The Impact of Rearmament

Abstract

The last year of Attlee’s administration — from mid-1950 until the Election defeat of 26 October 1951 — was dominated by concerns about the impact of rearmament on the strongly recovering British economy. Prior to the outbreak of the major hostilities across the 38th parallel the revised accumulation strategy appeared to be so successful that the usually cautious Economic Survey provisionally claimed that ‘by the end of 1950 the immediate task of postwar recovery would be complete’.¹ Yet, contrary to this early optimism (and even before the acceleration of the defence programme), many Treasury officials believed that a large-scale revival of munitions production would ‘mean demands on our resources which would render inescapable the abandonment of our efforts at economic recovery under present policies’.² According to this view, Britain could not secure viability by early 1952 and at the same time devote substantial resources to rearmament. Even with considerable reductions in production for export and civil use, rearmament was deemed impossible by many analysts without recourse to large American assistance which would once again for an indefinite timespan ‘mortgage the future’.³