifty years after the event would be abolutely worthless as reliable evidence in any courtroom.
I will try to contact Peter Hennessey
BTW. You rather give away the game you play by confusing Blue Danube with an H-bomb in the same sentence.
Please read it again the point was that Russia had just detonated an H-bomb so our A bombs were redundant.
Then you refer to 'one gigantic device sent by lorry to a concrete hut ...' Well ... it was not one gigantic device, nor was it sent by lorry in that condition.
I think any rational person would consider something 24x5 feet and weighing 10,000 lbs as large.
It does seem that the source material freely available at the PRO has not been read by you. Had you done that first your elementary mistakes would not have appeared here.
Which elementary mistakes? Which source material? Quote your references
How can you seriously expect those like me who worked painstakingly on this device to design it, to keep you safe from it, yet have it available for use if needed, ever trust a person who fails to research properly, and gets his facts so wrong? Had I and my many colleagues been so lax in our standards you might well be buried under a heap of self-inflicted radioactive ash
I have visions here of Dr Strangelove. However this is my best answer
I do not have an agenda. You do not know what my politics are and you do not know if I am/was a CND supporter and even if I was I would still be entitled to my opinion.
I believe that Britain would have built an A-bomb irrespective of political parties or personalities. We were a major power and we expected Russia to have the bomb in 1949/50.
It was decided to build it by a socialist government and they did the right thing painful as it probably was to them.
As I looked back it seemed relevant, taking a detached view to ask if it was cost effective in the context of the times.
Once we were on the horse we could not dismount it and I personally would, if asked, have supported all upgrades up to the current date. It does give us a place at the top tables above the salt.
I have a modest knowledge on the genesis of nuclear weapons from the 1920s to the present day. I was unaware of the delivery of our A-bomb in 1953 (Coronation year) to the RAF and I am interested in this period. I was looking for information.
For your info we have a Management Consultant assigned to us at the TNA and a Professor who does our TNA research as he has a home in Kew.
I would welcome any information available about the period of the delivery of the first bomb in 1953 and its issue to Squadrons in 1956. Either side of that is well documented.

[bri21]

I
Quote:
don't think that political posturing is the best way to get their co-operation. What you have to remember is that everyone has their political prejudices. Not all will read your pre-prepared agenda and will want to help you make the facts fit your version of events. Respectable researchers try to do it the other way around.

I don't know what this means

I believe its meaning is clear enough to those who read it and are familiar with the nuances. It makes very clear that there is an agenda into which you seek to shoehorn the facts. I'd like to keep this civilised, but since you raised the matter of CND I feel free to comment on that. At no time did I suggest that you were a member or supporter, but the language used is a reliable enough indicator to identify a political perspective. And I believe that pushing that agenda on what is on-the-face-of-it a non-political forum. I also noted the tasteless comment made on another topic (Linton) in which you inappropriately linked the serious burns suffered by a young trainee pilot that resulted from a thoughtless prank, to the napalming of Iraqis. That was sufficient to judge your perspective. http://www.pprune.org/military-aircrew/306123-l-i-n-t-o-n-2.html. Note that I also do research at Kew and elsewhere, and as a former elected officer of CND in the 1980's I can also recognize the language.

Quote:
On the narrower topic of Ernest Bevin .... the quote you attribute is not found in any printed record of those Cabinet committees, and I have searched diligently for them, and read the boring lot.
Where they are found is in the verbal recollections of an aging civil servant, recorded forty years after the event by an academic. The civil servant did not record this material in writing at the time, or at any later time. While I have great respect for Professor Peter Hennessy, he himself would be the first to acknowledge that his writings on this event were no more that a populist political polemic for a newspaper.
It seems Hennessey also put it in a book Cabinets and the Bomb
Are Cabinet Committee Minutes verbatim?

I restate for those hard of hearing. This remark, and nothing remotely like it, appears in the Cabinet minutes you refer to. Not surprising really, since GEN 75 did not even record a decision to build the bomb. That decision was taken by GEN 162, held the following year. Yet GEN 162 minutes do not record any remark or discussion along the lines of Bevin's alleged remarks. Again, I repeat, the remark was a remembered recollection of a civil servant, Sir Michael Perrin, recounted to a noted left-wing polemicist for publication in the popular press. The Times 30 Sept 1982. It was also broadcast by the BBC and Prof Hennessey did indeed include it in a book. That does not make it an accurate, correct account of the events forty years prior, as Hennessey will be amongst the first to concede. I note that you seek to contact the retired professor. By all means if you wish. I'll be happy to supply his address to you via email if required.

