title: Steller's sea eagle

text: Courtship, which usually occurs between February and March, and reportedly simply consists of a soaring flight above the breeding area. Steller's sea eagles copulate on the nest after building it. They lay their first greenish-white eggs around April to May. The eggs range from height and in width and weigh around , being slightly larger than those of harpy eagles. Clutches can contain from one to three eggs, with two being the average. Usually, only one chick survives to adulthood, though in some cases as many as three will successfully fledge. After an incubation period around 39 – 45 days the chicks hatch. The chicks are altricial and covered in whitish-down on hatching. The eaglets fledge in August or early September. Adult plumage is attained at four years of age, but first breeding does not typically occur for another year or two.


title: Steller's sea eagle

text: Eggs and very small nestlings can be preyed on by arboreal mammals, such as sables and ermines, and birds, usually corvids. Any of these small, clever nest predators rely on distraction and stealth to prey on the eagle's nests and are killed if caught by either of the parents. Once they reach roughly adult size in the fledgling stage, few predators can threaten this species. In one case, a brown bear ("Ursus arctos") was able to access a nest located on a rock formation and ate a fledgling eaglet, though this is believed to be exceptional. Fully grown fledglings in tree nests are probably invulnerable to predation. Excluding the Asian black bear ("Ursus thibetanus"), which has not thus far been recorded as a predator, no other mammalian carnivores are equal to or greater than the eagle's size can climb trees in the species' range. Due primarily to egg predation and nest collapses, only 45–67% of eggs are successfully reared to adulthood and up to 25% of nestlings may be lost. Once fully grown, though, the eagle has no natural predators.


title: Steller's sea eagle

text: Steller's sea eagles are classified as vulnerable by the IUCN. They are legally protected, being classified as a national treasure in Japan and mostly occurring in protected areas in Russia, but many threats to their survival persist. These mainly include habitat alteration, industrial pollution, and overfishing, which in turn decrease their prey source. The current population is estimated at 5,000 and decreasing. Heavy flooding, which may have been an effect of global climate change, caused almost complete nesting failure for the eagles nesting in Russian rivers due to completely hampering the ability of the parents to capture the fish essential to their nestlings' survival. Persecution of the bird in Russia continues, due to its habit of stealing furbearers from trappers. Due to a lack of other accessible prey in some areas, increasingly, eagles on Hokkaido have moved inland and scavenged on sika deer carcasses left by hunters, exposing them to a risk of lead poisoning through ingestion of lead shot.


title: Steller's sea eagle

text: In Kamchatka, 320 pairs have been recorded. An additional 89 nesting areas are not monitored. In the mountains of Koryakan and along the Bay of Penshina, over 1,200 pairs breed and at least 1,400 juveniles occur. About 500 pairs live in the Khabarovsk region of the Okhostsk coast, and 100 on the Shantar Islands. Another 600 pairs occur in the lower Amur. About 280 pairs are on Sakhalin Island and a few are on the Kurile Islands. The total population is around 3,200 breeding pairs. Possibly, up to 3,500 birds winter on Kamchatka, and another roughly 2,000 may occur on Hokkaido. Generally, the species' outlook is favorable. Outside the breeding range, food bases in the principal wintering areas are so far secure.


title: Callan McAuliffe

text: Callan Ryan Claude McAuliffe (born 24 January 1995) is an Australian actor, known for his roles as Bryce Loski in "Flipped" and Sam Goode in "I Am Number Four". He appeared as young Jay Gatsby in the 2013 film "The Great Gatsby". From 2017 to 2022 he starred on "The Walking Dead" as Alden.


title: Callan McAuliffe

text: Callan McAuliffe is a native of the Sydney suburb of Clontarf. He is the son of Claudia Keech, and author and journalist Roger McAuliffe. His cousin is actress Jacinta John. Two of his grandparents were Irish.


title: Callan McAuliffe

text: McAuliffe attended Scots College, an all boys school in Bellevue Hill. He was the head chorister at the school and topped the London Trinity musical theatre exams, scoring a high distinction in 2008. He was a track athlete until he was injured, leading to a stronger focus on the performing arts.


title: Callan McAuliffe

text: McAuliffe began acting at age 8, appearing in the Australian television series "Comedy Inc." and "Blue Water High". He then had a recurring role on "Packed to the Rafters". He also starred in the Australian independent coming-of-age short film "Franswa Sharl" in 2009, and also had a role in "Resistance" (2009). McAuliffe made his American feature debut in "Flipped", directed by Rob Reiner. He auditioned for the film while on vacation in the United States and won the role of Bryce, the lead. The film is based on the 2001 novel of the same title by Wendelin Van Draanen.


title: Callan McAuliffe

text: In May 2010, McAuliffe was cast in a lead role in the science fiction film "I Am Number Four" based on the novel of the same title by Pittacus Lore, the film is produced by Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. He played Sam, the best friend of Alex Pettyfer's title character. He then appeared in the Australian miniseries "Cloudstreet", based on the novel of the same title by Tim Winton, playing young Quick Lamb. McAuliffe appeared as young Jay Gatsby in the 2013 film adaptation of "The Great Gatsby", directed by Baz Luhrmann. McAuliffe subsequently starred in "Beneath the Harvest Sky" (2013).


title: Callan McAuliffe

text: McAuliffe was cast as the archangel Uriel alongside Djimon Hounsou in Alex Proyas' action film, "Paradise Lost", before the project was suspended. In 2012, he starred in the Australian television film "", as one of the teenage Assange's friends involved in the International Subversives. On 3 February 2013, it was announced that McAuliffe would star alongside Samuel L. Jackson and India Eisley in the live-action film remake of the 1998 Japanese anime "Kite". In 2015, McAuliffe joined the cast of "The Legend of Ben Hall", an Australian historical epic based on the true story of bushranger Ben Hall, where he portrays real-life gang member Daniel Ryan. In 2018, McAuliffe released his first novel, "The Hill Ghost."


title: Callan McAuliffe

text: McAuliffe was announced as a National Ambassador for UNICEF Australia in November 2013. After his appointment, he said: "It is an honour to be invited to be a National Ambassador to UNICEF Australia and so important that is at a time where I can really contribute. My friends, the actors I work with, and I, all have shelter, food and family. We need to help the children who are without these things."


title: Callan McAuliffe

text: McAuliffe is the Youth Ambassador of Wolf Connection, a non-profit organisation based in California, which rescues wolves and wolf-dogs, and also has a youth education and empowerment program.


title: Kunaal Roy Kapur

text: Kunaal Roy Kapur is an Indian actor, playwright and filmmaker who works in Hindi films and television shows.


title: Kunaal Roy Kapur

text: Kunaal comes from a family of mixed Hindu Punjabi and Indian Jewish heritage. His paternal grandfather, Raghupat Roy Kapur (or Raghupat Rai Kapoor), a Hindu of the Punjabi Khatri community, was a film producer. Kunaal's father was Kumud Roy Kapur, and his mother, Salome Roy Kapur, is of Indian Jewish descent. A dancer, dance instructor, stage choreographer and former Miss India, she is the daughter of Sam and Ruby Aaron, who were among the earliest accredited teachers of Ballroom and Latin American dancing in India, with degrees from the Federal Association of Teachers of Dancing in London. Kunaal is the second of three brothers. His elder brother is Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO of UTV and Disney India, and his younger brother is Aditya Roy Kapur. Actress Vidya Balan is his sister-in-law as she is married to Siddharth.


title: Kunaal Roy Kapur

text: Kapur started his acting career with the Indian soap "Just Mohabbat" (1997–98), which aired on Sony TV. He then appeared in a cameo role in the 2007 film, "Loins of Punjab Presents" opposite Shabana Azmi and Ishita Sharma. He was also seen in "Panga Naa Lo".


title: Kunaal Roy Kapur

text: As a director, Kunaal in 2006 directed a comedy, "The President Is Coming". He adapted the play into film, to make his directorial debut with the mockumentary "The President Is Coming" (2009), starring Konkona Sen Sharma and Shernaz Patel, which opened to mixed reviews and was declared a "Semi-Hit".


title: Kunaal Roy Kapur

text: Kapur appeared in six episodes of British-Indian comedy series "Mumbai Calling" (2009) as a call centre operator. He has appeared in Aamir Khan Productions' "Delhi Belly" (2011) alongside Imran Khan and Vir Das . Thereafter, he acted in "Nautanki Saala" (2013) with Ayushman Khurana and did a small role in "Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani" (2013) with an ensemble cast, including Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, and his younger brother Aditya Roy Kapur. Then he acted in "Action Jackson" directed by Prabhu Deva, along with Ajay Devgan, Sonakshi Sinha and Yami Gautam and "Gollu Aur Pappu", along with Vir Das and Karishma Tanna. His last release was "Azhar", where he played Reddy (Azharuddin's lawyer). Then in the 2017 release - "The Final Exit". He acted in Vishal Mishra directorial Hotel Milan alongside Zeishan Quadri, Karishma Sharma, Jaideep Ahlawat, Rajesh Sharma and Zakir Hussain, the film was based on anti-romeo squad and released in cinemas in 2018. Then he acted in an eight episode web series called "Going Viral", which aired on Amazon prime and in Eros Now's comedy "Side Hero". In 2019, he starred in another Mishra directored film, Marudhar Express. It was a sweet small town romantic film set in Kanpur. He was also seen on web series "TVF Tripling" (season 1 and 2) as Pranav.


