Cuban Missile Crisis

[Keith]

UK Government Bomb Shelter

Perhaps, but WWII vintage in Dover unless I miss my guess. I cannot imagine what use a gun embrasure fitted with a standard double glazed kitchen window would have been.

Amusing though Peekford.. From what I have seen with my own MKI Eyeball in the UK, to a documentary of the Greenbriar's 'big secret', below ground (the bit what mattered), they were very much built to the same standard. They were building the huge Greenbriar complex anyway, and so a few 'extra' amounts of stuff & men would have gone completely unnoticed.

Black Pudding is now on three threads. Is this an irrelevant record?

 

[David Morton]

Very relevant, IMHO.
Black Pudding ?
No limits and no barriers. It's even international.

 

[Mark]

But to truly go internatonal, it would have to be marketed and renamed, ethnic minority pudding. heaven forbid we offend anyone with our ye olde fashioned English ways!

 

[Keith]

Lets get relevant then.

Rocketry as in missiles.

A recent episode of Mythbusters explored the possibility of the CSA using a solid fuel rocket as a weapon, the fact that they used Salami as the solid part probably mixed with N20, as I recall it worked really well and begs the question:

Would the Confederate Unguided Rocket have fared better if the solid fuel component used had been:

Black Pudding?

See what I did there?

Anyway, discuss.....

 

[Mark]

What was the child support agency doing with solid fuel rockets?

 

[Keith]

That's silly Master Peekford. Go & stand in the naughty corner... :evil:

 

[Ian Anderson]

What was the child support agency doing with solid fuel rockets?

Is that what you call the BBC and Jimmy Saville?

I still cannot figure out though what that has to do with Black Pudding though!


Ian

 

[Jim Craik]

Has anyone else noticed that Mr Hardy is quick to critisize anyone else who may drift from the thread topic?

But I guess that Mr Hardy is only bothered by that sort of thing when others do it!

 

[Mark]

Another very worthwhile post Mr. C.

 

[Jim Craik]

Thank you Mark,

I see I'm not the only one bothered by hypocracy

 

[Mark]

Never fear Jim. Think of me as your yin as I do you, my yang.

 

[Keith]

What's the crackpot posting now?

Anyway, to enlarge on the solid fuel issue, I'm not sure how the solid fuel thing works, is the relative 'calorific value' of the fuel a factor in it's efficiency? Put another way - would Black Pudding be better or worse than Salami?

I know they have also used rubber tyres in some very effective rockets, and at this stage I am assuming that ICBM's would have been fueled by liquid not solid perhaps for weight purposes.

Hydrogen Peroxide? Alcohol? There must be some rocket experts here (and I'm not talking Google and Wiki experts)

I know nothing about rockets, and my only association with them was that in 1944 my mother went shopping in Southampton and when she returned a V1 had come calling, and later, in 1946 we bought a house in South London that had had it's roof removed by a V2 along with most of the rest of the street.

And that's as close as I want to get.

 

[David Morton]

This message is hidden because No names no packdrill is on your ignore list.
See Keith - its nice and quiet doing it that way. Ron said it would work.


The Thor ICBM (the only ones I ever actually saw 'close up in the flesh') were Parafin(RP1) and Liquid Oxygen. How many would have failed to launch during the Cuban Crisis and emoliated the countryside was anybody guess. I think they would certainly have lost a few.
The 1.44 megaton warhead would have been inert, that is to say ready to go but not armed, for the first 4 minutes or so of flight by which time they would be about as high as they were ever going to be and getting ready to re enter anywhere within their 1600 nautical mile range. Thereafter it was a 'bucket of sunshine' with a ground burst (dirty weapon) characteristic. For comparison , one Thor warhead would probably equal the bombload of 400 Lancaster WW2 Bombers dropping high explosive in terms capability so if 50% of the Thors got to their targets, it would be 12,000 Lancasters. To achieve 12,000 would mean flying about 21,000 Bombers and losing 9,000 aeroplanes or 63,000 crew. Sobering or what.

 

[David Morton]

http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/3387/1/Journal_of_International_History_2000_n3_Twigg_and_Scott.pdf

Interesting reading - Armageddon day was Black Saturday on Oct 27th. Missiles were at phase 2 ( 3 to 8 minutes ) and 9 V bombers carrying Blue Danube on each station were ready to launch or fly to their dispersal points.

All they heard on the squawk boxes (connected directly to here in High Wycombe)
"This is the Bomber Controller. The time is xxxx hrs" every fifteen minutes. The call several days later (November 4th?) to stand down came by telephone.

 

[Jon Briggs]

Far too young to have been around for this one, but listening to you old farts it seems quite scary.

BBC News - Cuba missile crisis: When nuclear war seemed inevitable

 

[Jim Rosenthal]

It was. We thought we were all going to die. I lived in NYC and we figured we would be one of the first targets. Now I live in Annapolis, MD, home of the US Naval Academy. I'm probably no safer at this point than I was in New York.

 

[David Morton]

Tomorrow (27th October) fifty years ago was one of the worst days. It was all about to happen and there was nothing you could do about it. Armageddon was the only thing on the menu.
My mother kept sane by making lunch and dinner before we were allocated to buses going to the west. All the aeroplanes on the base were sitting on the taxiways and end of the runway with the Pilots in the cockpits. There was a gate opposite the local german pub (Gasthof zum Flughafen) and you could walk in , go past the mess and on to the taxyway near the runway end so some of the families were taking refreshments to their men and bidding good bye as well. Security was pre-occupied aiming rifles through the fence at the known Russians in cars around the perimeter of the base.
I admit it. I was fifteen years old and shit scared with evey development. We were really kept in the dark as well.