Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

The P.17A brochure continues. In the paragraph immediately after the formalism, we read the following: ‘‘By comparing several aircraft, of known characteristics, which have been flown in low altitude tur­bulence, it is possible to decide a maximum value for this parameter which will ensure a comfortable flight’’ (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 2.1.9). ‘‘This parameter’’ is G. Gust response again.

Exhibit 2.1 is from page twenty-five of the brochure. As is obvious, this is a drawing, the drawing of an aircraft. Then the question arises immediately: how naive do we want to make the reader? If we insist on a radical version of naivete then we need to say that there is noth­ing about the picture that links it with the TSR2. For yes, it is a picture of an aircraft. But there is no caption to say that this aircraft is the TSR2.

EXHIBIT 2.1 Perspectival Sketch of Aircraft (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 25;

© Brooklands Museum)

EXHIBIT 2.2 ”The T. S.R.2 weapons system is capable of a wide range of recon­naissance and nuclear and high explosive strike roles in all weathers and with a minimum of ground support facilities.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 4)

EXHIBIT 2.3 ”In T. S.R.2, high grade reconnaissance is allied to very accurate navi­gation and this suggests the application of the aircraft to survey duties. In many areas the navigation accuracy of better than 0.3% of distance travelled is a signifi­cant improvement on the geodetic accuracy of existing maps. This degree of pre­cision enables new maps to be made or old ones to be corrected with a minimum of accurately surveyed reference points.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 17)

Exhibit 2.2 appears much earlier in the brochure—indeed on the first full page of text. Here we don’t learn anything about an aircraft. Instead, we learn that the TSR2 is a weapons system. We also learn that this weapons system fulfills a range of roles, and that it does so in ways that are independent of the effects of weather and elaborate ground-support facilities. But is it an aircraft? Again, to be sure, it de­pends just how naive we want to be. But ifwe were to dig in our heels then we would have to say that we’ve learned that the ‘‘TSR2’’ is a weapons system, but not that it is an aircraft.

Exhibit 2.3 tells us something about TSR2 and navigation. Here the naive reader does indeed learn that TSR2 is an aircraft, but that reader also learns something about the character of this aircraft: that it has

EXHIBIT 2.4 ”In T. S.R.2 the internal and external communications facilities are completely i ntegrated. Two control units provi de for i ntercommunicati on between the crew and for control of the radio equipment installed.” (British Aircraft Cor­poration 1962, 29)

to do with remote sensing and surveying. TSR2, or so it is being sug­gested here, is an aircraft capable of accurate navigation—but also, and perhaps more remarkably, one that is capable of making maps.

How many more versions of naivete do we need? Exhibit 2.4 turns the TSR2 into a communications system. Exhibit 2.5 (though, like the drawing in exhibit 2.1, it does not mention the TSR2 by name), turns it into a fuel system, complete with pipes, tanks, pumps, and engines. And exhibit 2.6 (again we need to enter the caveat about the absence of a name) turns it into a global traveler, moving to and fro between Britain, Australia, and a host of other points around the globe.

Let’s stop the experiment now. We could pile up more exhibits, but we have learned what we need to learn for the moment: a naive reader who does not start out with an idea of what it is, this TSR2, who does not make connections, will learn that it is many and quite different things.1 Let me stress the point: ‘‘the TSR2’’ is not a single
object; neither, whatever the exhibits might suggest, is it many differ­ent parts of a single object. Instead it is many quite different things. It is not one, but many.

This is the problem of difference: we have different objects. Or it is the problem of multiplicity: we have multiple objects. In other words, a reader who insists on being naive is likely to find that he or she is dealing not with a single object but rather with an endless series of different objects, objects that carry the same name—for instance “TSR2’’—but which are quite unlike one another in character.

Of course, we know that it is not really like that. We know—or at least we assume—that the object, the TSR2, is indeed an object. But why is this? Why do we make this jump? And how does it come about? The ability to pose such questions is the reason for avoiding a histo­rian’s sensibility and the justification for being naive. An initial as­sumption of naivete enables us to ask why the reader for whom the brochure was intended would assume that it was, indeed, describing a single object, a single aircraft, rather than a whole flock of differ­ent machines. In other words, an initial assumption of naivete is a methodological position.2

But why be naive? To answer this question I need to talk of strate­gies of coordination. In particular, I will identify a series of mecha­nisms that work to connect and coordinate disparate elements. The

TSR2 brochure, or so I want to suggest, embodies and performs a number of these.