title: Kunaal Roy Kapur

text: Kunaal is married to Shayonti Salvi since 2005. The couple together have a son Zahaan, and a daughter Shanaz.


title: Geetha Arts

text: Geetha Arts is an Indian film production and distribution company known for its works in Telugu cinema. It is established in 1972 by Allu Aravind. The company is based out of Hyderabad. It has produced around 60 films majority of them in Telugu in addition to a few films in Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada languages.


title: Geetha Arts

text: Geetha Arts marked its beginning through the 1974 Teugu film "Bantrothu Bharya". The company has made movies featuring actors such as Chiranjeevi, Rajinikanth, Aamir Khan, Ravichandran, Pawan Kalyan, Allu Arjun, Ganesh, Nani, Ram Charan, and Vijay Deverakonda. It has also expanded its presence into film distribution, exhibition and digital content.


title: Geetha Arts

text: Geetha Arts is an Indian film production and distribution company established in 1972 by Allu Aravind, the son of veteran Telugu comedian Allu Ramalingaiah. The company was named after the Hindu philosophical text "Bhagavad Geeta" which inspired Allu Aravind. It is formerly known as Geetha Art Productions, Geetha Cine Enterprises, Geetha Creative Arts.


title: Geetha Arts

text: Allu Aravind in association with "MyHome Group" owner Rameswar Rao Jupally started OTT named "Aha" which went live on February 8, 2020.


title: Geetha Arts

text: GA2 Pictures is indie production arm of Geetha Arts on which they produce small and medium budgeted movies and managed by Bunny Vas.


title: Geetha Arts

text: Geetha Film Distributors (GFD), a subsidiary of Geetha Arts has released over 300 Telugu, Hindi and English films in Andhra Pradesh.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Legends of vampires have existed for millennia; cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of demonic entities and blood-drinking spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. Despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century Southeastern Europe, particularly Transylvania, Romania as verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or a living person being bitten by a vampire themselves. Belief in such legends became so rife that in some areas it caused mass hysteria and even public executions of people believed to be vampires.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Tales of the undead consuming the blood or flesh of living beings have been found in nearly every culture around the world for many centuries. Today these entities are predominantly known as vampires, but in ancient times, the term "vampire" did not exist; blood drinking and similar activities were attributed to demons or spirits who would eat flesh and drink blood; even the devil was considered synonymous with the vampire. Almost every nation has associated blood drinking with some kind of revenant or demon, from the ghouls of Arabia to the goddess Sekhmet of Egypt. Indeed, some of these legends could have given rise to the European folklore, though they are not strictly considered vampires by historians when using today's definitions.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Many cultures in ancient Mesopotamia had stories involving blood-drinking demons. The Persians were one of the first civilizations thought to have tales of such monsters; creatures attempting to drink blood from men are depicted on excavated pottery shards. Ancient Babylonia had tales of the mythical Lilitu, synonymous with and giving rise to Lilith (Hebrew ) and her daughters the Lilu from Hebrew demonology. Lilith was considered a demon and was often depicted as subsisting on the blood of babies. The legend of Lilith was originally included in some traditional Jewish texts: according to the medieval folk traditions, she was considered to be Adam's first wife before Eve. In these texts, Lilith left Adam to become the queen of the demons (she actually refused to be Adam's subordinate and thus was banished from Eden by God himself) and, much like the Greek striges, would prey on young babies and their mothers at night, as well as males. Because Hebrew law absolutely forbade the eating of human flesh or the drinking of any type of blood, Lilith's blood drinking was described as exceptionally evil. To ward off attacks from Lilith, parents used to hang amulets around their child's cradle.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: An alternate version states the legend of Lilith/Lilitu (and a type of spirit of the same name) originally arose from Sumer, where she was described as an infertile "beautiful maiden" and was believed to be a harlot and vampire who, after having chosen a lover, would never let him go. Lilitu (or the Lilitu spirits) was considered to be an anthropomorphic bird-footed, wind or night demon and was often described as a sexual predator who subsisted on the blood of babies and their mothers. Other Mesopotamian demons such as the Babylonian goddess Lamashtu, (Sumer's Dimme) and Gallu of the Uttuke group are mentioned as having vampiric natures.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Lamashtu is a historically older image that left a mark on the figure of Lilith. Many incantations invoke her as a malicious "Daughter of Heaven" or of Anu, and she is often depicted as a terrifying blood-sucking creature with a lion's head and the body of a donkey. Akin to Lilitu, Lamashtu primarily preyed on newborns and their mothers. She was said to watch pregnant women vigilantly, particularly when they went into labor. Afterwards, she would snatch the newborn from the mother to drink its blood and eat its flesh. In the "Labartu" texts she is described; "Wherever she comes, wherever she appears, she brings evil and destruction. Men, beasts, trees, rivers, roads, buildings, she brings harm to them all. A flesh-eating, bloodsucking monster is she." Gallu was a demon closely associated with Lilith, though the word (like "Utukku") is also used as a general term for demons, and these are "evil Uttuke" or "evil Galli". One incantation tells of them as spirits that threaten every house, rage at people, eat their flesh, and as they let their blood flow like rain, they never stop drinking blood. Lamashtu, Lilitu, and Gallu are invoked in different amulet texts, with Gallu showing up in Graeco-Byzantine myth as Gello, Gylo, or Gyllo. There she appears as a child-stealing and child-killing female demon, in the manner of Lamia and Lilith.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Ancient Greek mythology contains several precursors to modern vampires, though none were considered undead; these included the Empusa, Lamia, and striges (the strix of Ancient Roman mythology). Over time the first two terms became general words to describe witches and demons respectively. Empusa was the daughter of the goddess Hecate and was described as a demonic, bronze-footed creature. She feasted on blood by transforming into a young woman and seduced men as they slept before drinking their blood. Lamia was the daughter of King Belus and a secret lover of Zeus. However Zeus' wife Hera discovered this infidelity and killed all Lamia's offspring; Lamia swore vengeance and preyed on young children in their beds at night, sucking their blood. Like Lamia, the "striges" feasted on children, but also preyed on adults. They were described as having the bodies of crows or birds in general, and were later incorporated into Roman mythology as "strix", a kind of nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood. The Romanian vampire breed named "Strigoï" has no direct relation to the Greek "striges", but was derived from the Roman term "strix", as is the name of the Albanian "Shtriga" and the Slavic "Strzyga", though myths about these creatures are more similar to their Slavic equivalents. Greek vampiric entities are seen once again in Homer's epic "Odyssey". In Homer's tale, the undead are too insubstantial to be heard by the living and cannot communicate with them without drinking blood first. In the epic, when Odysseus journeyed into Hades, he was made to sacrifice a black ram and a black ewe so that the shades there could drink its blood and communicate.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: In India, tales of vetalas, ghoul-like beings that inhabit corpses, are found in old Sanskrit folklore. Although most vetala legends have been compiled in the "Betal Panchabingshati", a prominent story in the "Kathasaritsagara" tells of King Vikramāditya and his nightly quests to capture an elusive one. The Betal is described as an undead creature who, like the bat associated with modern-day vampirism, hangs upside down on trees found on cremation grounds and cemeteries. "Pishacha", the returned spirits of evil-doers or those who died insane, also bear vampiric attributes.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The Hebrew word "Alukah" (literal translation is 'leech') is synonymous with vampirism or vampires, as is (literally, 'blood sucker'). The most detailed description of the "alukah" appears in Sefer Hasidim, where the creature is understood to be a living human being, but can shape-change into a wolf. It can fly (by releasing its long hair) and would eventually die if prevented from feeding on blood for a long enough time. Once dead, a vampire can be prevented from becoming a demon by being buried with its mouth stuffed with earth.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Later vampire traditions appear among diaspora Jews in Central Europe, in particular the medieval interpretation of Lilith. In common with vampires, this version of Lilith was held to be able to transform herself into an animal, usually a cat, and charm her victims into believing that she is benevolent or irresistible. However, she and her daughters usually strangle rather than drain victims, and in the Kabbalah, she retains many attributes found in vampires. A late 17th- or early 18th-century Kabbalah document was found in one of the Ritman library's copies of Jean de Pauly's translation of the Zohar. The text contains two amulets, one for male (), the other for female (). The invocations on the amulets mention Adam, Eve, and Lilith, "Chavah Rishonah" and the angels—Sanoy, Sansinoy, Smangeluf, Shmari'el, and Hasdi'el. A few lines in Yiddish are shown as dialog between the prophet Elijah and Lilith, in which she has come with a host of demons to kill the mother, take her newborn and "to drink her blood, suck her bones and eat her flesh". She informs Elijah that she will lose power if someone uses her secret names, which she reveals at the end.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Other Jewish stories depict vampires in a more traditional way. In "The Kiss of Death", the daughter of the demon king Ashmodai snatches the breath of a man who has betrayed her, strongly reminiscent of a fatal kiss of a vampire. A rare story found in "Sefer Hasidim" #1465 tells of an old vampire named Astryiah who uses her hair to drain the blood from her victims. A similar tale from the same book describes staking a witch through the heart to ensure she does not come back from the dead to haunt her enemies.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: There are also legends about Estries, female vampires of Jewish folklore that were believed to prey on Hebrew citizens.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: One of the most well known stories of Nobel Prize winning Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon is "The Lady and the Peddler" (). It tells of Yosef the Peddler who wanders a great East European forest and encounters a lonely house inhabited by a mysterious lady named Helen. First finding refuge there from a pouring rain, he is eventually seduced to stay and enter into a sexual relationship. Eventually, however, he discovers that she is in the habit of killing her husbands, devouring them and drinking their blood, which keeps her young and beautiful, and that she had done it to 17 men before him. She also tries to kill Yosef but fails, wounds herself and eventually dies. She is then eaten by birds while Yosef the Peddler picks up his pack and resumes his wanderings.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The 12th-century English historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded accounts of revenants, though records in English legends of vampiric beings after this date are scant. These tales are similar to the later folklore widely reported from Southeastern Europe and Transylvania in the 18th century, which were the basis of the vampire legend that later entered Germany and England, where they were subsequently embellished and popularised.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: During this time in the 18th century, there was a frenzy of vampire sightings in Southeastern Europe and Transylvania, with frequent stakings and grave diggings taking place to identify and kill the potential revenants; even government officials were compelled into the hunting and staking of vampires. Despite being called the Age of Enlightenment, during which most folkloric legends were quelled, the belief in vampires increased dramatically, resulting in what could only be called a mass hysteria throughout most of Europe. The panic began with an outbreak of alleged vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Habsburg monarchy from 1725 to 1734, which spread to other localities. Two famous vampire cases, which were the first to be officially recorded, involved the corpses of Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Paole from Serbia. Blagojevich was reported to have died at the age of 62, but allegedly returned after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the following day. Blagojevich soon supposedly returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood. In the second case, Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who allegedly was attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After his death, people began to die in the surrounding area and it was widely believed that Paole had returned to prey on the neighbours.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The two incidents were well-documented: government officials examined the bodies, wrote case reports, and published books throughout Europe. The hysteria, which is commonly referred to as the "18th-Century Vampire Controversy", raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural epidemics of so-claimed vampire attacks, undoubtedly caused by the higher amount of superstition that was present in village communities, with locals digging up bodies and in some cases, staking them. Although many scholars reported during this period that vampires did not exist, and attributed reports to premature burial or rabies, superstitious belief continued to increase. Dom Augustine Calmet, a well-respected French theologian and scholar, put together a comprehensive treatise in 1746, which was ambiguous concerning the existence of vampires. Calmet amassed reports of vampire incidents; numerous readers, including both a critical Voltaire and supportive demonologists, interpreted the treatise as claiming that vampires existed. In his "Philosophical Dictionary", Voltaire wrote:


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The controversy only ceased when Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician, Gerhard van Swieten, to investigate the claims of vampiric entities. He concluded that vampires did not exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies, sounding the end of the vampire epidemics. Despite this condemnation, the vampire lived on in artistic works and in local superstition.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Bearing little resemblance to its Ancient Greek precursors, the modern Greek "vrykolakas" (from a Slavic word meaning 'werewolf') has much in common with the European vampire. Belief in vampires commonly called , , though also referred to as , , on Crete persisted throughout Greek history and became so widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries that many practices were enforced to both prevent and combat vampirism. The deceased were often exhumed from their graves after three years of death and the remains placed in a box by relatives; wine was poured over them while a priest would read from scriptures. However, if the body had not sufficiently decayed, the corpse would be labeled a and dealt with appropriately.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: In Greek folklore, vampirism could occur through various means: being excommunicated, desecrating a religious day, committing a great crime, or dying alone. Other causes included having a cat jump across one's grave, eating meat from a sheep killed by a wolf, and being cursed. were usually thought to be indistinguishable from living people, giving rise to many folk tales with this theme. Crosses and "antidoron" (blessed bread) from the church were used as wards in different places. To prevent vampires from rising from the dead, their hearts were pierced with iron nails while resting in their graves, or their bodies burned and the ashes scattered. Because the Church opposed burning people who had received the myron of chrismation in the baptism ritual, cremation was considered a last resort.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The Icelandic (plural ) is usually translated as 'ghost', but unlike mainland ghosts Icelandic undead were believed to be corporeal. Icelandic scholars such as Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir and Ármann Jakobsson have argued that the Icelandic has more in common with the eastern-European vampire than it has with most beings categorized as ghosts. According to Ármann medieval Icelandic undead can be put into two categories, the first being or guardians, which are undead that stay in a certain place, usually their burial mound or home, and protect it and their treasures from thieves and trespassers. These are depicted as being driven by greed and unwillingness to part with their worldly belongings and are in many ways similar to dragons. The second category are (a is a type of undead in Icelandic folklore, a human rib given life by drinking the blood of a witch and then sent out to steal milk and money), parasitic ghosts who roam the earth and harass the living and try to drive them mad or even kill them, often by dragging them into their graves, and thereby turn their victims into more . This comparison of Icelandic to vampires is not entirely new as it was also made by Andrew Lang in 1897 when he called the Glámr in Grettir's Saga a vampire. There is also some similarity in the methods used to destroy as those used against alleged vampires. Decapitation of the suspected corpse was common as was driving nails or sharp stakes into the body to pin it down or into the grave.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Romanian vampires were known as "moroi" (from the Romanian word meaning 'dead' or the Slavic word meaning 'nightmare') and "strigoi", with the latter classified as either living or dead. Live were described as living witches with two hearts or souls, sometimes both. were said to have the ability to send out their souls at night to meet with other and consume the blood of livestock and neighbours. Similarly, dead were described as reanimated corpses that also sucked blood and attacked their living family. Live became revenants after their death, but there were also many other ways of a person becoming a vampire. A person born with a caul, an extra nipple, a tail, or extra hair was doomed to become a vampire. The same fate applied to the seventh child in any family if all of his or her previous siblings were of the same sex, as well as someone born too early or someone whose mother had encountered a black cat crossing her path. If a pregnant woman did not eat salt or was looked upon by a vampire or a witch, her child would also become a vampire. So too would a child born out of wedlock. Others who were at risk of becoming vampires were those who died an unnatural death or before baptism. Finally, a person with red hair and blue eyes was seen as a potential .


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Another type of Romanian vampire is "pricolici". These types are humans born with a tail, and they can shape-shift like a werewolf but they have control over their transformation. Their entire power is kept in their tail. In undeath, the remain in their wolf form.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Romanian vampires were said to bite their victims over the heart or between the eyes, and sudden deaths could indicate the presence of a vampire. Graves were often opened five or seven years after burial and the corpse checked for vampirism, before being washed and reburied.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The malign and succubus-like "Baobhan sith" from the Scottish Highlands and the "Lhiannan Shee" of the Isle of Man, Scotland and Ireland, are two fairy spirits with decidedly vampiric tendencies. Further Irish myths, alone or in combination, may have provided inspiration for Irish authors Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Some of the more common causes of vampirism in Slavic folklore include being a magician or an immoral person; suffering an "unnatural" or untimely death such as suicide; excommunication; improper burial rituals; an animal jumping or a bird flying over the corpse or the empty grave (in Serbian folk belief); and even being born with a caul, teeth, or tail, or being conceived on certain days. In southern Russia, people who were known to talk to themselves were believed to be at risk of becoming vampires. Slavic vampires were able to appear as butterflies, echoing an earlier belief of the butterfly symbolizing a departed soul. Some traditions spoke of "living vampires" or "people with two souls", a kind of witch capable of leaving its body and engaging in harmful and vampiric activity while sleeping.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Two of the earliest historical recordings of vampire activity in Europe can be found in the Neplach's Chronicle (14th century, probably written in 1360). For the year 1336 he mentions a shepherd named Myslata from Blov. He died and was buried but he didn't stay in the grave. Each evening he walked around, spoke to people as if being alive and was scaring them. Soon, he started killing the people and if he stopped by someone's home and called their name, said person died in 8 days. So the people of several villages decided to exhumate him and burn the body. During the process, he let out a loud scream. Someone stabbed him with a stick and a lot of blood came out of the wound. After he was burned, all of the evil events stopped. The second case happened 1344. Neplach writes about a wooman from Levín who after being buried came back, killed several people and danced on them. Once she was exhumated and a stake was put through her, blood started pouring out of her as if she was alive. She also ate her clothes and once removed from her mouth, the cloth was bloody as well. Even after that, she was still attacking villagers so they decided to burn her. However, the wood wouldn't catch fire until they used pieces of the church roof to start it. Both of these cases were later mentioned in the book Magia posthuma by Karl Ferdinand Schertz (1704) that intended to denounce the widespread folk belief in vampires.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Among the beliefs of the East Slavs, those of the northern regions (i.e. most of Russia) are unique in that their undead, while having many of the features of the vampires of other Slavic peoples, do not drink blood and do not bear a name derived from the common Slavic root for "vampire". Ukrainian and Belarusian legends are more "conventional", although in Ukraine the vampires may sometimes not be described as dead at all, or may be seen as engaging in vampirism long before death. Ukrainian folklore also described vampires as having red faces and tiny tails. During cholera epidemics in the 19th century, there were cases of people being burned alive by their neighbors on charges of being vampires.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: In South Slavic folklore, a vampire was believed to pass through several distinct stages in its development. The first 40 days were considered decisive for the making of a vampire; it started out as an invisible shadow and then gradually gained strength from the lifeblood of the living, forming a (typically invisible) jelly-like, boneless mass, and eventually building up a human-like body nearly identical to the one the person had had in life. This development allowed the creature to ultimately leave its grave and begin a new life as a human. The vampire, who was usually male, was also sexually active and could have children, either with his widow or a new wife. These could become vampires themselves, but could also have a special ability to see and kill vampires, allowing them to become vampire hunters.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The same talent was believed to be found in persons born on Saturday. In the Dalmatian region of Croatia, there is a female vampire called a "Mora" or "Morana", who drinks the blood of men, and also the who are the recent-dead "who have not lived piously." They can be men or women who show themselves at crossroads, bridges, caves, and graveyards and frighten the locals by terrorizing their homes and drinking their blood. To be killed, a wooden stake must be thrust through them. In Croatia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, a type of vampire called , which literally translates to 'leech', is used to describe a vampire who has led an evil and sinful life as a human and in turn, becomes a powerfully strong, cold-blooded killer. Incest, especially between mother and son, is one of the ways in which a can be created, and then it usually comes back to victimize its former family, who can only protect their homes by placing mashed garlic and wine at their windows and thresholds to keep it from entering. It can only be killed by fire while awake and by using the Rite of Exorcism if found in its grave during the day. In Bulgaria from the Middle Ages through to the beginning of the 20th century, it was a common practice to pin corpses through the heart with an iron stake to prevent their return as a vampire.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: To ward off the threat of vampires and disease, twin brothers would yoke twin oxen to a plow and make a furrow with it around their village. An egg would be broken and a nail driven into the floor beneath the bier of the house of a recently deceased person. Two or three elderly women would attend the cemetery the evening after the funeral and stick five hawthorn pegs or old knives into the grave: one at the position of the deceased's chest, and the other four at the positions of his arms and legs. Other texts maintain that running backwards uphill with a lit candle and a turtle would ward off a stalking vampire. Alternately, they may surround the grave with a red woolen thread, ignite the thread, and wait until it was burnt up. If a noise was heard at night and suspected to be made by a vampire sneaking around someone's house, one would shout "Come tomorrow, and I will give you some salt," or "Go, pal, get some fish, and come back."


