1963 ... Blue Steel away!


... as Strategic Air Forces struggled to cope with better and better ground launched guided missiles; the concept of 'stand-off' weapons emerged. The 'Blue Steel" air launched missile was one such solution developed by the British RAF. 

The 'Blue Steel' carried a 'Red Snow' H-bomb. Not to be confused with the 'Yellow Sun' which was the same H-bomb fitted into a gravity bomb casing. I have always thought the British pre-occupation with naming their strategic weapons with some sort of obscure color-code was strange. But they may have felt that American names for weapons like the 'Davey Crockett' or the 'Navajo' were just as eccentric. 

 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The colour codes were deliberately meaningless - we found during WW2 that German code names usually have a hint as to what they were hiding. Hence the colour codes, which were randomly selected and could give no clues.


Same thing is why the British Army deployed on Op TELIC instead of Op IRAQI FREEDOM. Only one of those gives away the idea!

Anonymous said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rainbow_Codes