I wonder how well the people of Cyprus (Greek and Turkish) would have reacted to silos been placed in the British Sovereign Bases. Not at all well I guess.
A British nuclear Triad.
- Thread starter aaronupright
- Start date
Nick P
Donor
Point of Order! The UK did have nuclear weapons in service with the Army, Navy and RAF at the same time.
Royal Air Force started with the Blue Danube in 1953 and finished with the WE.177 in 1998.
British Army had the Honest John and Lance battlefield missiles between 1954 and 1991.
Royal Navy had Polaris missiles on the Resolution class subs from 1967, and still have Trident on the Vanguard subs. The Fleet Air Arm also had the Red Beard bomb from 1962-71.
And until 1992 the RN also had WE.177A for use as Nuclear Depth Charges for both fixed wing and Helicopter use.
I'm sorry I just can't see this unless you delve into a asb brit-wank.
Firstly where is the money for this coming from? The treasury will have a coronary at this, if we assume a pod after polaris enters service. The treasury would raid the budgets of conventional forces so the RAFG and BAOR is going to be a shadow of itself and that has a political implication within NATO. The US will need to fill that gap.
Secondly I can't see silo based MRBMs in the UK, there isn't space, and sticking them on a Scottish island will make targeting even easier for the Soviets not harder. Yes I appreciate the french had mrbms but they were a very token force pretty soon after entering service , they allowed the french to say they had a fully independent triad but in a shooting war they would have been missile soaks.
Someone mentioned glcms , to me those are the only really practical land based options, that or pershing, for those you will need to wait for the 1980s , perhaps they could be NATO (read US) funded , UK operated under a dual key scheme but then they aren't really independent then, and that has political issues in the UK as well.
As side note someone mentioned above that deploying them off site might indicate intentions to the Soviets and escalate the situation, I would say the usaf operated glcms on a QRA basis where a flight of missiles would crash out onto the airfield with 5 minutes and fire from there in a bolt from the blue attack. And perhaps in the screwed up logic of nuclear strategy you might want to signal your intentions/resolve to the Soviets by dispersing the force. If they are already doing the same thing then it doesn't matter what they see.
So on to the airborne component, your then looking at a follow on strategic bomber, there's nothing available on European design boards , buy US , ok there's the B1B in the 80s but that will reduce the money for tornado, the fleet will be small I would guess 12 aircraft maybe 18 that means the cost of operating them will be astronomical plus you will need something like the ALCM and or SRAM so that adds to the cost, tanking will be an issue as well as they will be.limited to the boom method unless u pay for expensive upgrades.
Perhaps to pay for this you could cut the ssbn force in half but then you will loose the only truly survivable deterrent option by making it not a continuous presence at sea.
Sorry again to op I can't see a sane way of making it happen tbh
Deleted member 2186
Ore have the RAF have a nuclear cruise missile like the Storm Shadow in service, you do not need these huge old bombers.
Just like how people in Japan protested about alleged nuclear weapons the U.S. stored in Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima. These were only confirmed in 2000, way past after the Cold War ended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwo_Jima#U.S._nuclear_arms_base (links connected to the document are unfortunately dead links)
EDIT (September 28, 2021):
Found the links
U.S. Nuclear Weapons on Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima
U.S. Nuclear Weapons on Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima
nsarchive2.gwu.edu
Even in my country in the Philippines, some components of U.S. nuclear depth charges and tactical nuclear devices were alleged to be stored in Subic or aboard USN warships that are legally considered as U.S. territory, being that the ships are docked an inch away from port.
EDIT (September 28, 2021):
Inquirer article dated September 15, 2011 regarding U.S. nuclear weapons in the Philippines
Philippine Bases and U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy
Author(s): Schirmer, Daniel Boone | Abstract: In 1947, when the newly independent Philippine government granted the United States the right to use military bases at Subic Bay and Clark Air Field, the United States government saw to it that the terms included the right of the U.S. to install on...
escholarship.org
I knew it. The UK didn't have enough space to dig large silos unlike the Great Plains region of the United States.