I remind you that you first made this claim about Bevin. Its your responsibility to provide the source for your claims. Not the other way around. In short, if you make the assertion its up to you to put up the sources. Although in this forum it isn't expected of you to provide the academic footnotes. Just that assertions are accurate and truthful.

And then there is your later claim about the 'Management Consultant' at Kew. That claim and your use of the words 'we have' rather gives the game away. You are representing an organisation seeking to use this forum to promote an agenda. Period.

BTW. I also research at Kew. You might look at AIR 17/69 Transportation of Special Weapons: No 40 Group. 1953-56. After doing so you will doubtless understand my reference earlier to elementary mistakes caused by not doing the research. I don't have either a management consultant or a tame professor to do my research. I do it myself. Try it sometime. It can be rewarding

I'll return to your other points at a later time if necessary. You got it wrong. A little humility would go a long way to rehabilitate yourself. Email me if you still require Prof Hennessey's address.

[bri21]

As a matter of interest, what kind of target could be destroyed by a 200 KT bomb as opposed to a 10 KT one?

How large a bomb would you need for a typical military airfield for example?


You might find this declassified paper with target maps from TNA Kew to be useful. It doesn't inspire confidence in our intel, but neither did Iraqi WMDs.

http://www.banthebomb.org/newbombs/unacceptable%20damage.pdf

:mad:

[bri21]

ColinB

The financial cost of the atomic energy program in the period 1946 to 1952 was £104.7 million (mostly concealed in the budget statements) and there was a major re-direction of supplies, construction materials, building personnel, key scientists and technicians to build Harwell, Risley, Calder Hall, Aldermaston, Windscale and Dounreay. This investment was made at a time when the country really needed to apply all of its resources in re-building a war-torn and ravaged country.


1. Neither Harwell nor Dounreay were a part of the atomic bomb programme.

2. Dounreay didn't begin construction until 1955, after the first bombs were delivered.

3. The cost was but a tiny fraction of the national wealth. A far greater proportion was consumed by the V-bomber programme, and we rarely hear objections raised to the cost of these.

4. Unlike today, there was a national consensus that the money should be spent. People had just emerged from two damaging wars with 50 million dead. These weapons were regarded honestly as the guarantors of a hard-won peace. The casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seen as a necessary price for peace and stability. I don't recollect any crocodile tears then, and CND was more than ten years into the future. My own mum was not untypical. Aged 16 at the end of the Great War, half of the young men she knew from school were dead, and then twenty years later her generation had it all to do again in WW2. Can a modern 16-year-old girl even begin to comprehend the sadness that never left her. No surprise then that her generation and mine said "NEVER AGAIN", and the atom bomb was seen as a gift from God. Even our friends at the Guardian supported it, urging the UK government to build ballistic missiles as well as V-bombers. Strange bedfellows some will say. But that is as it was then. The present is not the same country. And those who held those views have nothing to apologise for. It's down to their efforts that we can spend our time in these pursuits. Its not for several generations removed to second-guess their choices. IMHO.

[bri21]

ColinB

It seems to me that such a great sacrifice resulting in one gigantic, untested and unusable device being sent by lorry to a concrete hut at RAF Wittering on 7th November 1953 (the first operational aircraft did not arrive at Wittering until July 1956) was not our finest hour.
It was known that we would need to manufacture H-bombs to maintain our posture but we continued to build 58 Blue Danubes at the 10Kton level. I understand they were to be used to bomb Russian airfields, so we were considering pre-emptive air strikes even in the mid-1950s

Opinions, opinions, opinions. And there was I in my naivety believing that history was principally founded on facts, fact, facts.

1. A decision to build an H-bomb was not taken until June 1954, well after Blue Danube deliveries began, and the first Valiant squadron formed at RAF Gaydon in April 1954. So by whom was it known by in 1953 that we needed H-bombs? Pray tell us. I can hardly wait.

2. Large, I grant you, but that was the technology of the age. Were not the first computers larger than our living rooms? But they were not as implied transported in one piece, but in sections for assembly on the airfields. See AIR 17/69 at TNA.

