Avro Vulcan: The Delta Wing That Carried Britain’s Cold War Deterrent
A telephone rings in a crew caravan at the edge of a runway before dawn. Five men are already strapped into a Vulcan bomber armed with a nuclear weapon, waiting to find out whether this alert is real.
This episode matters because the Vulcan spent almost its entire career preparing for a nuclear war against the Soviet Union that both sides worked constantly to prevent, then found its only combat missions decades later and thousands of miles away, dropping bombs and firing missiles in the Falklands War instead.
In this episode:
- How Britain’s secret 1947 decision to build its own atomic bomb created the V-force
- Why Avro gambled everything on an untested delta wing for the Vulcan
- Life on Quick Reaction Alert, and how close the Cuban Missile Crisis came to testing it for real
- Why the Vulcan abandoned high-altitude flying for a dangerous new low-level role
- How Britain’s nuclear deterrent passed from the RAF to Polaris submarines in 1969
- The extraordinary Black Buck raids that sent Vulcans 8,000 miles to bomb and strike radar sites in the Falklands
Listen if you’re interested in:
- The Cold War V-force and Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent
- Delta-wing aircraft design and Avro’s engineering gamble
- The Falklands War and Operation Black Buck
- RAF Quick Reaction Alert and nuclear readiness culture
Explore more from The RAF Chronicle: Read more RAF history, including deep dives into the V-force and the Falklands air war, at therafchronicle.co.uk.
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