Big Bangs For A Buck

摘要

Originally scheduled to serve until 2007, the WE177 free-fall nuclear bomb was then to have been replaced by the nuclear armed Tactical Air-Surface Missile (TASM), though this was cancelled on October 18,1993, before it could enter production. The dramatic shift away from Britain's use of tactical nuclear weapons began on the ground and at sea, where the UK armed forces still relied on the use of US-owned warheads. Within a decade, however, the process would extend to cover the withdrawal of the RAF's British nuclear weapons, and the cancellation of their planned successor. The British Army's Lance tactical nuclear missiles, and the nuclear artillery role, had been undertaken using US nuclear warheads held under 'dual-key' arrangements, and as such had been withdrawn as part of the unilateral reductions in tactical nuclear weapons announced by Presidents Bush and Gorbachev in 1991.