3. Neither were they untested. The nuclear device was tested at Hurricane and later tests. The casing on which I worked as a junior design engineer was fully tested to the standards applied to all Service equipment, including many scores of airdrop ballistic tests. A complete weapon with a degraded nuclear yield was tested at Maralinga in 1956, and the reliability of the casing was demostrated by its use adapted for all the Christmas Island H-bomb trials. Pretty conclusively tested I'd say.

4. Unusable. Now there's a strange word. Almost straight out of the Guardian methinks. And on who's say-so? You say unusable, I say "thats how it was meant to be", 'cos if it was ever used we wouldn't be here now. Opinions loosely opined with casual words that just slip out unguarded frequently betray a political standpoint. Although ColinB says he never intended to betray his. If he did.

5. BTW, there is in AIR 17/69 at TNA Kew, an hilarious handwritten account by a Group Captain Holloway of RAF No 40 Group writ in the officer's own hand, of the first road convoy of Blue Danube sections from Aldermaston to Wittering in 1953. Similar convoys left from five other locations with different sections. I recollect the convoys leaving Leeds where I was located. The Group Captain relates how his convoy travelled via the centre of Newbury, around Oxford, through Brackley, Silverstone, Towcester, Northampton, Kettering, there being no motorways and few bypasses in 1953. There were no pre-arranged police escorts, and the convoy was to wait at police boundaries while a phone call was made to each and every local force, with no large multi-county forces in 1953, and each city having a separate force. I presume the payphones actually worked in those days. Police were not to be told of the convoy content, or asked to turn up tooled-up with guns. Eventually, the weapon bits were delivered into the custody of Bomber Command Armament School Security Team, although not recorded is where they were then stored. In an appendix it was recorded that more convoys left ROF Burghfield than there were bombs. This was to fool Russian spies thought to be located nearby into reporting to Moscow more bombs than the RAF actually had. Yer just couldn't make it up.

6. And finally ... I'm puzzled as to how a simple statement that they were to be used to bomb Russian airfields, which may or may not be true, could so easily morph into an allegation that 'we' were considering a first strike. If [B]ColinB has evidence for that please let us all see it. Unless of course its just his politics intruding where not intended.

[Brewster Buffalo]

English Heritage's book "Cold War" comments that -

"..recent research has shown that no more than 20 Blue Danube warheads were functional between 1957 and 1961." and "..that the capacity of the stores far exceeded the number of warheads" and speculates "...may have been part of a deadly game of nuclear brinkmanship to mislead the Soviets about the size, location and readiness of the British stockpile."

[tornadoken]

br21 #18: thank you for the Grove correction (Note to self: always give sources, as here, to facilitate update/correction, as here)

Flaming here, as 21 believes CB to have a CND/make mischief slant. He has said not so. Let us believe him. 21 has dismissed Prof. Hennessey as leftie polemicist. I do not read him so, and in Cabinets and the Bomb he caused a publisher to make available to us basic source data that I have not detected to be slanted, selective. Just valuable. 21 has also cast doubt on the "Union Jack" recollection of (to be MoS Perm.Sec) Sir Michael Quinlan. Cabinet Minutes are crystallised by the Sir Humphrey of the day as instructions to public servants to get on with what Cabinet decides - here, to do Bomb, thus Bombers, pronto. It actually doesn't matter whether Prof. P.H, to kite a book or broadcast, puffed a half-century-old memory. Cabinet, 8/1/46, did the deed. (I doubt that Sir M.Q is hazy in this recollection: Lord Bullock's biog. puts us into Bevin's character, and this story fits, glovelike.)

Mischief here would be in CB's suggestion that Blue Danube was for Counter Force use, and so UK had a secret policy of pre-emption, despite public professions to the contrary. Deliberate ambiguity was/is inherent in Deterrence. Prof. PH has given us documents, and an Exhibition, of RAF nuclear targets at different times, ranging from High Authority (Moscow and assumed bolt-holes), to rear echelon POL dumps. Quite. UK Nukes: 1957-(RAF:1998, RN today and counting)+ never used+end of Cold War: 21 (and I) link these things. So does ColinB ("they did the right thing"). Just what point is being made?

