Brynley Heaven

Folkingham's 

deadly secret

by 

BRYNLEY HEAVEN

THERE IS NOTHING outwardly remarkable about Folkingham. The Georgian and early Victorian square might have been intended for a small town although it has now shrunk back into an attractive village. An interesting place to visit yet few would ever detect that it hides an extraordinary Cold War secret. 

Between December 1959 and 1963, Folkingham airfield was home to three sleek, gleaming white ballistic missiles sporting the RAF bull's eye emblem, each armed with 1.44-megaton nuclear warheads, 100 times greater than the atom bomb that decimated Hiroshima in 1945. The missiles were 65 feet long, eight feet in diameter, weighed 110,000 lbs when fuelled and were capable of reaching Russia. They were part of an overall secret operation codenamed Project Emily.

Alan Pickering, a local man, remembers: "When we walked up within sight of the rockets, obviously they had lookouts and they would drive out onto the road and ask us why we were there. The surface launch installations were of a massive thickness, huge concrete pads designed to absorb the rocket blast. I saw the tests or rehearsals which produced an effect like dry ice billowing from the rocket."

A military presence was nothing new to Folkingham because during the Second World War, both the army and the Royal Air Force had quite an impact on this locality but this Cold War deployment was different. It was not only very hush-hush but there was less fraternising by servicemen with locals.

In all, there were 60 American manufactured Thor missiles under the control of specially formed RAF squadrons, in this case 223 (SM) which stood for Strategic Missile, filling in for the indigenous Blue Streak missile programme that had been cancelled. The warheads, however, were under American control when on site, although the nuclear bombs were initially stored most of the time at Dogland Wood, between Lincoln and Market Rasen, an installation so sensitive that governments denied that it even existed.

Harold Macmillan, then Britain's Prime Minister, had agreed with President Eisenhower of the United States a system of joint responsibility for firing them. Since this would have been tantamount to national suicide, we must thank God that this system was never put to the test but it is generally argued that the RAF launch crews would have given Britain an effective veto. This was not idle speculation. It touched upon a central British interest of these times. In the 1950s, the British service chiefs privately expressed their concerns to the Prime Minister, reflecting a chilling reality: at this early stage in the Cold War, an American decision to halt a Soviet tank advance by first use of short range nuclear weapons would not necessarily endanger the American homeland. So the Americans might be tempted to block communist expansion at the price of incinerating Britain, hence the morbid, secretive Whitehall interest in every nuance of American nuclear planning.

The liquid fuel rocket motor missiles would have taken at least a quarter of an hour to fire, had the order come via the bunker near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, even assuming they were operationally ready. In May 1960, the order was given to fit the warheads on to the missiles, while in July 1960 it was decided that 40 of the 60 Thors should always be at 30-minute readiness round the clock. Then at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, 59 of the 60 Thors were placed on 15-minute readiness, stood on their launch pads, fuelled and prepared for firing. 

The Sputnik space probe of 1957 had impressed the West and given a misleading glamour to Russian technology but there was no Soviet satellite reconnaissance capability at this stage. The deployment of the Thor missiles in Britain and 45 similar Jupiter missiles (under different command arrangements) in Italy and Turkey, and the early failures in the Soviet SS-7 long-range nuclear missile deployment programme, led the Soviet Union to take the enormous risk of sending nuclear missiles to Cuba where they could return the compliment and threaten America directly.

After the Cuban missile crisis, the Thors were withdrawn from Britain as part of the secret superpower horse-trading which aimed to achieve a measure of strategic stability, although it is fair to say that they would have gone anyway. They were not part of the V-bomber independent deterrent, they had fixed launch sites and were therefore vulnerable, inaccurate and becoming obsolete. 

Were the Thor missiles dangerous? In 1960, a Thor missile was accidentally armed when an RAF man leaned on the keyway. These things were not just a comic invention by Peter Sellers. Former RAF officer Donald Hofford wrote to The Times on 23rd September 1974 that when the American officer in the launch team failed to show up, "adroit use of a screwdriver enabled the simulated launch to take place". 

Britain was informed of the high risk of accidental launch, which may have been an American cover for the realisation that the British could have launched the missiles alone, and modifications were made. Fortunately, if that is the word, when the inevitable serious Thor accident occurred, it blanketed Johnston Atoll, west of Hawaii, with plutonium and not Bourne. During the Cuban crisis, Prime Minister Macmillan indicated to President Kennedy that Thor missiles could be "in the frame" to broker some kind of deal, but in the event it was the Jupiter missiles, whose command and control problems made the Thors look safe by comparison, that Kennedy bartered with Khrushchev to get the missiles out of Cuba. 

Although there are many interesting remnants of Folkingham airfield, including some buried in nearby Temple Wood, they date from the site's many earlier incarnations that included wartime service as a decoy or fake. Folkingham was both a daylight decoy for RAF Grantham (dummy planes and lots of activity) and a Q site or night time decoy (dummy lighting) that successfully attracted the Luftwaffe. All that remains of Project Emily are three sites with a characteristic ground signature on the Folkingham side of the airfield.

WRITTEN MAY 2003

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Brynley Heaven lives at Aslackby, near Bourne, and edits the Sleaford and district Civic Trust newsletter. He has chaired local authority planning and housing committees as an elected councillor in London and, more recently, cherishes his many years resident in the Beara peninsula, West Cork. He writes regularly on issues of interest in the Sleaford area with a particular interest in land management, planning, left wing movements and neglected topics.

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