It’s like this, isn’t it? This was a moment of interpellation. Knowing subject, known object, the two were recognized together in a single instant. I would study, study the TSR2; the TSR2 would be studied, studied by me. The effect was, as it were, an instant recognition or performance of a set of subject/Subject or subject/object relations coming from—well, coming from somewhere, but deeply buried in its obviousness, somewhere before.

Obviousness? Let’s just remind ourselves of some of its dangers. If we are interpellated, then we are being made or remade as a particular subject position, made to constitute our objects in particular ways. In particular we are being made to constitute our objects in ways that are obvious, recognized and made before we come to see them and think about them. There is another study here. We might think of it as the erotics of interpellation: Why or how it is that we are spoken to and perform the obviousnesses of our objects of study?19 Technoscience studies, military technologies with all their genderings, biomedical this and that, consumer goods, in all of these we are making obvious­nesses of one kind or another. I say that we are making obviousnesses because our narratives are performative. But if this is the case, then the question becomes: Interpellated as we are, what on earth is it that we are performing in our embodiments?

On the one hand the two excerpts are contiguous. It is reasonable to imagine continuity, co-presence, and more relations of difference — an organization in terms of the narrative relations discussed in chap­ter 2. But as we read on and a moment passes, so the field of presence starts to shift. Before, it was a matter of formalisms, terms that stood in quantifiable relations with one another. Now it is something differ-

When we looked at that formalism we already knew that some­thing was absent. We knew that there was one kind of logic at work, a logic of absence. We also knew that this absence was an engineer – ing/algebraic logic, one of pragmatic simplicity, the business of limit­ing complexity in order to secure ease of manipulation. But there were other kinds of absence too. Indeed in order to make the narrative work, I let slip a clue. For by referring to ‘‘lift slope’’ as ‘‘idle’’ I traded on another absence: the suspicion that the reader would ‘‘know’’ what was meant by such terms as weight or surface area—which, by im­plication, were not idle. This, then, was the performance of another logic of absence.

The second excerpt takes us in another direction. For new kinds of relations are being performed, relations that no longer have to do with formalisms but rather with the flying of aircraft. I will delve into this shortly. But first let’s focus on the changing relations of presence. The second excerpt performs a subtle shift. It ‘‘reminds’’ us what is absent from the formalism. But this is a double effect: it ‘‘reminds’’ us that there is no reference to ‘‘the real world,’’ to what ‘‘actually happens’’ (as opposed to what might happen), but it also inserts that absent ‘‘real world’’ into the formalism, which means that after the second excerpt the real world is, as it were, both present and absent from the formal­ism, and that the formalism has started to acquire extra weight, an extra weight of difference. It has started to acquire this weight in the impossible interference between absence and presence.

This, then, is how I define heterogeneity, heterogeneity in design, and heterogeneity elsewhere. Heterogeneity is an oscillation between absence and presence. How it is that whatever is not there is also there. How that which is there is also not there. Both/and rather than either/or. Or both/and either/or and both/and. Heterogeneity, then, is about the differences that reside in connection and disconnection. Or, more precisely, it is about the ambivalent distributions entailed in dis/connection. Which means that simplicity is not simply about absence but it is also about presence. Hence the term heterogeneity/ simplicity.

Now we can ask: Are there other forms of absence/presence? Are there other heterogeneities?

Fourth Story

If we stay with the aircrew a little longer and search through the pile of documents we find this:

The state of the pilots is variously described as ‘‘tired,’’ ‘‘bathed in sweat,’’ ‘‘weakness in limbs,’’ ‘‘headache.’’ The main factors causing fatigue appear to be several. There are oscillations in the higher frequencies to which various portions of the human anatomy respond. . . , moderate impacts which continually jar the pilot and throw him about, and occasional large gusts which frighten him by giving the aircraft a violent movement. In addi­tion the pilot had the strain of carrying on with his job, and the worry whether the aircraft structure would stand up to the treat­ment. (English Electric 1957)

This paragraph is taken from an internal English Electric memo­randum. Observing next that the pilots are ‘‘near the limit of their en­durance,’’ it continues:

The navigator, who has his eyes on his instruments, will be more prone to sickness than the pilot who looks at the horizon.