Could this Thread concentrate on sharing info that has been found by those of us that have read, for example, Prof. Gowing's magisterial Official History - which if ever found costs >£100. Many persons subject to OSA and natural reticence might welcome knowing what it's OK to know. So:
PhilG: MacMahon, wand. Congress, summer 1946, passed (just, UK's Loan (the one we paid off in 2005), and) MacMahon, and listened to HST's man B.Baruch talking about "the (atomic) secret". In December,1946 UN Atomic Energy Commission resolved 31/12/46 that civil and military AE, "the Bomb", should be pooled. The world was blessed with hope that wars were history; Stalin was a hero. The purpose of MacMahon was to bring all aspects of atoms under civilian, that is Presidential, control. Curtis LeMay, burner of many Japanese cities, saw only a degree of efficiency to distinguish Fat Man from phosphorus. It never crossed HST's mind in all this, to wonder whether (France and) UK might feel vulnerable if they were cut off from the fruits of Manhattan. Ike after Sputnik needed all the help he could get to stop its launcher raining warheads on Washington.

Which step here is "silly", or a "magic wand"?

[bri21]

Just a small but important point.

Sir Michael Perrin was the civil servant who recounted his tale for Prof P.H.

Sir Michael Quinlan was of a later generation, heavily involved in decisions on Chevaline and Trident, and not at all involved in this affair.

As for Prof P.H. being a bit of a leftie, so what! So am I. What matters is that he is a superb historian.

[bri21]

Blacksheep:


Were the squadrons flying with untested units?
Except at the test range the weapons were never flown. Aircraft on QRA were loaded with live weapons but would only have flown in the event of war.

Untested units? Answer = No

Blue Danube and the later Red Beard were considered safe to fly with the bomber to assigned dispersal airfields on exercise and in periods of tension. But the bombs were not actually 'live' because to prep them for use a ground crew had to insert the 'gauntlet' or nuclear core at the very last minute before an operational sortie. These were always kept separate from the weapon itself. Furthermore, Blue Danube's electrical power was supplied by 6vdc commercial motorcycle batteries that were inserted only at the very last minute before take-off on an operational sortie, and never inserted at any other times.

Later weapons had the nuclear core permanently inserted, and with Violet Club and Yellow Sun Mk1 that made them unsafe to fly to dispersal airfields, and road transport was equally hazardous. It was because of this issue with the later weapons that Blue Danube was retained longer than expected and used to arm those bombers that dispersed from main bases. See nuclear-weapons.info (http://www.nuclear-weapons.info/vw.htm#Violet%20Club)
:ok:

[Tim McLelland]

I'm still waiting to read what possible reason there could be to suppose that Britain ever considered a first strike capability. I'd love to know what kind of lunatic would fancy taking-on the Soviet Union with a handful of Blue Danubes, most of which probably wouldn't have even worked!:p

[411A]

Ike after Sputnik needed all the help he could get to stop its launcher raining warheads on Washington.


A bit of a stretch.:rolleyes:

[bri21]

Tim McC

I'm still waiting to read what possible reason there could be to suppose that Britain ever considered a first strike capability. I'd love to know what kind of lunatic would fancy taking-on the Soviet Union with a handful of Blue Danubes, most of which probably wouldn't have even worked!

Me too. I can hardly wait.

But in fairness (and it's painful to be scrupulously fair in this instance) there were more than a handful planned to be built. Production stopped at 58 (whether all were serviceable not is debatable) because production switched to Red Beard, of which there were approx 120 built. Some Red Beards used converted Blue Danube nuclear cores. But original RAF plans conceived before the first detonation of a US H-bomb were for up to 800 kiloton bombs. That they were never built on this scale matters little, for it illustrates that the planners believed they had a use for them, and planned more than one sortie per bomber.

In stating that though I don't make the elementary mistake of assuming and alleging that they were intended for a first strike. No one can see into the planner's minds, and there is no published evidence from official sources that suggests a first strike was ever contemplated. Or at least I ain't seen any, and I've looked hard for any hint of it.

It was the sudden arrival of the H-bomb that concentrated the military chiefs minds, and its immense power made them understand that all had changed. That a nuclear war was not something that could be fought, but best avoided. That was the true origin of deterrence.

Some above have suggested that the UK arsenal was too puny to take on Russia, but they miss the point. It wasn't only intended to deter Russia but also to restrain a gung-ho element in the US. There were Ministers even within Winston Churchill's Cabinet in 1954 who advocated a British H-bomb for that very reason. Read the Cabinet minutes. They argued that a British bomb would 'bind' the US into NATO, and make it impossible for the US to stand aside to protect American cities while British cities burned. Mrs Thatcher's later decision to acquire Trident and ensure interchangeability with US Tridents was an extension of that. On the basis that a Trident heading for Moscow was of indeterminate origin. It could be US. Or it could be British. The Russians wouldn't know who fired it and would act accordingly.

