The biggest industrial and technological story of this week is the collision of ongoing talk about civil defence or continental air defence with ongoing planning for OPERATION CASTLE, in which the BRAVO test blast of 1 March 1954 will demonstrate the feasibility of noncryogenic, "dry" hydrogen bombs. It will also detonate with two-and-a-half times the predicted yield, and catch
Daigo Fukuryu Maru within its unexpectedly large fallout radius. With its usual maladroitness (I seriously do
not get the Eisenhower revisionism school at this point), the Administration tried to cover up the enormous screw-up and blame the crew of the trawler at a very delicate moment in American-Japanese postwar relations, and possibly leading (not a Japan expert!) to the confirmation of the postwar "pacifist" constitution, and certainly to
Godzilla. Would we have otaku culture without
Godzilla? I don't know. Probably.
Hydrogen bombs are a few things. First, they make civil defence seem vaguely ridiculous. Second, they need even less precise aiming than the previous generation of mere atomic bombs. Third, they can be lighter than that previous generation. People have been talking about intercontinental ballistic missiles since before the end of the war in Europe. Hydrogen bomb-tipped missiles actually make sense, because with an error of 3 km at the delivery end, you can still aim at "Moscow" and blow up all the strategic tarets in the Moscow vicinity, along with the rest of Moscow. That being said, ICBMs are a lot harder to build than to imagine. In the rough sketch of a plan for the future of the British nuclear deterrence that developed within its aviation-technical community after WWII, the ICBM would be preceded by an intermediate range ballistic missile. In April of 1954, the outgoing Minister of Supply in the Churchill government, Duncan Sandys, pushed through the concrete realisation of this schedule: the BLUE STREAK, a somewhat more advanced counterpart to the American Thor and Jupiter missiles that would deploy in underground bases in 1964, following several generations of life extensions for the V-bomber fleet and preceding an all-British ICBM that would never be ordered.
Today we are not talking about the BLUE STREAK so much as its guidance system, and we have been led to that discussion via a technology which was not used in it, the "tuning fork" gyroscope. My inspiration for this was taken from an article in Aviation Week about this new "gyratron" or "vibragyro," and an offhand mention of the fact that it had been tried by Smiths in the Smith's Automatic Pilot, SEP2 militarised as the RAF Mk10. The Sperry vibrayro of 1953 doesn't appear to have gone any further. The idea was revived by Westinghouse for the space programme in the 1960s, but it wasn't until they were made piezoelectric that they became common in such vital gyrostablising applications as electric skateboards.
So instead I'm going to talk about the technology that was used, and the concept of the BLUE STREAK as a total weapon system.