Green Cheese (missile)

Fairey's Green Cheese, a rainbow codename, was a British-made radar-guided anti-ship missile project of the 1950s. It was a development of the earlier and much larger Blue Boar television guided glide bomb, making it smaller, replacing the television camera with the radar seeker from the Red Dean air-to-air missile, and carrying a smaller warhead of 1,700 pounds (770 kg).

Green Cheese arose as part of the 'Sverdlov crisis', when the Royal Navy were concerned over the appearance of a new Soviet heavy cruiser class. Green Cheese was a longer-ranged and guided replacement for the unguided Red Angel, which had required an approach by the attacker too close to the target to be considered survivable. Green Cheese was initially unpowered, but during development the range requirement could not be met and a small rocket motor was added to improve this. This also increased the weight to 3,800 pounds (1,700 kg) from the planned 3,300 pounds (1,500 kg).

Green Cheese was intended to arm two aircraft, the Fairey Gannet, and the still-under-development Blackburn Buccaneer. The rising weight made it too heavy for the existing Gannets, and the Buccaneer had enough performance to directly attack the ships with conventional bombs, at least in the short term. Green Cheese was cancelled in 1956 and development of an even more powerful design for Buccaneer began.