'Cabinets and the Bomb' workshop Published below is the edited transcript of the discussion at a workshop on 'Cabinets and the Bomb', held at the British Academy on 27 March 2007, in association with the National Archives and the Mile End Institute of Queen Mary, University of London. The workshop brought together historians working on British nuclear and defence policy, and some of the former officials and ministers involved in the original decision-making processes. The meeting was chaired by Professor Peter Hennessy FBA, and two former Permanent Secretaries at the MOD, Sir Michael Quinlan and Sir Kevin Tebbit, provided some opening and concluding thoughts. The documents discussed at the workshop - ranging from the first breakthrough made by British scientists in 1940, to the formal December 2006 exchange of letters between Blair and Bush on the upgrade of Trident - have been published in a British Academy book, Cabinets and the Bomb. The transcript of the workshop discussion below has been edited for publication by one of the participants, Catherine Haddon - who has also published an article on the workshop in the British Academy Review (PDF). The British Academy is grateful to all those quoted below for permission to reproduce their comments. |  |
SESSION ONE 
Some participants at the workshop: Sir Kevin Tebbit (standing); a serving MOD official; Sir Ronald Mason; Lord Carrington; Sir Michael Quinlan; Professor Peter Hennessy.
The Cabinets and the Bomb book publishes the list of documents discussed at the workshop, and also the opening two contributions: The introductory 'Overview' by Peter Hennessy has been published as The Nuclear Certificate. Michael Quinlan's 'Key questions' have been published as the book's Introduction. The discussion continued: Frank Panton: An interesting and complete change in the direction of the United Kingdom programme of nuclear weaponry pre-1958 occurs after 1958 and before 1963. Before 1958, Aldermaston had a whole host of requirements for the Army, Navy and the Air Force to which they had given separate cover names, and I assume - or you could assume - meant that AWRE were working on as different warheads.
After 1958 and by 1963 you will find that the UK programme was simply on two nuclear weapons. One was Polaris and the other was the 177 family of free-fall weapons. The Army had no UK nuclear weapons in the programme, the Navy only Polaris, and the Air Force the WE 177 family but no new nuclear weapons. The WE 177 depth bomb seems not to have entered service, and all the tactical weapons that AWRE were apparently working on had disappeared. The Air Force was flying American bombs under Project E as well as 177.
So far, historians working on the UK Nuclear programme do not seem to have uncovered what happened in that period and it mystifies me. A number of fairly obvious reasons would have influenced the changes. An obvious major change was that in 1962 we got Polaris on the demise of Skybolt and the nuclear deterrent was being switched from the Air Force to the Navy. In the meantime, while Polaris was being built, the Navy would still continue to fly 177s along with US Project E bombs as a strategic strike force coordinated with the US. The Army gets absolutely no UK nuclear warhead for use in the land battle, reliance being placed on the Americans' offer of nuclear warheads under Key of the Cupboard arrangements for Lance, Honest John and other tactical systems. The history of how all this was decided has not really been uncovered by the historians yet, or at least I haven't seen anything like that, and I am very interested to know because there are some pretty big decisions to uncover.
