The Green Cheese missile was a British radar-guided anti-ship tactical nuclear warhead missile project of the 1950s. It was developed by Fairey Aviation to be used by the Fairey Gannet shipborne anti-submarine warfare aircraft, and was originally called Fairey Project 7. Unfortunately, the missile's 3,800 lb (1720 kg) weight proved to be too heavy for the Gannet, and would have required modifications to the Gannet's bomb bay to expose the missiles' seeker heads to the target before launch. The missile project continued, since the Blackburn Buccaneer naval strike aircraft had a rotating bomb bay which was ideally suited to the task.
The project was cancelled in 1956 due in part to cost over-runs, at which point it had a reached a stage called Cockburn Cheese (after the British military scientist Dr. Robert Cockburn), and was replaced with the Green Flash project. This too was cancelled and the idea of a tactical nuclear guided missile for anti-shipping use was given up in favour of a simple "lobbed" tactical nuclear bomb.
The name was randomly generated as one of the UK's Rainbow Codes.
Famous quotes containing the words green and/or cheese:
“Love to chawnk green apples an’ go swimmin’ in the
lake.—
Hate to take the castor-ile they give for belly-ache!
‘Most all the time, the whole year round, there ain’t no flies on
me,
But jest ‘fore Christmas I’m as good as I kin be!”
—Eugene Field (1850–1895)
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)