The puny size of the UK stockpile hardly mattered if we were suicidal. Assume the unlikely, a British first-strike, the Russians would act to protect themselves from a US follow-on strike to take advantage of Russian weakness. American cities would be turned into ashes. The trick pulled off by deterrence policy was to convince others that we were so irrational, so blindly stupid that we would, just possibly might, on a bad hair day, respond to a threat by pushing the nuclear button, possibly even in a suicidal first strike. But pretending to our enemies (and our friends) that we might just possibly be so irrational is streets away from actually planning cold-bloodedly to do it.

That was in part, the rationale for the independent deterrent. And for fifty years it worked well enough, and I have no regrets for my small part in it whatever revisionist historians say from their ivory towers.

[ColinB]

One would think that users of a public forum would subscribe to the Gallic bit. You know the one ”I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

However, on reflection I wish to address the following.
On the narrower topic of Ernest Bevin .... the quote you attribute is not found in any printed record of those Cabinet committees, and I have searched diligently for them, and read the boring lot.

Where they are found is in the verbal recollections of an aging civil servant, recorded fifty years after the event by an academic. The civil servant did not record this material in writing at the time, or at any later time. While I have great respect for Professor Peter Hennessy, he himself would be the first to acknowledge that his writings on this event were no more that a populist political polemic for a newspaper.

As for the old man's recollections of fifty years ago, try thinking of it in this way. An identification by an old man at a police ID parade held fifty years after the event would be abolutely worthless as reliable evidence in any courtroom.

I have forwarded above to Peter Hennessey and asked for his comments. I suppose the response will be somewhere between a disdainful “No” and a writ for libel.

To set the record straight I have listed below highlights from the relevant Cabinet Meeting

There was a meeting of The Cabinet Committee on Atomic Energy, GEN 75, 25th October 1946.
CR Attlee (Prime Minister), E.Bevin (Foreign Secretary), H. Dalton (Chancellor), Viscount Addison (Dominion Affairs), Sir Stafford Cripps (Board of Trade), and J.Willmot (Ministry of Supply).
The following were also present; Sir E Bridges (Secretary), N.Butler (Foreign Office), Lord Portal (Ministry of Supply), W.L Gorrell-Adams (PMs Office), M.W Perrin (Ministry of Supply)
Perrin’s role was that of professional advisor on all atomic matters.
United Kingdom Atomic Energy Programme
[U]Proposal to Build a Gaseous Diffusion Plant[U]
The cost would be £30-40 million spread over four to five years.
Para 5 In discussion it was urged that we must consider seriously whether we could afford to divert from civilian consumption and the restoration of our balance of payments, the economic resources required for a project on this scale. Unless present trends were reversed we might find ourselves faced with an extremely serious economic and financial situation in two to three years time…….
Para 7 (b) Part of the necessity for the plant arose from the refusal of the Americans to give us the “know-how”. Should not a decision be deferred until a further approach had been made to the President?
The Foreign Secretary said that he had discussed this matter with Mr Byrnes and would be willing to take the matter up again as soon as the elections to Congress were over. Even with American information, however, there would be strong grounds for proceeding with the construction of the Plant

THIS CAN BE FOUND IN TNA, PRO, CAB 130/2
Such minutes do not contain verbatim quotes and the vision of a reputable researcher spending time at TNA looking for them stretches the bounds of credibility.

The recollections of Bevin’s stand were related by Perrin in September 1982.

Sir Michael Willcox Perrin joined ICI after leaving Oxford and led the team which patented polythene in 1935. He was then Deputy to Research Director Wallace Akers still at ICI. They served on the Maud Committee and then they ran Tube Alloys from 1941 onwards. He was really the CEO of Tube Alloys and with Chadwick was our top operating officer on the Manhattan Project.
In the post-war years he ran the atomic affairs of this country under Lord Portal who was a figurehead until he retired to chair the Wellcome Foundation.
To dismiss him as aging civil servant shows a lack of judgement. Perrin in the years 1941 to 1950 was the top man in the UK in atomic matters, the Nuclear Knights, Cockroft, Penney and Hinton reported to him.
I do not believe that anyone would forget such a meeting as that on 25th October 1946 even 36 years later He may not have got the words precisely correct but I believe that he got most of them in.
To put it in terms you may recognise it is like someone sitting through the Churchill’s “Blood, sweat and tears” speech in 1940 and recalling it in 1976. You would guess that the person would get some of the words wrong but not the overall context.
I do hope this helps.
I have read some of your other irrational comments and take the view that you should choose someone else to harass or to quote William Lloyd Garrison "With reasonable men I will reason" and I do not believe you qualify.

