Newsnight 15/11/2007 – RAF Nuclear Weapon Arming

Ken,

Thank you for the link to Burnell’s website. It is very good indeed. You are right about Wynn, he is difficult to read, but it should be remembered that his work was originally purely for internal distribution. Publication was not the intention. That probably is not an apology for his turgidity, just a reason!

As an aside, a friend of mine had a copy of Wynn in his office at work. It was kept in the safe as it was a classified document. A few years after he retired his wife bought him a copy as a Christmas present. How the world moves on.

I expect that you have read Lorna Arnold’s “Britain and the H Bomb”. It does cast some light in unexpected corners.

exmpa

No RAFG nukes before Bruggen B(I).6, Geilenkirchen/Laarbruch/Wildenrath B(I).8, Project ‘E’ Mk.7 and their custodians fr. May,’58.

Source, after much chore, is Wynn’s Official History. Chore because he is turgid. So is everything at Kew. So all this PAL fuss is a great sadness, because the trigger (Hah!) for it is a researcher trying to do us all a favour, at www.nuclear-weapons.info/vw.htm . Brian Burnell has started with Violet Club and WE.177 (copied 7/11/07 into Wiki), onway to the lot. He will have been pleased that a reputable journalist picked it up (Susan Watts checked the sexed-up dossier story (Dr.D.Kelly) so did not cover herself with ordure). But she/her Editor took a sensationalist slant, swallowed even by a poster here, and took as expert witness the Chair of CND! I don’t suppose hapless delver BB expected that. I hope he perseveres in dredging out facts, to counter eco-nuts’ disparaging of deterrence.

Why do arm-chair types think they know better than those that were there, doing it for real? They enjoyed coming, intact, off shift. Not likely to hazard life and limb to no purpose.

There is a paranoid response when the word Nuclear gets mentioned in relation to transportation. I am always cheesed off when near panic is created by the reporting of nuclear convoys in the uK . Even the movement of non weapons nuclear material is over hyped in news stories.

Having worked as a firefighter during the firemans strike several years ago I was shocked to discover just how much potential there was for explosion from every day UK cargo carried on roads . This included the petrol and gas tankers plus the hazard chemical loads on articulated trucks. Every so often one explodes , for example a gas tanker wiped out a campsite in France.But these loads are not nuclear and get no protests even though the potential for explosion is far greater.

Oh well its just another example of media led hysteria..like the recent Northern Rock fiasco.

LesB: RAFG B(I)8 QRA with Mks.7 & 43: Does nobody else know about them? No.

Jacko incurred much wrath raising some of this on Pprune. It is frustrating to Google any nuke subj and come up with eco/CND sites deriding any/every-UK-thing…because they can. Try coming up with such stories on N.Korean/Chinese/Sov kit, or even French. So we are shrinking violets, hiding behind residual “National Security”. A Judge has said nonsense to that – long decayed, like the warheads. Some Official stuff is public, but obfuscated to preserve UK’s modest scale cf. US’, with which we were/are interdependent.

RAFG nuke QRA involved a clutch of stations’ warmware launching in no time flat, before blast and irradiation. Saner erks would have cycled far off at first hint of trouble. You would not. The bad guys knew that. So you never had to do it. And greeny types can pooh-pooh the illogicality and hazard of it all, warm and safe.

Oh come on, it’s blatantly a party popper!

As for the ‘bicycle key’. It was the woman interviewer of the so-called expert that said it looked like a bicycle key. The key looks like this . . .

Don’t tell them what the other bit on the keyring is for Les! That’s the real secret;)

exmpa

None of the issues involved addressed directly except to whine that “. . . it could happen.”

I did smirk a bit when Kate Hudson, the chairwoman of CND, suggested that hijacking a Trident submarine was a possibility. :rolleyes:

It was a load of typical BBC garbage trying to be sensationalist approx 43 years after the events. (Maybe the beeb’s pinkos are feeling guilty about all the good and sympathetic coverage the military have been getting recently!)

And as for that CND woman – what a self-righteous prig. None of the issues involved addressed directly except to whine that “. . . it could happen.” No it bluddy couldn’t, not in the RAF I was in!

Again, in an RAF nuke report, no mention of the nuke carrying Canberras of RAF Germany. Is it only those of us that were on them know about them? Does nobody else know about them?

As for the ‘bicycle key’. It was the woman interviewer of the so-called expert that said it looked like a bicycle key. The key looks like this . . .

😡

I found the Newsnight report both fascinating and disturbing (as I did the report from Scotland – the bloke had obviously misunderstood the term “old bike” 😀 ) but agree about the old footage. Cosford got a ‘plug’ as well with some filming next to the Valiant.

The reporter played on the fact it was a ‘bicycle lock’ but when introduced for use on the bomb I imagine it was ‘state of the art’ lock technology.

Roger Smith.

I rather found this story on that site quite amusing

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7095134.stm

😀