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 .
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 from the planned .
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.
Development
Previous systems
One of the earliest responses to the Sverdlov was the Red Angel anti-shipping rocket, essentially a greatly enlarged version of the armour-piercing RP-3 used during World War II. The intended aircraft was the Westland Wyvern strike aircraft, but as development dragged on, plans to replace the Wyvern with a jet-powered design, NA.39, were advancing. This would leave a gap where the Wyvern would be removed and the jet not yet introduced. To fill this gap, the Fairey Gannet was selected, a much larger and slower aircraft than the Wyvern. It was felt that Red Angel's range would not be enough to keep the Gannet safe from the Sverdlov-class' ship-board guns.
Longer range
Through this same period, the Royal Air Force and Vickers had been developing a large television guided glide bomb, Blue Boar. This system was overtaken by other developments, and ultimately cancelled in 1956. However, a smaller development under OR.1127 was already being considered as an anti-shipping weapon. This would be launched in large numbers from the Vickers Valiant while flying at high altitude, around , far beyond the range of the ship's guns. In 1954, the Navy released AW.319, calling for a smaller version that could be launched from the Gannet, and later, the NA.39 aircraft. This was assigned the name Green Cheese.
For the Gannet, it was envisioned the aircraft would drop Green Cheese from around altitude, with a required range of . The original Blue Boar design had relatively high drag as it was designed to fall at a fairly steep angle around 45 degrees, giving it perhaps range from this altitude. For this reason, the wings were redesigned to have lower drag. The Valiant would drop it from high altitudes which would give it prodigious range, but this was limited in practice to the range of the radar seeker being used, which was adapted from the Vickers Red Dean air-to-air missile. Fairey Aviation won the contract with their Fairey Project 7.
The weapon would be produced in two versions, one with fixed wings to be carried externally on the Valiant and designed to hit the ships above the waterline, and a second with flip-out fins for the Gannet and NA.39, designed to hit the ship under the waterline as with the earlier rockets. To do this, the missile would hit the water about short of the target. The radome was designed to crush on impact with the water and expose an angled section that caused it to curve up and travel horizontally through the water.