[bri21]

One would think that users of a public forum would subscribe to the Gallic bit. You know the one ”I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

I don't see any contribution on this forum that states or even suggests that ColinB does not have a right to an opinion, or the right to air it. Methinks he has a rather thin skin on this topic. Twice he have raised it for no good reason IMO.

There was a meeting of The Cabinet Committee on Atomic Energy, GEN 75, 25th October 1946.
CR Attlee (Prime Minister), E.Bevin (Foreign Secretary), H. Dalton (Chancellor), Viscount Addison (Dominion Affairs), Sir Stafford Cripps (Board of Trade), and J.Willmot (Ministry of Supply).
The following were also present; Sir E Bridges (Secretary), N.Butler (Foreign Office), Lord Portal (Ministry of Supply), W.L Gorrell-Adams (PMs Office), M.W Perrin (Ministry of Supply)
Perrin’s role was that of professional advisor on all atomic matters.

Perrin was a professional civil servant. He was not a scientist, but a professional administrator, with no professional qualifications in science or engineering that I am aware of.

Is it really going to be necessary to reprint here verbatim the whole of the Cabinet minutes of GEN 75. I restate. It contains no reference to the building of the atom bomb itself, but only to research facilities and production plant that was intended and required for a civil nuclear energy programme. A decision to build the atom bomb was not discussed or taken at that meeting.
The decision to build the bomb was in fact taken in Jan of the following year in a different Cabinet committee from which Attlee has excluded Ministers known to be opposed. IMO ColinB has sought to confuse matters by reference to GEN 75, when in fact his only dodgy source is a second-hand verbal account given forty years after the event to a third party for publication in the popular press at a time in 1982 when a national debate on Polaris replacement was raging. As an elected officer of CND at that time time I remember it clearly, and I have no doubt that publication at that time was intended to influence the outcome. And while I have great respect for Prof Hennessey, as stated earlier I have no doubt that he himself would readily agree that to be so.

ColinB's dodgy quote has been exposed and he should accept it. His speculation [opinion] presented as fact and without any evidence whatsoever, that a first strike was planned was also exposed. I note that he has not responded on that score, and I and others still eagerly await an explanation or some evidence from him. There is of course, none.

Cabinet Committee on Atomic Energy, GEN 75, 25th October 1946.
United Kingdom Atomic Energy Programme. Proposal to Build a Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
This plant was indeed discussed at GEN 75, but not in the context ColinB implies; that it was intended for a bomb programme. It was an integral part of a civil nuclear power research programme that was heavily backed by Bevin at that meeting. The minutes clearly record that Bevin declaimed that Britain could not afford to be left behind in this vital area of industrial expertise. His remarks had nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear weapons as such, as the extract from GEN 75 minutes below show. This plant was also required for a naval power reactor programme that had no connection whatsoever with the bomb programme.


Verbatim from Cabinet Committee on Atomic Energy, GEN 75, 25th October 1946.
... it was argued that we could not afford to be left behind in a field that was of such revolutionary importance from an industrial, no less than a military point of view. Our prestige in the world, as well as securing American co-operation would both suffer if we did not exploit to the full a discovery in which we had played a leading part at the outset. The development of a new source of industrial power might strengthen our industrial position very considerably in the future, particularly at a time when it was becoming more and more difficult to find labour for coal-mining.

... Part of the necessity for the plant arose from the refusal of the Americans to give us the 'know-how'.

... The Foreign Secretary said that he had discussed this matter with Mr Byrnes [of the US State Dept] and would be willing to take the matter up again as soon as the elections to Congress were over.


[B]Self-evidently, the source ColinB gave was not primarily concerned with a bomb programme at all, but with preservation of Britain's industrial base. Still considerable, and that generated the exports ColinB believes should have been prioritised before the bomb. In those times it was the industrial base, not financial services, that put the food on our plates.

To dismiss him [Perrin] as aging civil servant shows a lack of judgement.

Not at all. He was indeed an aging [fact] retired [fact] civil servant [fact] at the time in 1982 [fact] he recollected events for Prof P.H. almost forty years after the event [fact]. Which of these facts does ColinB have a problem with. Could it be that these facts don't actually fit with the story he tells.

