Britain, the Prime Minister will be pleased to learn, once had a nuclear weapon named the Tony. (It was a prototype warhead to be fitted to the Bloodhound surface-to-air missile, tried in the 1950s but never developed.) The record books of our great nation’s early nuclear experiments also yield something called the Peter (appropriately enough, a trigger device for a larger explosion) but, alas, no Alastair, no Gordon (though there was, perhaps in anticipation of the late Robin Cook, another prototype unhappily christened the Pixie).
The first-generation Tony, produced by trench-coated chaps with soldering irons in a collection of sheds just off the A340, was reassuringly cheap. Hidden under a thick 1950s bedsheet of secrecy, it was also free from specific public controversy. The new generation of nukes now being planned by Mr Blair — the Tony II — will be neither.
Officially, of course, ‘no decision has yet been taken’ to replace Britain’s existing Trident ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) system, as the Prime Minister and his Defence Secretary, John Reid, continue to insist whenever they are asked.
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