At the same time he will be trying to extract precise informa­tion from a variety of electronic equipment requiring fine adjust­ments to be made by hand. (English Electric 1957)

Let’s start very humbly, even though the point is obvious and may be made very briefly The brochure coordinates different objects, differ­ent TSR2s, in part by means of syntax. Exhibit 2.2 is an example of this: TSR2 is a weapons system, or so we learn; it is capable of recon­naissance roles; it is capable of nuclear roles; it is capable of high – explosive strike roles; it is capable of operating in all weathers; and it is capable of doing so with a minimum of ground support facilities. How then is TSR2 made into a single object, rather than four or five? Of course the answer is by syntax. What might be several aircraft are being grammatically turned into one.4

Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser have something in common other than their radical politics and their semiotic interest in rela­tions. Both tend to imagine that the logics of discourse, of semiotics, come in very large chunks. Althusser, talking of the multiplicity of and differences between ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), writes: ‘‘If the ISAs ‘function’ massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity is precisely this functioning, insofar as the ide­ology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of the ‘ruling class’’’ (Althusser 1971, 139). And Fou­cault? ‘‘In the last years of the eighteenth century, European culture outlined a structure that has not yet been unravelled; we are only just beginning to disentangle a few of the threads, which are still so un­known to us that we immediately assume them to be either marvel­lously new or absolutely archaic, whereas for two hundred years (not less, yet not much more) they have constituted the dark but firm web of our experience” (Foucault 1976,199).

‘‘Is always in fact unified.’’ ‘‘The dark but firm web of our experi­ence.” So the metaphors and the theories are different, but they have this much in common. Despite the cracks and the strains, most of the space—the space made by ideology for Althusser and the episteme for 52 Subjects Foucault20—most of the space we have for knowing and being, living

and building is structured by a single set of ontological strategies or distributions. These distributions (this is the crucial point) displace others to the margins, to the places that Foucault, with his exquisite sense of spatiality, sometimes calls the heterotopic.21 They are dis­placed to a few places of resistance. Althusser again: ‘‘I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped’’ (Althusser 1971,148).

This is okay intellectually if not politically. Perhaps it is really like that. Perhaps, to use Donna Haraway’s very different words, we live in a world dominated by narrative metaphors that perform ‘‘militar­ism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy.’’ Perhaps we live in a world in which the narratives that perform one another tend to support one another despite some discordances and thereby produce such obnoxious singularities. Perhaps we live in a world in which the ‘‘personal’’ subject positions into which we are interpellated are, in­deed, more or less consistent, performed as reasonably coherent and well coordinated locations within a single great episteme. Perhaps we live in a world that presses toward singularity rather than multi­plicity, a world that is modern rather than postmodern in character.22 If it is like that, or largely like that, then an inquiry into our interpel­lations as knowing subjects seems necessary, indeed vital. That is, if (like Althusser’s teachers) we can manage ‘‘to turn the few weapons [we] can find. . . against. . . the practices in which [we] are trapped’’ and so make different stories and narratives, narratives that explore the ways in which our constitution as subjects has generated objects and knowledge relations that perform their obviousness under what­ever sign ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘reality’’ now sail.

Perhaps. But I am just a little more optimistic than that because I take it that the established disorders are multiple as well as singu­lar. Notwithstanding the coordinations of the many strategies for co­ordination, the strains toward singularity are counterbalanced by the heterogeneity of multiplicity, and the interferences and overlaps do not necessarily ensure that the fields of ontological force are aligned. I am more optimistic because I take it that the conditions of possibility do not necessarily come in large blocks.23

1985-1989

Between 1985 and 1989 I studied the TSR2.1 sought to develop actor- network theory by adding the TSR2 to the long list of technoscience case studies: bicycles, electric lighting, electric vehicles, electricity power systems, imperialist ships, turbojets, Pasteurizations, aqua­cultures, domestic heating, technology transfers. I was specially con­cerned with the social and the technical. The social, or so I sought to show, was as malleable as the technical. Its shape was not given in the order of things but rather emerged in the course of “heterogeneous engineering.” To show this I told stories to do with the trajectory of the TSR2 project, its rise, its development, and its fall. I also told stories of particular specificities in this trajectory, particular incidents. I was quite pleased with some of these project stories. In the space created for this new sociology of technology they seemed to work reason­ably well.24 But things started to go wrong. This showed itself in a number of ways. In particular, however, I started to become uneasy about my relationship with this aircraft, and especially, with its high – status spokespersons. These were people who were often impressive, thoughtful, successful, and attractive. But as I talked to them, I gradu­ally found that these conversations seemed to be laying a charge on me: I was being constituted as the person who would document this project “definitively” It was, or so some of them said quite explicitly, the right time to document the project. Far removed from those sad days in 1965 when the aircraft was canceled, people could now look back calmly and reflect upon what had happened. By now mostly in retirement, enough of them were still alive to make the study possible.

