Missile Silos in the UK?

The British apparently came up with the original idea of missile silos going so far as to build a couple of scaled down test models before financial concerns, estimates that they'd require the entire UK concrete output did a year to build, and other concerns saw the idea cancelled. I need some abandoned missile silos for an idea I'm considering so supposing that they had been built and later decommissioned does anyone happen to know where they were considering building them? IIRC the choices were limited by a combination of distance from the potential targets and the local geological conditions. Thanks.
 
As far as I know, the RAF Spadeadam underground silo was the only one built, but was not completed and not operational.
 
Plenty of WW2 and Cold War surplus bomb shelters, etc. buried in British soil.
See the film "The Great Train Robbery."
 
Apparently, geological concerns weren't a consideration for the Spadeadam silo, which is now a pond, fed from something called CheeseBurn Creek.
 
The British apparently came up with the original idea of missile silos going so far as to build a couple of scaled down test models before financial concerns, estimates that they'd require the entire UK concrete output did a year to build, and other concerns saw the idea cancelled. I need some abandoned missile silos for an idea I'm considering so supposing that they had been built and later decommissioned does anyone happen to know where they were considering building them? IIRC the choices were limited by a combination of distance from the potential targets and the local geological conditions. Thanks.

I have always realized the economy of the US vs Great Britain but this really brings it out.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Even the Soviets had to cancel a super heavy ICBM based on the Proton because it would have required far too much concrete, and the Soviets were the largest concrete producers in the world (I think with many times the capacity of the United States). They even had enough concrete to fill a lake full of nuclear waste. How much concrete production did the various missile silo programs consume?
 
IIRC East Anglia was considered. There's some information about Blue Streak and the proposed 'underground launchers' here.
Thanks for the link. Don't know why but I was sure I'd read somewhere that North West England west of the Pennines had been proposed for having the right kind of geology, solid enough rock and stone, to build them in but I now can't for the life of me find anything like that. Who knows. Probably just as well the programme was cancelled as even if the report used to justify it was unsound by the time they became operational they'd likely only have a decade worth of military effectiveness before the Soviets introduced their first counterforce missiles that would have rendered them obsolete.

For my purposes they shall however be built in the early to mid-1960s only to be decommissioned in the late 1970s and then left vacant. Perfect sites for what I have in mind in later decades. :)
 
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Silos n Britain really don't make a lot of sense. You need hardened silos to preserve a second strike/retaliatory deterrence capability. For the UK, submarines in a countervalue role did this quite effectively. Any hardened silos would have been very effectively targeted by Soviet IRBMs in Eastern Europe no later than the early 1970s which means that they would have been as easily knocked out in a first strike as anything not in a hard silo. Hard silos worked in the US because it had a lot of space in which to place them and the industrial capacity to build them. Britain really didn't have either.
 
Any hardened silos would have been very effectively targeted by Soviet IRBMs in Eastern Europe no later than the early 1970s...
I'd have to double check but I was under the impression that the Soviets didn't roll out their first missiles accurate enough to be used as a counterforce weapon until the start of 1975. Hence my mention of silos likely only being viable for roughly a decade, although this is of course all with hindsight.
 
I'd have to double check but I was under the impression that the Soviets didn't roll out their first missiles accurate enough to be used as a counterforce weapon until the start of 1975. Hence my mention of silos likely only being viable for roughly a decade, although this is of course all with hindsight.

That is probably right for ICBM over 11000km ranges but the same guidence system in an MRBM over 3500k will give considerably better accuracy, although I don't know if it would be enough for hard targets.
 
OK, according to Fire Across the Desert by Peter Morton, the Blue Streak silos were to be placed in the British countryside and Middle East to Bring the western Soviet Union into range. They had to be bored into granite and there were few places in Eastern England that had the 100 metre deep strata, the best places were the rocky, mountainous western parts of British Isles. Test borings at Uphaven in Wiltshire because of ground water problems at Duxford Cambridgeshire.

The silos themselves were cool, U shaped and blasted the LOX into the rocket in 3 1/2 minutes using compressed nitrogen.
 
According Nicolas Hill book "A Vertical Empire" page 137.

were two K11 test silos planned, one at Woomera, one at Spadeadam to build overground in local ravines.

after series of elimination twelve disused airfield were consider for underground silos

Castle Camp in cambridgeshire,
Rigdewell in Essex,
Tibenham and Handwick in Norfolk
Eye, Beccles, Sudbury, Metfeld, Raydon, Bungay, Halesworth and Horeham in Suffolk
 
I don't think the British ever considered building ballistic missile launch silos on UK soil because of the fact the Russians by the early 1960's could put mobile-launched Scud missiles in the German Democratic Republic, which would mean the British radars would only get at most a few minutes' warning before the missile launched in East Germany lands on British soil. That's why the RAF wanted the Skybolt missile so they could be carried by the Avro Vulcan bomber, and eventually got the Polaris missile launched from far less vulnerable submarines.

In the USA, ICBM silos made more sense, especially once the Minuteman missile became operational and the time to launch a missile once the launch order was received was around one minute. The Soviets kept most of their very long-range SLBM submarines (Delta III/IV and Typhoon class) mostly in the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, mostly because it was less vulnerable to American submarine attack. But that meant even Soviet-launched SLBM's had fairly long reaction times--way more than enough to get the Minuteman missiles off the ground and bombers into the air.
 
I don't think the British ever considered building ballistic missile launch silos on UK soil because of the fact the Russians by the early 1960's could put mobile-launched Scud missiles in the German Democratic Republic, which would mean the British radars would only get at most a few minutes' warning before the missile launched in East Germany lands on British soil.

The Scud D had a range of 700km, marginal at best for attacking targets in Britain from East Germany, perhaps you mean the SS3 with a 1200km range which was the first missile the Soviets deployed outside of the Soviet Union in 1959. In any case until Britain cancelled Blue Streak and Blue Steel MkII in 1960 they most certainly did plan to build silos in Britain, the silos protecting the Blue Streaks from near misses. What's more Britain did have an early warning system in the early 60s and the Blue Streak could launch within 4 minutes of the order, this is the state of play in the early 60s.
 
Even the Soviets had to cancel a super heavy ICBM based on the Proton because it would have required far too much concrete, and the Soviets were the largest concrete producers in the world (I think with many times the capacity of the United States). They even had enough concrete to fill a lake full of nuclear waste. How much concrete production did the various missile silo programs consume?
I've always suspected that the concrete production excuse for not deploying UR-500 as an ICBM was an excuse - the real reason being that there was no mission for such a large missile!
What's more Britain did have an early warning system in the early 60s and the Blue Streak could launch within 4 minutes of the order, this is the state of play in the early 60s.
And of course, the missiles weren't expected to launch on warning. They were to ride out the attack and launch a retaliatory strike - hence considerable design effort put into shock resistance and devising ways to clear rubble from the launch port.
 
That's right, even at close range missiles were countervalue weapons, if you wanted to actually hit something with a nuke you used a bomber until the 70s.
 
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