Peden G.S. Arms, Economics and British Strategy From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

the formation of NATO gave the War Ofﬁce the chance to return to

political as well as strategic arguments in favour of a greater continental

commitment, to encourage the French, and in March 1950 the Defence

Committee agreed to promise reinforcements of two divisions in the

event of war, to add to the two base d in Germany.

There was a need to

review defence policy and global strategy as a whole in the light of

developments since the Chiefs of Staff’s paper in 1947, and a fresh

appreciation was completed in June 1950, just before the outbreak of the

Korean War.

In 1950 the Chiefs of Staff still believed that it would be possible to

develop more effective defences against air attack an d warned that it

would be dangerous for the Western powers to place all their hopes on

‘an easy shortcut to victory via atomic weapons’. Research and devel-

opment, they recommended, should be timed to ensure that NATO

would be ready at the right moment to stand up to Soviet threats.

Britain’s own ﬁrst defence priorities should be (a) the defence of the

United Kingdom as a secure home base; (b) adequate strategic striking

power; (c) a bare minimum of land, air and sea forces for Cold War

purposes; and (d) minimum forces to hold the Egyptian base. The

defence of the United Kingdom depended on an efﬁcient air defence

system, which must be given the highest priority, but also on the defence

of sea communications with North America and Europe, and also on

preventing Soviet forces from occupying the coast of Western Europe, as

it would only be with the greatest difﬁculty that Britain could survive

attacks from there. Priority (a), therefore, included naval and land as

well as air forces. Priority (b), strategic striking power, was now to be

concentrated in the United Kingdom and bombers would be sent to the

Middle East only once Bomber Command had more resources. The

Middle East was not written off, however, and the development of Egypt

as an offensive base was described as a basic requirement of war-time

strategy.

The continuing importance of conventional weapons in NATO

planning was indicated by the decision at a meeting in Lisbon in

February 1952 to adopt the target for the alliance of having ﬁfty divi-

sions ready by the end of the year, with a longer-term goal of ninety-six

by the end of 1960. As already noted, however, the Treasury persuaded

the Cabinet on 29 May 1952 to review Britain’s defence programme

from the point of view of reducing the burden on the economy and the

Defence Committee minutes, 23 Mar. 1950, CAB 131/8, TNA.

‘Defence policy and global strategy’, DO (50) 45, 7 June 1950, CAB 131/9, TNA,

reproduced in DBPO, series 2, vol. IV (1991), pp. 411–31.

The impacts of the atomic bomb and the Cold War 265

balance of payments (see p. 254). The outcome was the 1952 Global

Strategy paper of 17 June. As the Chiefs of Staff explained, the con-

ception of a war and deterrence had changed radically since 1950. It was

now accepted that there would be no effective defence against atomic air

attack in the foreseeable future. The primary deterrent to war must be

the knowledge in the Kremlin that any Soviet aggression would lead to

devastating retaliation by long-range bombers armed with atomic

weapons. The Chiefs of Staff advised that public opinion should be

‘educated to see beyond emotion’ that ‘the great atomic deterrent’ to

war was of ‘vital importance to humanity’. They were, however, con-

cerned that the Soviet Union might begin a war with a declaration that it

would use atomic bombs only in retaliation, in the hope that public

opinion in Europe would restrain the Unite d States. In 1952 the Soviet

Union lacked effective intercontinental bombers, and had no inter-

continental rockets, which doubtless accounts for the Chiefs of Staff’s

conﬁdence that the Americans, with whom ‘the ultimate decision’

would lie, would nevertheless use atomic bombs. Although the atomic

deterrent would, for economic reasons, always be largely an American

responsibility, the Chiefs of Staff believed that Britain should contribute

her own atomic bomber force, because only then could she be sure that

targets necess ary for the defence of the United Kingdom – for example,

enemy air and submarine bases – were attacked. Moreover, inability to

contribute to the only allied offensive in a world war would weaken

British inﬂuence with the United States on American planning and

policy in the Cold War.

Logically such an analysis might have been expected to lead to the

highest priority being given to strategic bombers armed with atomic

bombs, but in June 1952 the ﬁrst British atomic bomb had yet to be

tested, and the medium bombers designed to carry atomic bombs would

not begin to enter service for three to four years. The report did

recommend that the current RAF expansion scheme target of a ﬁrst-line

strength of 882 bombers, of which 730 would be Canberra light bom-

bers and 152 medium bombers, should be revised to something like

420, mainly medium bombers. However, conventional weapons were

not downgraded. The report contained a curious section entitled ‘The

nature of a future war’, which set out a theory of what came to be called

‘broken-backed warfare’ . It was suggested that after an opening phase of

great intensity, lasting only a few weeks, in which both the Soviet Union

and the United Kingd om would suffer terrible damage from atomic

‘Defence policy and global strategy’, D (52) 26, 17 June 1952, CAB 131/12, TNA.

Arms, economics and British strategy266

bombs, there might be a long, intermittent war that would gradually

spread round the world.

Slessor, the CAS, later said that the idea of a

broken-backed phase of a war had been included because otherwise

there would be no case for keeping a large navy; neither he nor the

CIGS, Slim, believed in broken-backed warfare, but they accepted the

need to justify a compromise whereby all three services would be treated

equally in the cuts that the report was intended to identify.