And then this. I wanted to write an actor-network story, a narra­tive exploring the malleability of the technical and the social. But my interviewees knew nothing of actor-network theory Instead, they treated any empirical description as an admittedly crucial prelude to the more important task of making balanced judgments—and two such judgments in particular. First, whether it was indeed right to have canceled the TSR2. And second, and more generally, what might be learned from this sorry story that could be applied to other military aircraft projects.

I had written most of a book on the TSR2 project. But toward the end of 1989 I put that manuscript in a box, put the box on a shelf, and

went to work on a quite different project. And that manuscript is still in its box.

Let’s talk first of absence—for here we have a second form of absence.

This isn’t a matter of simplicity, or if it is, then it is a new form of simplicity. For this is material absence. Removed from the flat space occupied by the formalism, we find ourselves in the sweating world of the aircrew. We discover pilots who flew their creaking aircraft too low, who worried about whether the wings would break off, who were thrown about their cockpits, and who climbed shaking from their air­craft at the end of these flights.

If we are imaginative enough then perhaps we can smell the fear, feel the sweat on the bodies, taste the vomit. For this is another set of presences, another set of relations, another syntax. It is another set of differences—different presences that are absent from the space of

algebra. Heterogeneities 97

Nausea

The corporeal or, if we include the aircraft, the corporeal with the technological—these are absent from the space of the page, from the formalism about G, gust response. This is the absence of materiality. For, in the way they write the P.17A brochure, there is no room for vomit. It does not fit. There is no room for sweat in formalisms. In the documents that are sent to the government ministries, there isn’t enough space for the test aircraft they used, such as the Meteor air­craft. So they are removed, and not simply because there isn’t enough room, but also because they are materials that do not perform them­selves in the differences of the page, within a logic performed in alge­braic difference.

And yet, these are absences that are also present. For G is there on the page. Gust response is fixed. It is fixed not by the other parame­ters that occur in the formalism (though these are fixed in their re­lations with one another). Rather, it is fixed in a set of relations, re­lations of absence/presence, to do with the suffering of the aircrew. ‘‘By comparing several aircraft, of known characteristics, which have been flown in low altitude turbulence,” (I quote the sentence again) ‘‘it is possible to decide a maximum value for this parameter which will ensure a comfortable flight.’’ A parameter to do with comfort, the comfort of a particular aircrew. Comfort that will allow them to per­form the task of piloting the aircraft efficiently, properly.

Absence/presence, the absence of materiality that is also a pres­ence—no doubt this is what those who write actor-network studies intend when they talk of ‘‘translation’’ and ‘‘chains of translation.’’ (See, e. g., Latour 1993.) And this is a second oscillation in the dis­tributions of heterogeneity: the absent presence of materiality, the Otherness of materials that don’t fit in. But do.

The second strategy is almost equally humble. This is the physical structure, not of the aircraft, but of the brochure. As I’ve said, the latter is sixty-odd pages long. More important, these pages are num­bered and bound, together with a cover, a title page, and a table of contents. I shall have more to say about the table of contents shortly. For the moment let me just observe that the cover (exhibit 2.7) maybe understood as a mechanism that glosses whatever it is that will fol­low within the pages of the brochure. Announcing itself in bold type, ‘‘TSR2,’’ and then adding in a smaller cursive typeface, ‘‘Weapons Sys­tem,’’ the cover frames or coordinates the contents of the brochure. Presumptively, then, and as a result of this, everything within the bro – chure—and that includes the above exhibits—will have ‘‘something to do’’ with the TSR2. Physical structure, then, is a second strategy for coordinating disparate objects or object positions.

