Conclusions

Abstract

The story of Britain’s nuclear-weapons programme is a complex one, and a great deal happened during the six years covered in this study. Some distillation is required before we can address, for example, the motivations behind Britain’s massive effort to achieve and maintain a credible nuclear capability. Several essentially political issues were central to the story: the long quest for a measure of nuclear test limitation; concern over American bases in the UK, reaching a peak during the Holy Loch negotiations; and the twin cancellation crises of Blue Streak in 1960, and Skybolt in 1962. Each of these issues made the achievement of a credible nuclear capability more difficult, and each was solved with American help. The test moratorium of 1958–61, for example, made it impossible in the short term fully to engineer, for weapons use, the advanced British nuclear warhead designs of the Grapple-Z series. British scientists had mastered tritium boosting and the two-stage H-bomb using radiation implosion, but without testing they could take that theoretical knowledge only so far. President Eisenhower was sympathetic enough to modify the US Atomic Energy Act and authorise the July 1958 bilateral agreement to allow Britain to use engineered US warhead designs. American atomic scientists were meanwhile interested and impressed enough by British progress to forge a productive relationship with Aldermaston over the following several years.