After so many days of heavy topics like war, war and, well, war, it seemed reasonable to go for a little comedic relief with the assistance of the British government. So, here’s a story for the record books on inane government, brought to you today from that tiny island nation that long ruled the world. After today’s story, you’ll wonder how.
It’s such an oddball story I couldn’t decide whether to file it under “Just Plain Offbeat News” or under “Doomer Humor.” Finally, I decided to just lampoon the heck out of right here in the editorial. I learned about it from an article titled “Key UK Nuclear Deterrent Link Destroyed Over Yorkshire,” a.k.a “Britain Uses Old-World Blimp as Essential Communication Relay with Trident Nuclear Submarines and is Shocked it Can Be Disabled.”
The system was designed in case London or some other major part of the isle of Great Britain gets destroyed by a nuclear attack. It is meant to be the last-surviving, last-ditch method by which the UK can send a signal to its nuclear-armed subs to retaliate in order to fulfill the promise of “assured mutual destruction.”
I did not even find it published in The Onion or The Babylon Bee. I had to check out the publication to see if was some British counterpart to those; but, now, they are a serious group with fabled journalists from some of the big guys.
Really? This is your plan, Britain:
You’re going to drop a wire from a big fat balloon? Have we not entered 21st century communications yet? You could disable Britain’s nuclear missile command with a cheap rifle. Oh, and the system was to be guarded by sailors armed with baseball bats! (And this is APPARENTLY not a joke.)
Well, surprisingly (to the Brits in charge) the system, at last experienced a technical glitch, which looked something like erectile disfunction:
It popped. That’s not how you want your blimp to point. Yet, the story gets funnier . (My commentary interjected in brackets)
Until this week, official plans [yes, official] in a military emergency [yes, in an EMERGENCY] and if nuclear war seemed possible, [yes, in case of a NUCLEAR emergency] would instruct a secret convoy of trucks and specially equipped vehicles to leave from an army warehouse discreetly located in a Dundee industrial estate, with orders to head for the hills. The convoy would then hide as far as possible away from cities and other likely UK nuclear targets. When and if any surviving post-nuclear attack British government decided to order retaliation on Moscow, their order would go through to the balloon unit to send pre-arranged LF [low-frequency] messages, capable of being received underwater.
“To head for hills!” That’s great. The Keystone Cops are going all jump in some old army lories stashed away in a warehouse in Dundee and “head for the hills” to try to inflate a “top-secret” communications devise disguised as a weather balloon and send out Britain’s last ever emergency command to destroy Russia for nuking London. Sounds like a plan concocted in Roswell! I can just see them arriving somewhere in “the hills” and saying, “Bill, did you remember to bring the helium? … Dang! (Or whatever it is Brits say for such occasions.)”
So, in an emergency, they not only have to spend an hour heading for the hills but then have to inflate this thing when they get there and then get it aloft, perhaps in a windstorm. Two hours later, they’re ready to launch their nukes. Wouldn’t it work better just to stick the horn of a megaphone underwater and yell?
And here is how secret it was, which is where the story picks up some quaint British charm along the lines of Waking Ned Divine. OK, that’s Irish, but I recommend it as close enough with good laughs.
In a ritual now familiar to residents of the Yorkshire market town of Thirsk, [you cannot make up humor this good] every September the convoy from Dundee has rolled onto the nearby former airfield at Topcliffe to conduct a nuclear war test drill. The Scottish soldiers taking part are mainly part-time members from a Territorial Army unit called 2 (City of Dundee and Highland) Signal Squadron (Volunteers).
So, every resident around Dundee knows the day and the hour when the top-secret blimp shall rise. They even set out lawn chairs to watch for it. The well guarded part of secret, though, is yet to be revealed because the village folk do not know the PURPOSE, and for the watchful villagers speculation about the purpose of the big balloon is part of the fun … just like in the little town of Roswell, New Mexico:
They erect security fencing [I presume to maintain the top secret about what is in there] and inflate the aerostat balloon with helium gas, ready to fly when and if ordered. Once aloft, simulated nuclear attack orders are sent to a Trident deterrent patrol boat submerged in the North Atlantic. One test reportedly connected to the US Navy headquarters to pass on orders, according to an Army magazine report.
