Category A VERTICAL EMPIRE

The RAE at Farnborough, Hampshire, provided the guiding hand behind most of these projects. Together with the Rocket Propulsion Department (RPD), later the Rocket Propulsion Establishment (RPE), based at Westcott, Buckinghamshire, RAE carried out all the preliminary research for the ballistic missile, and also initiated and oversaw the Black Knight programme. It was also responsible for all the further studies that culminated in Black Arrow.

RAE was a large and wide spread organisation in the 1950s and 1960s; the Guided Weapons (GW) Department was responsible for all the early work on Blue Streak and Black Knight. In January 1962 Space Department was created, taking over much of the work of the GW Department. Space Department was responsible for a good deal of the UK’s work with ELDO, for the later re-entry experiments, Skylark, Black Arrow, and the technology satellites Prospero and Miranda.

In 1988 the RAE was renamed the Royal Aerospace Establishment, and in 1991 the RAE was merged into the Defence Research Agency (DRA). In 1995 the DRA and other Ministry of Defence organisations were merged to form the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). In 2001 DERA was part – privatised, resulting in two separate organisations, the state-owned Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), and the privatised company QinetiQ.

A pressure-fed liquid oxygen/petrol rocket motor was first tested in Britain as early as 1941. It could provide a thrust of 2,000 lb and was intended as an assisted take-off device. The motor was also used in the early LOP/GAP and the later RTV-1. Hydrocarbons have a high flame temperature and cooling proved to be a problem – the solution was found by changing from petrol to a water – methanol mixture as in Snarler. This led to a prejudice against the combination that persisted through the early 1950s.

In the early 1950s, RPE began taking an interest in larger rocket motors, and a design for a liquid oxygen/liquid ammonia motor was drawn up, notable mainly for its spherical combustion chamber2. Discussions were held with ICI at Teeside concerning the availability and supply of liquid ammonia, but visits to America by members of the technical staff at Westcott re-awakened their interest in kerosene as a fuel. The idea of lox/kerosene motors moved back up the agenda, and the ammonia design was dropped. These new designs were named Delta, following the Alpha/Beta/Gamma sequence.

Delta 3 is the most interesting in that it would have been the starting point for a ballistic missile. Indeed, reasonably detailed sketches were made for a design of such a missile.3

Once Rolls Royce had licenced the North American S3 design and developed it into the RZ 2, there was little point in continuing with the work on the larger Delta chambers, and work on them ceased in 1957. Firings of the smaller Delta 5 and 7 continued until 1966.

All modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics.

– Sir Sydney Camm

Politics obviously play a very important role in a project such as Blue Streak. It was competing for resources, or to put it another way, for money, with not only other defence projects, but with Government spending as a whole. The Government was the customer, and it was the Government that would have to decide whether it was value for money. On the other hand, the Government is not one single entity; it is a mixture of departments all with their own agenda, and their own axes to grind. These agenda would often come into conflict, and that is what the story of the cancellation of Blue Streak illustrates.

The political decision by the UK to become a nuclear power in the late 1940s implied two interlinked technical policies: the development of the nuclear device itself, and the development of a credible means of delivery. Credible in this context can imply a variety of different concepts.

Primarily, the threat of the nuclear deterrent has to be credible to the opposition, and as far as the UK was concerned, this meant Russia. Secondly, the deterrent has to be credible to the armed services that have to deploy it, and also politically credible to the UK electorate. Thirdly, in the UK context, it had to be credible to the US, since the UK deterrent was perceived by the Government as essentially an adjunct to the US deterrent, and also since the UK wished to have some influence over US nuclear policy. This was not possible unless the UK had her own nuclear weapons. The 1957 Defence White Paper described the U. K deterrent thus:

The free world is today mainly dependent for its protection upon the nuclear capacity of the United States. While Britain cannot by comparison make more than a modest contribution, there is a wide measure of agreement that she must possess an appreciable element of nuclear deterrent power of her own.

A bomb without a delivery system is of little use. In the early 1950s, the intended means of delivery was by a free fall bomb dropped from jet aircraft (the

V bombers, which were the Valiant, the Vulcan, and the Victor), which were to be further augmented with Blue Steel. However, technological advances meant that many other means of delivery became possible as the decade advanced.

Principal among these was the ballistic missile, which, above all, seemed to have one overriding advantage. This lay in its apparent invulnerability: once the vehicle was safely launched, it would be extremely difficult to intercept. But there were various ways in which ballistic missiles could be deployed, and as the various possibilities unfolded, each new system appeared to offer advantages over its predecessors. Thus it was possible to begin development of one system only to find half way through that another system was becoming feasible, and which threatened to supersede its predecessor. Technological advances during the 1950s were such that a new system could appear within a year or two of development having begun on an earlier system.

This was a particular problem for UK policy makers, those in the Cabinet and the Defence Ministry. For whatever reasons, development times in the UK were far greater than their US counterparts. UK policy makers were put into a position where they had to take a decision on a system which might take ten years to develop, with an expected service life of perhaps another ten years. Thus they had to look 20 years into the future, and with little hard intelligence as to the capabilities of the Soviet Union. Much of this intelligence was based on erroneous assessments of the industrial capacity and technological achievements of the USSR. The launch of Sputnik in particular led the West to think that the USSR was in many areas technically superior. In fact, the missile that launched Sputnik, the R7, was far too big and clumsy to be deployed operationally. However, Soviet nuclear forces from the late 1960s onwards would be a formidable challenge to a country such as the UK.

