[A6BSTARM]

For those of you that got the Jan 07 issue of Proccedings there is an interesting article in it by Norman Polmar. He talks about how the carriers Hermes and Invincible along with the frigates Brilliant and Broadsword were called up so fast that they didn't have a chance to offload thier nuclear shapes. Even after the fleet mustered as Ascension island there were a number of issues there that prevented offloading as well and it wasn't until the carrier battle group went south and during an unrep that the training rounds and a few survelliance rounds (shapes that measure the enviroment in a magizine but don't have the warhead in them) were removed from the rest of the frigate forces and only a few of the live rounds were able to be removed from the carriers.

So the carriers that went south in that conflict carried about 25% of the UK nuclear depth bombs. I also know from reading about that conflict the military junta in Argentina were trying to build a nuclear weapon and the last I heard they were pretty close to getting a working weapon.

So this little article makes me if the junta was dumb enough to cross the threshold either at sea on ashore, would the UK had retalitated? Let me ask then one then how much harder would it had been for the amphibs to had still be in Port Stanley offloading of the ground troops? This really adds some more intersting thoughts to how one would of conducted this conflict.

[VCDH]

hi Chuck

I too have the same article here. Polmar goes to great lengths to point out that it was highly unlikely that any nukes were lost prior to there being any ships in action (or sunk).

Do I think it could have gone nuclear? I don't think so. Even if there was a nuclear program underway in Argenentia (I don't know if there was) the threat of retaliation would have been too great for them to take that step. In that case it would have been similar to a 1945 US going nuclear against a 1985 USSR. The difference in capabilities would have ensured a Soviet win in that example. Given the current political situation in the UK as described from Woodwards book 'One Hundred Days', it seems very likely that Thatcher would have ordered a retaliation. She would have been caught between a rock and the preverbial hard place by comitting to retaking the Falklands and to pull out due to the nuclear threat would have been a serious show of weakness in the face of a (then) overpowering USSR. The sudden influx of US spending would not have had any affect until around that time and even then the balance of power wasn't adressed until 1983/1984, at least a year after the Falklands.

What did you think of Friedman's article on that Song SSK?

Later
D