Oh, this definitely will save money in the long run.
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Would a railway based ballistic missile be feasible?
That is technically feasible. I suspect that it would be unaffordable and have most of the practical problems that have already been noted about the Tomahawk GLCMs that were deployed in the UK during the 1980s.
That is technically feasible. I suspect that it would be unaffordable and have most of the practical problems that have already been noted about the Tomahawk GLCMs that were deployed in the UK during the 1980s.
Basing might be a bit easier if the missile was HTP fueled...its been suggested you can get a Blue Streak equivalent missile but half the height and two thirds of the diameter and with fuel that is storable.
Though you will still have the same size support facilities, accomadate etc which are a bit harder to reduce in size.
Though you will still have the same size support facilities, accomadate etc which are a bit harder to reduce in size.
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The problem with that is , and I considered it, storm shadow is only formulated in the late 80s and the VS is over by 90 so the justification for it has gone. iirc correctly there was a air staff requirement for standoff WE177 replacement envisaged in use from the mid 90s service back in the 80s I think the optIons were SRAM 2, a version of the French ASMP with a British warhead or so.during home grown, but again by 90 that requirement is gone. None of which BTW are strayegic, all probably are at most theatre nuclear forces.
Am not all that knowledgeable the UK rail network but I don't think it is, in the 1960s lots of miles of supposedly unprofitable Victorian era branch lines were closed by Dr Beeching so I would say no rail basing isn't feasable. When I think about the East or west coast mainline for example there isn't a diversion around if the line is blocked so it would trap the missile train in a realitivley small section tbh.
For me rail basing adds survivability through mobility but also large tracts of rail track for the trains to move too, the problem for the UK is the same issue as silos, space to build the track. You might as well just go with road mobile missiles either glcm or mrbm if your heartset on a land based deterrent.
*I'll gladly defer to anyone with a better knowledge of UK railways as mine is pretty poor. BTW a lot of the lines closed in the 60s as unprofitable are now being really opened as the are profitable , go figure lol
When @aaronupright wrote...
It was perfectly clear to me that he meant the following...
That is a force of of strategic bombers, land-based strategic missiles and sea-based strategic missiles.
Therefore, when @aaronupright wrote...
It was perfectly clear to me that he meant the following...
Which is 100% correct. However, there were two periods when it had two-thirds of of a strategic nuclear triad. That is...
- From the late 1950s to the early 1960s when it had land and air-based strategic weapons at the same time, i.e. the V-bombers and Thor IRBMs.
- The late 1960s when it had sea and air-based strategic weapons at the same time, i.e. the V-bombers and Resolution class SSBNs. However, this was only while the Polaris force was being "worked up". The V-bombers were transferred to the tactical nuclear role when the Polaris force achieved full operational capability.
The British Army also operated the Corporal missile, but that was another tactical nuclear weapon. AFAIK/IIRC the RN first ship to take nuclear weapons to sea was Victorious in 1958 but they were to be used as tactically rather than strategically. FWIW I used to work with someone who was in the nuclear weapons section on Victorious in 1958 and he told me that they used to sit on the bombs while they ate their sandwiches.
Finally, a "point of order" is...
I was going to say that you were making a "point of fact" but according to the online Macmillan Dictionary a "point of fact" is...
Mobile IRBM are a category of weapons which only saw development and deployment in the late 70's and early 1980's OTL.
There is no technical reason that work could not have commmeced a generation prior, and it makes sense that the British would lead such efforts.
A British SS20 could well enter service around the mid 1970's and be replaced with a road mobile ICBM come the 2000:s.
There is no technical reason that work could not have commmeced a generation prior, and it makes sense that the British would lead such efforts.
A British SS20 could well enter service around the mid 1970's and be replaced with a road mobile ICBM come the 2000:s.
It's perfectly true that British Rail closed 6,570 route miles and 17,900 track miles (of which 11,701 miles were running lines and 6,829 miles were sidings) between 1960 and 1970.
