Clive Richard discusses the RAF’s Medium Bomber Force in the aftermath of the Nassau Agreement

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Few post-war British military aircraft have attracted as much attention as those of the RAF’s Medium Bomber Force (MBF), or ‘V-Force’ – the Vickers Valiant, Handley Page Victor and Avro Vulcan. Popular accounts, however, have focussed largely upon the aircraft, the crews that flew them and the weapons that they carried.

Although official and academic studies have looked beyond the ‘hardware’, they have concentrated primarily upon the V-Force’s role as the UK’s primary strategic nuclear deterrent prior to the 1962 Nassau Agreement and the eventual transfer of this responsibility to the Royal Navy’s Resolution-class Polaris submarines in 1969.   At the other end of the V-Force timeline, much has been written about the ‘Black Buck’ operations conducted during the 1982 Falklands Islands campaign (Operation CORPORATE) and the role of the Victor tanker force in supporting this and later operations.

Less consideration, by contrast, has been paid to the way in which the RAF sought to employ the Medium Bomber Force (MBF) and the doctrine that guided these operations in the two decades between the Nassau Agreement and BLACK BUCK.  Stripped of its’ strategic deterrent duties, during this period the MBF morphed from a UK national asset into one integrated increasingly into NATO.

In this paper, Clive Richards, whose articles have been published in Air Power Review and the Royal Air Force Historical Society Journal, will seek to examine the final chapter of the MBF story.  Drawing upon material in The National Archives and those of NATO and the Central Intelligence Agency, supplemented by a range of secondary sources, it will examine how and to what degree evolving appreciations of Soviet air defences, shifts in NATO strategy and doctrine, and changes to the structure of the RAF effected the role, size and functioning of the MBF.  It will also consider the continued relevance of the MBF’s contribution to the RAF, and to NATO air power in general, in the years between the cancellation of TSR-2 and the introduction of Tornado.

Full details of Clive Richards and the lecture series can be found on the RAF Museum Website

A Wasting Asset? The RAF’s Medium Bomber Force in the aftermath of the Nassau Agreement, 1962-1982