David Miller - The Cold War - A Military History

Specifications of British, Chinese and French SSBNs are given in Appendix 14.

Specifications of French nuclear weapons are given in Appendix 15.

A ‘retarded’ bomb deploys a small braking parachute to delay its fall, thus enabling the aircraft to fly clear before the nuclear weapon explodes.

MSBS = Mer–Sol Balistique Stratégique (sea-to-land ballistic strategic missile).

Specifications of Chinese ballistic-missile submarines are given in Appendix 14and of Chinese missiles in Appendix 16.

The wide ranges resulted from taking a variety of assumptions for the attack pattern and for weather and other environmental factors at the time of the attack.

In the United Kingdom, civil-defence responsibility was split: the Home Office (equivalent to an interior ministry in most other countries) was responsible for England and Wales, while the Scottish Home and Health Department and the Northern Ireland Office covered civil defence in their particular areas.

The Royal Observer Corps was established during the Second World War to spot, identify and report approaching enemy aircraft; it converted to its nuclear-war role in the early 1950s. Its personnel wore a distinctive uniform, but were part-time, unpaid volunteers.

The figures in Tables 14.2 to 14.4 are derived from the detailed tables in Appendix 17.

Rickover (1900–86) was on the verge of retirement as a captain in 1946 when he joined the atomic-energy programme. He subsequently became chief of the Nuclear Power Division of the US navy. An extremely influential figure, with many friends in Congress, he eventually retired at the age of eighty-two, with the rank of four-star admiral.

A further eleven Ticonderoga-class cruisers and sixteen Los Angeles-class SSNs were completed after the end of the Cold War.

Albeit after the end of the Cold War, both STANAVFORMED and STANAVFORCHAN were deployed to the Adriatic during NATO operations after the break-up of Yugoslavia.

During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), its Pacific Fleet having been virtually eliminated by the Japanese, the Imperial Russian Navy dispatched its Baltic Fleet, commanded by Rozhdestvensky, to the Pacific. It left its home ports in October 1904 and sailed via the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Near the end of a desperate voyage, on 27 May 1905 the Russians met the Japanese fleet, commanded by Admiral Togo Heihachiro, at Tsu-shima, where they were decisively defeated.

Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergei Georgiyevich Gorshkov was commander-in-chief of the Soviet navy from January 1956 to December 1985.

The second British battleship was retained by the Soviet navy. It was broken up at Sevastopol in 1957.

‘Flag’ facilities are the command, control and communications facilities and the additional working and living accommodation necessary to enable a ship to embark an admiral and his staff and to serve as the flagship of a group.

The term ‘battlecruiser’ dated back to the early years of the twentieth century, when battleships optimized firepower and protection at the expense of speed, while the equally large battlecruisers had firepower equal to that of a battleship, but achieved rather greater speed at the expense of protection. The term was resurrected in the West as being the only appropriate designation for the Kirov class.

The snorkel tube was actually invented by the Dutch navy in the 1930s, to enable submarines in East Indies waters to recharge their batteries without exposing themselves to the tropical heat.

The Soviet navy carried out experiments in the late 1930s with the Kreislauf air-independent propulsion system, which used liquid oxygen as the source of oxygen for submerged propulsion. It was later used in a class of post-war submarines.

With the loss of the original name-ship, the class was then officially redesignated the Permit class.

There was also a sub-limit of eight on Tomahawks.

A body of revolution is one which is symmetrical about its main axis – e.g. an Indian club or a baseball bat.

Specifications of Soviet SSNs are given in Appendix 20.

Specifications of Soviet diesel-electric submarines are given in Appendix 21.

A measure of the boats’ popularity can be gauged from the fact that Explorer and Excalibur were known to their crews as Exploder and Excruciator respectively.

The Upholder class in fact proved to be the last British diesel-electric class, being retired after a very brief spell of front-line service following the end of the Cold War.

The Type XXI was restored to fully functioning order, but, in the event, was used only for experiments and trials and did not actually become operational.

The ordnance load was reduced to 1,985 tonnes from the third-of-class onwards, to compensate for the new Kevlar protective lining over the ship’s vital spaces.

The Sea Control Ship design was eventually sold to the Spanish navy, which, having modified and updated it, built it as the Principe de Asturias . The V/STOL Support Ship project also lives on, as the new Wasp-class amphibious assault ships have a secondary role as Harrier/ASW helicopter carriers.

This plan was a virtual rerun of the raid led by Lieutenant-Colonel James Doolittle against Tokyo, Nagoya and Kobe in Japan on 18 April 1942. In this raid, sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers were loaded aboard the carrier USS Hornet and were successfully launched at a distance of some 1,250 km from Japan. One bomber made an emergency landing at Vladivostok, while the others flew on to China, where the crews bailed out.

Some authorities suggest that this may have been the result of an inability to develop a reliable steam catapult rather than the ‘ski jump’ having been developed on its own merits.

The Dutch carrier was later also sold to Argentina.

In Greek mythology, the aegis was a short cloak, later a shield, which protected Zeus from harm.

The four Kidd-class ships were ordered by the shah of Iran, but, following the shah’s overthrow, the new government cancelled the order and the US navy bought the ships. They were, in essence, anti-aircraft versions of the Spruance class.

A fourth was greatly delayed during construction by the ending of the Cold War, and was eventually commissioned into the Ukrainian navy in 1995 with the name Vilna Ukraina .

This rate of fire was theoretical; in practice there were many stoppages, which reduced the rate considerably.

The Italian ships were two cruisers and four destroyers, which were allocated to France under the terms of the 1948 peace treaty with Italy.