However, 11,799 route miles and 31,281 track miles (of which 23,726 miles were running lines and 7,555 miles were sidings) remained in 1970.
The source is Table 251 - British Rail: Assets, Great Britain from an early 1970s Annual Abstract of Statistics.
Up until the early 1960s there were lots of duplicate lines and links in the British rail system. Including rail spurs and sidings at numerous military establishments where a "shell game" could be played to disguise where the real missile carriers were ( using fake containers on rail cars). Sort of the way the V-bomber force practised dispersal to secondary airfields. (Although the one time this might have helped keep it safe from a Soviet First Strike, the Cuban Missile Crisis, that wasn't done.)
But that's too early for such mobile IRBMs I think. There would have to a decision to preserve such routes in advance of the missile development. Not impossible but very implausible. And expensive.
UK keeps ICBM's based in Australia as a nuclear deterrent against a more powerful China?
Riain
Banned
The 20kt A and 190kt C were theatre tactical weapons , but the 53 450kt Bs were strategic weapons. They were developed from the RE.179 warhead to be used by the British Skybolt and intended to cover the gap between the Blue Steel and Polaris. Despite being the B model it actually entered service before the A due to the urgency of the strategic need.
Planners identified several sites for Blue Streak. It seems that the first site and home of the OCU would have been the old RNAS Crail in Scotland. I'll need to dig out my book on the missile to see what other sites were considered, but putting an MRBM in silos was considered viable in a UK context.
Cost wise, I think a triad would be too expensive for the UK. However, a dyad would probably be possible - SLBM with the RN and an air launched weapon of some kind (ALCM) for the RAF.
I suspect that with more funding the British efforts at developing a hydrogen peroxide oxidized, kerosene burning missile system for both land based and submarine launched applications could have borne fruit considerably earlier than OTL, by perhaps a decade or more.
If it had been realized earlier than OTL that the keys to storing and handling hydrogen peroxide in addition to high cleanliness of the storage vessel (suitable stainless steel alloys) were 1) achieving extremely high purity, with practically zero water content, which is counterintuitive to be sure, and 2) chilling the pure peroxide to just above its freezing point, then perhaps redoubled effort would have been made and rewarded with practical engine designs earlier, encouraged by the considerations that
1) a quasi-"hypergolic" simplicity of engine design whereby catalyzing the peroxide produces a jet of hot oxygen and steam that fuel will spontaneously combust with;
2) is coupled with substantially lower temperatures than with either hypergolic or kerosene-oxygen combustion allowing simpler, cheaper, less advanced alloys to make the engine core at given pressures;
3)the resulting propellant mix is remarkably dense, permitting storage of large reaction masses offsetting the lower specific impulse and allowing greater delta-V or throw weight for a given volume of missile;
4) although wanting to keep the peroxide at 270 -275 K or so is a sort of quasi-cryogenic requirement (with a side benefit of condensing the kerosene type fuel to be sure) it is far far easier to achieve than storing liquid oxygen at about 100 K--the difference between a typically 290 K or so exterior in summer is just 20 K (or a lot less in chilly weather in Britain) versus nearly ten times that for LOX. I envision, for a simple no-silo gantry launched version (quite vulnerable to a first strike to be sure, therefore launch-on-warning) a system whereby light fall-away gantry arms similar to the Soviet launchers for the R-7 hold pneumatic pads, essentially giant low pressure air mattressess, flushed with cold gaseous nitrogen blanketing the major length of the body of the missile that contains propellant; on launch the pads are jerked away leaving a chilled body with very high thermal inertia, even in noonday sun on the hottest summer days that happen in Britain, the sunlit side will hardly warm up all with all that chilled peroxide and kerosene touching the inner surface. Unlike the Atlas, Thor, or R-7 missiles that need to be filled with LOX at the last minute, peroxide-kerosene launchers will be filled and standing by all the time much like hypergolic missiles such as most later Soviet designs or the US Titan II; they can be launched at the push of a button any time. In fact so-called "room temperature" hypergolic rockets are just a bit oversold as such--the fact is, the N2O4 based oxidant