Political and Service tensions developed as a result of the development of potential rivals to Blue Streak. Proponents of one system often deliberately misused technical information to cast doubt upon another, and a good deal of the policy making was deliberately partisan. In other words, lobbying for a particular system was heavily influenced by particular Service departments who wished to control the means of delivery themselves and whose budget would benefit accordingly. There were also other Service factions who wanted as little money as possible to be spent on nuclear weapons, to free up the Defence budget for conventional weapons. Most of this is as true now as it was then!

The Operational Requirement for Blue Streak had called for a missile that could carry a megaton warhead over a distance of 2,000 nautical miles. The weight of the warhead then available meant that a relatively large missile had to be designed, and in retrospect, this was a mistake. Given the long development time for the missile, it might have been reasonable to assume that warhead design might have made significant advances in the interim. Indeed, at the time the design was ‘frozen’, Britain had not yet developed a fusion weapon. However, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

The use of a cryogenic fuel for Blue Streak was also a potential limitation on its deployment as the missile could not be kept in a ‘ready to fire’ state indefinitely. However, in this context it should be noted that exactly the same constraints were to apply to contemporary Russian and American designs such as the R7, Atlas and Thor. Furthermore the structure of this type of missile was relatively fragile, and extremely vulnerable if deployed on the surface. Hence the intention at the outset was to site the missile in ‘underground launchers’, as already described.

Compared with the US, development times for UK projects were very much longer. By the time of cancellation, Blue Streak had been under development for around 57 months with the first flight still some months away. The Thor missile, albeit smaller but of the same technological sophistication, was 13 months from inception to first launch. There are various reasons for this.

The first is that the Americans had much more prior experience than the UK: American missile development had proceeded almost uninterrupted since the war, whereas efforts in the UK had been much smaller scale and directed mainly at small defensive missiles.

A second reason was the means of procurement. In the US, specific teams were set up with considerable executive powers and, by comparison with the UK, almost unlimited finance. In the UK, the procurement ministry was the Ministry of Supply (later to become the Ministry of Aviation). A reading of the Ministry papers shows that the executive powers of the Ministry with regard to the industry carrying out the work were very much less.

Furthermore responsibility for the project was very much divided. The Ministry of Supply was the procurement Ministry. The Air Ministry would deploy the missile when it went into service. The Air Ministry, however, came under the control of the Ministry of Defence, who also then became involved. Finally, the RAE was to be the technical overseers of the project. Hence representatives of all these organisations, together with representatives from the firms, might all have been present at the various progress meetings. Such cumbersome bureaucracy cannot have helped the progress of the project. For example, an official in the Ministry of Defence wrote about the building of the facilities at Spadeadam:

I think the Minister of Supply ought to be shaken. It is up to him to warn us as soon as there is any administrative or financial difficulty to his not getting on as fast as he could with the project.[6]

The sending of memoranda back and forward (in the days before email!) from one Ministry to another must have been another time waster.

A third brake on the project was the Treasury, who took a much closer interest in Blue Streak than seems to be the case with many other defence projects. Thus in a minute to the Minister of Defence: ‘During most of 1956 we were defending the very existence of Blue Streak against savage attacks by the Treasury.’2 Such comments occur frequently in the Ministry of Defence files. By comparison, US resources were incomparably greater, and American engineers could afford to launch missile after missile until the design was a success. The UK did not have this luxury.

However, the feature of Blue Streak that was to prove the most controversial was the means of deployment in ‘underground launchers’. These launchers evolved gradually from relatively simple ideas into what today would be termed missile silos, although the term was not then in contemporary British use. The design of these launchers would give almost as many technical problems as the missile itself, and their size and complexity would have created considerable construction problems for the UK

But Blue Streak was running into other financial difficulties, apart from the cost of the ‘underground launchers’. In a sense, the Treasury’s anxiety was justified, since the costs seemed to be open-ended. The Ministry of Supply seemed to be unable to make any realistic cost estimates, and the time was fast approaching when firm decisions as to silos and their location would have to be taken. In addition, even the Home Office was becoming concerned since their location affected civil defence decisions. The sheer size and scale of the silos was only just becoming evident: a site would occupy around three acres, and would have to be a considerable distance from any habitation. (One potential site at Bircham Newton was ruled out on the grounds that it was too close to the Queen’s residence at Sandringham!) Stopping any such major project in its tracks is extremely difficult; very good reasons had to be found. There would be considerable political implications to cancelling such a major project.

Alternatives to Blue Streak did begin to emerge soon after development had begun. These were the Polaris submarine launched missile, and an air-launched missile code named WS138A, later to be known as Skybolt.

Polaris was a system developed by the US Navy. It used solid propellant motors, and the early versions had limited range and payload. However, a decision had been taken by the US Navy that since warheads would become much lighter as their design improved, the range/payload problem would be much less pressing by the time of deployment (warhead design in the US was considerably in advance of that in the UK).

Britain’s first nuclear submarine was HMS Dreadnought, made possible once the US Navy had provided a design for a lightweight reactor. Since then there had been close co-operation between the two services, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, in charge of the programme in the US, was eager for the Royal Navy to acquire the Polaris system.

