During World War II, British intelligence was able to glean details of new German technologies simply by considering their code names.
[1] Wishing to avoid making this sort of mistake, the Ministry of Supply (MoS) initiated a system that would be entirely random and deliberately unrelated to the program in any way,[2] while still being easy to remember.
Each rainbow code name was constructed from a randomly selected colour, plus an (often appropriate) noun taken from a list, for example: While most colour and noun combinations were meaningless, some combinations produced real names, although quite unrelated to the project they designated.
[3] Rainbow codes, or at least names that look like them without being official, have occasionally been used for some modern systems; current examples include the Orange Reaper electronic support measures system and the Blue Vixen radar[4]—the latter most likely so named because it was a replacement for the Blue Fox radar.
Both names were based on Blue Streak (which was mentioned in the novel); the title was of a fictional solid-fueled ICBM which was the object of a covert theft operation at an isolated Fijian test site.