boils at temperatures that might rarely be reached in Britain but are often exceeded in the USA in summer, whereas the hydrazine-based fuel can freeze solid at temperatures that are admittedly terribly cold even in the heartland of the USA or Alaska (or Siberia) but quite easy for an orbiting spacecraft to fall to, so that "storable" hypergol spacecraft engines need some auxiliary heating to guarantee this does not happen. The more serious problem for Earth-based missiles is of course the oxidant boiling, which is largely sidestepped by keeping the missiles in hardened bunkers that can be air-conditioned--but it is a thing and was an issue in the 1980 Damascus (Arkansas) incident where a dropped wrench socket breached the fuel tank of a Titan II missile, causing a slow but unstoppable leak that gradually weakened the partially pressure-strengthened structure predictably leading to buckling and release of the boiling hot oxidant to react with the hydrazine-laced air in the silo, eventually (after some 16 hours or so, IIRC) causing the whole missile to explode and blast out of its silo like a huge bullet--and by reading the book Command and Control that used this incident as narrative binder for a discussion of the general safety or lack thereof of American made (and presumably anyone-made) thermonuclear warheads, i learned that there was a definite possibility the H-bomb warhead might have been set off too. This did not happen to be sure, but it could have. Anyway the issue is a real one, and so is the general toxicity of both the raw oxidant and fuel substances separately and their various combustion products, which has been a real thing in terms of visible health hazards both in the former Soviet Union and ongoing Russian Republic, where Kazhak and other tribal peoples in the flight paths of Proton launches and missile tests out of Kosmograd have demonstrated cancers and other syndromes from the microscopic traces of contaminants filtering down from stratospheric and greater altitudes in the wake, and in my own, ahem, nuclear family whereby my own uncle, a SAC officer whose career largely centered on Titans, was sent down into the devastated wreck of the Damascus facility after the blow-up--he and every other member of the evaluation/clean-up team he commanded all died of the same rare and nasty cancers some decades later, himself holding out the longest but at great pain and cost. (The Air Force denies any connection but I think they are clearly lying about it in view of the universal fate of the entire squad).
I don't like hypergols much you see. I recognize that in space, they have a role, but love to see them bypassed.
And by golly, hydrogen peroxide is a suitable way to do it. In terms of immediate explosion/fire hazard the stuff is comparably risky of course, though its path of gradual decay might have enabled an ATL Ker-Peroxide Titan at Damascus to simply be drained of its oxidant and then the kerosene fuel leak patched, or drained away for the missile to be scrapped in favor of a fresh one. If one does not vent a peroxide chamber that has some catalyst introduced (and the interior cracks involved in some exterior ding such as the heavy wrench socket banging on the peroxide segment instead of the fuel segment might be a sufficient catalyst) the heat release will combine with the vapor pressure of released oxygen gas to accelerate the decomposition and eventually burst the vessel, though if the liquid is initially kept at 270 K there is a lot of heat capacity to be filled before the temperature of the peroxide can rise much, buying a lot of time, and if active cooling is required that cooling can be stepped up to check temperature rise completely or even freeze the material. One can of course include a pressure driven safety valve to vent the outgassed oxygen! To produce a Damascus incident, or the even more spectacular Soviet Nedelin Incident (which killed General Nedelin along with a hundred or so other site workers) one requires quite a lot of either stupid design failures or very unfortunate coincidences, and draining away the peroxide always seems to be possible.
But meanwhile, in terms of long term chemical toxicity--again concentrated peroxide is bad news health wise, it can do severe damage to skin, lungs, eyes etc even if its accelerant properties as a concentrated oxidant don't promote severe fires. But once dispersed, it breaks down into plain water and oxygen, and even dumped on the ground concentrated will over time decay into those substances, or reacting with various materials typically produce carbon dioxide and more water. An explosion however accomplished will drop in toxicity quite rapidly and become quite tolerable quickly, and then completely innocuous.