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: One of the earliest recordings of vampire activity came from the region of Istria in modern Croatia, in 1672. Local reports cited the local vampire Giure Grando of the village Kringa near Tinjan as the cause of panic among the villagers. A former peasant, Guire died in 1656; however, local villagers claimed he returned from the dead and began drinking blood from the people and sexually harassing his widow. The village leader ordered a stake to be driven through his heart, but when the method failed to kill him, he was subsequently beheaded with better results.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Among the Romani people, "mullo" (literally "one who is dead") are believed to return from the dead and cause malicious acts as well as drink human blood, most often that of a relative or the person who had caused their death. Other potential victims were those who did not properly observe the burial ceremonies or kept the deceased's possessions instead of properly destroying them. Female vampires could return, lead a normal life and even marry but would eventually exhaust the husband with their sexual appetite. Similar to other European beliefs, male vampires could father children, known as "dhampirs", who could be hired to detect and get rid of vampires.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Anyone who had a horrible appearance, was missing a finger, or had appendages similar to those of an animal was believed to be a vampire. A person who died alone and unseen would become a vampire, likewise if a corpse swelled or turned black before burial. Dogs, cats, plants or even agricultural tools could become vampires; pumpkins or melons kept in the house too long would start to move, make noises or show blood. According to the late Serbian ethnologist Tatomir Vukanović, Roma people in Kosovo believed that vampires were invisible to most people, but could be seen by a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday who wore their clothes inside out. Likewise, a settlement could be protected by finding twins who could also see the vampire outdoors at night, who would have to flee immediately after they spotted it.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: In Spain, there are several traditions about beings with vampiric tendencies. In Asturias, the Guaxa is one such being, which is described as an old vampire who bites with his single tooth and sucks the blood of his victims. The Cantabria equivalent exists by the name of Guajona. Catalonia has the legend of the Dip, an evil vampire dog. In Galicia, the Meiga Chuchona is a type of Meiga (Galician Witch) that enters houses with captives in them to suck their blood at dawn, which causes them to lose weight until their bodies are mirrored.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: In the Canary Islands, there was also a belief in vampiric beings, in the form of a blood-sucking witch. One such example is provided by the legend of the Witches of Anaga in Tenerife.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Various regions of Africa have folkloric tales of beings with vampiric abilities: in West Africa the Ashanti people tell of the iron-toothed and tree-dwelling "asanbosam", and the Ewe people of the "adze", which can take the form of a firefly and hunts children. The Eastern Cape region of South Africa has the "impundulu", which can take the form of a large taloned bird and can summon thunder and lightning, and the Betsileo people of Madagascar tell of the , an outlaw or living vampire who drinks the blood and eats the nail clippings of nobles.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Female vampire-like monsters are the "Soucouyant" of Trinidad, and the "Tunda" and "Patasola" of Colombian folklore, while the Mapuche of southern Chile have the bloodsucking snake known as the "Peuchen". "Aloe vera" hung backwards behind or near a door was thought to ward off vampiric beings in South American superstition. Aztec mythology described tales of the Cihuateteo, skeletal-faced spirits of those who died in childbirth who stole children and entered into sexual liaisons with the living, driving them mad.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The "Loogaroo" is an example of how a vampire belief can result from a combination of beliefs, here a mixture of French and African Vodu or voodoo. The term "Loogaroo" possibly comes from the French "loup-garou" (meaning 'werewolf') and is common in the culture of Mauritius. However, the stories of the "Loogaroo" are widespread through the Caribbean Islands and Louisiana in the United States. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, there was a widespread belief in vampires in parts of New England, particularly in Rhode Island and Eastern Connecticut. There are many documented cases of families disinterring loved ones and removing their hearts in the belief that the deceased was a vampire who was responsible for sickness and death in the family, although the term "vampire" was never actually used to describe the deceased. The deadly disease tuberculosis, or "consumption" as it was known at the time, was believed to be caused by nightly visitations on the part of a dead family member who had died of consumption themselves. The most famous, and most recently recorded, case of suspected vampirism is that of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown, who died in Exeter, Rhode Island in 1892. Her father, assisted by the family physician, removed her from her tomb two months after her death and her heart was cut out and burnt to ashes.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Among the Wyandots was the legend of the Hooh-Strah-Dooh. A cross between what current fiction/legends portray as zombies and vampires, the Hooh-Strah-Dooh was an evil spirit that inhabited recently dead bodies and caused the corpse to rise and devour the living. The redbud was believed to be an effective ward.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Rooted in older folklore, the modern belief in vampires spread throughout Asia with tales of ghoulish entities from the mainland, to vampiric beings from the islands of Southeast Asia. India also developed other vampiric legends. The "Bhūta" or is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wanders around animating dead bodies at night, attacking the living much like a ghoul. In northern India, there is the "BrahmarākŞhasa", a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood. Japan has no native legends about vampires. However some Japanese mythical creatures bear some similarities to vampires, such as the Nure-onna who is a snake-like woman that feasts on human blood. Japanese vampires made their first appearances in the cinema of Japan during the late 1950s.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Legends of female vampire-like beings who can detach parts of their upper body occur in the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia. There are two main vampire-like creatures in the Philippines: the Tagalog "Mandurugo" ('blood-sucker') and the Visayan "manananggal" ('self-segmenter'). The is a variety of the aswang that takes the form of an attractive girl by day, and develops wings and a long, hollow, thread-like tongue by night. They use an elongated proboscis-like tongue to suck fetuses off pregnant women. They also prefer to eat entrails (specifically the heart and the liver) and the phlegm of sick people. The is described as being an older, beautiful woman capable of severing its upper torso in order to fly into the night with huge bat-like wings and prey on unsuspecting, sleeping pregnant women in their homes. The tongue is used to suck up blood from a sleeping victim.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: The Malaysian "Penanggalan" may be either a beautiful old or young woman who obtained her beauty through the active use of black magic or other unnatural means, and is most commonly described in local folklores to be dark or demonic in nature. She is able to detach her fanged head which flies around in the night looking for blood, typically from pregnant women. Malaysians would hang "jeruju" (thistles) around the doors and windows of houses, hoping the "Penanggalan" would not enter for fear of catching its intestines on the thorns. The Leyak is a similar being from Balinese folklore. A "Pontianak", "Kuntilanak" or "Matianak" in Indonesia, or "Langsuir" in Malaysia, is a woman who died during childbirth and became undead, seeking revenge and terrorizing villages. She appeared as an attractive woman with long black hair that covered a hole in the back of her neck, which she sucked the blood of children with. Filling the hole with her hair would drive her off. Corpses had their mouths filled with glass beads, eggs under each armpit, and needles in their palms to prevent them from becoming "langsuir".