The problem was that Polaris was not particularly attractive to Whitehall. It would mean building quite a number of nuclear submarines (certainly more than the five, later reduced to four, planned after the Nassau agreement) and buying the missiles from America – providing America was prepared to sell them. Such an arrangement did not appear to be cheaper than Blue Streak, it would have taken just as long to get the submarines into service, it would mean spending valuable dollars on the missiles, and it would also appear to reduce Britain’s independence as a nuclear power. Certain factions in the Admiralty had rather different views.

The Navy felt it had come out of the cuts in defence resulting from the 1957 Sandys’ White Paper relatively lightly. But the deterrent and Blue Streak in particular was resented as it was felt that too much of the defence budget was being diverted towards it; money that could be used for new ships. However, attitudes began to change when the First Sea Lord, Mountbatten, was told of Polaris by Arleigh Burke, the originator of the system in the US. Mountbatten and Burke were old friends, and a rather clandestine correspondence began between them. Soon the correspondence became more official. Burke was a formidable proponent for the system: he invented rather poorly scanning clerihews for the system along the lines of ‘move deterrents out to sea/where the real estate is free/and where they are/far away from me’3 to hammer the point that a submarine on patrol does not need fixed bases, and where it can remain undetected and thus invulnerable. A faction within the Navy took up Polaris with enthusiasm during 1958, but realised that the big obstacle was Blue Streak. The UK could not afford yet another nuclear delivery system. Accordingly a campaign began with the Admiralty, as an internal memo shows. I

I share your views that what we are most immediately concerned about is so to reduce the deterrent that we can maintain adequate conventional forces. I believe however that a decision to go for Polaris would give a large enough saving to guarantee the conventional forces we need. Further expenditure on Polaris would I think be less than future expense on Blue Streak plus fighter defence of the deterrent.

If I am right that we can get an immediate saving by taking the decision now, I feel that we should present the economic advantages of Polaris rather more strongly. Such a presentation would it appears fall on fertile ground.

Further papers indicate similar lobbying. In a note on a possible European IRBM from the First Sea Lord in February 1959, he comments:

Nevertheless, mainly thanks to the Treasury, it was possible to secure a chance to refer this point to Ministers on the grounds that, in the highly unlikely event of our NATO partners taking up the offer, HMG would be committed to the completion of Blue Streak with all that entails.

Later on in the note, commenting with reference to solid fuel motors, he says ‘… unless we can effectively answer them, the chances of upsetting BLUE STREAK may be considerably weakened.’

The Admiralty became even more excited when they discovered (and misinterpreted) a scheme for a UK ABM system: ‘You would hardly believe it, but since sending you my note this afternoon we have unearthed further information which really does put BLUE STREAK out of court.’

The language used goes well beyond the simple evaluation of the merits of rival systems: it becomes distinctly partisan.

The Navy’s efforts had not gone unnoticed by the Air Ministry either, as the following note in June 1958 from the Secretary of State for Air to Sandys shows:

The general conclusion that I come to is that the matter is of such fundamental importance and so complex that it might be more helpful to you if the Chiefs of Staff were asked to examine the requirement in all its aspects, strategical, tactical and technical, in the light of… the First Lord’s paper, and then to put forward a considered military opinion to you.

Mountbatten, then First Sea Lord, was pushing hard for some form of report too, as a note to Sir Frederick Brundrett shows:

. we are all most anxious to see that the Powell enquiry is dealt with on the right lines, to be quite sure that it will lead to the right answer. This is a Defence question first and foremost, although it may have all sorts of secondary interests. We none of us can believe that Powell and two outside scientists can possibly arrive at the right answers if they have no Service views on the requirements represented at the Committee.

For this reason, we are all convinced that we must have adequate representation on the Committee from each of the Services; and that is why we decided that the three Vice Chiefs should sit on it.4

[‘Powell’ refers to Sir Richard Powell, then Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, and a key figure in the story of the cancellation.]

This is a letter full of ambiguity: what is the ‘right answer’? Presumably, to Mountbatten, this meant Polaris. And it is interesting that Mountbatten is pressing for Service representation on the committee.

Accordingly, Sandys minuted Powell in December 1958:

The Chiefs of Staff have no doubt been considering for some time the respective advantage and disadvantages from the British stand-point of basing our nuclear deterrent underground or under the sea.

I think we ought to have a discussion of this matter at an early meeting of the Defence Board. I should, therefore, be glad if you would let me have a summary of the views of the Chiefs of Staff as soon as you can after Christmas.

Powell submitted a reply to Sandys outlining the form he felt such an inquiry should take, and suggested its terms of reference as being: ‘To consider how the British-controlled contribution to the nuclear deterrent can most effectively be maintained in the future, and to make recommendations.’

But then he had to push Sandys for further action:

In a minute of 23rd March I submitted proposals for setting up a study into the future of the British deterrent… you agreed that this should be set in action but subsequently asked me to do nothing, in order to avoid casting doubt on the future of BLUE STREAK.

The Chiefs of Staff and Sir Norman Brook [the Cabinet Secretary] have recently asked me about this study. Both felt that it ought to go on, since the future of the deterrent is bound to come up again after an election, if not sooner. I think they are right, and should like to have your authority to proceed.

In any event, a note from Sandys’ office to Powell shows that his hand was being forced:

The Minister discussed with you this afternoon the proposed Study Group on the British deterrent. He felt that we had only recently reached our conclusions on the need and form of the British contribution to the nuclear deterrent. Little further information would be available, and in his view, the time was not yet ripe for a further study of this problem. He asked that if this matter was raised in your coming meeting at Chequers, you should say that he was considering setting up a Study Group, and you should leave this matter open. You agreed to discuss this further with the Minister after discussing it with Sir F. Brundrett and after your visit to Chequers.

