The V-force

Two runs of the same force against the same targets, switched on the clock panel.

• The force. 159 aircraft on eight stations in the middle of 1964, the peak the official history gives: Vulcan B.2 at Scampton, Waddington and Coningsby, Victor B.2 at Wittering, Victor B.1A at Cottesmore and Honington, Vulcan B.1A at Finningley, and the Valiants at Marham that lost their wings to the low-level role and were withdrawn in 1965. Forty aircraft carry Blue Steel. The strength at each base is reconstructed from the squadron establishments and says so; the dispersal scheme, four aircraft to each of thirty-six airfields, and quick reaction alert at fifteen minutes are on every base's readout.
• The targets. Sixty documented Soviet complexes from the American study of 1956, filtered to those within a 3,000 km radius of action, in the study's own priority order, Moscow first. They are not a British list, and every target's readout says so in the withheld tier.
• The profiles. High level, as built: fifty thousand feet, Blue Steel away a hundred nautical miles out, and a third of the force through the defences. Low level, as flown: transit at forty-five thousand, down to three hundred feet seven hundred kilometres from the target, Blue Steel down to forty nautical miles, and three fifths through. The loss figures are inferred and stated as such; the altitudes and the Blue Steel ranges are the open literature's.

The V-force is the arsenal whose story is its flight profile. It was designed for one thing, a high-altitude approach above the reach of guns, and within a decade the reason for its shape had gone. Gary Powers was shot down at 70,000 feet on 1 May 1960 by an SA-2, and the fleet that had been built to fly high spent the rest of its life on the deck, at 250 feet, in camouflage instead of anti-flash white. The Blue Steel missile, bought to let the bomber turn away a hundred miles out, was designed for release at 40,000 feet and had to be recertified for low-level launch, at which its range fell by most of what it had. No other force makes the argument of this instrument, that the weapon is what the delivery lets it be, quite so plainly. Grid/84 now has the machinery to draw it: air legs with a climb, a cruising altitude and a descent to the deck.

Enough for an honest study, and less than one would like.

• Humphrey Wynn, RAF Nuclear Deterrent Forces (HMSO, 1994). The official history, written inside the Ministry of Defence with access to the files, and the single best source. It gives the readiness states, the dispersal scheme, the weapons and the shape of the planning.
• The National Archives at Kew. AIR 2, AIR 8, AIR 20, DEFE 4, DEFE 5, DEFE 6, DEFE 13 hold Bomber Command and Chiefs of Staff papers, many released, some retained. Individual operation orders have been opened in batches since the 1990s.
• The Anglo-American co-ordination of 1958, under which Bomber Command's targets were fitted to the American plan and later to the SIOP, and the Nassau agreement of December 1962 that assigned the Polaris force to NATO with the escape clause for supreme national interests. Both are documented, the second published.
• What is public in outline: quick reaction alert from 1962 with aircraft at fifteen minutes and later at cockpit readiness; the four-minute warning as the public expression of the same clock; dispersal from the main bases to satellite airfields in fours; the weapons, Blue Danube, Red Beard, Violet Club, Yellow Sun Mark 1 and 2, and Blue Steel; the transition to low level in 1963 and 1964; the handover of the deterrent to the Royal Navy on 30 June 1969.

The target lists. British nuclear targeting has never been released in the way the SIOP-62 briefing was: individual desired ground zeros, the assignment of aircraft to cities, and the retaliation plan's contents remain withheld or heavily weeded, and secondary accounts of "the 48 cities" or similar figures differ from each other. A study must not invent them. The honest form is the same one the SIOP//62 study takes where the record stops: name the category, state the rule, mark the tier as withheld, and let the reader see the shape of the plan without a fabricated list. If the archive yields a released list, it can replace the rule.

• The dispersal as geometry. The thirty-six airfields are named in the readout but not drawn; putting the force on them would show what the scheme was for.
• The defences as entities. The penetration fraction is a number where it should be a belt of SA-2 sites the routes have to be planned around, which is what the crews actually did and what the great circles here certainly do not.
• Refuelling and route planning, both absent.
• The archive. If a released British operation order turns up at Kew, the inferred assignment can be replaced by the real one, and the withheld tier on each target with a documented one.

That a deterrent can be obsolete in the middle of its own service life without anyone being able to say so out loud; that the answer to a surface-to-air missile was to fly under it, at a cost in range, accuracy and crew survival that was never fully argued in public; and that Britain's independent deterrent was, in its planning, fitted to somebody else's plan from 1958 onwards.