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British Strategy: Inter-Dependence

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NATO, Britain, France and the FRG

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Abstract

The nuclear age began for Britain with the joint US-British-Canadian work that made the Manhattan Project and the development of the first nuclear weapons possible. The 1943 Quebec Agreement between the three states provided not only for technical co-operation but also for the ‘complete interchange of information and ideas’.1 It also pledged the signatories not to use the atom bomb ‘against third parties without each other’s consent’.2

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Notes

  1. Jan Melissen: The Struggle for Nuclear Partnership: Britain, the United States and the Making of an Ambiguous Alliance, 1952–1959 (Groningen: Styx, 1993), p. 13.

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  2. Simon Duke: US defence bases in the United Kingdom: A matter for joint decision? (London: Macmillan for St. Antony’s, 1987), p. 39.

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  3. On British-American military co-operation in this period, see also Alex Danchev: ‘In the back room: Anglo-American defence cooperation, 1945–51’, in Richard Aldrich (ed.): British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–51 (London: Routledge: 1992), pp. 215–35.

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  4. DCER Vol. 16 p. 1488, Note of 2 December 1950. It seems that the bombers deployed to Britain in 1948 during the Berlin crisis, although in principle nuclear-capable, were not fitted with nuclear weapons, see Sheila Kerr: ‘The Secret Hotline to Moscow: Donald Maclean and the Berlin Crisis of 1948’, in Anne Deighton (ed.): Britain and the First Cold War (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 78–81.

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  5. James Eayrs: In Defence of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 247–49.

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  6. Ian Clark and Nicholas Wheeler: The British Origins of Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 139–140.

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  7. COS(45)402(0), quoted in Julian Lewis: Changing Direction: British Military Planning for Post-War Strategic Defence, 1942–1947 (London: The Sherwood Press, 1988), p. 187.

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  8. Annex to COS(45)246th Mtg (1), quoted in Lewis: Changing Direction, p. 201. Cf. also Alan Macmillan: ‘British atomic strategy 1945–52’, in John Baylis and Alan Macmillan (eds): The Foundation of British Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1960, International Politics Research Papers No. 12 (Dept. of International Politics, University College of Wales, 1992), p. 41.

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  9. Cf. Andrew J. Pierre: Nuclear Politics: The British Experience with an Independent Strategic Force, 1939–1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 87 and confirmed by Clark and Wheeler: The British Origins, p. 170.

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  10. See Andrew D. Lambert: ‘The Parameters of British Naval Power 1850–1914: Deterrence and War Fighting’, in Michael Duffy (ed.): Parameters of Naval Power (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1997).

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  11. Uri Bialer: The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1933–1939 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980), p. 48.

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  12. Reference in Freedman, Navias and Wheeler: Independence in Concert: The British Rationale for Possessing Strategic Nuclear Weapons Nuclear History Program Occasional Paper 5 (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, 1989), p. 11.

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  13. Margaret Gowing assisted by Lorna Arnold: Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–1952 Vol. 1 Policy Making (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 184f.

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  14. Cf. Stuart Croft and Phil Williams: ‘The United Kingdom’, in Regina Cowen Carp (ed.): Security with Nuclear Weapons (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 149.

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  15. For a chronology, cf. the Office of the Historian of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Commission (Lorna Arnold): The Development of Atomic Energy 1939–1984 (Bournemouth: The Bourne Press, 1984).

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  16. COS, January 1947 quoted in Alan Macmillan: Britain and Atomic Weapons 1945–1949: The Development of a Deterrence Frame of Mind, International Politics Research Paper No. 9 (Dept. of International Politics, University College of Wales, 1991), p. 11.

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  17. Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland: The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945 (London: HMSO, 1961), pp. 63 f., 284–311.

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  19. Full text edited by Alan Macmillan & John Baylis: A reassessment of the British Global Strategy Paper of 1952, International Politics Research Paper No. 13 (Dept. of International Politics, University College of Wales, 1993), here § 39, on p. 26; this has to be read in the context of the section on ‘Small Atomic Weapons for Tactical Use’, §11 on p. 21;

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  20. see also Sir John Slessor: Strategy for the West (London: Cassell, 1954), p. 60f.

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  21. Martin S. Navias: Nuclear Weapons and British Strategic Planning, 1955–1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 43.