But an internal Admiralty note written to the First Lord (the Earl of Selkirk) by the First Sea Lord (Admiral Sir Charles Lambe) in May 1959 gives another perspective:

My predecessor also turned over to me the fact that the Minister of Defence had agreed to a team under the Chairmanship of Sir Richard Powell, to examine the pros and cons of three possible methods of providing the future British contribution to the Deterrent, namely Manned Aircraft, Ballistic Missiles (BLUE STREAK) and POLARIS. Though this had been agreed by the Minister, I understand that, just before he left for New Zealand, he ordered this investigation to be suspended, giving as his reason the fact that ‘he did not wish the validity of BLUE STREAK to be questioned’ …

As I see it, the present Minister of Defence [Sandys] will do all in his power to prevent any alternative to Blue Streak from even being considered. I am also certain that the new Chief of the Defence Staff [Mountbatten], when he takes office, will do everything in his power to see that the merits of Polaris are brought to the attention of HM Government. Domestically, I am certain that we in the Admiralty need a much clearer picture than we have at present of the probable repercussions of the Polaris programme on the rest of the Navy before we start any official pro Polaris propaganda. Indeed, I doubt it is right for the Navy to undertake any such propaganda at all. I believe we would be in a far stronger position if we were (at any rate, apparently) pushed into the POLARIS project rather than have to push it ourselves.5

Note: these are listed in the order in which they were fired, not the vehicle number.

BK01

Single stage. Launched 7 September 1958 at 20:03. Apogee 140 miles. No re­entry head.

The preliminary post firing meeting stated that:

… the vehicle appeared to follow the anticipated velocity and acceleration programme until about 132.7 secs from time zero when the motor flame went out. At the same instant, transmission from the body telemetry sender ceased, and there was failure of all information channels on the head sender. some seconds later, a large bright flash was observed which seemed to travel laterally.

The vehicle was recovered in two main portions, one consisting of the engine bay and part of the HTP tank and the other the head, electronics bay and approximately half the kerosene tank.

Fragments of the engine bay, and HTP tank were scattered over a wide area, and the state of the engine bay contents suggested that an explosion had occurred on impact. Extensive burning of cable looms in the lower half of the bay had occurred.2

The vehicle was fitted with a destruct mechanism in case of failure. If the appropriate signal was sent, small explosive charges would blow manganese dioxide powder into the HTP tank. Manganese dioxide is a fine black powder, and a very effective catalyst for the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. Post flight analysis showed that the aerial had picked up a stray signal and had inadvertently triggered the destruct mechanism. This would cause the HTP to explode, destroying the vehicle – hence the bright flash, which was probably the remainder of the kerosene burning in the hot steam and oxygen produced by the decomposition. In all other respects, the vehicle had behaved as designed, and from most points of view, the flight could be called a success.

Two stage. Launched 24 April 1965 at 20:32. Apogee 404.6 miles.

Both the main stage and second stage performance was satisfactory. The re­entry head was a GW 20 shape made from copper. A thicker rope was used to retard the sabot, but again it broke without retarding the sabot significantly. The copper cone disintegrated on re-entry, and the tape recorder was not found until two months after the trial.

It can be argued that the Cold War became a war of resources, and one in which the UK effectively dropped out of at the start of the 1960s. It could be further argued that the collapse of Communism in Russia was also due to the collapse of a command economy directed to large military and technological programmes. However, let us concentrate on the UK.

As already mentioned, most of the projects discussed so far were military in origin, but many were never carried through to completion. This is not unique to the UK; similar cancellations happen in all countries developing new technology. One of the major factors contributing to the cancellation of such projects, not only in the UK but in the US, was the very rapid advance in technology during the 1950s.

In many ways, the major aerospace technologies, with the exception of computing and electronics, had become mature by the mid-1960s. Thus the jet engine, the rocket motor, supersonic aircraft and the rest had been successfully developed by this time. There have obviously been improvements, but they have been incremental rather than breakthroughs into new areas. It is also interesting that up until the 1970s, almost all technological advances came from government and military projects, whereas today the main driving force seems to be business and consumer interests, most notably in electronics and computing. Military spending is no longer the great driver of projects that it once was.

After the cancellation of Blue Streak there was virtually no further military interest in long-range missiles. The UK was left with the legacy of the work done so far on Blue Streak and Black Knight to pursue a rather half-hearted space programme. Considerable muddle in the subsequent policy left the UK disillusioned with space research – or, at least, with launchers – with the inevitable cancellations later in the 1960s.

The question then comes: why, when America, Russia and France were pursuing space exploration with vigour, and why, when countries such as China and India are launching satellites almost as a matter of routine, has the UK shown such little interest both at government level and among the people at large?

A useful German word can be used here: the Zeitgeist, which might be translated as ‘the spirit of the times’, or the outlook characteristic of the period. America and Russia were pursuing their race in space as a way of fighting the Cold War at one remove, in an attempt to show the rest of the world who was technologically the more sophisticated. Britain had no such interest: at the end of the 1950s it was beginning the long retreat from Empire, and at the same time beginning to suffer from the economic and social ills which were to plague the country for the next 30 or 40 years. Another phrase has been used of the government at this time: ‘managing the decline’. A country that feels itself to be in decline does not embark on new, challenging technological challenges.