Let us hope their “simulation” is not has half-baked as the real plan, or they may accidentally send out orders misunderstood to be real commands to nuke Moscow. If I were Putin, I would be more afraid of this blimp than of NATO just because the Keystone Cops might accidentally wind up firing a real nuke toward the Kremlin. You’ll see that I’m not going hard on them in a minute. Maybe that is why Putin must have sent out someone with a pistol to disarm the nuclear missile system this year.
The Topcliffe event is a Top Secret UK Eyes Only and ultra-sensitive annual rehearsal for the last days of Britain, as depicted most graphically in the 1984 BBC drama Threads.
Or as depicted more seriously in the American drama Weekend at Bernie’s.
So, it’s “for UK Eyes only,” unless you happen to be a non-citizen of the UK in Dundee for a September visit. Then you can sit down with the rest of your family in one of the lawn chairs and/or friends and watch the “system launch.” This time, however, they got a “system launch error”:
Dang. (Or whatever they say.) With ED like that, it looks like the British military needs to be buying shipments of Hegseth’s US testosterone:
That will get them back up and running as well as the US military is in Iran where we seem to be assuring the mutual destruction of all our allies by starting a war from which we were incapable of defending them or just making them all so mad they cease to be our allies. More than one way to skin an ally.
But, hey, the story gets better:
Once this balloon went up, if for real, [That’s the question I was asking: Is this for real? Apparently.] former officials anticipated that signals from SUNFLOWER [gotta have a code name with a project this protected] would be the last military event before Britain’s rapid fall into a violent struggle for survival and then a decline to pre-medieval living standards and population levels in near-starvation conditions.
With military plans like this one, I’m sure it will be their last military event before Britain’s fall. As for those living standards, the present two major wars in Ukraine and Iran are providing that kind of mutually assured global destruction anyway as the UK has already warned its citizens to plan for food shortages. On that program, of course, they got help from the US, though not with the provisions side, just with assuring the shortages and borderline starvation.
Ahead of each annual war rehearsal and balloon relay exercise, the Ministry of Defence publishes a “Notice to Airmen” (NOTAM) banning all aviation activity below the height of 1,800 metres (6,000 feet) within three nautical miles of Topcliffe.
In other words, they send out the location of their secret drill each year to all non-military pilots and anyone who happens to be having lunch with those pilots as they read the announcement. They, of course, don’t inform anyone of the purpose because THAT is the secret, which you’ll see is carefully guarded.
Thirsk locals have become used to then seeing the balloon appear over their town about the same time as kids go back to school every year, and to then exchanging speculation about its real purpose. Residents usually guess, wrongly, that it is a “weather balloon”.
If they would just watch the dramatic television series Roswell, they would know not to fall for the weather balloon story! Of course, maybe this whole story was concocted by AI. When I asked Google, “Does Britain really use a blimp for nuclear communications,” their AI answered by default, “No information is available on this.”
OF COURSE, THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT IT TO SAY IF I WAS INQUIRING ABOUT A TOP-SECRET NUCLEAR COMMUNICATIONS LAUNCH SYSTEM! AI HAS GUARDRAILS, YOU KNOW? So, that is practically as good as proof right there that the story is real! ; )
I had expected the AI to respond “Heck no!” … or whatever it is they say over there.
This September began as usual.
Don’t they all … in every movie of this kind? Then stuff like this starts to happen:
Scottish squaddies set up their balloon camp. When the balloon was inflated on Tuesday, local social media woke up. Locals passing on the A168 trunk road took and posted images to social media, showing the inflated balloon made ready on the ground. [I see the security fencing is working well.] A local businessperson reported he had been asked to deliver diesel “on the bounce, they’re Scottish, and there are lots of big computers in several trucks, wouldn’t even give me a clue as to what they were doing”.
Sounds like the diners gathering at the Crackdown Cafe in Roswell. Oh, and it’s always good to have a top-secret military plan that requires you stop at the local petrol station for refueling before completing your mission so that the locals get a chance to ask what you’re up to! You can just tell them, “It’s just a big computer delivery up in ‘the hills.’” Because annual computer deliveries by large canvas-clad lories to a vacant hilltop in the countryside would never raise suspicions.
Although SUNFLOWER might have been assumed to be one of Britain’s most vital and precious national security secrets, [well, that wouldn’t have been my assumption, but … ] details of the system have for years been as visible as its sudden demise high in Yorkshire skies.
