Skywatch Volume 3: The History Of The Royal Observer Corps, 1945-1995

The prospect of nuclear war brought a renewed urgency to aircraft reporting and the RAF's defensive organisation to stop enemy bombers. Whilst air defences improved, it was realised they could never be expected to halt every Soviet bomber. Therefore, Britain needed an organisation to detect, measure, and monitor the effects of a Soviet nuclear attack on the country. With Posts and Controls spread across Britain, the Royal Observer Corps was ideally placed to do this. From 1955, the organisation began its transition to a new nuclear role. The ROC became the backbone of the Home Office's United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation. New underground Posts were built, and Group and Sector Controls were constructed, intended to protect against a nuclear strike. Able to detect and measure the power of nuclear explosions, the ROC would monitor the arrival and levels of associated nuclear fallout as it spread across the country. The information generated would be used by central government, civil defence, local and military authorities. This volume explores the ROC's early postwar years, the transition to the nuclear role, its new equipment, training and changing organisation over the decades. It examines how the national financial crisis drove its halving in 1968 and navigated the strictures of the 1970s. It considers how the resurgence of the Cold War in the 1980s brought new funding to modernise the Corps' equipment and communications. This process ended abruptly with the Soviet Union's implosion in 1990. This book uses a combination of new research, recently released official files, and first-hand accounts from former members to critically assess the Royal Observer Corps's activities and its operations, from high-level policy-making to life at Posts and Group Centres across Britain and Northern Ireland. AUTHOR: Having taught Cold War history, international security and politics at the University of Essex from where he gained a PhD, Kevin is a regular contributor to several UK aviation magazines and aviation photographer. Publications have included books on the U-2, Cold War aerial intelligence and contemporary military topics. From 1980 to Stand-down in 1991, he was a member of the Royal Observer Corps, the last eight years as a spare-time Group Officer with No. 4 Group (Colchester), responsible for Posts in North Essex and South Suffolk. 80 b/w illustrations, 10 colour photos, 21 colour profiles, 2 colour maps, 4 tables