In the end the RAF had constructed only two ‘special weapons’ PADs; Faldingworth and a twin facility, located at Thetford Heath in Suffolk, known as RAF Barnham. The two PADs had ‘opened for business’ in 1957 and 1956 respectively. While Barnham had survived the October War physically intact, over half its personnel had died on the night of the war off base and many of the unfortunate survivors of the nearby Soviet air burst strike over what was otherwise rural East Anglia, had subsequently died of radiation sickness. In February, March and April last year Bomber Command had mounted a salvage operation to remove all remaining ‘nuclear stores’ from Barnham to Faldingworth, and to the pre-existing secure ‘on station special weapons bomb dump’ at RAF Scampton.
For most of the last year Faldingworth had accommodated a mixed inventory of Blue Danube and Red Beard tactical — Hiroshima-type free fall devices — and Yellow Snow city-killer bombs. In the dreadful jargon of these things, Blue Danube and Red Beard came in various ‘flavours’ with 15-kiloton and 25-kiloton warheads; and Yellow Sun in variants with a tested 400–500 kiloton, and an untested 1.1 megaton capacity. Until two months ago several American dual key bombs and missile warheads previously held at V-Bomber bases, had been stockpiled at Faldingworth but these had all been handed over to the US Air Force Radiological Materials Recovery Task Force based at Greenham Common near Newbury, under the terms of the ‘US-UK Mutual Assistance Treaty’ initialled in Washington in January.
Until the end of March 1964, № 92 Maintenance Unit had been systematically recovering, making safe and storing the bomb casings, the ‘physics packages’ and the fissile elements of over eighty percent of the United Kingdom’s entire nuclear arsenal. A major part of its work recently had been processing the consignment of over thirty warheads secretly brought back to England from the officially unacknowledged ‘special storage facility’ at Singapore in the holds of two modified merchant ships, and in the air-conditioned ‘special magazine compartments’ of the Ark Royal and the Hermes under cover of Operation Manna the previous autumn.
Just a week ago Faldingworth had been implementing plans to operate on a ‘long-term’ secure ‘care and maintenance’ level, involving the mothballing of one of the two ‘assembly bunkers’. Days before the outrage at Tehran, and notwithstanding Red Dawn’s nuclear strikes in the Mediterranean in early February, Margaret Thatcher’s government had issued revised ‘special weapons’ policy guidance directives to the RAF based on the assumption that another ‘all out’ nuclear exchange was ‘unlikely in the foreseeable future’. Therefore, henceforward the reduced V-Bomber Force and the Royal Navy’s ongoing nuclear ‘throw’ should be reduced to and maintained at a ‘prudent minimum deterrence level’ rather than a ‘first strike level’.
In practice this had meant that by mid-summer less than forty free fall weapons would be available for deployment at any one time; of which only ten Read Beard Mark I 15-kiloton, and ten Yellow Sun bombs with 400-kiloton Green Grass warheads should be immediately available to RAF bomber squadrons based in the United Kingdom. Under the new arrangements all Royal Navy-held nuclear weapons would be brought ashore to the two ‘secure depots’ at Fort Nelson in Hampshire and Rosyth in Scotland pending transfer to Faldingworth.
A week was a very long time in this brave new post-October War World. Now Faldingworth’s row upon row of squat, ugly fissile ‘Hutches’ were being methodically emptied, and its bomb assembly shops were working non-stop to enable the RAF and the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm to wage all-out nuclear war at the press of a button.
Chapter 2
Although Tehran was over six hundred and fifty miles away as the crow might fly from Dhahran, fifty-four year old Thomas Barger, the Chief Executive Officer of the Arabian American Oil Company, sensed the seismic shift beneath his feet as he stood looking out of the windows of his second floor office across Half Moon Bay towards Al Khobar — half lost in the mid-day heat haze — where he had first set foot in Arabia some twenty-six years ago.
The Cuban Missiles War had not directly touched Arabia; there had been no radioactive fallout clouds and bizarrely, in the first weeks and months after the cataclysm things had seemed oddly unchanged. However, lately the aftershocks had been arriving almost daily. One by one the old assumptions about the nature and reach of American power had been subtly undermined in Arabia in ways he feared had been largely discounted or dismissed out of hand back in the United States. Now the unthinkable had happened; the Soviets — whom the ‘best and the brightest’ in America had declared vanquished — had destroyed Tehran and had invested the mountains of Northern Iran. Whether the Red Army poured through the passes of the Zagros Mountains, out onto the plains below the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, or drove south across the great rocky plateau of central Iran mattered not one jot. In either case the oilfields of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, and the biggest refinery complex on the planet at Abadan in the south, and everything in between lay at the mercy of the Russians. Even if the Soviets only — and even this was an incalculably nightmarish ‘if’ — planned to capture the Iraqi and Iranian shores of the Persian Gulf, American hegemony and what little remained of European influence in the Middle East was about to disappear in a huge oily cloud of smoke.
Nobody had really known what was going on until the last twenty-four hours. And then the scale of the impending disaster had suddenly been writ plain in impossibly and frighteningly massive letters. The news was so bad that Barger had started to bypass the conversations he had been having with his people at the US Embassy in Riyadh and his contacts at the Consulate in Dhahran, and was getting his news exclusively from the BBC’s recently re-instituted World Service and Aramco’s internal wire service.
Red Army airborne troops had seized the Shah of Iran; put the bastard up against a wall with several terrified members of his harem — all young European women — and machine gunned him, and the unfortunate young women to pieces. Copies of the movie of this atrocity and of the nuking of Tehran had been sent to every foreign ministry in the Middle East! Soviet tanks had besieged Tabriz, and driven south as far as Bonab and Malekan; simultaneously airborne forces had taken the city of Urmia without a fight ensuring that the invaders controlled both the western and eastern banks of Lake Urmia. There was nothing to stop the invaders over-running the key city of Qoshachay on the Zarriné River; and thereafter the whole of Azerbaijani Iran opposite the old Turkish border and the — probably virtually undefended — north eastern border of Iraqi Kurdistan would soon be in Russian hands; from that bastion the Red Army could turn back into Iran, or fall upon Iraq, a sad country sliding into an inevitable sectarian civil war.