UB.109T: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1955

 

So my boss is on his annual pilgrimage to the Old Continent to show everybody that he's a big shot in Canada, and we're training yet another ambitious young man as a future produce manager, as we do because the company totally has a skilled labour continuity plan that involves systematically identifying talent and nurturing it. "Nurturing" in this case tends to mean humping oversized orders around the back room, because our automated perishable ordering system is proving the brilliance of our plan to use AI to replace skilled labour. (Look, it's obviously not the computer's fault that we use the same produce code for two distinct kinds of carrots, but manually straightening out the order and inventory every day is precisely the kind of fiddling that AI was supposed to get rid of!) The upshot is that yesterday was my second day off in the last eight and I was not exactly filled with energy on what had to be a laundry day anyway. 

Which is fine, because this is the month that Flight grudgingly fessed up to an explanation for why the United States has the Matador, and we don't. We have the UB.109T, or RED RAPIER. So why have I chosen a Bomarc for my thumbnail?

Because.

On 31 March 1958, the Canadian electorate got its long-awaited opportunity to send Canada's Natural Governing Party to the benches, electing "Prairie populist" John Diefenbaker and his Progressive Conservatives by a swingeing 53% to 34% popular vote majority. Diefenbaker proceeded to reign over the Party for an immensely destructive decade-and-a-half. Anyone who has read as much contemporary Newsweek as I have and wonders whether my narrator's cynicism is anachronistic is referred to my Dad's collection of old Brothers-in-Laws albums to illustrate one fairly common reaction to Dief the Chief.  One might even draw larger conclusions about contemporary events if it were desired! 

Although as far as aerospace defence issues are concerned this would be a red herring. Cancelling the upcoming Avro long-range supersonic continental interceptor was an unfortunate necessity, and the fact that the Bomarc was insane has nothing to do with the fact that Diefenbaker was also crazy. And since Wikipedia has pictures of Bomarc and not RED RAPIER, there you go. 

Bomarc was rejected by the Canadian electorate because the idea of a nuclear-tipped antiaircraft cruise missile wandering the  Northern landscape was an impossible sell. That it had an airframe itself made of a radioactive alloy, hardly even registered at the time, although in some ways it is the most telling detail for me. The Cold War was crazy, folks!

Nothing illustrates that better than the Bomarc's precursor, the MGM-1 Martin Matador, intended to deliver an old-fashioned unboosted W5 warhead across a 600 mile range with a theoretical half-mile radius accuracy. In practice, the Cape Canaveral missile test range routinely misplaced Matador test flights. The exact point of the US Army's four operational Matador squadrons, including one stationed in Taiwan in 1958--62 is a bit lost on me, and presumably anyone else asking just how much overkill was needed against the Red cities of the Pale of Settlement, Shandong and Fujian. 

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One would like to think that Clement Attlee would never condone anything so pointlessly dangerous, but UB.109T  got its start in the crisis atmosphere triggered by the outbreak of the Korean War, when a world war with the Reds seemed to be on the horizon, not least because of the immense pressure on the Truman Administration to start one.  However, as per Wikipedia, it was Churchill who gave UB.109T "super priority," leading to Boeing Washington air-launched tests of prototype UB.10Ts in February 1955, five months after it was downgraded to a developmental programme towards BLUE STEEL.

Blue Steel isn't just the rare example of an aerospace defence programme of this era to reach the finish line without Lord Mountbatten getting out to push. It was also, in important ways, less ambitious than its ground-launched precursor, which was to depend in service on a steam catapult and a network of ground control stations. Engine and aerodynamics are uninteresting. The catapult spared the designers the need to get a pilotless aircraft with a small and expendable engine. Unlike the Buck Rogers Bomarc or its imaginative BLUE RAPIER rival with Fiberglas body, the UB.109T was going to be made of sheet metal, a Morris Mini of strategic attack weapons, much like its V-1 inspiration.  The fascinating part was the guidance system. UB.109T was specified as a conventional weapon, unlike the Matador, overwhelming Red air defences by saturation rather than high tech and requiring 100 missiles in the air at the same time. Guidance was to be by a modified OBOE, a Pathfinder system intended to direct one or two marking aircraft. 

Electronic, automation, and expendability go together in the modern imagination, but that was not the case in 1955. UB.109T required a simple and robust analog logic system to tell it which direction to turn under the guidance signal, and an equally "automated" system to allow a single ground station to control 64 missiles, the number of control channels allowed by its pulse repetition frequency  equipment. To make this work, the missiles also had to talk to the ground control stations, which is, for one thing, dumb, and, for another thing, a good reason to not go with atomic warheads on missiles that could be "taken over" from the ground! (Didn't they do that in a Bond movie?) 

It seems that TRE never got as far as choosing an appropriate technology for the PRF. The rest was just a matter of adding the radar transponder signal to the missile's "reply" to produce the control "error" signal, once the missile climbed high enough to come into the ground control radar's view, perhaps 50,000ft. The missile would then sinusoidally course correct by hunting within the turn limits of the autopilot and settle down to the right course.  Or it would exceed those limits because of a random gust and go pitching into the Pripet marshes in search of the primordial home of the Slavic nations. 

Whichever. Again, a good think these weren't nukes. The Wiki article concludes that the whole project was "delayed up to two years by the slow funding of the guidance system," so that it was eclipsed by the abrupt arrival of the Vickers Valiant, which who could have anticipated considering that while it was being built in the next room to the UB.109T, they probably kept the door shut and whispered over there. 

I feel  like there's more to this story with the Vickers Valiant that no-one is telling us. Was there pressure to cancel it?

On the other hand, the test firings were fun (except the one where the Soar didn't start up and the missile ended up wrapped around the firing Washington's tail) and justified building some new test ranges at Woomera, which probably made the Australians happy. And apparently the retrieval system, consisting of a big spike on the nose so that the test missiles wouldn't dig in to far when they crashed, was proven for the BLUE STEEL trials. And TRE was still playing with the guidance system in 1957, so there was probably some Autoland money slushed in there. 

And this concludes the story of the "wandering atomic cruise missiles" story for the moment, although I'm willing to be there's going to turn out to be at least one more shoe to drop with the USN's Regulus programme, which also sounds a bit fruity loopy.