As mentioned earlier, Macmillan’s initial announcement in Parliament in 1959 was greeted with the response: ‘… is it just an attempt to keep up with the Joneses?’ This was a fairly common attitude, as when Thorneycroft, then Minister of Aviation, was interviewed on television about the proposed Blue Streak launcher and ELDO in 1961. Ministers, when interviewed on television, have to expect difficult questions – but the tone of the questioning is interesting.

Mr. Mackenzie: But couldn’t it be argued that we, in Britain, have after all only a limited number of technologists available, even in any aspect of this area and that we might be better advised to get them off working, for example, in exploration of the problem of supersonic aircraft, or some more obviously commercial operation, rather than this rather exhibitionist activity of rocketeering?

Minister: There’s nothing exhibitionist about the brilliant Rolls Royce and de Havilland engineers who’ve, incidentally, done a great deal more than keep this in mothballs. We’ve just done two fully integrated static firings. The work is going well ahead and the Americans will tell you themselves that the payoff in other forms of industry – in metallurgy, electronics and the rest – have wide application to civil industry as a whole, is very great if we go into it.

Mr. Mackenzie: But are we remotely in this competition? One knows how very far the Russians have gone, and the Americans and one has the awful feeling that this is the kind of feeble rearguard, final action to show the flag.

Minister: Don’t be so depressed, Robert. This is not a rearguard action at all. We are in this for eternity, all of us. It isn’t just the question of doing it with the Atlas or the Blue Streak. We shall be making these rockets: I hope we shall be making them in Europe for a long time ahead, with great advantage to ourselves, to the world and to all the countries, including the smaller ones, that are in it.1

‘Exhibitionist activity of racketeering’, ‘feeble rear guard action’. And another quote from Mackenzie later in the interview: ‘But I don’t understand why, if the Americans are offering a launcher – which is presumably more advanced than the one we have – Blue Streak – why we may as well not write off Blue Streak and use their launcher for whatever purposes we’ve got in mind.’

And Mackenzie was wrong. Blue Streak was actually based on American technology, but it could be argued that in the process of anglicisation that a considerable number of improvements had been made.

Another example of the same frame of mind (and the frame of mind perpetually adopted by the Treasury) can be seen in a note from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, John Boyd Carpenter, in July 1963:

Like other post-war establishments such as Harwell and Aldermaston, Westcott was originally an RAF airfield before being taken over in 1946 as the Guided Projectile Establishment. In 1947 its status changed to the Rocket Propulsion Department of RAE, and then in 1958 it became the Rocket Propulsion Establishment.

A good deal of work was done on solid motors (all named after birds, since the Superintendent was a keen ornithologist), but in addition, there was a good deal of early work done on liquid motors using HTP involving German engineers who had come to Britain at the end of the war. These were the Alpha, Beta and Gamma series of motors. The Delta was a low-key liquid oxygen/kerosene programme, which became rather pointless once Rolls Royce began development of the RZ 1 and RZ 2 chambers. There was also a very considerable liquid hydrogen programme, producing some sophisticated chambers which could almost have been fitted directly into a rocket stage without much further work. In addition, P site was used by Rolls Royce in some early firings of the RZ 1 and RZ 2 before Spadeadam became available.

One of the major projects of the 1950s was the 1/6th scale silo, which must have been quite an impressive sight when the motors were fired inside the tube. Nothing remains of the site today, although there are still hexagonal pieces of concrete which formed the walls of the model silo to be found to this day.

Spadeadam in Cumbria was chosen as the site to test and develop the Blue Streak engines, and here Blue Streak vehicles were assembled for static firing before shipment to Australia. Rolls Royce ran the site as an agency.

The engine test area at Prior Lancy Rigg consisted of four concrete stands into which the engines could be mounted for test firing. Three remain, copied from a Rocketdyne design used at their California Santa Susana Field Laboratory site; the fourth has been demolished. This last and lost stand seems to have been built to a different design, using an innovative application of pre-stressed concrete to contain liquid oxygen spills.

Two static firing stands themselves stood at Greymare Hills and were large enough to accommodate a full Blue Streak missile. All firings were controlled from command centre bunkers connected to the stands by tunnels or surface cabling ducts.

After the demise of ELDO, Spadeadam was taken over by the RAF. Its primary purpose today is to provide a location for teaching of electronic warfare to RAF and other NATO aircrew.

The Germans pioneered the use of hydrogen peroxide as a rocket fuel in the early 1940s, powering the Me163 rocket fighter, and the V2’s turbine and fuel pump. British work was to take this much further. The key to a successful HTP motor is the choice of catalyst. When the HTP is passed over a suitable catalyst, it decomposes into steam and oxygen, and the decomposition is sufficiently energetic for the HTP to be used as a monopropellant. However, it is much more effective then to inject a fuel into the steam and oxygen. In British rocket motors this was always kerosene. The kerosene ignites spontaneously in the hot gases. Silver plated nickel gauze was used as the catalyst, and such catalyst packs could be easily inserted into the rocket chamber. The ratio of HTP to kerosene was around 8 : 1. Although the combination does not give a very high S. I. compared with many other fuel combinations, it has other advantages. Not being cryogenic, it can be left in the vehicle and does not need topping up. Nor does it need insulation as liquid hydrogen does: the insulation adds to the vehicle weight. Further, HTP is quite dense, 1375 kg/m3, as opposed to 80 kg/m3 for liquid hydrogen. This makes for a very much smaller volume and thus smaller tanks, again saving on vehicle weight. The later rockets developed by the UK using HTP technology were structurally very efficient.

