Tag Archives: weapon

Anatomy Of A Special Weapon

Many moons ago, I was walking around the RAF Museum at Cosford when I was taken aback to see a “special weapon” on display.  I didn’t realize that they had been declassified so, to see an inert one on display was rather a shock.  Now they crop up all over the place.  The Boscombe Down Aviation Collection at Old Sarum has one on display.  It has been cut open to reveal the various elements of what turns a small amount of metal into a large amount of energy!  Amazing to think so much destruction can be done wrought with so little!

Fort Casey Emplacements

I posted about the lighthouse at Fort Casey here but the fort is obviously a lot more than just a lighthouse.  It was built to defend Puget Sound and this meant some big gun emplacements.  Much like similar emplacements along the west coast, most of the hardware is now long gone but some has been kept in place to show how things once were.  The emplacements themselves are pretty substantial and are well maintained by the park team.  With the guns gone, you see just how big the space taken up by the guns was.

Meanwhile, a couple of installations are still equipped.  One has a gun elevated to the firing position while the other has the mechanism retracted.  The complexity of the gearing to raise, lower, elevate and rotate the guns is old school engineering at its best.

Behind the guns are some of the spotting towers.  From here the crews would have identified targets and called in the sighting requirements to the gun crews for them to engage.  They are painted green to blend in with the background since they would have been a primary target for any invaders.  As it happened, no-one came so these forts never engaged any enemies.

Special Weapons at Cosford

wpid13693-22.jpgI have twice been able to visit the museum at RAF Cosford outside Telford in the UK. On my second visit, I had a very surprising experience. I was looking at a Buccaneer that was on display in one of the hangars. As I walked around it, I saw something that I had not expected to see. They were some bombs but not normal bombs. When I worked on Tornado many years ago, some of the handling clearances we wrote were for what were euphemistically called special weapons. Even the outline of these stores was highly classified and anything we did that included clearances for them had a higher security rating than normal weapons. I never saw one for real. Only the drawings showing the shapes were available. Once I finished working on them, I figured I wouldn’t see them again.

wpid13691-21.jpgTurns out I was wrong. The RAF retired their weapons as part of an overall strategic weapons reform and, once they were withdrawn from service, the classification was downgraded. This included allowing the weapon shapes to be declassified so they could be put on display in a museum. When I first saw them, I thought that someone must have made a big mistake but it turns out that everything was above board. I doubt many people walking past them were even aware of what they were and they certainly won’t have been as surprised as I was.