Arms Control: The Untold Story

A chill wind was blowing as half a dozen women, middle-class gypsies of the British peace movement, sat around the campfire. One duffel-coated figure was slicing mushrooms (toadstools?) into a much-used frying pan. Nearby stood a beat-up, Sixties-style Volkswagen bus. Behind us stretched the chain-link fence of the U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common. Some time after midnight, one of the peace women told me, 16 cruise missiles would be driven out of the base gate—the “Woad Gate,” the women called it—and down the winding roads of Berkshire on a “dispersal exercise.”

The Americans acquired the Greenham base after World War II, and for years the U.S. Air Force used the long runway for training missions. Then the local residents of Newbury (Dick Francis country) began to complain about the noise of the warplanes. So the bombers were moved elsewhere, or phased out altogether, and were replaced in 1983 by 96 cruise missiles—flying torpedoes with nuclear warheads, mounted on trucks. They can fly at hedge-hopping heights (evading radar), and strike within a few feet of their target. This means cruise missiles don’t even have to be nuclear (the amount of explosive force needed being inversely proportional to accuracy). Conventionally armed cruise missiles, it is now believed, could have been used instead of F-lll bombers in the 1986 bombing raid on Libya, perhaps striking Qaddafi’s tent directly.

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Tom Bethell

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A chill wind was blowing as half a dozen women, middle-class gypsies of the British peace movement, sat around the campfire. One duffel-coated figure was slicing mushrooms (toadstools?) into a much-used frying pan. Nearby stood a beat-up, Sixties-style Volkswagen bus. Behind us stretched the chain-link fence of the U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common. Some time after midnight, one of the peace women told me, 16 cruise missiles would be driven out of the base gate—the “Woad Gate,” the women called it—and down the winding roads of Berkshire on a “dispersal exercise.”

The Americans acquired the Greenham base after World War II, and for years the U.S. Air Force used the long runway for training missions. Then the local residents of Newbury (Dick Francis country) began to complain about the noise of the warplanes. So the bombers were moved elsewhere, or phased out altogether, and were replaced in 1983 by 96 cruise missiles—flying torpedoes with nuclear warheads, mounted on trucks. They can fly at hedge-hopping heights (evading radar), and strike within a few feet of their target. This means cruise missiles don’t even have to be nuclear (the amount of explosive force needed being inversely proportional to accuracy). Conventionally armed cruise missiles, it is now believed, could have been used instead of F-lll bombers in the 1986 bombing raid on Libya, perhaps striking Qaddafi’s tent directly.