Other engines were then developed using this combination: Spectre, Sprite, Scorpion, Stentor and Gamma. These were initially for aircraft use, although Stentor would be used in the Blue Steel stand-off missile, and Gamma would go on to power Black Knight and Black Arrow. Most of these were developed by commercial firms: Scorpion by Napiers; Sprite and Spectre by de Havilland; Stentor and later Gammas by Armstrong Siddeley, as they were then. Sprite and Super Sprite were designed to assist the take-off of large aircraft such as the V bombers and the Comet, but the increase in effectiveness of the jet engine meant that these units were obsolete before entering service in any major fashion. Scorpion and Spectre were intended for aircraft, to augment the jet engine. However, the HTP combination was to represent the principal British contribution to the rocket field.

The UK was to make hydrogen peroxide technology very much its own: no one before or since has made use of it on such a large scale. Early German and British work used compounds of manganese in one form or another to decompose the peroxide, often injected with the fuel, leading to a very messy exhaust. The secret lay in a metal gauze, through which the HTP was passed, and as it did so, decomposed to steam and oxygen at a temperature of around 500 °C. The gauze was made of silver coated nickel, and a catalyst pack was fitted at the top of the combustion chamber. Into these hot gases a fuel could be injected, and at that temperature they burned spontaneously, meaning there was no further ignition needed. This was very convenient, particularly in the rocket aircraft and the Blue Steel missile.

The largest HTP motor produced was the large chamber in the Stentor motor for Blue Steel, seen above, which had a thrust of around 24,000 lb at sea level. Although the small chamber would find use in Black Knight and Black Arrow, the large chamber was not developed further.

It has been argued that, in some respects, HTP was a technology in search of an application, and in some cases this was certainly true. The Sprite and Super Sprite were developed as rocket assisted take-off units for the Comet airliner and the Valiant bomber, but were far too sophisticated for simple RATO units, which were normally made from clusters of small solid fuel motors. The advantage of using several motors in clusters is that it was far less catastrophic if one failed. Having just two motors, one on either side, was much more hazardous, since the failure of one of the two would result in an off-centre thrust sufficient to make

the aircraft lose control. Such an elaborate system, whereby the used motors would be jettisoned, parachuted back to the ground, then serviced for re-use, made very little sense.

The Scorpion was produced by Napier, and a twin-chambered version, the Double Scorpion, was fitted to Canberra bombers, enabling one of them to reach a new record altitude of 70,310 ft. They were to have been used for high altitude cloud sampling at the H bomb trials at Christmas Island (Operation Grapple), but

the second Canberra was grounded during the crash investigations. There was also a proposal to fit it to the English Electric Lightning, but the Lightning’s performance proved to be quite good enough without the rocket. Rocket assisted take-off and rocket interceptors very soon became obsolete; the main contribution of HTP motors was to Black Knight, Black Arrow and Blue Steel – and it is questionable whether HTP was the correct choice for Blue Steel. However, a new use was to be found for HTP motors – in ballistic rockets. The original Gamma 201 motor for Black Knight used four Gamma chambers, a double-walled chamber developed by RPE. This chamber was later replaced by the small chamber from the Stentor motor, which used the tube-walled construction. Equally importantly, the 301 allowed better adjustment of the kerosene/HTP mixture ratio, making the motor more efficient.

The Stentor small chamber was carried over into Black Arrow, where the first stage motor, the Gamma 8, had, not surprisingly, eight chambers, arranged as four pairs. The second stage of Black Arrow was powered by the Gamma 2, which had two chambers, but with an extended expansion cone, as it would be operating in the near vacuum of altitude. This gave it a higher thrust than the first stage chambers.

There is a final footnote to British HTP work. Bristol Siddeley (who became part of Rolls Royce in 1966) were given a contract by the Ministry of Aviation to develop a high performance HTP motor of 7,500 lb thrust, following on from suggestions made by the firm in 1963. The development programme ran from January 1964 to December 19664. The chamber was designed to run at much higher pressures than usual – 1,000 psi – and a total of 118 firings were achieved, totalling 78 minutes. The thrust level of 7,500 lb was chosen deliberately so that the chamber could be used as a direct replacement for the existing Gamma chamber.

Unlike the existing Gamma chambers, the new chamber (named, for some inscrutable reason, Larch) was double-walled. The reason given for this was that ‘HTP tends to decompose on the hot surfaces in the cooling tubes, producing insoluble gases which can occupy an unacceptable proportion of the restricted passage of one or more of the tubes and lead to burnout’.

The higher chamber pressures also gave an improved S. I.:

Standard Gamma Larch

Sea level SI 217 226

Vacuum SI 251 269

The new chamber (Figure 11), would also have been slightly lighter.

Replacing the existing Gamma chamber in Black Arrow with the new improved version meant that the vehicle could be stretched. As a consequence, the payload could be increased from 232 lb in polar orbit to 375 lb.

Despite the time and money that had been spent on the development, it was not taken further. When RAE did decide to uprate Black Arrow, it went for the solid fuel strap-on booster option. The Gamma motors of Black Arrow were to be the last HTP motors to be developed, but HTP motors did put Britain’s only satellite into orbit, and it is fitting that a British developed technology was used to do so.

