Higher, faster, further: The Vulcan, UK’S nuke bomber, takes to the air

The Post reported on a new front in military aviation history in 1952.

“The world’s first four-engined Delta bomber made a maiden flight of 36 minutes at Woodford (Cheshire) Aerodrome yesterday,” read the paper. “It is the Avro A 698. It flies faster, higher and farther with a bigger load more economically than anything else in the world.

“‘The advent of this huge four-jet Delta plane represents yet another dramatic leap in the progress of British aviation,’ said Mr Duncan Sandys, the Minister of Supply.”

The plane, with its unusual triangular-shaped wing, was eventually named the Vulcan bomber and came out of development from the early British atomic weapons programme and nuclear deterrent policies.

The Vulcan was to carry Britain’s first nuclear weapon, the Blue Danube gravity bomb, a lowkiloton yield fission bomb designed before the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb. The UK further developed Green Grass, a large pure-fission warhead, which held the Violet Club high yield atomic bomb.

The plane’s only combat missions took place towards the end of the aircraft’s service in 1982, when it was deployed against Argentinian forces during the Falklands War.