early entry in the javelin

The leaflet informed him that during the London 2012 Olympic games the army will be putting missiles on the roof of his building and there will be soldiers on duty there 24 hours a day. He was not asked about this in advance, or given a choice, simply informed that his building was the best place to site these missiles. 

It's going to be regular festival of fun, isn't it?

Comments

[ejh]

One wonders whether there'll be a point at which the stuff starts appearing on the BBC, or whether the pressures to not spoil the party will prevail.

[Igor Belanov]

Is there any precedence for this ridiculous militarisation of an Olympic city? Does anyone know what kind of measures have been taken in past events?

[ejh]

Well I believe that in 1936 they....

[Cian]

I hope this is a trend. Then in about 2056 they'll dispense with the sport entirely, and one country's defence companies will have their opportunity to show the world how good their stuff really is.

[hellblazer]

Cian's comment reminds me that I recently reread Hugh Laurie's book The Gun Seller. Anyone got any attack helicopters to sell?

[belle le triste]

Um. I too live a building with a nice flat quite large roof. With a good gunsight view of the Pembury Estate at one end, and the main stadium visible a little further off at the other. If you had lasers, you could pick off teenytiny ninjas as they swarmed the Eye, the Gherkin and (if you felled a tree) Canary Wharf.

[BenSix]

The burning question is whether they'll be able to distinguish the starter's gun from all their other explosions.

[Chris Williams]

I'm more interested in the rules of engagement. Putting short range SAMs in East London clearly implies that someone's decided that having the bad people and their associated cargo of avgas crash inside the ring of steel is worse than having them crash outside it. Residents of the flak zone, of course, may disagree.

[ejh]

It has turned up on the BBC - this was on BBC World news just now.

[Barry Freed]

I hope this is a trend. Then in about 2056... we'll have our first Armoured Olympics, as discussed just last month in these here parts.

Also, I'm now imagining Belle as The Jackal.

[Chris Williams]

Javelin, Rapier... any more unfortunate sport/SAM naming crossovers? Nike are banned from the Green Zone itself: they must be kicking themselves that their namesake is obsolete.

[Barry Freed]

Just do it.

[chjh]

This isn't just any block of flats, BTW. it's the 'gated community' Bow Quarter, which was built on the site of the Bryant and May factory made famous by the 'matchgirls' strike'.

[NomadUK]

This isn't just any block of flats

It's an M&S block of flats...

[nick s]

A BBC piece on Bow Quarter, written in 2004.

There's a lovely irony about how living in a walled yuppie enclave of East London makes you an ideal location for the army to set up its missiles. (Ideally, they'll have white phosphorous rounds as a nod to "local heritage".)

Perhaps this is the start of an encouraging trend which will see artillery positions established in Virginia Water and Weybridge.

[ajay]

Putting short range SAMs in East London clearly implies that someone's decided that having the bad people and their associated cargo of avgas crash inside the ring of steel is worse than having them crash outside it.

This is a good point. HVM has an effective range of (wikipedia) 7 km at best. 7 km from Bow Quarter in pretty much any direction is still London.
In fact, given that the likely target is the Olympics, they've taken the decision that they'd rather have the aircraft crash on the City than on Stratford.

Which is at least an improvement from the policy with regard to the V-2s...

[ajay]

If you had lasers, you could pick off teenytiny ninjas as they swarmed the Eye, the Gherkin and (if you felled a tree) Canary Wharf.

(opens notebook, looks over top of spectacles)

Tell me about these tiny ninjas, belle. Do you see them often?

[Alex]

Somebody does seem to want a *lot* of air defence. Obviously, the first solution to an unidentified radar contact heading for the Boris Vibrator would be to have the RAF southern QRA intercept it, and I believe they're planning to deploy an extra QRA flight somewhere in the South East to shorten the response time.

Then there's the T45 ship in the Thames. The Sea Viper system on those is meant to be able to hit incoming ballistic missiles or artillery rounds, to say nothing of aircraft, and the radar looks out to 80 miles or so.