The events that finally led to the cancellation of Blue Streak began as a consequence of a meeting at the Prime Minister’s country home, Chequers, in June 1959, referred to in Sandys’ note above. The guest list for that weekend is quite impressive:

Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister;

Sir Norman Brook, Cabinet Secretary;

Sir Roger Makins, Joint Permanent Secretary to the Treasury;

Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office;

Sir Patrick Dean, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC);

Sir Richard Powell, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence;

Marshall of the RAF Sir William Dickson, Chief of the Defence Staff; Admiral Sir John Caspar, Vice Chief of the Naval Staff;

Marshal of the RAF Sir Dermot Boyle, Chief of the Air Staff;

Lt. Gen. Sir William Stratton, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff;

Lord Plowden of the Atomic Energy Authority.

This was indeed an august gathering: their brief from the Prime Minister was to try and look ten years into the future and plan for the changes that they saw coming. In the words of Norman Brook, the Cabinet Secretary, ‘The purpose of the meeting is to put in hand a study of future policy… This study will be undertaken by officials – the Prime Minister does not wish other Ministers to be troubled with it at this stage.’6. There may well have been a subtext behind that last comment, perhaps along the lines that the Prime Minister wanted a relatively disinterested viewpoint for his future-gazing. The Civil Service and the military could also give a longer term view – they would still be there, implementing policy, long after the politicians had gone.

Their focus, as can be seen from the people present, was foreign policy and defence. A major issue at the time was the size of the Defence budget – indeed, the appointment of Sandys as Minister of Defence, and the resultant 1957 Defence White Paper, was intended as the first step in the rationalisation of defence spending. The intention was to keep defence expenditure at 7% of total Government spending, and indeed the deterrent was invoked as part of this. Nuclear deterrence could mean less money spent on conventional arms. In anticipation, the Air Staff had provided briefing papers on the various deterrent options for the assembly.

The deterrent at that time was being maintained by the V bombers, which would shortly be supplemented by Blue Steel. Soon bombers would be obsolete in the strategic role, and the only possible replacement available was Blue Streak. In the words (almost) of another Prime Minister, There Was No Alternative. Blue Streak might have been highly unpopular in Whitehall, but in the absence of a viable alternative it was either Blue Streak or no deterrent at all.

The RAF were not happy with the tone of the discussion when it came to deterrent policy:

It was obvious in the Working Group’s discussions that our sister services resent the overriding priority afforded the Deterrent (at present in RAF custody) under HMG’s policy, and are covetous of the money and resources assigned to it. They have endeavoured to cloak these base motives by advancing arguments of expediency in the guise of military and political rectitude.7

It has been said that the Services often spend more time fighting each other than fighting the enemy, and this is quite a good example of that maxim. That atmosphere of inter-Service enmity (particularly between the Navy and the RAF) should be borne in mind when watching how events unfolded.

‘Base motives’ or not, at the end of their deliberations the Working Group ‘invited the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence to consider further with the Secretary of the Cabinet the question of a separate inquiry into the means of delivery of the British contribution to the nuclear deterrent’8.

Sir Richard Powell was the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence at that time, and having been given this brief, he wrote to Sandys, then Minister, about setting up an inquiry. As we have seen, Sandys was not at all keen for any inquiry.

Other matters intervened with the General Election of October 1959. During the run-up to an election much of Government is put on hold: Ministers have other pre-occupations, and there is little point in going ahead with projects if a change of government means they will be reviewed. There is always a hiatus in Whitehall as the new ministers come in and are brought up to speed on their department.

General Elections also give Prime Ministers the opportunity to reshuffle their Cabinet, and this one was no exception. Sandys was replaced as Minister of Defence by Harold Watkinson, a career politician who had been a businessman and had no great ideological position as far as defence was concerned – he set out to be a practical man, who would bring a businesslike approach to the department rather than an ideological one. His obituary in ‘The Independent’ newspaper says of him that:

He was, already, a highly successful businessman and, like many before and after him (the late John Davies and today Sir James Goldsmith spring to mind), believed that businessmen could handle government far more efficiently and effectively than could politicians. He found out, however, that politics was an art of its own, and that the methods of man management that he had evolved for himself in business were ineffective when applied to the emotional, and often tortuous, handling of political affairs.9

Sandys himself was moved to a renamed Ministry of Supply – now the Ministry of Aviation – with the brief to ‘rationalise’ the aircraft industry. In many ways this can be seen as a demotion, or certainly a sideways move, given that he had been Minister of Supply in 1952 – so much so he asked Macmillan for assurances that his Cabinet seniority would not be affected.

It could be argued that Sandys had fulfilled his brief as Minister of Defence, and had taken his reforms as far as he could. His personal relations with some of the senior military figures had not always been good, and it was probably time for him to move on. Whether the ongoing Blue Streak saga was also a contributory factor is open to debate.

Sandys having gone, the way was clear to the setting up of the British Nuclear Deterrent (Study Group) or BND(SG) (known affectionately to the Admiralty in a later incarnation as the ‘Benders’, presumably from ‘BNDS’). On the face of it, the composition of the Study Group was impeccable:

Sir Richard Powell, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence;

Sir William Strath, Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Aviation;

Sir Frederick Brundrett, Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Defence;

Sir Patrick Dean of the Foreign Office and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee;

Mr. B. D. Fraser of the Treasury;

Vice-Admiral Durlacher, Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff;

Lt.-General Sir William Stratton, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff; Air Marshal Sir Edmund Hudlestone, Vice-Chief of the Air Staff;

Sir William Cook of the Atomic Energy Authority.

