Lethality, Cost, Size

To be sure, the cultural strategies of continuity come in various forms. Vickers Armstrong’s way of making similarities and building connec­tions wasn’t like that of English Electric, not, at any rate, in certain important respects:

Whilst unit cost has very considerable significance the really sig­nificant parameter is made up of cost/size/lethality. The aero­plane is designed to do a certain job—primarily strike—there – fore the financial outlay per successful strike is the important thing, or in other words the cost of a given degree of lethality. The achieved lethality is bound up closely with vulnerability and vul­nerability is closely bound up with size. Cost per pound of all up

weight is of no direct significance. It might, for instance, be pos­sible to show that an aircraft of 45,000 a. u.w. had a higher cost £/lb. than an aircraft of 65,000 lb., but if they had the same range and speed characteristics, and navigation bombing systems of exactly equal capacity, the small aircraft would have greater le­thality because it is less vulnerable due to its smaller size.

Therefore even if the unit cost of the two aircraft were the same (and in fact the smaller aircraft would be less) the small aero­plane is still cheaper because it offers more lethality per £ ster­ling. (Vickers Armstrong 1958b, 2-3)

This is a full-blown expression of the ‘‘weapons systems’’ approach, a performance thereof. It is one of the strategies of coordination of which I spoke in chapter 2. But this is an approach to cultural distri­bution that constitutes its objects by making connections not through time but across space. Let’s call this virtual space, virtual because it is conceptual and contains such entities as cost, size, lethality and “le­thality per £ sterling.’’ Such is the storytelling mode preferred by Vick­ers. It connects with government policy statements but then performs conceptual worlds and novel connections even though the company would also be able to recount perfectly plausible narratives about de­scent and genealogy.