Within that, it seems we're getting one or possibly two layers of SAMs with at least Starstreak and possibly also Rapier. Both of those come with their own radars.

Come to think of it, if the electrosensitivity mob don't really freak out about this, I'm going to be disappointed, because the Sea Viper radar on its own is a fuck-off huge RF source. They'd better come out in boils. Green boils.

[ajay]

the radar looks out to 80 miles or so.

The radar is on a mast. This means it can't actually look out to more than 20 miles or so (depending how high the target is flying) and even less if there is tall stuff in the way. Stuff like, for example, the City of London.

[Alex]

Wikipedia.

[CMcM]

Surely, on the general logic of asymmetric warfare, all that hardware pointing at the skies pretty much guarantees that any attack will come via the sewers?

[ajay]

Alex: horizon for a 30m mast is 20km, no matter what kind of radar you've got. OK, if you're flying at normal commercial airliner heights, then you're getting into the hundreds...

[Charlie W]

I don't see why compensation for east end residents isn't in order. At least sufficient so that they can go on holiday for a month, and thus be out when the flaming helicopter smashes into the chimney pots, closely followed by bits of whatever was fired at the airspace intruder. After all, these aren't West Bank settlers: the Olympics is something that's being done to them.

Expensive? I imagine it'd cost about as much as the McDonalds main tent gas bill.

[ajay]

It's the East End, though, Charlie. They love that sort of thing. Look how they go on and on about the Spirit of the Blitz. Fifty years time they'll still be telling their grandkids about the time the flaming Sky News helicopter crashed into the kebab shop down the road, and old Mrs Khan got conked on the head by a falling HVM launch sabot...

[guthrie]

I thought the east end had been fully colonised by yuppies and the like already? Therefore no old timers willing to put up with aircraft debris landing on them.

[chris y]

I think Leyton was the last old timers' holdout, which is why they chose it to level for the playgrounds. But since the point of the occupation is presumably to prevent aircraft debris landing on the playgrounds, one wonders if this had been thought through at all. (No one doesn't - ed)

[belle le triste]

It's much more Stratford than Leyton (which is further north and currently largely still unleveled as far as I know). The Olympic postcode is the formerly fictional E20 (Eastenders' Walford): and the main stadium is built on what was Stratford Marsh and Marshgate Trading Estate, a lot of which was still unreclaimed land five years ago ("marsh" is not a figure of speech).

Yuppification has occurred in pockets all over East London, of course, but the idea that it's triumphed everywhere is nuts; Hackney remains one of the poorest -- and most multicultural -- boroughs in Europe. Old timers have been displaced by poorer influx as well as as richer.

[CMcM]

It seems there will be a veritable ring of roof top defences, from Leytonstone to Greenwich and from Enfield to Epping Forest.

"A council spokesperson said: ‘We were naturally surprised when we were approached about placing a missile system on the roof of Fred Wigg Tower during the Olympic Games.

‘The MOD has impressed upon us that this is the only suitable location in the vicinity and that the equipment will form a vital part of national defence plans.

‘The armed forces are talking directly with residents to reassure them that disruption will be kept to a minimum and to answer any of their concerns.’"

Shall we block book some tickets for those consultation meetings?

[ajay]

Is there any precedence for this ridiculous militarisation of an Olympic city?

Yes. There were AWACS and Patriot batteries deployed for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. And the 1996 games in Atlanta. And the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City.
As for the 2008 Beijing Olympics...

[Chris Williams]

At least a Patriot can be used in a situation where it's odds-on that the target's going to crash in a depopulated area. Starstreak HVM, not so much.

[Charlie W]

Update: Brian Whelan, the guy who got leafleted, and then objected, is being evicted. Did they really think they could put the missiles in on the sly and no one would say anything?

[Alex]

No, because they informed the national press months in advance.

[Charlie W]

Yes, because they didn't say anything to the people actually living at the planned missile sites.