Sahara Incident - 1960 - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 21 January 2009

The High Court case today, 21 January 2009, concerning the veterans of the UK nuclear tests in the 1950s/60s who claim that they contracted radiation effects which have blighted their lives ever since, reminded me of a story I was told in 1960 but never published anywhere before.

I was a newly-qualified Air Electronics Officer flying on Valiants with 18 Squadron at RAF Finningley. One day while we were getting to know each other, my new captain told me of an incident he’d been involved in a few months earlier on another Valiant bomber squadron.

He and his crew had been detached at very short notice from a UK base to RAF Luqa on the island of Malta to await further orders. Those orders came very early one morning shortly before dawn. The crew were called from their beds for an operational briefing. They were told that their Valiant had been modified to collect air samples. They were ordered to fly to a particular location over French-controlled Algeria where they would see a mushroom cloud following a nuclear weapon test explosion! They were to fly around the cloud at 40,000 feet above the ground, as close as they could without actually going inside the cloud mass, so that radiation samples could be collected. They were assured that because no radiation could penetrate the pressurised cabin of the Valiant, there was no danger to their health. They were instructed not to file a flight plan and to maintain radio silence from take-off until they approached Luqa on their return. On crossing the north coast of Africa they would be flying in French-controlled airspace but there was no need for concern as there were no radar stations capable of tracking their flight.

As usual the skies over the Sahara Desert were cloudless and as they reached about 100 miles from the location they had been ordered to go to, they saw what was undoubtedly a nuclear explosion. They decided to fly anti-clockwise around the towering cloud so that the captain, in the left hand side, would be better able to judge distance from the cloud. About halfway round, the co-pilot called out that another aircraft had just appeared, at a similar height, flying round the cloud in the opposite direction! Immediately they assumed that it must be a French Air Force aircraft coming to see what they were up to. Flying almost head on to the other aircraft and at a combined closing speed of approaching 1,000 mph there was no time to take any sort of evasive action. Within seconds of the first sighting, the two pilots in the Valiant realised that the other aircraft was a USAF B-47 – presumably on a similar clandestine mission. The two aircraft waggled their wings conspiratorially as they passed close by each other. Their mission complete, they returned to Malta where the Valiant was placed in quarantine in a remote part of the airfield and the crew were flown back to UK on a scheduled transport aircraft.

I never did find out whether my former captain’s story was absolutely accurate and I cannot now ask him because he has passed away. It does have a ring of truth about it though. I wonder if the French knew that these flights were going to take place – or was it just good intelligence?