Of course, we must remember that in 1958 the Ministry of Defence centrally was almost a holding organisation with the three services more or less distinct, and with their own direct links to Aldermaston. By the early 1960s, however, reorganisation of the MOD brought the three services under strengthened central control, which must have made a change in nuclear policy easier to achieve. Then, too, at that time, Sir Frederick Brundrett retired and Sir Solly Zuckerman took over as CSA MoD. You know that if nothing else Solly was a great sceptic about the usefulness of tactical nuclear weapons, almost as great a sceptic as he was about the UK nuclear deterrent in itself, and he must have influenced if not instituted changes. However there is a whole area of decision-making there which so far has not been exposed.. Perhaps some of the people round the table can give some elements to this? Chair [Peter Hennessy]: Kristan, have you some thoughts on those questions? Are the documents there, for a start? Kristan Stoddart: I have thoughts, papers and presentations on tactical nuclear weapons. Chair: You have? Kristan Stoddart: I am presenting one at Charterhouse in April, Frank. Frank Panton: Are you? I shall hear it with interest. Kristan Stoddart: Good; but as to whether the documents are available - yes, pretty much they are. It is difficult to trace the train of decision and the thought processes that went into, say, the cancellation of Blue Water for example. It is far easier to trace the American involvement in tactical nuclear weapon strategy and how we were not piggy-backing on it, the UK I mean, but is at the centre of trying to re-articulate and to reframe the whole series of arguments and debates into war prevention first and foremost, through conventional strategic deterrents, for want of a better phrase. However, the whole issue gets confused, the whole issue about what is strategic, what is sub-strategic, and what is tactical. Michael will talk about the seamless robe of deterrence; it is a little bit more difficult, and it certainly is a problematic theory when you are looking at ground-based operations, the likelihood being that the Warsaw Pact would simply overrun NATO forces within hours very probably, and they stay current all the way through until at least the 1980s - and there are Warsaw Pact documents which actually bear that out now. Peter Carrington: Could I just say something about 1962? Chair: Yes; do you want to go earlier than that? Peter Carrington: You are absolutely right, the Air Force wanted to keep the delivery systems for them, they didn't want to lose it, but the Navy didn't want it because the Navy thought that they were going to lose out financially on the estimates, having to deal with this, so they didn't want it at all. However, the interesting thing was that it would not have been possible to do Polaris in the Navy but for the fact that Solly Zuckerman and Dickie Mountbatten had got on terms with Admiral Rickover, and Admiral Rickover was the sort of key to nuclear propulsion in the American submarines. Dickie Mountbatten and Solly managed to persuade him to give us the technology to do the nuclear submarine, and but for that it would not have been possible to do Polaris. Kevin Tebbit: And of course the heirs of Rickover walked in his shadow and continued right until I left at the end of 2005. Virtually every maritime nuclear officer in the United States regarded Rickover as his model all the way through from that period. Ronald Mason: Rickover of course insisted that every one of the nuclear submariners, the Captains, should be personally seen by him. One of the things that he tried to foist on the UK was that he wanted to do the same for the UK. You can imagine what our Admirals would say to that one! Towards the end of the early Trident negotiations I had an invitation to a meeting on a Saturday morning, during the first half of which I was subjected to a diatribe which, to put it mildly, cast doubts on the UK's capabilities and determination to maintain a credible deterrent force. There was a huge gap between Rickover's engineering and political skills! Frank Panton: The only point I would make on Suez, and I can't answer your question I am afraid, but it does bring me to say that the main legacy of Suez from the nuclear point of view was that Macmillan became PM, because Macmillan as I have said already was absolutely instrumental in getting alongside Eisenhower and working on Eisenhower so that he got the 1958 Agreement, and at the same time caused a start to be made on nuclear test ban discussions. Absolutely incredibly of course he did the same job on Kennedy, regarding the Polaris Sales Agreement and so the main plus out of Suez, I think, for the United Kingdom in nuclear policy, was that Macmillan emerged as PM at this time. Chair: We have 10 minutes before supper break, but I think we need to talk a little more about the '58 Agreement, "the Great Prize" as Macmillan called it, and he was striving for it from the moment he became Prime Minister as Frank was saying, from the Bermuda Conference onwards. As Kevin said the lesson of Suez is you never go it alone again anywhere in the world without at least their concurrence, if not active participation, and that certainly I think the documents show tilted across into the nuclear. Michael Howard: I don't know how relevant it is, but one should mention I think not simply Suez but the Sandys Defence White Paper of 