You know, the villagers probably could have figured out the purpose, even without the crash, if they just had an Ovaltine decoder ring. (Please pardon the frequent references to popular serious documentary films.)
The basic LFFB design was patented in 1984. Full details of the system, including its power design and technology, were published in a 1993 NATO conference paper.
And the Russians could never have looked at the plans to figure out what it was going to be used for. That would be as hard as backward engineering the secret craft scooped up at Roswell and taken to Area 51. Of course, Area 51 is probably just a decoy, and the actual craft was actually taken to a hilltop near Dundee, Scotland where they clearly have people who know how to handle these things. Now we know!
Details of the acquisition, deployment, testing, exercising and nuclear role of the now-shredded balloon
That is exactly how these things always end up—just parts of a shredded weather ballon.
have routinely been published and described in open Army publications, notably the Royal Signals Corps magazine Wire. Wire featured the balloon with cover pinup prominence in its December 2007 edition (illustration).
Ah, so even the most “top-secret for UK eyes only” communications plan containing “sensitive information” was spread all over the coffee tables of every UK military base and sometimes hung on the wall as a pinup. I guess this is the ol’ hide-it-in-plain-site strategy deployed on the basis that no one would ever expect a top secret to be hidden so openly, so they will ignore it. (Except the villagers who lacked a movie hall, so launch chairs and the annual balloon festival were about as good as it gets.)
After a decade of LFFB operations, in 2014 the Royal Signals Institute awarded a Silver Medal to Dundee Staff Sergeant George Cowan, citing an “unsurpassed… contribution to the operational effectiveness of the LFFB and for developing a unique unproven civilian system into a deployable military system … whilst assuring its credibility [?] within the Nuclear Firing Chain. Sgt Cowan was also commended for having a “the message must get through” attitude in the face of possible national nuclear destruction.
Well, that spelled the purpose out nicely for everyone! Oops, cat’s outa the bag! The message got through to everyone in Britain now.
And here is the part that only government could do:
The citation also revealed that, despite the lifetime cost of Trident estimated by the House of Commons at £21 billion, with annual running costs of £3 billion, the former emergency war link was apparently being maintained on a shoestring.
Only in inept government would the cost of £3 billion to warehouse and annually run a a blimp up a distant hill and fly it be considered a “shoestring” budget. Why wouldn’t you just store the blimp in an underground vault in the countryside or just a barn on a remote hilltop in Scotland locked with the same padlock you used on the industrial warehouse in Dundee? When you need to send out a smoke signal to your Trident nuclear submarines to destroy the Kremlin, just call your Scottish Shephardess and have her go out and make the launch. She could do a better job of protecting it with her grouse-hunting shotgun than those guards armed with mere baseball bats. That way you don’t have to raise the attention of 700 villagers by stopping to refuel your computer trucks as your caravan of blimp, helium plus computers & company makes it way into the deep countryside. And you cut down the travel time, because the shepherdess only has to walk 400 feet to the barn. (OK, I know: they were talking about the cost of running the submarine program; but they deserved that criticism since they are practically running the nuclear launch codes on a shoestring between two styrofoam cups and a couple of buttons.)
Sgt Cowan’s citation stated that he was the only person in Britain capable of getting a nuclear retaliation order sent out, as “he has been the solitary Flight Control Officer capable of flying the system for over eight years.”
Since it is unmanned, that’s a bit amazing that he is the only one who can fly it. What does that involve, unwinding the tether or filling it with the helium? They should talk to my grandson, he could figure this out in three minutes. However, if they are all as dumb over there as this article makes them sound, no wonder he is only person in Britain capable of getting an order sent out. The others are all too busy trying to figure out the blimp inflation instructions, probably written by someone in China! Always good to put something so critical in the hands of only a single person capable of running it. No offense, Brits. I spend MOST of my time reporting on how dumb the clowns over here are. Love you!
And good luck with your clowns. (Sounds like you’re going to need it.)
Despite the obvious security sensitivity of the Flight Control Officer’s job,
Yes, obvious security puts the operative word in place. No security has EVER been as obvious as a big white blimp launching over the Scottish countryside every September right after the convoy of military trucks stops in town for refueling and a bag of crisps! (Or whatever they call those things.)