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: In Cambodia, the (), similar to the Penanggalan, is either a young or an old woman which detaches her head at night through windows of houses looking for lungs, hearts and blood of dead or alive animals and returns to her body in the day. Married go to bed quickly and start detaching their heads. Most of them do not allow anyone to go into the room, and their husbands are afraid of them. In movies, women turn into abs through a special holy water, but according to local legends it is passed through heredity. are considered to be afraid of humans; however, if a human is afraid of the it may give chase. She might get her intestines stuck into thorns. The s, like a river, go along a certain path and remember it very carefully.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: "Jiangshi", sometimes called "Chinese vampires" by Westerners, are corpses that are usually reanimated due to magical reasons. In ancient China, people always had the preference of being buried in their hometowns, and when a person dies in a land that is not their hometown, their family members hire a sorcerer to bring back their deceased family member. The family commissions the sorcerer in their village to travel to the place of the person's death, locate the corpse, and to write a spell and stick it upon the corpses's face, in which the spell-paper contains their name, birthdate, and some other words to reanimate the corpse. Once the paper is stuck upon the corpses's face, the newly created would follow the sorcerer by hopping around, in which the sorcerer would lead it back to its hometown for burial (this was often a last-resort choice used by families with not enough money to hire a cart to carry the corpse back). Usually, the sorcerer would travel by night, and would at least have around three traveling with it. But when the written spell-paper falls or is pulled off of the (in the case the sorcerer is not paid the agreed amount for his doings, he might rip off the "'s" spell-paper), it gains its own consciousness, and all the power that the sorcerer formerly had over it would be lost. Instead of being an obedient corpse that followed the sorcerer, the would be rampant and dangerous. The freed would begin killing living creatures to absorb life essence (qì) from their victims. They are said to be created when a person's soul ( "pò") fails to leave the deceased's body.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Some unusual features of the Chinese vampire include its long, curved fingernails, perhaps derived from the appearance of growing fingernails on corpses due to flesh recession, and its greenish-white furry skin, perhaps derived from fungus or mould growing on corpses. legends have inspired a genre of jiangshi films and literature in Hong Kong and East Asia. Films like "Encounters of the Spooky Kind" and "Mr. Vampire" were released during the cinematic boom of the 1980s and 1990s.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: In Sri Lanka the belief of "Riri Yaka" (Blood Demon) can be found. According to mythology, he tore his mother's breast and emerged into the human world as a demon, killing her. The demon is said to give a primary form and eight other manifestations. In most cases he is said to be a giant who towers over his human victims. In the primary form, his face is blue and splotched with blood. Red rays radiate from his bloodshot eyes. Blood pours from his nostrils and smoke billows from his ears. His mouth is filled with decomposing human flesh and his breath is foul. His entire body is coloured scarlet with dripping blood. He is closely associated with Mara, the demon king of death.


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: Folklorist and scholar Stith Thompson noted two tale types that closely resemble legends about vampires:


title: Vampire folklore by region

text: In Thompson's "Motif-Index of Folk-Literature", the vampire appears in the classification as Motif "E.251.Vampires".


title: Frontend and backend

text: In software engineering, the terms frontend and backend (or sometimes referred to as back end or back-end) refer to the separation of concerns between the presentation layer ("frontend"), and the data access layer ("backend") of a piece of software, or the physical infrastructure or hardware. In the client–server model, the client is usually considered the frontend and the server is usually considered the backend, even when some presentation work is actually done on the server itself.


title: Frontend and backend

text: In software architecture, there may be many layers between the hardware and end user. The "front" is an abstraction, simplifying the underlying component by providing a user-friendly interface, while the "back" usually handles data storage and business logic.


title: Frontend and backend

text: In telecommunication, the "front" can be considered a device or service, while the "back" is the infrastructure that supports provision of service.


title: Frontend and backend

text: A rule of thumb is that the client-side (or "frontend") is any component manipulated by the user. The server-side (or "backend") code usually resides on the server, often far removed physically from the user.


title: Frontend and backend

text: In content management systems, the terms "frontend" and "backend" may refer to the end-user facing views of the CMS and the administrative views, respectively.


title: Frontend and backend

text: In speech synthesis, the frontend refers to the part of the synthesis system that converts the input text into a symbolic phonetic representation, and the backend converts the symbolic phonetic representation into actual sounds.


title: Frontend and backend

text: For major computer subsystems, a graphical file manager is a frontend to the computer's file system, and a shell interfaces with the operating system. The frontend faces the user, and the backend launches the programs of the operating system in response.


title: Frontend and backend

text: In compilers, the frontend translates a computer programming source code into an intermediate representation, and the backend works with the intermediate representation to produce code in a computer output language. The backend usually optimizes to produce code that runs faster. The front-end/back-end distinction can separate the parser section that deals with source code and the backend that generates code and optimizes. Some designs, such as GCC, offer choices between multiple frontends (parsing different source languages) or backends (generating code for different target processors).


title: Frontend and backend

text: Using the command-line interface (CLI) requires the acquisition of special terminology and memorization of commands, so a graphical user interface (GUI) acts as a frontend desktop environment instead.


title: Frontend and backend

text: Another way to understand the difference between the two is to understand the knowledge required of a front-end vs. a back-end software developer. The list below focuses on web development as an example.


title: Frontend and backend

text: Note that both positions, despite possibly working on one product, have a very distinct set of skills.


title: Frontend and backend

text: The frontend communicates with backend through an API. In the case of web and mobile frontends, the API is often based on HTTP request/response. The API is sometimes designed using the "Backend for Frontend" (BFF) pattern, that serves responses to ease the processing on frontend side.


title: Frontend and backend

text: In network computing, "frontend" can refer to any hardware that optimizes or protects network traffic. It is called application front-end hardware because it is placed on the network's outward-facing frontend or boundary. Network traffic passes through the front-end hardware before entering the network.


title: Frontend and backend

text: In processor design, "frontend design" would be the initial description of the behavior of a circuit in a hardware description language such as Verilog, while "backend design" would be the process of mapping that behavior to physical transistors on a die.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: In 1952, the United Kingdom became the third country (after the United States and the Soviet Union) to develop and test nuclear weapons, and is one of the five nuclear-weapon states under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The UK initiated a nuclear weapons programme, codenamed Tube Alloys, during the Second World War. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943, it was merged with the American Manhattan Project. The British contribution to the Manhattan Project saw British scientists participate in most of its work. The British government considered nuclear weapons to be a joint discovery, but the American Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) restricted other countries, including the UK, from access to information about nuclear weapons. Fearing the loss of Britain's great power status, the UK resumed its own project, now codenamed High Explosive Research. On 3 October 1952, it detonated an atomic bomb in the Monte Bello Islands in


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Australia in Operation Hurricane. Eleven more British nuclear weapons tests in Australia were carried out over the following decade, including seven British nuclear tests at Maralinga in 1956 and 1957.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The British hydrogen bomb programme demonstrated Britain's ability to produce thermonuclear weapons in the Operation Grapple nuclear tests in the Pacific, and led to the amendment of the McMahon Act. Since the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement, the US and the UK have cooperated extensively on nuclear security matters. The nuclear Special Relationship between the two countries has involved the exchange of classified scientific data and fissile materials such as uranium-235 and plutonium. The UK has not had a programme to develop an independent delivery system since the cancellation of the Blue Streak in 1960. Instead, it purchased US delivery systems for UK use, fitting them with warheads designed and manufactured by the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) and its predecessor. Under the 1963 Polaris Sales Agreement, the US supplied the UK with Polaris missiles and nuclear submarine technology. The US also supplied the Royal Air Force and British Army of the Rhine with nuclear weapons under Project E in the form of aerial bombs, missiles, depth charges and artillery shells until 1992. Nuclear-capable American aircraft have been based in the UK since 1949, but the last US nuclear weapons were withdrawn in 2006.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: In 1982, the Polaris Sales Agreement was amended to allow the UK to purchase Trident II missiles. Since 1998, when the UK decommissioned its tactical WE.177 bombs, the Trident has been the only operational nuclear weapons system in British service. The delivery system consists of four s based at HMNB Clyde in Scotland. Each submarine is armed with up to sixteen Trident II missiles, each carrying warheads in up to eight multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). With at least one submarine always on patrol, the "Vanguards" perform a strategic deterrence role and also have a sub-strategic capability.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The neutron was discovered by James Chadwick at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in February 1932, and in April 1932, his Cavendish colleagues John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split lithium atoms with accelerated protons. In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at Hahn's laboratory in Berlin-Dahlem bombarded uranium with slow neutrons, and discovered that barium had been produced. Hahn wrote to his colleague Lise Meitner, who, with her nephew Otto Frisch, determined that the uranium nucleus had been split, a conclusion they published in "Nature" in 1939. By analogy with the division of biological cells, they named the process "fission".


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The discovery of fission raised the possibility that an extremely powerful atomic bomb could be created. The term was already familiar to the British public through the writings of H. G. Wells, with a continuously exploding bomb in his 1913 novel "The World Set Free". George Paget Thomson, at Imperial College London, and Mark Oliphant, an Australian physicist at the University of Birmingham, were tasked with carrying out a series of experiments on uranium. Oliphant delegated the task to two German refugee scientists, Rudolf Peierls and Frisch, who ironically could not work on the university's secret projects like radar because they were enemy aliens and therefore lacked the necessary security clearance. In March 1940 they calculated the critical mass of a metallic sphere of pure uranium-235, and found that instead of tons, as everyone had assumed, as little as would suffice, which would explode with the power of thousands of tons of dynamite.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Oliphant took the resulting Frisch–Peierls memorandum to Sir Henry Tizard, the chairman of the Tizard Committee, and the MAUD Committee was established to investigate further. It held its first meeting on 10 April 1940, in the ground-floor main committee room of the Royal Society in Burlington House in London. It directed an intensive research effort, and in July 1941, produced two comprehensive reports that reached the conclusion that an atomic bomb was not only technically feasible, but could be produced before the war ended, perhaps in as little as two years. The Committee unanimously recommended pursuing the development of an atomic bomb as a matter of urgency, although it recognised that the resources required might be beyond those available to Britain. A new directorate known as Tube Alloys was created to coordinate this effort. Sir John Anderson, the Lord President of the Council, became the minister responsible, and Wallace Akers from Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was appointed the director of Tube Alloys.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: In July 1940, Britain had offered to give the United States access to its scientific research, and the Tizard Mission's John Cockcroft briefed American scientists on British developments. He discovered that the American S-1 Project (later renamed the Manhattan Project) was smaller than the British, and not as far advanced. The British and American projects exchanged information, but did not initially combine their efforts. British officials did not reply to an August 1941 American offer to create a combined project. In November 1941, Frederick L. Hovde, the head of the London liaison office of the American Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), raised the issue of cooperation and exchange of information with Anderson and Lord Cherwell, who demurred, ostensibly over concerns about American security. Ironically, it was the British project that had already been penetrated by atomic spies for the Soviet Union.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The United Kingdom did not have the manpower or resources of the United States, and despite its early and promising start, Tube Alloys fell behind its American counterpart and was dwarfed by it. On 30 July 1942, Anderson advised the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, saying: "We must face the fact that ... [our] pioneering work ... is a dwindling asset and that, unless we capitalise it quickly, we shall be outstripped. We now have a real contribution to make to a 'merger.' Soon we shall have little or none."


