Nuclear Weapons Versus Conventional Forces

Abstract

Britain’s determination to maintain a ‘special relationship’ with the United States for most of the period since 1945 has been closely tied to the determination of both Labour and Conservative governments to become, and then remain, a nuclear power. As Chapter 3 has shown, the Attlee government in 1945 was reluctant to accept an American monopoly of nuclear weapons and decided in 1947 to produce a nuclear capability, partly to facilitate British independence, and partly to encourage the restoration of interdependence with the United States at some point in the future. This latter objective having been achieved in 1958, independence and interdependence have remained important themes in British nuclear policy ever since. From the late 1950s on, Britain has sought to maintain a sophisticated nuclear capability under national control through reliance on American technology. At the same time, however, successive governments have attempted to retain a spectrum of balanced, well-trained and well-equipped conventional forces in order to perform a wide range of alliance and national tasks which could not be met with nuclear weapons alone. Given the economic constraints on the defence budget and the effects of defence inflation (which has consistently outrun ‘ordinary’ inflation), the result has been a continuing struggle over whether to give priority to nuclear or conventional forces.