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'EUNT' AND THE SOVIET NUCLEAR TARGET 119
itself had proved to be a bonanza, with new Soviet radio equipment
being captured, including direction-finding equipment
which showed 'marked improvement in design and construction'.37
Success in the exciting new field of elint offset some recent
disappointments. GCHQ and its American partners had not yet
recovered the medium-grade Soviet cyphers lost during the infamous
'Black Friday' of October 1948. They had not detected
the advent of the first Soviet atom bomb, nor had they anticipated
the outbreak of the Korean War. However, the elint effort
against the Soviet Air Force, which also involved directionfinding
and traffic analysis, was one of the key areas in which
GCHQ could claim outstanding achievement in the first postwar
decade - and it was sustained.
There was an especially secret reason why GCHQ and NSA
examined the operational anatomy of the Soviet 'nuclear bear'
so minutely. During the early 1950s, target intelligence officers
in London and Washington had been busy exchanging sensitive
data on 'the mission of blunting the Russian atomic offensive'.
This meant planning early counter-force attacks against
Soviet nuclear forces, especially bombers, in the hope of
destroying them on the ground in Eastern Europe before they
could be used in a future war. GCHQ had given particular attention
to this matter because of the vulnerability of Britain, and
the Americans were impressed by the progress London had
made on it. GCHQ and the RAP's secret units had amassed 'a
significant amount of evaluated intelligence, particularly in the
special intelligence field, which would be of the greatest value'
if war broke out. 38
American officers considered that 'vigorous efforts should be
taken immediately to ensure rapid development of a joint
research program to insure maximum exploitation of the British
resources'. In short, it was not just the raw elint that the British
had collected, but their sophisticated analysis of it that allowed
it to be turned into high -quality finished intelligence, a legacy
of the skills garnered during Bletchley Park's Hut Three operation.