Tornado and earlier V-bomber crews trained with these, which were identical in every way to the live bombs except for the nuclear warhead.
To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws - like a battery cover on a radio - using a thumbnail or a coin.
Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.
The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key
So in Thunderball, all Emilio Largo had to do was steal an Avro Vuclan and pop into halfords.
I guess now with hindsight it feels a bit un-nerving that our nuclear bombs were not as well protected as the US and Russia's.
I think "bike lock" is rather be-littling the mecanisim, a not untypical bit of newsnight journalisim... or maybe just a civilianisim
I would suppose that there were many unique keys and locks and they were difficult to 'pick'. added to that there were other physical security measures to access the device as well
Having a "secure system" didn't stop the yanks from depositing a couple of nukes on those spanish tomatoes...
'Bicycle lock KEY'. But if you watch any 'preventing a nutter:twisted: from exploding a nucear bomb' type film over the last forty years, almost without exception, the vital 'key/s' with which the bomb is armed/disarmed by the baddie:evil:/hero:grin: is/are of the common or garden flat cycle/gym locker type. So I'm not really surprised by this revelation - !
Lets not forget all the US military stuff that was secured by a British lock - the Ingersoll 10 lever core was used extensively by Sargent and Greenleaf as a high security solution to make their own padlocks sufficiently secure for sensitive military applications in the States.
I understand the Ingersoll deadlock hookbolt range was also extensively used in UK SSAs too, securing storage igloo doors.
I would be interested to see the type of "bicycle lock" key actually involved... if it was for instance the Abloy style of rotating disk-detainer lock (found on many modern bike locks these days) then it would be highly secure. I doubt it was one of this type though as they were not common back then.
OK the key did indeed look like a bike lock key but at times they had me guarding them with the authority to shoot on sight, especially if the 2 man rule was broken ! So I was licenced to kill 'Dobbo 450' !
The first day I arrived at Honington I was accidently led into an office with a large bag of 'bike locks' in it. The number of keys matched the number of alleged 'weapons of mass destruction' !
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