Of course storing tanks full of it in a submarine can be risky, but certainly less risky than storing comparable tonnages of hypergolic propellants. The USN and OTL RN, along with the French navy, eventually opted for solid fuel missiles.
It should of course be possible for the British to develop underground hardened silos just as the Americans did for both versions of Titan--the original Titan being a kerosene-oxygen rocket. As with the Titan II silo it is necessary to somehow dispose of the exhaust products as the missile rises out of the protected recess, but with ker-peroxide these products are steam and carbon dioxide, not the weird carcinogens one gets from hypergol combustion. It might be possible to actually use the exhaust to propel the missile sort of like a bullet. This approach might aid submerged launch from submarines.
Needless to say, early success, by say 1955 or so, in developing a practical IRBM comparable to say Thor, can lead to very early British space launch capability.
If it had been realized earlier than OTL that the keys to storing and handling hydrogen peroxide in addition to high cleanliness of the storage vessel (suitable stainless steel alloys) were 1) achieving extremely high purity, with practically zero water content, which is counterintuitive to be sure, and 2) chilling the pure peroxide to just above its freezing point, then perhaps redoubled effort would have been made and rewarded with practical engine designs earlier, encouraged by the considerations that
1) a quasi-"hypergolic" simplicity of engine design whereby catalyzing the peroxide produces a jet of hot oxygen and steam that fuel will spontaneously combust with;
2) is coupled with substantially lower temperatures than with either hypergolic or kerosene-oxygen combustion allowing simpler, cheaper, less advanced alloys to make the engine core at given pressures;
3)the resulting propellant mix is remarkably dense, permitting storage of large reaction masses offsetting the lower specific impulse and allowing greater delta-V or throw weight for a given volume of missile;
4) although wanting to keep the peroxide at 270 -275 K or so is a sort of quasi-cryogenic requirement (with a side benefit of condensing the kerosene type fuel to be sure) it is far far easier to achieve than storing liquid oxygen at about 100 K--the difference between a typically 290 K or so exterior in summer is just 20 K (or a lot less in chilly weather in Britain) versus nearly ten times that for LOX. I envision, for a simple no-silo gantry launched version (quite vulnerable to a first strike to be sure, therefore launch-on-warning) a system whereby light fall-away gantry arms similar to the Soviet launchers for the R-7 hold pneumatic pads, essentially giant low pressure air mattressess, flushed with cold gaseous nitrogen blanketing the major length of the body of the missile that contains propellant; on launch the pads are jerked away leaving a chilled body with very high thermal inertia, even in noonday sun on the hottest summer days that happen in Britain, the sunlit side will hardly warm up all with all that chilled peroxide and kerosene touching the inner surface. Unlike the Atlas, Thor, or R-7 missiles that need to be filled with LOX at the last minute, peroxide-kerosene launchers will be filled and standing by all the time much like hypergolic missiles such as most later Soviet designs or the US Titan II; they can be launched at the push of a button any time. In fact so-called "room temperature" hypergolic rockets are just a bit oversold as such--the fact is, the N2O4 based oxidant boils at temperatures that might rarely be reached in Britain but are often exceeded in the USA in summer, whereas the hydrazine-based fuel can freeze solid at temperatures that are admittedly terribly cold even in the heartland of the USA or Alaska (or Siberia) but quite easy for an orbiting spacecraft to fall to, so that "storable" hypergol spacecraft engines need some auxiliary heating to guarantee this does not happen. The more serious problem for Earth-based missiles is of course the oxidant boiling, which is largely sidestepped by keeping the missiles in hardened bunkers that can be air-conditioned--but it is a thing and was an issue in the 1980 Damascus (Arkansas) incident where a dropped wrench socket breached the fuel tank of a Titan II missile, causing a slow but unstoppable leak that gradually weakened the partially pressure-strengthened structure predictably leading to buckling and release of the boiling hot oxidant to react with the hydrazine-laced air in the silo, eventually (after some 16 hours or so, IIRC) causing the whole missile to explode and