Cowan’s official mobile phone number was published in warning notices for each exercise. The current NOTAM warning for Topcliffe, available on the web at the time of publication, provides mobile phone numbers for SUNFLOWER’s current flight controllers.
I thought they only had one who could control it. Ah well, always a good idea to publish the phone numbers of the official and flight controllers who have to issue the truly MAD “Mutually Assured Destruction” nuclear order. That way, the Russians can simply jam his phone by having all the agents at one of their Siberian troll farms dial in at the same time to reduce the likelihood that MI6 or the prime minister at #10 Downing (or wherever the heck? he lives over there) manages to get through from the “red” phone.” (That is, of course, if the troll farm is not busy running one of the many fake Russian/Ukrainian dating sites.)
The apparently unusual decision to allocate the nation’s most vital last-resort military mission to a Scottish reserve unit based in a Dundee industrial estate was historically the result of second world operations by MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
Second world? You flatter yourselves. Heck, this doesn’t even rise to third-world status! It’s barely a step above prehistoric smoke signals or child cups connected by strings.
A secret agent radio control station to connect to Northern Europe was constructed near Forfar, 13 miles from Dundee….
And what was it made of? The box the blimp shipped in?
Like I say, just keep the darn thing in a stable and deploy the local shepherdess for a salary of £3 thousand a year, instead of billions, to guard the thing and test launch it each year. Maybe have a backup in some old abandoned coal mine in Wales somewhere just in case the Scottish Coleen is sleeping one off that day after a rough night working the pub. An old coal car that carries the folded blimp up out of the padlocked mine would raise far less attention than the caravan making fuel stops!
With a United States President increasingly unstable and hostile to the UK,
OK, see, you got me on that one, Brits. I told you you would. Our president is clearly as unstable as your blimp that just popped, and many of us are wondering when he’s going to pop, being as overinflated both physically and in ego as he is. If you are lucky he won’t force you to build a golden Arc de Trump in Trafalgar Square or threaten you with 250% tariffs on all crumpets and Land Rovers if you don’t give “your attention to this matter.”
(Sorry, crumpets and Land Rovers were the only two things I could think of that we buy over here from Britain. Well, that and the occasional Jag, of which I am a fan. They enabled me to make money by fixing three-year-old Jags and reselling them in operable condition again after enjoying them for six months many years ago. Come to think of it, I did attempt that once with a Range Rover, too, but it was beyond reasonable repair. So, I just enjoyed it for a year until it died. Heck, I only paid $4,000 for it, and I got most of that back, so it was cheap fun compared to a new car payment. And it would’ve worked great for hauling my blimp up into the hills … when it worked! If I had only had money back then for a blimp.)
the only obvious trustworthy military replacement for SUNFLOWER that could be available might be its French equivalent, Système de transmission de derniers recours (SYDEREC)….
Leave it to the French, inventors of the original balloon with basket, to come up with something better than the modern blimp! Remember the World’s Fair! They are always thinking, those French. I mean, look at the great job they did with inventing fries! (OK, they stole the credit from the Brits just by branding chips (if that’s what you call them over there) with the “French” moniker in America.)
Until last Friday, if the VLF stations were destroyed by attacks with advanced conventional weapons, the balloon could have gone up to provide a national emergency link.
Unless they were disabled with a sharp pin. Dang! It was such a good plan, and then somebody popped it while in flight with a .22. It didn’t even require a Kalashnikov. Hardly sporting.
The situation now has parallels to warnings written forty years ago by civil service planners advising Mrs Thatcher’s successor what to do if all links were destroyed: “This is not a situation easily provided for, but the argument is that if we do not provide for it – and should the Russians discover the fact [how would they on a carefully guarded secret like this?]– we do not have a deterrent which is credible in all circumstances.”
Hate to break it to you guys, but I don’t think you had a deterrent that was credible under any circumstances.
But this is why we pay for government!
(P.S. I perhaps should have made more clear in my last article that by “death of the dollar,” I meant death of the petrodollar, which means end of the dollar’s longstanding privileged status among the world’s trade currencies. It doesn’t mean the dollar ceases to exist or that it takes a Zimbabwe style swan dive in value, though it could; but it does mean some seriously bad things. Maybe I’ll delineate that in a Deeper Dive. We’ll see what else happens this week.)