In order to make sense of all this I now want to tell a rather formal story. I want to imagine that we are concerned with five discourses, five separate discursive forms, five distributions, five modes of in­terpellation. Putting it in this formal way means that the differences that I make are too discrete, too clear, too abrupt. In practice, mat­ters would always be more subtle, less clear. But I do so in order to make a simplicity that will help in the process of exploring a logic of interference.

The discursive forms.

Let me call this first form history, plain history. It is a story, a form of storytelling, that starts at the beginning and moves to the end. A follows B follows C. It is a story that charts the inception, the concep­tion, the development of a project, its growth, and its decline. Perhaps it charts its cancellation. At any rate, it is a story that tells of the tra­jectory of a technoscience project. This small example of the genre comes from a book by a well-known military aviation journalist and commentator, Derek Wood.

By mid 1957 the RAF had formulated its basic requirement under the title of General Operational Requirement No. 339 and it was passed to the Ministry of Supply for action. The Controller Air­craft, Sir Claude Pelly, sent out a letter to industry on GOR.339 on September 9th. (Wood 1975,153)

There is obviously no such thing as ‘‘plain history.’’ All history, ‘‘plain’’ or otherwise, is a narration and a performance. It makes, distrib­utes, and links things together, bringing them into being and assert­ing their significance (or otherwise) by chaining them into possibly chronological sequences. I’ll talk more about the properties of such ‘‘arborescent’’ arrangements in chapter 8. For the moment just let me observe that it performs them too, constituting some kind of truth regime and, no doubt, effecting some consequences. This little ex­cerpt is just that, an excerpt. It makes one or two links in a narrative that would be much longer if we were to spend more time on it. But

in the present context this does not matter, for my point is that in many stories of social science-including those that have to do with technology—there is this sense of something like a lowest common denominator: the making of a series of linked dates and events. This, then this, then this. The effect is the production of something, a set of specificities, specific object positions, which will often subsequently come to act as the ‘‘raw material’’ for other forms of storytelling, other discourses. And at the same time, a set of more or less centered sub­ject positions or a reader/author is produced that makes, that appre­ciates, that is interpellated, by ‘‘the facts as they are’’—the facts, for instance, about a project, an aircraft project.25

I’ll call the second discursive mode policy narrative. This mode tells a story that has something to do with the first narrative, that of plain history, but in policy narrative the specificities are distrib­uted into chains that are energized and achieve value by being given some kind of pragmatic policy relevance. That is, the specificities that might have been built in ‘‘plain history’’ are now awarded the poten­tial for judgment or for contributing to a judgment. This, then, is a normative form of narrative, one that chains itself together by dis­tributing praise, blame, and responsibility. It is energized with polari­ties, with pluses and minuses. And it creates a series of engaged, nor­mative, and more or less centered subject positions. Here is a small example of the genre.

Sixth, and probably the greatest single cause of increased costs, was the repeated delay in getting official decisions, and the per­manent uncertainty which so grievously effected the rhythm of production and from time to time the morale of design and pro­duction teams. (Hastings 1966, 60)

So this is an instance of policy narrative, a story about TSR2, written by a historically minded policy practitioner, Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Stephen Hastings. And the subject made in this form of writing is that of the judge, a location or a role in which the pros and cons, the lessons, may be weighed up.

Narrative style number three is somewhat like number two. It is about judgment, right and wrong. In particular, it is a way of talk­ing and living that is ethical in character. Perhaps, then, the distinc – 56 Subjects tion is like that made by Max Weber between instrumental and value –

rational action. (See Weber 1978, 24.) Here, at any rate, is Labour MP Tam Dalyell in a parliamentary debate that took place immediately after the cancellation of the TSR2, a censure debate:

It is a sombre fact that as the twentieth century rolls on more and more science-based developments have evolved from arma­ments. The right hon. Gentleman is, tragically, historically accu­rate when he says that armaments have been the life-blood of industry, but the fact that he is historically right casts a pretty damning reflection on contemporary capitalism. . . . One of the reasons why I became a Socialist was my belief that in a Social­ist set-up at least one had a chance of creating conditions in which technical progress could be freed from the armaments race. (Hansard 1964-65)

Wertrationalitat rather than Zweckrationalitat. Here the links that provide for the performance of the narrative are normative—but also ethical. The subject positions are interpellated and linked together by means of a particular sense of right and wrong. Interpellation—and relative subject coherence—are achieved by moral means.

