Vickers Mk.4 Valiant (Ground Defence International No.70 December 1980)īased in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the northeast of England, engineers at the British firm of Vickers, with decades of tank building experience, were, at this time, developing a new ‘conventional’ tank for the export market: the Mk.3. With this new armor, and a need for a replacement for Chieftain urgently required, there was a clear opportunity for a large and lucrative contract for a new main battle tank for the UK, and potentially for export. A whole new level of protection for Western tanks promised to provide a true qualitative edge in protection over their Soviet contemporaries. Much of that Western generational change from tanks based on steel armour had come about as a result of the British development of a new type of armor, announced in June 1976 as ‘Chobham’. The Western tank armies of NATO were dominated by an older generation of tanks in a long and slow process of improvement and replacement: the British wanted a replacement for the Chieftain, the Americans were replacing the aged M60 with the new M1 Abrams, and the Germans were replacing the Leopard I with the Leopard II. The Soviet-led forces were dominated by tanks such as the T-55, T-72 and variants of both, and there were continuing concerns over even newer Soviet tanks with improved armor and firepower. The final decades of the Cold War saw a generational change in Western tanks as they faced off against the armies of the Warsaw Pact across Central Europe. Main Battle Tank – 1 Built The Chieftain tank replacement?
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