1957, which did make us dependent upon deterrence, and that excused drastic cutting of all the other three services - from which indeed I think many of them have never really recovered. I wonder whether the realisation in the back of people's minds that we have got the deterrent, we are absolutely dependent upon it for our general defence policy, made very much difference to the way in which they handled these matters. Chair: It is interesting, because I remember talking to Alec Home - and we will come to this after supper - about the Nassau Conference, but according to Alec Home (and Peter will say whether this is wrong or not) regarded the cancellation of Skybolt as potentially a Government-wrecking measure, that if he could not get the substitute quickly the Government might fall, which again looking back from our perspective seems melodramatic but in view of what Michael has just said it becomes much more explicable. I don't know if Peter remembers that, but that is certainly what Alec said and Alec was not a man to dissemble or to deceive, was he? Kristan Stoddart: One thing we are missing a little is the economic arguments as well. Also in '57 was the founding of the EC. Certainly in regard to at least two approaches that were made, first with De Gaulle and then later Pompidou, all geared it seems towards finding French favour to gain entry into the EC. On the Sandys White Paper there is a linkage between the two. If you look at defence expenditure, certainly up until the Korean War it is astronomically high as a proportion of GDP. It is not only post-Korean War, they started building a series of rationalisation measures and saying 'We must devote more effort in the civilian economy'. Michael Quinlan: Firstly to pick up what Kristan has just said, about the Sandys review. As I remember, we all hated it at the time - I was Ian Orr-Ewing's Private Secretary in the old Air Ministry. It was not that he suddenly elevated nuclear weapons in the sense of expanding the force or anything like that; he was under great economic pressure, with less money, and he left the nuclear force alone and cut the rest. It was not, as I say, an elevation except in a priority sense of what went out, and much as we hated it, I think he was probably very broadly right.
The other unrelated point I wanted to make is that nuclear collaboration, not on warheads admittedly, with the Americans well pre-dated Suez and all that. We were already at the time of Suez receiving nuclear weapons from the Americans for carriage on Canberras, and - initially, I think - for the Valiants, which was the first of the three V bomber types. Chair: Yes; any more thoughts on 1958 and thereabouts, Matthew, before we break? Matthew Grant: On Sandys, it is interesting what has just been said about Sandys that how the drafting of the White Paper was in many ways decided to try and cover up these cuts, and the strategic justification very much dealt with that, for example, there is a very famous phrase in Sandys about "They have no adequate defence against hydrogen bombs". However the first draft stated "British fighters", saying "There is no adequate defence against hydrogen bombs and British fighters, and that is why we are cutting the fighter force", but that was cut because people worried about criticism of the Government in asking "Why are you cutting fighters now we are allowing Soviet bombers through?". By getting rid of that line it made it look as though the Government was admitting that there was absolutely no defence on any scheme from hydrogen bombs, and Britain would be completely destroyed. Sandys is really what gave the impetus to CND being formed the next year, and it is that realisation that all Britain's defence eggs were in the nuclear basket as it were, and historians of CND now say that is what woke people up to the threat and why CND came into being. Catherine Haddon: I have two particular points. Firstly, going back to Suez, what some people have been suggesting is that these contacts - as with many other aspects of the UK/US relationship - they carried on regardless. Suez did not have that kind of impact upon them. The other thing in terms of looking at the 1958 Agreement, one has to look through the entirety of Eisenhower's approach towards the British, because he does come in in 1953 wanting to improve things to a degree, and there is some discussion in the US about whether or not McMahon had been the right thing to do. Obviously there are disagreements within the American world itself about whether they should approach the British, and all the spy scandals which is another whole story.
Briefly going on to 1958 and the thing that we have not touched upon and which brings us nicely into the second half of all this stuff, is the impact of Sputnik. The '58 Agreement and some of the goings-on had preceded all of this, and you can certainly see from correspondence between Macmillan and Eisenhower that Macmillan takes Sputnik and runs with it, saying to Eisenhower "Look, this proves that we must work together, they can get ahead of us". He almost throws the missile gap theory right down Eisenhower's throat, and I think that is a fascinating aspect. Chair: Good, thank you Catherine. That brings us neatly to supper time, and after supper we will keep to time in good order, 8.15 reassemble here. We will start with Skybolt, Skybolt cancellation and into the great Polaris story. Thank you. End of Session One
Proceed to SESSION TWO |