Narrative number four is different again. This I will call esoteric narrative (though perhaps all narrative styles are more or less eso – teric—or at least more or less specific). This is because I want to find a way of talking about forms of storytelling that are both local and self­professedly analytical—as, for instance, is the case for most versions of academic storytelling. There are, to be sure, innumerable variants here, just as there are innumerable variants of policy storytelling and, for that matter, of historiography, plain history But sometimes, per­haps often, academia is a place that makes stories, but stories where the links, and so the reader positions, are indeed esoteric in quality: interpellative for a specialist reader, and drawing on but not very di­rectly feeding back into other forms of narration. And it is this sense of removal, of strictly local relevance, that I want to catch by talking in this way So the story I am telling right now (though it performs ar­rangements that will in some measure interfere with other genres) is no doubt a version of esoteric narrative. But so too is this:

At this point, then, the project came properly into being. The

managers had been granted an area of relative autonomy by ac – Subjects 57

tors in the global network; they had been granted what we will call a negotiation space in order to build a local network. (Law and Callon 1988, 289)

This is Michel Callon and John Law working with actor-network theory, making arguments that operate in a more or less local space. And again, as is obvious, there is a relationship between this narra­tive and that of plain history. The one is, in some sense, parasitic on the other.26

And number five? This is rather different: let’s call it aesthetic. It is a form of narrative that has to do with distributing and perform­ing pleasure, with what is beautiful. It makes, in short, a particular form of (no doubt gendered) aesthetic subject.27 This is an issue that I will look at more closely in chapter 6. For now, however, consider the following:

The cockpit felt almost detached from reality. There was no vibra­tion; the only noise a subdued hum from the big turbo jets, the seat comfort as luxurious as an airliner’s and the air condition­ing warm, fresh and comfortable. The instrument panels showed steady readings of flight conditions, engine and systems perfor­mance with no malfunctions; the radio for once silent.

Outside an unbroken cloud sheet stretching below to the pale northern horizon, varied in colour only here and there by long streaks of shadow laid by the low winter sun from behind strato cumulus domes.28

The excerpt is from a book by the test pilot Roland Beamont, and much could be said of it. For instance, like David Bailly’s vanitas it artfully bridges the distinction between public and private, but at the same time it also performs it. The pilot, or so we learn, is a cool technician (‘‘the instrumental panels showed steady readings,’’ and he recognizes ‘‘strato cumulus domes’’). But there is also poetry here, poetry, pleasure, and no doubt sadness too, the sadness of a loss that will come, as the TSR2 is grounded and destroyed. This, then, is a performance of a particular form of aesthetic narrative — another in- terpellative logic, the production of another subject position.

Before we go on with this story of what is absent—about the absence, for instance, of fear—we need to go back to the formalism to under­stand what is happening to G and to forget, for the moment, the crew:

‘‘If the gust response parameter, G, is fixed to give a certain response level, and the operational Mach number and the aircraft weight are also fixed, then from (1) it is clear that at-S becomes constant.’’ What is happening here? Let’s deal with formalism first.

If G (gust response), M (speed), and W (weight) are fixed, then the only terms that still have freedom to move are at and S. It’s easier to see what’s going on if we rewrite the first expression

M-at G = –

W/S

naissance operations in limited war using nuclear and conventional weapons. Such an aircraft will enable the Royal Air Force to continue to make an effective contribution to the strength of SACEUR’s shield forces, as well as to our other regional pacts.’’ SACEUR is an acro­nym for Supreme Allied Commander Europe, which tells us, as if we didn’t already know, that we have encountered another looming absence/presence: ‘‘We shall wish to consider whether there is a re­quirement for a low level weapon, either manned or unmanned, in case the Russian defences become effective against high flying air­craft and ballistic missiles’’ (AIR8/2167 1957). Here it is at last, made present not in OR 339 but in the correspondence of government min­isters.

And the defenses of the Russian enemy? A background document to OR 339, referring to the earlier Canberra, states that ‘‘the Canberras, operated strictly at a low level, may continue to be effective until the enemy develops an efficient low level surface to air guided weapon’’ (AIR8/2014 1956). A defensive, surface-to-air, guided weapon. If the attacking plane is to evade such a weapon, it must fly at high speed and low altitude.