Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Operation Grapple

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Article promoted by HJ Mitchell (talk) via MilHistBot (talk) 23:31, 14 October 2017 (UTC) « Return to A-Class review list[reply]

Operation Grapple[edit]

Nominator(s): Hawkeye7 (talk)

Operation Grapple (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

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I gathered a great deal of material on Operation Grapple while building the article on the British hydrogen bomb programme. So I thought I would improve it too, and nominate it for an A class review. Hawkeye7 (talk) 05:54, 1 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Support and image review
I just reviewed this article pretty comprehensively at GAN, and also looked at the image licensing as part of that review. I believe it meets the Military history A-Class criteria including that the images are appropriately licensed. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 03:32, 2 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Drive-by comment -- Don't know if I'll get to do a full review but I thought I'd stop by here and query the licensing for the Oulton portrait, which I came across while doing a ce and B-Class review for the guy's article. While I don't necessarily doubt that the picture is held by the family, that doesn't make it a "family photo", as in taken by the family -- it looks more like an official RAF portrait, in which case I wonder about the licensing employed at the moment. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 07:07, 2 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking about that too - and for the same reason. Usually for each Featured Article I write I create a couple of Good Articles on side topics as spinoffs. In this case I improved the article on Oulton. So I was thinking about the image. I have added a Fair Use rationale, and removed it from this article. Hawkeye7 (talk) 09:01, 2 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Tks Hawkeye. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 06:13, 9 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Support: Nice work, I believe that this meets the A-class criteria. I made a few minor tweaks, and have the following suggestions: AustralianRupert (talk) 07:26, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • "which was 25 kilotonnes of TNT (100 TJ) Menzies": suggest adding a full stop before "Menzies"
    checkY added. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 08:45, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    One thing I haven't been able to find is where these restrictions on bomb yields in Australia came from. Lorna Arnold points out that they were repeatedly exceeded. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:10, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • this sentence is missing something: "Core boosting using tritium gas and external boosting with layers of lithium deuteride, allowing a smaller, lighter Tom for two-stage devices"
    checkY re-worded. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 08:45, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • this sentence doesn't seem quite right grammatically speaking: "Shackleton had detected the SS Effie, an old Victory ship now flying the Liberian flag, had been sighted in the exclusion zone"
    checkY re-worded. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 08:45, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • not sure about the formatting or ref # 153 (Norris), which seems inconsistent with the other citations
    checkY removed. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 08:45, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • "File:Survey Ship HMNZS Lachlan in Dusky Sound (12954922013).jpg": currently has a date of "4 March 2014", but this is probably the Flikr upload date, not the date it was actually taken
    checkY Not sure of the exact date. Added "c. 1950" Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:08, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • "File:HMS Warrior (R31) MOD 45139702.jpg": date probably should be adjusted and the source link appears to be dead:
    checkY It's not dead; it's just an ephemeral URL. Switched to a (hopefully) better one. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:08, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • "File:International Diplomacy.jpg": not sure about this licence, does "PD-UKGov" apply?
    checkY Yes, it does. Added. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:08, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks, nice work. Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 09:32, 10 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comments It's great to see a high quality article on this important topic. I have the following comments and suggestions:

  • "The search for a location continued, with Malden Island and McKean Island being considered" - given that the political status of the various potential test sites is a feature of this para, I'd suggest identifying who administered these islands
    checkY They were uninhabited, but claimed by both Britain and the United States, under the notorious Guano Act. Added a bit. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:09, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Three Avro Shackletons from No 240 Squadron were sent to conduct an aerial reconnaissance" - do we know where they operated from? (did another country agree for them to fly from its territory to conduct this survey?)
    Canton Island. This was also claimed by both Britain and the United States. Added this. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:09, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    "The Guano Islands Act is perhaps the most interesting federal example. Passed in 1856 during the administration of Franklin Pierce, the act was designed to address one of the most important problems then facing the nation. Namely, a critical shortage of bird poop. (If you guessed the problem was “escalating tensions over slavery,” you have overestimated the administration of Franklin Pierce.)" [1] Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:41, 27 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Were Christmas Island and the other nearby islands inhabited? If so, where they consulted about hosting the test program and did they receive any kind of compensation?
    checkY They were uninhabited. Added this. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:09, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • It might also be worth noting that these were tropical islands given the implications this had on the logistics for the operation
    checkY Added. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:09, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • "When documents on the series began to be declassified in the 1990s, they were denounced as a hoax" - this is unclear. Where the official files called a hoax, or the claims that the test had been one of a thermonuclear weapon?
    checkYThat the test had been a successful h-bomb test. Improved the wording. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:09, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    This is still a bit unclear - who denounced them as a hoax? Could you say that the British Government's position was revealed to have been a hoax? Nick-D (talk) 11:07, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    The allegation first came up in an article by Norman Dombey and Eric Grove, "Britain's Thermonuclear Bluff", in the London Review of Books in October 1992. [2] This was based on sources then available, and alleged (correctly) that "Orange Herald was not an H-bomb at all, but a large A-bomb" and that "none of the four nuclear tests held in 1957 was a hydrogen bomb test as we now understand it". The conspiracy theory was that the UK tricked the US into sharing technology under the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement. The release of documents appeared to confirm this, resulting in headlines like Britain's H-bomb triumph a hoax: Patriotic scientists created an elaborate and highly secret bluff to disguise dud weapons. [3] It fell to Lorna Arnold to correct the record in her book Britain and the H-bomb in 2001. As the official historian, she had access to the documents all along. The article follows this account. (See her article for the story of how it was written.) Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:56, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • What happened to all the personnel, aircraft and ships between each series of tests? Were they sent back to the UK, or did they hang around on Christmas Island (or a bit of both?). If they were kept on Christmas Island, what did they do, and what was morale like?
    Both. Most of the Army, RAF and AERE personnel remained on Christmas Island. You would think they would have preferred it to the UK, but by all accounts this wasn't the case. I don't have all my books with me here, so I will update the article when I get back. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:09, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    checkY I have now added two paragraphs on maintenance of morale on Christmas Island. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:23, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • When were the evacuated civilians returned to their homes?
    I'm not sure. Soon after. This will need looking up. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:09, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    checkY The book you recommended had the answer. Added a paragraph about this. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:23, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • "On 22 August 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced a moratorium on nuclear testing, effective 31 October 1958. 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" - this is a bit unclear: was this a unilateral US moratorium which the other countries felt obliged to also honour, or an agreement by the three countries? Nick-D (talk) 00:25, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    checkY It was an offer to get the test ban talks moving again. There was an agreement. Added a bit. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:40, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    It was considered vitally important that Britain was seen as a peace-loving nation totally committed to the abolition of nuclear weapons; but of course this could not be allowed to stand in the way of the British nuclear weapons programme. The situation remains the same today. According to Baroness Warsi, the Senior Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in 2014:
    We are committed to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons and firmly believe that the best way to achieve this is through gradual disarmament negotiated through a step-by-step approach within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The UK has a strong record on nuclear disarmament and continues to be at the forefront of international efforts to control proliferation, and to make progress towards multilateral nuclear disarmament.[4]
  • All issues should be addressed now. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:23, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(Belated) Support All my comments are now addressed Nick-D (talk) 07:29, 10 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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