blast out of its silo like a huge bullet--and by reading the book Command and Control that used this incident as narrative binder for a discussion of the general safety or lack thereof of American made (and presumably anyone-made) thermonuclear warheads, i learned that there was a definite possibility the H-bomb warhead might have been set off too. This did not happen to be sure, but it could have. Anyway the issue is a real one, and so is the general toxicity of both the raw oxidant and fuel substances separately and their various combustion products, which has been a real thing in terms of visible health hazards both in the former Soviet Union and ongoing Russian Republic, where Kazhak and other tribal peoples in the flight paths of Proton launches and missile tests out of Kosmograd have demonstrated cancers and other syndromes from the microscopic traces of contaminants filtering down from stratospheric and greater altitudes in the wake, and in my own, ahem, nuclear family whereby my own uncle, a SAC officer whose career largely centered on Titans, was sent down into the devastated wreck of the Damascus facility after the blow-up--he and every other member of the evaluation/clean-up team he commanded all died of the same rare and nasty cancers some decades later, himself holding out the longest but at great pain and cost. (The Air Force denies any connection but I think they are clearly lying about it in view of the universal fate of the entire squad).
I don't like hypergols much you see. I recognize that in space, they have a role, but love to see them bypassed.
And by golly, hydrogen peroxide is a suitable way to do it. In terms of immediate explosion/fire hazard the stuff is comparably risky of course, though its path of gradual decay might have enabled an ATL Ker-Peroxide Titan at Damascus to simply be drained of its oxidant and then the kerosene fuel leak patched, or drained away for the missile to be scrapped in favor of a fresh one. If one does not vent a peroxide chamber that has some catalyst introduced (and the interior cracks involved in some exterior ding such as the heavy wrench socket banging on the peroxide segment instead of the fuel segment might be a sufficient catalyst) the heat release will combine with the vapor pressure of released oxygen gas to accelerate the decomposition and eventually burst the vessel, though if the liquid is initially kept at 270 K there is a lot of heat capacity to be filled before the temperature of the peroxide can rise much, buying a lot of time, and if active cooling is required that cooling can be stepped up to check temperature rise completely or even freeze the material. One can of course include a pressure driven safety valve to vent the outgassed oxygen! To produce a Damascus incident, or the even more spectacular Soviet Nedelin Incident (which killed General Nedelin along with a hundred or so other site workers) one requires quite a lot of either stupid design failures or very unfortunate coincidences, and draining away the peroxide always seems to be possible.
But meanwhile, in terms of long term chemical toxicity--again concentrated peroxide is bad news health wise, it can do severe damage to skin, lungs, eyes etc even if its accelerant properties as a concentrated oxidant don't promote severe fires. But once dispersed, it breaks down into plain water and oxygen, and even dumped on the ground concentrated will over time decay into those substances, or reacting with various materials typically produce carbon dioxide and more water. An explosion however accomplished will drop in toxicity quite rapidly and become quite tolerable quickly, and then completely innocuous.
Of course storing tanks full of it in a submarine can be risky, but certainly less risky than storing comparable tonnages of hypergolic propellants. The USN and OTL RN, along with the French navy, eventually opted for solid fuel missiles.
It should of course be possible for the British to develop underground hardened silos just as the Americans did for both versions of Titan--the original Titan being a kerosene-oxygen rocket. As with the Titan II silo it is necessary to somehow dispose of the exhaust products as the missile rises out of the protected recess, but with ker-peroxide these products are steam and carbon dioxide, not the weird carcinogens one gets from hypergol combustion. It might be possible to actually use the exhaust to propel the missile sort of like a bullet. This approach might aid submerged launch from submarines.
Needless to say, early success, by say 1955 or so, in developing a practical IRBM comparable to say Thor, can lead to very early British space launch capability.