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The British considered producing an atomic bomb without American help, but it would require overwhelming priority, would disrupt to other wartime projects, and was unlikely to be ready in time to affect the outcome of the war in Europe. The unanimous response was that before embarking on this, another effort should be made to secure American cooperation. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943, Churchill and the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the Quebec Agreement, which merged the two national projects. The Quebec Agreement established the Combined Policy Committee and the Combined Development Trust to coordinate their efforts, and specified that the weapons could only be used if both the US and UK governments agreed. The 19 September 1944 Hyde Park Agreement extended both commercial and military cooperation into the post-war period.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: A British mission led by Akers assisted in the development of gaseous diffusion technology at the SAM Laboratories in New York. Another, led by Oliphant, who acted as deputy director at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, assisted with the electromagnetic separation process. Cockcroft became the director of the Anglo-Canadian Montreal Laboratory. The British mission to the Los Alamos Laboratory was headed by Chadwick, and later Peierls. It included distinguished scientists such as Geoffrey Taylor, James Tuck, Niels Bohr, William Penney, Frisch, Ernest Titterton and Klaus Fuchs, who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy. As overall head of the British Mission, Chadwick forged a close and successful partnership with Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project. He ensured that British participation was complete and wholehearted.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Penney worked on means to assess the effects of a nuclear explosion, and wrote a paper on what height the bombs should be detonated at for maximum effect in attacks on Germany and Japan. He served as a member of the target committee established by Groves to select Japanese cities for atomic bombing, and on Tinian with Project Alberta as a special consultant. Because the Quebec Agreement specified that nuclear weapons would not be used against another country without mutual consent, British authorisation was required for their use. On 4 July 1945, Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson agreed that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan would be recorded as a decision of the Combined Policy Committee. Along with Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, sent by Wilson as a British representative, Penney watched the bombing of Nagasaki from the observation plane "Big Stink". He also formed part of the Manhattan Project's post-war scientific mission to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that assessed the extent of the damage caused by the bombs.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: With the end of the war, the Special Relationship between Britain and the United States "became very much less special". The British government had trusted that America would share nuclear technology, which it considered a joint discovery. On 8 August 1945, the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, sent a message to President Harry Truman in which he referred to themselves as "heads of the Governments which have control of this great force". But Roosevelt had died on 12 April 1945, and the Hyde Park Agreement was not binding on subsequent administrations. In fact, it was physically lost. When Wilson raised the matter in a Combined Policy Committee meeting in June, the American copy could not be found.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: On 9 November 1945, Attlee and the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, went to Washington, D.C., to confer with Truman about future cooperation in nuclear weapons and nuclear power. A Memorandum of Intention they signed replaced the Quebec Agreement. It made Canada a full partner, continued the Combined Policy Committee and Combined Development Trust, and reduced the obligation to obtain consent for the use of nuclear weapons to merely requiring consultation. The three leaders agreed that there would be full and effective cooperation on atomic energy, but British hopes were soon disappointed; Groves restricted cooperation to basic scientific research.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The next meeting of the Combined Policy Committee on 15 April 1946 produced no accord on collaboration, and resulted in an exchange of cables between Truman and Attlee. Truman cabled on 20 April that he did not see the communiqué he had signed as obligating the United States to assist Britain in designing, constructing and operating an atomic energy plant. The passing of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) in August 1946, which was signed by Truman on 1 August 1946, and went into effect at midnight on 1 January 1947, ended technical cooperation. Its control of "restricted data" prevented the United States' allies from receiving any information. The remaining British scientists working in the United States were denied access to papers that they had written just days before.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: This partly resulted from the arrest for espionage of British physicist Alan Nunn May, who had worked in the Montreal Laboratory, in February 1946, while the legislation was being debated. It was but the first of a series of spy scandals. The arrest of Klaus Fuchs in January 1950, and the June 1951 defection of Donald Maclean, who had served as a British member of the Combined Policy Committee from January 1947 to August 1948, left Americans with a distrust of British security arrangements.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Most leading scientists and politicians of all parties were determined that Britain should have its own nuclear weapons. Their motives included national defence, a vision of a civil programme for nuclear power, and a desire that a British voice should be as powerful as any in international debate. Attlee set up a cabinet sub-committee, the Gen 75 Committee (known informally by Attlee as the "Atomic Bomb Committee"), on 10 August 1945 to examine the feasibility of an independent British nuclear weapons programme. A nuclear reactor and plutonium-processing facility was approved by the Gen 75 committee on 18 December 1945 "with the highest urgency and importance". The Chiefs of Staff Committee considered the issue in July 1946, and recommended that Britain acquire nuclear weapons. They estimated that 200 bombs would be required by 1957.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The Tube Alloys Directorate was transferred from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to the Ministry of Supply effective 1 November 1945. To coordinate the atomic energy effort, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal, the wartime Chief of the Air Staff, was appointed the Controller of Production, Atomic Energy (CPAE) in March 1946. The Gen 75 Committee considered the proposal in October 1946. In October 1946, Attlee called a meeting to discuss building a gaseous diffusion plant for uranium enrichment. Michael Perrin, who was present, later recalled that:


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The decision to proceed was formally made on 8 January 1947 at a meeting of Gen 163, a subcommittee of the Gen 75 Committee consisting of six Cabinet members, including Attlee, and was publicly announced in the House of Commons on 12 May 1948. D notice No. 25 prohibited the publication of details on the design, construction or location of atomic weapons. The project was given the cover name "High Explosive Research". As Chief Superintendent Armament Research (CSAR, pronounced "Caesar"), Penney directed bomb design from Fort Halstead. In 1951, his design group moved to a new site at Aldermaston in Berkshire.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Production facilities were constructed under the direction of Christopher Hinton, who established his headquarters in a former Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) at ROF Risley in Lancashire. These included a uranium metal plant at Springfields, nuclear reactors and a plutonium processing plant at Windscale, and a gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment facility at Capenhurst, near Chester. The two Windscale reactors became operational in October 1950 and June 1951. The gaseous diffusion plant at Capenhurst began producing highly enriched uranium in 1954.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Uranium ore was stockpiled at Springfields. As the American nuclear programme expanded, its requirements became greater than the production of the existing mines. To gain access to the stockpile, they reopened negotiations in 1947. This resulted in the 1948 "Modus Vivendi", which allowed for consultation on the use of nuclear weapons, and limited sharing of technical information between the United States, Britain and Canada.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The United States feared the USSR obtaining British atomic technology after conquering the United Kingdom in an invasion of western Europe. In February 1949 General Dwight D. Eisenhower offered to General Sir William Duthie Morgan American atomic weapons if the British programme ended. Britain would have used the weapons with its own aircraft for its own targets. Whether the McMahon Act would have permitted the transaction is unclear, but Britain refused because of its intention to develop its own weapons.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: By that year, international control of atomic weapons seemed almost impossible to achieve, and Truman proposed to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in July a "full partnership" with Britain in exchange for uranium; negotiations between the two countries began that month. While the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949 was embarrassing to the British (who had not expected a Soviet atomic weapon until 1954) for having been beaten, it was for the Americans another reason for cooperation. Although they would soon have their own nuclear capability, the British proposed that instead of building their own uranium-enrichment plant they would send most of their scientists to work in the US, and swap plutonium from Windscale for enriched uranium from the US. While Britain would not formally give up building or researching its own weapons, the US would manufacture all the bombs and allocate some to Britain.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: By agreeing to subsume its own weapons programme within the American one, the plan would have given Britain nuclear weapons much sooner than its own target date of late 1952. Although Truman supported the proposal, several key officials, including the United States Atomic Energy Commission's Lewis Strauss and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, did not. Their opposition, along with security concerns raised by the arrest of Fuchs, who was working at Harwell, ended the negotiations in January 1950. After Britain developed nuclear weapons through its own efforts, the engineer Sir Leonard Owen stated that "the McMahon Act was probably one of the best things that happened ... as it made us work and think for ourselves along independent lines."