Frankly, after stating earlier that I would hope that this could be debated here in a civilised manner, and addressing each point that ColinB himself had raised logically and rationally, he now introduces the abusive term 'irrational'. I do not believe that any of my earlier comments merit the description 'irrational'. ColinB also used the word 'harrass', and that, taken with the term 'irrational' and the quote above about his freedom of speech (which has not been curtailed) is bordering on personal abuse.

My views are as worthy as ColinB's, and have the merit that I lived through these events, unlike him. And unlike ColinB, I am not prepared to put the words into Prof P.H's mouth that ColinB clearly wants to hear Prof P.H utter. As for ColinB's prediction of a writ for libel; well ... in his dreams.

Furthermore, having unlike ColinB lived through the Second World War as a child, I well remember the views of my parents generation on the atom bomb. Including the very many relations, schoolmasters etc who returned from the war determined that it should never happen again. To describe their generalised views on the atom bomb as irrational is frankly insulting.

One correction with apologies. The Cabinet meeting that took the decision to build an atom bomb was not Gen 162 as stated earlier. It was in fact Gen 163. the date was 08 Jan 1947.
:)

[swordfish41]

It was NATO doctrine that any invasion by Warsaw pact forces would escalate to a nuclear conflict within three days at the latest. NATO Battlefield nuclear weapons would of necessity have to be used against overwhelming Warsaw pact conventional forces. It doesn't take a lot of thought to work through the theories of escalation to realise that in fact if you have a first use doctrine it is a pre-emptive strike doctrine. "Use em or lose em.";)

[Yellow Sun]

swordfish41
Battlefield nuclear weapons would of necessity have to be used against overwhelming Warsaw pact conventional forces.

That reminds me of a particularly black piece of humour from those days:

Q. What is the definition of a tactical nuclear weapon?
A. One that goes off in Germany.

But was this not part of the deterrent posture? The willingness to employ these weapons in our defence. Whether we would have or not is up to the opposition to decide, are they willing to risk it given the very public statements made by NATO?

Personally I think first use would have been at sea, but that is another matter entirely.

YS

[Tim McLelland]

Maybe it's the talk of tactical weapons that has fostered this bizarre notion that Britain ever considered a pre-emptive strike policy. Okay, it's fine to say that Nato might have been forced to employ tactical nuclear weapons first in order to stop a Soviet advance but that's a long, long way from a pre-emptive strike. This is simply a case of using whatever weapons you have at your disposal to prevent being over-run - simple as that.

The idea of a pre-emptive strike, which would have meant launching the V-Force directly against their Soviet targets, is just ridiculous. Of course it was never considered. We had only a few (by comparison) bombs and when you take into account the number of weapons that would have actually worked and the number of bombers that would have successfully reached their targets, then it's a pretty small result. Okay, it would have seriously upset the Soviets but it wouldn't have destroyed them, and the result would have been our inevitable obliteration. No matter how you look at it, a pre-emptive strike from Britain would have been suicide. I don't accept for a minute that the Soviets ever imagined that even as an act of irrational stupidity, Britain would have done something like that.

It just doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. It never happened.

[ColinB]

