V-Force

Prologue

In balance with this life, this death

Nuclear white knights. B.2 Vulcans at RAF Wittering, 1963

RAF Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Friday, 26 October 1962. 'I'm dashing off,' said newly commissioned Pilot Officer Peter West to his wife as he prepared to swap his married quarters for a caravan parked next to a pure white delta-wing Vulcan B.2 nuclear bomber stabled on the fringe of the airfield. The caravan was where West and his four fellow crew members were to wait for the call to 'scramble'.

'If you see us take off,' continued the young air electronics officer, 'I want you to take the children, put them in the car, put a few things in the car with them, and get the hell out of there. Drive up to Scotland. Go to your brother in Skye. You'll probably be safe there.'

Even when strapped into the cramped cockpit of the Vulcan and prepared for take-off at any moment, West thought - and hoped - the bombers would remain on the ground. For West believed in the sanity of MAD, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, by which the full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities, like his Vulcan bomber, would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.

'In the highly improbable idea that we would take off,' West recalled in 2009, 'we knew that if we did get back, there would be nothing to get back to. Long afterwards, my wife said that she thought to herself at the time, "What a bloody fool. Where does he think I'm going to go? How far does he think I'll get? I would be passing all the airfields, all of which would be primary targets, come on!"'

If those airfields had been hit by Soviet nuclear bombs or missiles, much of Britain would have been devastated, vast swathes of its population killed, maimed or fatally weakened - very possibly for generations to come. Mrs West would have needed a brand-new 120-mph Jaguar Mk X, clear A roads, and the driving skills of Pat or Stirling Moss to have any realistic chance of speeding her family 500 miles north-west to Skye. Even then, RAF Machrihanish, on the west coast of Scotland - one of the RAF's nuclear bomber dispersal bases - may well have been hit. And who, in any case, could be sure of which way the wind, laced with nuclear fallout, would be blowing, or even if the ferry over the sea to Skye would be sailing? Mrs West felt it would have been best to stay at home with the children. If the family was going to die, it would be with the children in their mother's arms.

These were the hours and minutes, we are taught, that the world held its breath. The Four Horsemen were mounted. The gates of Hell appeared to gape. Armageddon seemed inescapable. Apocalypse now. Was US president John F. Kennedy truly prepared to launch nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union that October weekend in 1962? Would his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, be forced to reply in kind? If Friday 26th, when Pilot Officer West was called away from home, was 'hot', then, if it had been possible to measure the temperature on some politico-military thermometer, Saturday 27th was scorching.

At what time should the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have set their well-known Doomsday Clock that weekend? When this graphic device first appeared on the cover of the scientific journal in its new magazine format in June 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight. The aim had been to alert the public at large to the imminent threat of uncontained nuclear weaponry. Founded in 1945 by the Russian-born biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch of the University of Chicago following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bulletin's early contributors included Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell and Soviet physicist Nikolay Semyonov.

Newspaper editors worldwide were entranced by the Doomsday Clock. It was designed both intellectually and graphically - the memorable artwork was by the artist Martyl Langsdorf - to make alarming front-page headlines, and it did. Peter West and many of his colleagues were certainly aware of it. Following the testing of H-bombs in November 1952 in the US and August 1953 in the Soviet Union, the clock had advanced to two minutes to twelve. On Saturday, 27 October 1962, it must surely have ticked towards a minute - or even to just a few seconds - to midnight.

That afternoon, a Soviet S-75 Dvina ground-to-air missile system shot down a US Lockheed U-2 'spy' plane over Cuba - killing its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson. Two weeks earlier, Anderson had been one of the USAF reconnaissance pilots who discovered nine Soviet nuclear missile launch sites dotted along the Cuban coastline, installed following the failed US-backed invasion to oust Castro at the Bay of Pigs the previous year. Forty R-12 and R-14 ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, capable of striking targets across the United States, were on their way by sea from the USSR to the Caribbean island, and heading towards a US Navy blockade.

Since February, two nuclear bombers at key RAF bases had been on QRA (Quick Reaction Alert) standby. On Saturday 27th, Bomber Command ordered Alert Condition 3. This meant that as many of Britain's nuclear bombers as possible should be armed and prepared for take-off within fifteen minutes. Far from the east coast of England, a dozen Fleet Air Arm Sea Vixens on board the 23,900-ton aircraft carrier HMS Hermes were also on alert and ready to strike Sevastopol - a key Soviet military base - and other Crimean targets with free-fall Red Beard A-bombs. The distinctive all-weather de Havilland FAW.1 jets, featuring twin Rolls-Royce Avon engines and twin tail booms, had a maximum speed of 650 mph (a Mach 1.4 version had been considered, but dropped) and a range of 600 nautical miles. Designed by a team led by Ronald Bishop of de Havilland Mosquito fame, they could fly low over the water at high speeds. Although their primary role was to protect the fleet, they could carry air-to-ground as well as air-to-air missiles and Red Beard.

While the minutes to Armageddon ticked by, diplomacy was at work. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, spoke by phone to President Kennedy, who was keen to invade Cuba and destroy the nuclear missile silos. We can listen to their conversation today - the veteran British politician calming the presidential waters while Soviet diplomats negotiated with the Americans in Washington. Despite loud threats, Khrushchev had no desire for nuclear war.

What neither Kennedy, Macmillan nor even Khrushchev knew at the time was that, on Saturday 27th, one of the four Foxtrot-class submarines escorting the Soviet ships steaming to Cuba very nearly fired the opening shot of World War III. Surfacing to recharge its batteries, B-59 caught the attention of the US Navy, and Captain Valentin Savitsky ordered his crew to submerge. Because, at this moment, the sub was out of contact with anyone, including Moscow, US ships hoping to establish communication lobbed practice depth charges, aiming to encourage it to resurface. Believing he was under lethal attack, Savitsky prepared to launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo at one of his antagonists. He was stopped at the last moment by Captain Vasily Arkhipov, the submarine brigade's measured chief of staff who, very fortunately, was on board B-59. It was, although recollections vary, a very close-run thing indeed.

In the eastern and East Midland counties of England that momentous Saturday, villagers became aware of sudden preparations to launch (not that they would have known their technical specifications) 65-foot high, 11,000-mph Thor nuclear intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs). These rose from top-secret RAF Bomber Command launch pads close to the medieval parish churches and rural pubs they frequented. Sixty of these weapons - delivered to twenty sites in Cambridgeshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northants and Norfolk - had arrived from the US between 1958 and 1961, in the bellies of Douglas C-124 Globemaster II transport planes. Designed by US Navy rocket engineer Commander Robert Truax and program manager Adolf Thiel - who had earlier worked for Wernher von Braun on the design of the V-2 rocket in Nazi Germany - the safety record of Thor was not 100 per cent. There had been several accidents in the United States, while in December 1960 liquid oxygen spilling from one of the missiles onto its launch pad at RAF Ludford Magna, Lincolnshire, very nearly caused a fire that could have detonated its rocket fuel and very possibly its 1.44-megaton warhead.

Was anyone supping a pint in Ludford Magna's White Hart Inn that weekend aware that they were a sitting target for Soviet missiles and bombers? Or that they could have been blown to kingdom come by their own countrymen nearly two years ago by that nuclear missile, based on the design of a Nazi 'vengeance weapon', sited across the fields little more than a mile south of the pub? Did they know on that knife-edge October weekend that Mach 2 RAF Lightnings and even faster ground-to-air Bloodhound missiles were on red alert to intercept Soviet bombers entering British airspace?

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