This was a high-powered group of men, and any conclusion they arrived at would be buttressed by the authority of their rank. Needless to say, their deliberations would have to be extremely confidential, since any leak could have considerable consequences. Having said that, it is clear that the Ministry of Aviation seemed to be ‘out of the loop’, despite their Chief Scientist being a member of the Study Group. After the report had been issued, the CGWL, Sir Steuart Mitchell, complained that

Adequate opportunities did not occur during the drafting of their report by the Study Group for my Controllerate to brief you properly on the technical issues as they arose, nor to discuss with you the conclusions and recommendations of the report.

I write this to say that now that I have seen the report I am seriously disturbed at the picture it presents in so far as the technical issues are involved, and that I disagree with some of the conclusions.

I am having those technical aspects of the report which lie in my sphere examined (for the first time) in detail and will submit some comments on them to you in a few weeks’ time.

Comments such as these from the CGWL show that the BND(SG) must have been distinctly selective in whom it chose to consult. It also shows how well they were able to keep their discussions under wraps.

Sandys himself seems to have had no prior warning either. The Treasury was delaying the authorisation of funds for further development, and as late as 25 January 1960, he was writing:

Therefore, unless the Defence White Paper contains an announcement that Blue Streak is to be abandoned, which I regard as inconceivable, and which I would, of course, strongly resist, I must ask you to give the ‘all clear’ so that further serious delays can be avoided.10

The wording could, of course, be political disingenuousness, but it does not sound like the words of a man who has read the Study Group’s report – or at least

who has heard about their conclusions. The Chancellor, Derek Heathcote Amory, replied on 4 February:

I do not think it would be reasonable, at a time when the future of the weapon is the subject of a searching review as a major question of defence policy, to accept that the programme should suffer no delay… I am afraid therefore that I still feel unable to authorise the further expenditure referred to.11

He also cited a previous hold up of funds (the Prime Minister’s note of December 1958) as a precedent.

Another part of his letter caused one of the officials in the Ministry of Aviation to note:

The Chancellor is stretching things very far when he says that the possibility of the weapon coming into service late has been one of the considerations necessitating the current review. The Chancellor, having always disliked the Blue Streak policy, might indeed almost be thought to have done his best, by imposing financial restrictions, to ensure that he would be able to say that the weapon would be late and therefore not worth having but in fact it is only the complete hold up of fresh capital expenditure in the last four or five months that has caused us to wonder whether the little elbow room that we had in the R&D programme would no longer prove sufficient.

So who on the Study Group could be seen as opposed to Blue Streak? The position of the Services is interesting. Firstly, the Army would have no strong views on Blue Streak one way or other, except in terms of cost. Blue Streak would take up a relatively large proportion of the defence budget, money that could be used for conventional weapons. The positions of the RAF and Navy are more interesting.

Certainly, sections of the Navy, led by Mountbatten, were campaigning hard against Blue Streak and in favour of Polaris. A memo from Lord Selkirk, First Lord of the Admiralty, illustrates this quite clearly:

My aim last year was not only to make the Prime Minister, Minister of Defence, and other members of the Defence Committee aware of the potentialities of POLARIS, but also to check, so far as this was possible, the BLUE STREAK programme before it gathered momentum. We had some success. The decision at the turn of the year that BLUE STREAK should be allowed to proceed in 1959/60 was certainly accompanied by a growing realisation in the Defence Committee of its disadvantages and mounting costs.

Since then, however, BLUE STREAK has become more firmly established and it looks, at the moment as if the 1960/61 Estimates discussions this Autumn may strengthen it further. If this should be so, its formidable cost, as shown in the draft paper you attached, will become a most serious threat to our hopes of increasing the size of our conventional naval forces, even it the total defence vote were to be fairly substantially enlarged.

We must carefully consider our tactics for dealing with this. Whatever help we may get from the new CDS [Chief of Defence Staff, Mountbatten], I believe that we must be prepared to make the running ourselves.

As I see it, the Government is unlikely to go so far as to stop BLUE STREAK unless there is something which can be put in its place as the future British controlled contribution to the deterrent. From what you say, we are unlikely to be in a position this Autumn, even if we were asked to do so, to present for consideration a substitute programme for POLARIS submarines. What then can we do?12

And, of course, there the Navy hit the nail on the head. There was, at the time the Study Group began its deliberations, no single well-developed system that could be put in Blue Streak’s place. No British long-term possibility was even on the horizon, but there were possible American systems.

Polaris was showing great potential, but still had some way to go, and had other drawbacks, such as the need to build a fleet of atomic powered submarines from scratch. But during the few weeks that the Study Group deliberated, considerable progress was being made elsewhere on another missile – WS138A, or, as it would become better known, Skybolt.

Single stage. Launched 12 March 1959 at 20:20. Apogee 334 miles. No re-entry head.

BK03 was the second proving trial, and was successful except for an engine malfunction late in flight resulting in a long period of ‘cold’ thrusting (that is, decomposition of HTP in the absence of kerosene). The fault was subsequently traced to excessive heating of the propulsion bay, in which temperatures were measured during flight.

Control of the vehicle was satisfactory both during ‘hot’ burning and ‘cold’ burning. In this trial, the guidance telescope tracking was made the primary source of information and radar tracking was retained as the stand-by; this proved very successful. Very good tracking information was received until engine flameout, after which radar information was used during ‘cold’ burning.