To understand the importance and implications of this meeting. I provide the following background. To make any sense of documents they must be put in context.
In December 1938 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were conducting experiments firing neutrons at a piece of uranium. There was some activity and when they analysed the residues they found the presence of Barium. They sent their findings to Lisa Meitner in Stockholm and she along with her nephew Otto Frisch identified that uranium atoms were splitting in two (Fission). It was quickly discovered that only the isotope Uranium235 (the stuff) was fission-ing and the stuff only occurred in the proportion of seven parts per thousand in refined uranium. Further as the uranium and its isotope were chemically the same there was difficulty in separating them and there the matter lay until 1940.
Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls were both expatriate Germans working at Birmingham University and were required to report daily to the local police station. The apocryphal story is that being bored they calculated on the back of a cigarette packet how much of the stuff would be needed to give a big bang (critical mass) and came up with answer of 1Kg. This became the basis of the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum where they stated that the best way to separate the stuff on an industrial scale was by gaseous diffusion. This was where uranium in a gaseous form in a chamber was forced through a fine membrane, causing the stuff to flow through more quickly than the other uranium atoms. This small increase could be enriched further by being fed as input through thousands of subsequent chambers. It would take two years to build and perfect the diffusion plant and it would then produce enough stuff for two bombs per month (equivalent to 1,700 tons TNT). The cost would be £50 million.
This led in 1941 to the formation of Tube Alloys and one of the first tasks was to prove the viability of gaseous diffusion. To this end four prototype units were ordered from Metro-Vick and installed at Valley Works, Rhydymyn, this operation was led by Rudolf Peierls and his assistant Klaus Fuchs. Work continued until August 1943 when under the Quebec Agreement atomic development moved to the USA. In December 1943, Peierls and Fuchs went to New York as consultants to the Kellex Corporation (Kellex were the main contractors for the massive K25 gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The building covered 100 acres and was the largest in the world). They were never allowed to visit Oak Ridge.
In early 1944 Peierls transferred to the theoretical labs at Los Alamos as the leader of the British delegation and head of T1. Fuchs followed and was involved firstly in the lens design for the plutonium device and was later in charge of the initiator program.
There were two different types of bombs the Hiroshima (U235 device) and the much more technically difficult Nagasaki (plutonium) device. U235 was necessary to manufacture plutonium.
After the dropping of the bombs on Japan most of the twenty or so “British” scientists returned to the UK
We had been involved from the earliest days and shared our knowledge in the development and planning of both types of weapon but had been excluded from any connection with the production methods of enriching U235 or the details of the piles fed by it to produce plutonium.
When we asked for details on a formal basis Foreign Secretary (Bevin) to Secretary of State (Byrne) it appears we had been rudely re-buffed. I do recall from some source mention of “Those days are over, there will be no more European hand-out programs”
I suspect we were deeply hurt by all of this and felt betrayed. I think the reference to a further approach to the President (side-tracking Byrnes) and Bevin’s noted response that irrespective of the American input “there would still be strong grounds for proceeding with the construction of the plant” ties up with the Perrin’s recollection
There can have been no doubt that this top secret committee (which was not revealed to the rest of the cabinet or the opposition parties) was deciding to commit to building what became Capenhurst. The inescapable conclusion must be that the purpose of the plant was not to keep the freezing masses warm in the evil post-war winters but it was to produce enriched uranium to feed piles to make plutonium for nuclear weapons.
One last piece of background, it was believed that Russia would have an atomic bomb by 1949/50. It was no secret in the international scientific community that if you enriched uranium to a sufficient extent to have enough for a critical mass and assembled it in two parts and with a gun mechanism fired them explosively into each other you would have a weapon. This was the basis of the Hiroshima bomb and it did not need testing.
In 1945/6 there was no NATO, the Cold War was beckoning and atomic weapons were a good way to deter any potential invaders.

PS This is the beginning of a reply I have just received from another researcher “Blue Danube was scheduled for delivery to Wittering on 1st October 1953 according to published accounts. The Operations Record Book shows it being delivered to Bomber Command Armament School, under its CO Wing Commander J. S. Rowlands GC MBE and the idea was to instruct personnel in the storage, custody, servicing transportation and use.” More to follow.

Edited for unecessary ageism remarks and rudeness.

[bri21]

While not wishing to do other than accept at face-value this latest offering from ColinB I am rather puzzled as to why he believes it necessary to state it at such length, when the extract from the minutes of GEN 75 printed here earlier is a model of clarity. Readers will form their own views after reading the extract, and for my part, I believe that readers here are intelligent beings, and do not need to have events 'interpreted' for them.

PPS It’s time now for me to go to our weekly meeting of geriatric conspiracists, a group for whom the Zimmer frame is a necessity and not a fashion accessory. We are so old we forget who we are conspiring against but next month we are going to have a séance and try to recall the spirits of Kim, Guy, David, Donald and Anthony to inspire us to really conspire. We may even invite the tame professor.

This paragraph may be intended to be funny, although I myself fail to see the joke, if it is a joke. My interpretation is that it only serves to diminish the person who wrote it. Sad really.

More to my taste is the definition of a TNW posted earlier by Yellow Sun. Now that really was funny.

Q. What is the definition of a tactical nuclear weapon?
A. One that goes off in Germany.

[Evileyes]

This could have been an interesting topic, short the melodrama, personal rancor, and thinly veiled propaganda which has had its days in the sun.

However, it seems this particular catfight has reached its use by date. We suggest the primary antagonists get a room or use the PM system if they desire to continue so that the rest of us do not have to wade through their childish sniping at each other.

The Mods