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  22. For example Beatrice Heuser: Western Containment Policies in the Cold War (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 134–7.

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  23. Navias: Nuclear Weapons, pp. 214–29; Jan Melissen: ‘The Thor Saga: Anglo-American Nuclear Relations, US IRBM Development and Deployment in Britain, 1955–1959’, Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 15 No. 2 (June 1992), pp. 172–207, and id.: The Struggle, pp. 63–86.

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  24. Sir John Slessor: ‘British defense policy’, Foreign Affairs Vol. 35 No. 4 (July 1957), p. 551;

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  25. John Baylis and Alan Macmillan: ‘The British Global Strategy Paper of 1952’, The Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 16 No. 2 (June 1993), pp. 219–20.

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  26. Ian Clark: Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship: Britain’s Deterrent and America, 1957–1962 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 129–35;

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  27. see also John Baylis: Ambiguity and Deterrence: British Nuclear Strategy 1945–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

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  28. Peter Malone: The British Nuclear Deterrent (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 113; John Roper: ‘The British nuclear deterrent and new developments in ballistic-missile defence’, The World Today (May 1985), pp. 92–5.

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  29. P.M.S. Blackett: Atomic Weapons and East-West Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P, 1956), p. 9–11.

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  30. Sir Anthony Buzzard, Sir John Slessor and Richard Loewenthal: ‘Massive retaliation or graduated deterrence?’, International Affairs Vol. 32 No. 2 (1956), p. 148.

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  31. The — (false) — story that Hitler was planning an all-out air attack on London for 21 February 1939 as a pre-emptive strike against Britain was a crucial factor in moving the British Government from appeasement to containment of Hitler in early 1939, see Donald Cameron Watt: How War Came: The immediate origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1989), p. 101 f.

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  32. Hugh Gaitskell: ‘Disengagement: Why? How?’, Foreign Affairs Vol. 36 No. 4 (July 1958), p. 542.

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  33. CAB 131/25, D(61)23, ‘UK views on NATO Strategy and Nuclear Weapons’, Memorandum by the Minister of Defence, 1 May 1961, p. 3. Cf. Rear Admiral Sir Anthony Buzzard: ‘The H-bomb: Massive retaliation or graduated deterrence?’, International Affairs Vol. 32 No. 2 (April 1956), pp. 148–58.

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  34. HMG: ‘Statement on the Defence Estimates 1968’, Cmnd. 3540 (London: HMSO, February 1968), § 8 in advocating ‘extending the conventional phase of hostilities, should war break out’, reflects a temporary acceptance by the United Kingdom of the US preferences. But Healey otherwise expressed his dislike of the emphasis on conventional defence, cf. David N. Schwartz: NATO’s Nuclear Dilemmas (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1983), p. 184f.

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  35. His own explanation of his temporary support for more conventional forces is counter-chronological, cf. Denis Healey: The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989, this edition: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 309.

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  36. J. Michael Legge: Theater Nuclear Weapons and the NATO Strategy of Flexible Response, RAND Paper R-2964-FF (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, April 1983), p. 70ff;

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  38. Susanne Peters: The Germans and the INF Missiles (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1990), p. 162f; see pp. 54–7 above.

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  39. Lawrence Freedman: Britain and Nuclear Weapons (London: Macmillan for the RIIA, 1980), pp. 28–29.

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  40. Cf. also Christoph Bluth: Britain, Germany and Western Nuclear Strategy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 179–200.

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  41. As Michael Edwardes suggested in 1967: ‘India, Pakistan and nuclear weapons’, International Affairs Vol. 43 No. 4 (October 1967), p. 663.

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  42. Denis Healey: ‘Perspektiven der sowjetischen Militärpolitik’, Wehrkunde Vol. XVIII No. 3 (March 1969), p. 113; see also ‘On European Defence’, Survival Vol. 11 No. 4 (April 1969), p. 114.

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  43. Two years later, Christopher Irwin spoke of British nuclear capable aircraft still assigned to CENTO: ‘Nuclear aspects of West European Defence Integration’, International Affairs Vol. 47 No. 4 (October 1971), p. 680.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of War Studies, King’s College, London, UK

    Beatrice Heuser (Senior Lecturer)

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© 1997 Beatrice Heuser

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Heuser, B. (1997). British Strategy: Inter-Dependence. In: NATO, Britain, France and the FRG. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377622_3

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