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Churchill, now again prime minister, announced on 17 February 1952 that the first British weapon test would occur before the end of the year. During Operation Hurricane, an atomic bomb was detonated on board the frigate anchored in a lagoon in the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia on 3 October 1952. Britain thereby became the third country to develop and test nuclear weapons.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: This led to the development of the first deployed weapon, the Blue Danube free-fall bomb. It had a diameter, 32 explosive lens implosion system with a levitated pit suspended within a natural uranium tamper. The warhead was contained within a bomb casing measuring diameter and long, and it weighed approximately , of which about was high explosive. The first Blue Danube bombs were delivered to the Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command in November 1953, although the bombers to deliver them did not become available until 1955. On 11 October 1956, a Vickers Valiant from No. 49 Squadron RAF piloted by Edwin Flavell became the first British aircraft to drop a live atomic bomb when a Blue Danube was exploded over Maralinga, South Australia during Operation Buffalo.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: About fifty-eight Blue Danube bombs were produced. The first bombs had plutonium cores, but all service models were modified to use a composite core which used both uranium-235 and plutonium. The bomb had a nominal yield of . The cores were stored separately from the high explosive components in concrete "igloos" at RAF Barnham in Suffolk and RAF Faldingworth in Lincolnshire. Some casings were stored elsewhere in the UK and in Cyprus for "second strike" use. It remained in service until 1962, and was replaced by Red Beard, a smaller tactical nuclear weapon. The Blue Danube cores were recycled, and the plutonium used in other nuclear weapons.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Being so big and heavy, Blue Danube could only be carried by the V bombers, so-called because they all had names starting with a "V". The three strategic bombers, known collectively as the V class, comprised the United Kingdom's strategic nuclear strike force during the 1950s and 1960s, which was known as V force of the Main Force. The three V bombers were the Vickers Valiant, which entered service in February 1955; the Avro Vulcan, which entered service in May 1956; and the Handley Page Victor, which entered service in November 1957. The V Bomber force reached its peak in June 1964, when 50 Valiants, 70 Vulcans and 39 Victors were in service.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: A month after Britain's first atomic weapons test, America tested the first thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb. The Soviets responded with Joe 4, a boosted fission weapon, in 1953. Penney feared that Britain could not afford to develop a hydrogen bomb, as did Tizard, who argued that the nation should focus on conventional forces instead of duplicating the nuclear capabilities of the American forces that were already defending Britain and Europe. He warned that: "We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation. Let us take warning from the fate of the Great Powers of the past and not burst ourselves with pride."


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The government decided on 27 July 1954 to begin development of a thermonuclear bomb, and announced its plans in February 1955. British knowledge of thermonuclear weapons was based on the work done at the Los Alamos Laboratory during the war. Two British scientists, Egon Bretscher and Klaus Fuchs, had attended the conference there on the Super (as it was then called) in April 1946, and Chadwick had written a secret report on it in May 1946, but the design was found to be unworkable. Some intelligence about Joe 4 was derived from its debris, which was provided to Britain under the 1948 "Modus Vivendi". Penney established three megaton bomb projects at Aldermaston: Orange Herald, a large boosted fission weapon; Green Bamboo, an interim thermonuclear design similar to the Soviet Layer Cake used in Joe 4 and the American Alarm Clock; and Green Granite, a true thermonuclear design.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The Green Granite prototype, known as Short Granite, was tested in the first of the Operation Grapple test series, Grapple 1. The bomb was dropped from a height of by a Vickers Valiant piloted by Wing Commander Kenneth Hubbard, off the shore of Malden Island in the Pacific on 15 May 1957. It was Britain's second airdrop of a nuclear bomb after the Operation Buffalo test at Maralinga on 11 October 1956, and the first of a thermonuclear weapon. The United States had not attempted an airdrop of a hydrogen bomb until the Operation Redwing Cherokee test on 21 May 1956. Short Granite's yield was estimated at , far below its designed capability. Despite its failure, the test was hailed as a successful thermonuclear explosion, and the government did not confirm or deny reports that the UK had become a third thermonuclear power. When documents on the series began to be declassified in the 1990s, the Grapple X tests were denounced as a hoax. The reports would not have fooled the American observers into thinking they were thermonuclear explosions, as they were involved in their analysis.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The next test was Grapple 2, of Orange Herald, the first British weapon to incorporate an external neutron initiator. It was dropped on 31 May, and exploded with a force of . The yield was the largest ever achieved by a single stage device, which made it technically a megaton weapon. The bomb was hailed as a hydrogen bomb, and the truth that it was actually a large fission bomb was kept secret by the British government until the end of the Cold War. Penney cancelled the planned Green Granite test, and substituted Purple Granite, a Short Granite with some minor modifications. Its yield was a very disappointing , even less than Short Granite; the changes had not worked.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: An Operational Requirement (OR1142) was issued in 1955 for a thermonuclear warhead for a medium-range ballistic missile, which became Blue Streak. This was revised in November 1955, with "megaton" replacing "thermonuclear". Orange Herald could then meet the requirement. Codenamed Green Grass, the unsuccessful fusion boosting was omitted, and it used Green Bamboo's 72-lens implosion system instead of Orange Herald's 32. This allowed the amount of highly enriched uranium to be reduced from 120 to 75 kg. Its yield was estimated at . For use in the V bombers, it was placed in a Blue Danube casing to become Violet Club. Road transport of the weapon was hazardous. As a safety measure 120,000 steel ball bearings were used to fill a cavity inside the core and keep the fissile components apart. In an accident, the steel bung was removed and the ball bearings spilled on the floor of an aircraft hangar, leaving the bomb armed and dangerous. About ten were delivered.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The scientists at Aldermaston had not yet mastered the design of thermonuclear weapons. They produced a new design, called Round A. Another trial was scheduled, known as Grapple X. Round A was dropped on 8 November 1957. To save time and money, the target was off the southern tip of Christmas Island rather than off Malden Island, just from the airfield where 3,000 men were based. This time the yield of exceeded expectations. Round A was a true hydrogen bomb, but it used a relatively large quantity of expensive highly enriched uranium.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Aldermaston had plenty of ideas about how to follow up Grapple X. A new design used lithium deuteride that was less enriched in lithium-6 (and therefore had more lithium-7), but more of it, thereby reducing the amount of uranium-235 in the core. Because of the possibility of an international moratorium on atmospheric testing, plans for the trial, codenamed Grapple Y, were given verbal approval by the Prime Minister, and known only to a handful of officials. The bomb was dropped off Christmas Island on 28 April 1958. It had an explosive yield of about , and remains the largest British nuclear weapon ever tested. The design of Grapple Y was notably successful because much of its yield came from its thermonuclear reaction instead of fission of a uranium-238 tamper, making it a true hydrogen bomb, and because its yield had been correctly predicted—indicating that its designers understood what they were doing.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Eisenhower, now US president, on 22 August 1958 announced a moratorium on nuclear testing. This did not mean an immediate end to testing; on the contrary, the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom all rushed to perform as much testing as possible before the deadline. A new British test series, known as Grapple Z, commenced on 22 August. It explored new technologies such as the use of external neutron initiators, which had first been tried out with Orange Herald. Core boosting using tritium and external boosting with layers of lithium deuteride were successfully tested, allowing a smaller, lighter two-stage devices. The international moratorium commenced on 31 October 1958, and Britain ceased atmospheric testing for good.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Believing that the United Kingdom was extremely vulnerable to a nuclear attack to which defence was impossible, the Chiefs of Staff and the RAF first advocated a British nuclear deterrence—not just nuclear weapons—in 1945: "It is our opinion that our only chance of securing a quick decision is by launching a devastating attack upon [enemy cities] with absolute weapons." In 1947, the Chiefs of Staff stated that even with American help the United Kingdom could not prevent the "vastly superior" Soviet forces from overrunning Western Europe, from which Russia could destroy Britain with missiles without using atomic weapons. Only "the threat of large-scale damage from similar weapons" could prevent the Soviet Union from using atomic weapons in a war.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Air Chief Marshal Sir John Slessor, who became Chief of the Air Staff in 1950, wrote that year that the Soviet superiority in European forces was so great that even "an ultimatum by Russia within the next two to three years" might cause Western Europe to surrender without a war. He feared that the United Kingdom might also do so "unless we can make ourselves far less defenceless than we are now." By 1952, the Air Ministry had abandoned the concept of a conventional defence of Western Europe. The hydrogen bomb increased the threat to Britain. In 1957, a government study stated that although RAF fighters would "unquestionably be able to take a heavy toll of enemy bombers, a proportion would inevitably get through. Even if it were only a dozen, they could with megaton bombs inflict widespread devastation." Although disarmament remained a British goal, "the only existing safeguard against major aggression is the power to threaten retaliation with nuclear weapons."


