Strategies for Survival

Abstract

On 14 November 1957 Robert Mackie, the International Department chair, together with Kenneth Slack (BCC general secretary) and Alan Keighley (DIA secretary) met to discuss the Council’s October request that the ‘International Department set up a special group from its own membership and from people related to defence policy which would give continuous study to the moral aspects of the disarmament problem and of defence policy in the light of nuclear armament’. Here Mackie entrusted Keighley and Slack with the task of formation. Keighley (who became secretary) and Slack quickly recruited Admiral Buzzard’s friend Alan Booth (London Secretary of the CCIA), the experienced Rev. Dr Norman Goodall (Secretary of the Joint Committee of the IMC and the WCC), and Canon Herbert Waddams (General Secretary of the Church of England’s Council on Foreign Relations) as a staff team.¹ Buzzard’s mission statement had succeeded, as The Times (23 October 1957) averred, in having a ‘stunning effect’ on Council’s attitudes. It was the catalyst that turned the BCC to consider views that appreciated ‘the complexity of the problems facing those concerned with defence’ (DIAM, 10 December 1957). The emergent International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) particularly welcomed the focusing of Christian judgement in this area. From the start Robert Mackie, as chair of the group, keenly felt the need to be mindful of the views of those who thought the BCC had been brought into disrepute by creating a new committee with a remit that put matters of defence before disarmament.