What defensive armament did the Vulcan carry?

Unlike the bombers of the Second World War, the Vulcan carried no defensive guns or machine guns. Its original concept relied on flying at high speed and high altitude to escape fighters and anti-aircraft fire. That is why, when the prototype trials revealed a dangerous tendency to pitch into a dive near the Mach limit, this was considered unacceptable precisely because the bomber was unarmed.

From around 1960, the Vulcan B.1 (which, with these upgrades, became known as the B.1A) and the B.2 received electronic countermeasures equipment. The B.1 XA895 served as a testbed for a system with jammers housed in a bulged tail cone and a tail-warning radar. The original equipment of the B.1A and B.2 included a Green Palm voice-communications jammer, two Blue Diver metric-band jammers and three Red Shrimp S-band jammers, among other items.

Soviet defences improved, and altitude ceased to be sufficient protection. In the mid-1960s the Vulcan switched to low-level tactics, flying high en route and descending to penetrate defences. Even in the Falklands War, in 1982, the aircraft still carried no defensive armament of its own: some examples carried Shrike anti-radar missiles, but as an offensive weapon against Argentine radars, not for protection against fighters.

The aircraft originated from Air Ministry specification B.35/46. The first prototype flew on 30 August 1952, and the RAF received its first Vulcan B.1 in September 1956.