The Bombing Run From the Edge of the World — Black Buck, 1982

A little after eleven o'clock at night on the 30th of April, 1982, a single Avro Vulcan bomber rolled down a runway on a volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and lifted into the dark. Ahead of it lay the longest bombing mission anyone had ever attempted — almost four thousand miles to the target, and four thousand back, to drop twenty-one bombs on a single runway at the bottom of the world. To get there it would need to be refuelled in mid-air again and again by a fleet of eleven other aircraft, in a relay so complicated that the men who planned it weren't certain it could be done. The bomber itself was nearly obsolete. It had been built for a different war — a war that was supposed to end with a nuclear bomb falling on Moscow. Wideawake Airfield, Ascension Island. A single 10,000-foot strip of tarmac on a volcanic speck near the equator, 3,300 nautical miles from the Falkland Islands and 3,700 from Britain. The RAF had been staging operations from it since mid-April. That night it held thirteen aircraft: two Avro Vulcan B.2s and eleven Handley Page Victor K.2 tankers, taking off at one-minute intervals in full radio silence. Flight Lieutenant Martin Withers was last to leave the ground, commanding Vulcan XM607 — the spare. He wasn't supposed to be going anywhere near Port Stanley. His aircraft was the reserve, there only in case something went wrong with the primary bomber, commanded by Squadron Leader John Reeve in XM598. Withers and his crew expected to fly four hours south, turn around once Reeve had cleared his first refuelling, and come home before dawn. Something went wrong almost immediately. Shortly after take-off, a rubber seal on the captain's direct-vision side window had perished in Reeve's aircraft. The crew cabin wouldn't pressurise. XM598 turned back for Ascension. A radio call went up to Withers. According to Barry Masefield — who later wrote of the mission for the Vulcan to the Sky Trust — it went quiet on XM607 for a moment. Then Withers said they had a job to do. Eleven Victors and one Vulcan turned south. Before understanding what happened next, you need to go back twenty-five years. The Vulcan didn't arrive at Wideawake by accident. It arrived as the end product of a very specific promise Britain had made to itself, and to the world, at the beginning of the Cold War.