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Churchill stated in a 1955 speech that deterrence would be "the parents of disarmament" and that, unless Britain contributed to Western deterrence with its own weapons, during a war the targets that threatened it the most might not be prioritised. The Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, advanced the position that nuclear weapons would give Britain influence over targeting and American policy, and would affect strategy in the Middle East and Far East. His Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys, considered that nuclear weapons reduced Britain's dependence on the United States. The 1956 Suez Crisis demonstrated that Britain was no longer a great power, but increased the value to Britain of an independent nuclear deterrent that would give it greater influence with the US and USSR. While the military target of British nuclear weapons was the Soviet Union, the political target was the United States.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Independent targeting was vital. The Chiefs of Staff believed that—contrary to Tizard's view—once the Soviet Union became able to attack the United States itself with nuclear weapons in the late 1950s, America might not risk its own cities to defend Europe, or not emphasise targets that endangered the United Kingdom more than the United States. Britain thus needed the ability to convince the USSR that attacking Europe would be too costly regardless of American participation. Part of the perceived effectiveness of an independent deterrent was the willingness to target enemy cities. Slessor saw atomic weapons as a way to avoid a third devastating world war given that the two previous ones had begun without them. When Air Marshal Sir George Mills became head of RAF Bomber Command in 1955 he similarly insisted on targeting Soviet cities.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, on 4 October 1957, came as a tremendous shock to the American public, who had trusted that American technological superiority ensured their invulnerability. Now, suddenly, there was incontrovertible proof that, in some areas at least, the Soviet Union was actually ahead. In the widespread calls for action in response to the Sputnik crisis, officials in the United States and Britain seized an opportunity to mend the relationship with Britain that had been damaged by the Suez Crisis. Macmillan wrote to Eisenhower on 10 October urging that the two countries pool their resources to meet the challenge.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: British information security, or the lack thereof, no longer seemed so important now that the Soviet Union was apparently ahead, and British scientists had demonstrated that they understood how to build a hydrogen bomb with a different form of the Teller-Ulam design to the Americans. The opposition that had derailed previous attempts was now absent. The McMahon Act was amended, paving the way for the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA). Macmillan called this "the Great Prize".


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Under the MDA, 5.37 tonnes of UK-produced plutonium was sent to the US in exchange for 6.7 kg of tritium and 7.5 tonnes of HEU between 1960 and 1979. Much of the HEU supplied by the US was used not for weapons, but as fuel for the growing fleet of UK nuclear submarines. Under the MDA, the US supplied the UK with not just nuclear submarine propulsion technology, but a complete S5W pressurised water reactor of the kind used to power the US submarines. This was used in the Royal Navy's first nuclear-powered submarine, , which was launched in 1960 and commissioned in 1963. The S5W had a nuclear reactor core that used uranium enriched to between 93 and 97 per cent uranium-235. Reactor technology was transferred from Westinghouse to Rolls Royce, which used it as the basis for its PWR1 reactor used in the UK's nuclear submarines.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The MDA has been renewed or amended many times. Most amendments merely extended the treaty for another five or ten years; others added definitions and made minor changes. , the most recent renewal was on 22 July 2014, extending the treaty to 31 December 2024. A 1974 US proliferation report discussing British nuclear and missile development noted that "In many cases, it is based on technology received from the US and could not legitimately be passed on without US permission."


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Production of British nuclear weapons was slow and Britain had only ten atomic bombs on hand in 1955 and just fourteen in 1956. At the three-power Bermuda Conference with Eisenhower in December 1953, Churchill suggested that the United States allow Britain to have access to American nuclear weapons to make up the shortfall. The provision on American weapons was called Project E. The agreement was confirmed by Eisenhower and Macmillan, who was now the Prime Minister, during their March 1957 meeting in Bermuda, and a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed on 21 May 1957.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Four squadrons of English Electric Canberra bombers based in Germany were equipped with US Mark 7 nuclear bombs stored at RAF Germany bases. There were also four squadrons of nuclear-armed Canberras based in the UK, which were capable of carrying either the Mark 7 or Red Beard. They too were assigned to the SACEUR in October 1960. The planned V-bomber force was reduced to 144 aircraft, and it was intended to equip half of them with Project E weapons, so 72 Mark 5 nuclear bombs were supplied for the V-bombers. When the MDA came into force, the US agreed to supply the V-bombers with megaton weapons in place of the Mark 5, in the form of Mark 15 and Mark 39 nuclear bombs.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Under the Project E MOU, US personnel had custody of the weapons. This meant they performed all the tasks related to their storage, maintenance and readiness. The bombs were stored in Secure Storage Areas (SSAs) on the same bases as the bombers which British staff were not permitted to enter. It was therefore impossible to store British and American bombs together in the same SSA. US custody also created operational problems. The procedure for handing over the bombs added an extra ten minutes to the bombers' reaction time, and the requirement that US personnel had guardianship of the weapons at all times meant that neither they nor the bombers could be relocated to dispersal airfields as the RAF desired. The operational restrictions imposed by Project E "effectively handed the US government a veto over the use of half of Britain's nuclear deterrent".


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The Air Council decided on 7 July 1960 that Project E weapons would be phased out by December 1962, by which time it was anticipated that there would be sufficient British megaton weapons to equip the entire strategic bomber force. Project E weapons were replaced by British Yellow Sun bombs. Problems encountered in the development of Red Beard meant that the replacement of kiloton weapons took longer than anticipated. The Air Ministry decided to replace the Canberras with Valiants as the long-range Vulcan and Victor V bombers became available. A Valiant squadron at RAF Marham was assigned to SACEUR on 1 January 1961, followed by two more in July. The UK-based Canberra squadrons were then disbanded. Each of the 24 Valiants was equipped with two Project E Mark 28 nuclear bombs. These were replaced by the newer Mark 43 nuclear bombs in early 1963. The Valiants were withdrawn from service in 1965.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Project E nuclear warheads were also used on the sixty Thor Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) that were operated by the RAF from 1959 to 1963 under Project Emily. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the RAF's bombers and Thor missiles targeted 16 cities, 44 airfields, 10 air defence control centres and 20 IRBM sites. The RAF high command never warmed to missiles, and always ranked them secondary to the V bomber force. The missile bases were separate from the rest of the RAF and its personnel considered outside the mainstream. Project Emily gave the RAF considerable experience in missile operations, but the 1960 cancellation of Blue Streak in favour of the American Skybolt, an air-launched ballistic missile, rendered this expertise of dubious value. An Air Council meeting on 31 May 1962 decided that Project Emily should be terminated by the end of 1963, and the last Thor squadrons were inactivated on 23 August 1963.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The British Army purchased 113 Corporal missiles from the United States in 1954. It was intended that they would be equipped with British warheads under a project codenamed Violet Vision, but Project E offered a quicker, simpler and cheaper alternative. The US supplied 100 W7 warheads, which had to be drawn from US Army storage sites in southern Germany until arrangements were made for local storage in August 1959. A British missile, Blue Water, with an Indigo Hammer warhead, was developed to replace Corporal. The US offered the Honest John missile as an interim replacement. The offer was accepted, and 120 Honest John missiles with W31 warheads were supplied in 1960, enough to equip three artillery regiments. Blue Water was cancelled in July 1962, and Honest John remained in service until 1977, when it was replaced by the Lance missile. The US also supplied the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) with 36 W33 nuclear warheads that equipped four batteries of eight-inch M115 howitzers. These were later replaced by M110 howitzers. The British Army deployed more US nuclear weapons than the RAF and Royal Navy combined, peaking at 327 out of 392 in 1976–1978.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: A maritime version of Project E, known as Project N supplied US Navy weapons. Providing American atomic bombs for Royal Navy ships would have involved similar dual key arrangements and detachments of US Marines on board Royal Navy ships, which was deemed impractical even for ships and weapons dedicated to use in European waters. However, RAF Coastal Command acquired Mk 101 Lulu nuclear depth bombs (with the W34 nuclear warhead) for its Avro Shackleton and Hawker Siddeley Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft from 1965 to 1971 under Project N. These were later replaced by the more capable Mark 57, which was stockpiled at RAF St Mawgan and RAF Machrihanish.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: When the Cold War ended in 1991, the BAOR still had about 85 Lance missiles, and more than 70 W33 eight-inch and W48 155 mm nuclear artillery shells. The last Project E warheads, including the Mark 57 nuclear depth bombs and those used by the BAOR, were withdrawn in July 1992.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: In the early years of the Cold War, the majority of the bomber force of the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) was made up of World War II vintage Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers, and their successors, the Boeing B-50 Superfortress and the Boeing B-47 Stratojet, all of which lacked the range to reach targets in the Soviet Union from bases in the continental United States. Only the small number of Convair B-36 Peacemaker bombers could do this. Overseas bases were therefore required, and the need for bases in the UK was a feature of American war planning for over a decade.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: Obtaining British permission was easy thanks to the wartime comradeship between the RAF and the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF). Bypassing the politicians, General Carl Spaatz, the commander of the USAAF, came to an agreement with the Chief of the Air Staff, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Tedder, in June and July 1946. Work began on extended and strengthened runways at RAF airbases in East Anglia to receive the B-29s. In June 1947, nine B-29s of the 97th Bombardment Group deployed to RAF Marham, where they were greeted by Tedder. This was merely a test; the bombers were not nuclear-capable. Only the Silverplate B-29s of the 509th Bombardment Group could do so. Their first deployment was in April 1949. Ninety sets of bomb assemblies—atomic bombs without the fissile cores—were stored in the UK by July 1950, and authority to deploy the cores as well was given in April 1954.


title: Nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom

text: The 3rd Air Division was formed in 1949 to control the deployments of B-29s to the UK. It was soon upgraded to the status of a major command, and became the Third Air Force in May 1951 as part of the United States Air Forces in Europe. SAC then formed the 7th Air Division to control the nuclear bomber deployments. With the introduction to service of long-range bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, the need for a SAC presence in the UK diminished, On 3 April 1964, the last SAC aircraft, a B-47 from the 380th Bombardment Wing, left RAF Brize Norton, ending nearly 12 years' of continual B-47 deployments, and the 7th Air Division on 30 June 1964. During the later Cold War years, Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers became regular visitors to the United Kingdom, turning up at bases such as RAF Greenham Common and also taking part in RAF Bomber competitions, but were deployed to NATO on an individual basis, not as groups or wings. In 1962 there were one or two visits each month.