Across the United Kingdom, the reassuring tick from WB400 carrier receivers suddenly changes to a two-tone warble followed by the words, "Attack warning red" High over the mountains of central Norway and above the Aegean Sea, RAF deterrent carriers discharge fuel and commence a climbing turn to the optimum launch altitude and heading for their Skybolt missiles. That scenario could have played out in the late 1960s had the RAF's 'V-Force,' rather than the Royal Navy's Resolution-class Polaris submarines, continued to carry -and potentially deliver - the UK's nuclear deterrent. What could that force have looked like? The means of delivery was to be the Douglas AGM-48 Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM). This was the answer to the Air Staff's prayers, saving Bomber Command's crews from a troglodytic career in Blue Streak missile silos across eastern England and providing plenty of stick time for pilots. The mode of deployment for Skybolt was on a continuous airborne alert basis, along the lines of US Air Force Strategic Air Command's Operation 'Chrome Dome,' As a shorthand, or codename, for such continuous operations, someone at the Air Ministry came up with the term 'Poffler! This might have originated with the same classically educated Scotsman who applied 'Dominie' to the military version of the de Havilland Dragon Rapide, a poffler being an obscure Scottish term for a farmer.
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