It seems to

have been in this spirit that the CAS agr eed to the listing of the security

of the United Kingdom and its sea communications ahead of the atomic

air offensive in the report’s conclusions. Nevertheless, Richard Moore

has shown that for the navy, at least, the concept of broken-backed

warfare was more than a contrivance to give an appearance of inter-

service agreement. Plans were made for alternatives to the principal

ports that would be subject to nuclear attack, a list of emergency minor

ports being drawn up and m inesweepers and escorts distributed round

the coast to deal with the intense mining and submarine campaign with

which the Soviet navy was expected to attempt to cut British sea com-

munications.

Slessor believed that the basic strat egy of air power must be offensive.

Ball has shown how the CAS developed a counter-bombing strategy

against military targets, like enemy bomber and submarine bases, in

place of earlier plans directed against cities and economic targets, to

protect Bomber Command from pressu res in favour of diverting

resources to other purposes, such as Fighter Comma nd or Coastal

Command, or the army or the navy.

Yet, inconsistently with the

doctrine that there would be no effec tive defence against atomic air

attack, the Global Strategy paper placed a high priorit y on Fighter

Command, although not at the expense of Bomber Command. Fighter

Command was due to undergo a major programme of re-equipment

with swept-wing aircraft as soon as these were available, and the Global

Strategy paper recommended a deferral of the expansion of the ﬁghter

force instead of equipping it with obsolescent types. No immediate

reduction in Fighter Command was offered, although the prospect of

air-to-air guided missiles increasing the efﬁcacy of interceptors was held

out as an ‘ultimate’ means of making savings at the expense of numbers

of ﬁghters (air-to-air guided missiles were not expected to become

Ibid., para. 32.

For Slessor’s account, see Anthony Seldon, Churchill’s Indian Summer: The Conservative

Government 1951–55 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981), p. 335.

Richard Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons (London: Frank Cass, 2001),

pp. 66, 69.

Ball, Bomber in British Strategy, pp. 50–60.

The impacts of the atomic bomb and the Cold War 267

operational until 1956). An immediate economy was suggested of

abandoning modernisation of medium anti-aircraft guns, since these

weapons would ‘in due course’ (later than 1956) be replaced by surface-

to-air guided missiles.

Although only four months had passed since the Lisbon goals had

been adopted by NATO, the Chiefs of Staff were not optimi stic about

continental allies mak ing the political and economic sacriﬁces necessary

to reach the overall target of 96 divisions and 9,000 aircraft. The United

Kingdom had agreed as a planning goal to assign to the Supreme Allied

Commander Europe (SACEUR) by 1955 nine divisions and 1,550

aircraft, quite apart from Fighter Command (currently 650 aircraft),

which would remain under national control. With war seeming less

imminent than in 1950–1, the Chiefs of Staff recommended that the

scale of the defence forces being created should be related to what could

be maintained in the long term, bearing in mind the rapid turnover of

equipment that would be necessary owing to the modern tendency for

armaments to become obsolescent quickly. Research and development

must keep ahead of the Russians. The recent development by the

Americans of smaller atomic bombs for tactical air warfare would

strengthen the defensive against the superior numbers of the Soviet

army, and NATO should not attempt to maintain large ground forces in

addition to a new atomic strategy. Accordingly, NATO should initiate a

reassessment of the forces to be built up for war. In particular, the

British target of 1,550 aircraft for SACEUR should be reduced to a total

of 600 tactical aircraft, thereby accommodating the proposed expansion

of the medium bomber force within a smaller budget. The army,

however, was protected from being required to make a corresponding

reduction in the number of its Regular divisions. The report pointed out

that the Regular Army bore the brunt of the Cold War, both by com-

mitments to NATO and through world-wide action to check Commu-

nist aggression and subversion. Its size should, therefore, remain at the

equivalent of eleven divisions, and economies should largely be at the

expense of the Territorial Army, which was designed to provide rein-

forcements in war-time.

In the summer of 1952 a revised version of the Global Strategy paper

was taken by S lessor to t he United States, where General Bradley, the

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticised what he saw as its likely

deleterious effects on attempts to b uild up NATO’s conventional

forces. Nevertheless, from January 1953 the new Eisenhower admin-

istration, fac ed with pres sures from rising defence expenditure on the

D (52) 26, paras 96, 101, 103–4, CAB 131/12, TNA.

Arms, economics and British strategy268

Federal budget, responded on similar lines to the Global Strategy

paper by developing a doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’, suggesting

some causal connection. The common factor seems to have been

the similarity of budgetary situations, however, and the American

‘New Look’ s trategy of 1953/4 went further than the British Global

Strategy paper of 1952 by rejecting the concept of broken-backed

warfare.

100

Since the Global Strategy paper failed to produce sufﬁcient econo-

mies to satisfy the Treasury, ministers looked for an alternative way of

balancing armed and economic strength. The Radical Review of 1953

was unusual in that the Chiefs of Staff were excluded from ministerial

discussions. Confronted with the cost of preparing for both the Global

Strategy’s short, atomic war, and its long, broken-backed war, ministers

decided that the country could not afford both. At a meeting on 22 June,

attended by Churchill, Cherwell, Butler, Alexander, the three service

ministers and Sandys, it was agreed to accept the suggestion of the last-

named, then minister of supply, that the Chiefs of Staff should be told to

plan on the basis of a short war only. The only forces to be maintained

were those that contributed in peace to Britain’s position as a world

power and which would be relevant to the ﬁrst six weeks of war, during

which time USAF strategic bombers would break the Soviet Union’s

will to ﬁght.

101

The effect of this ‘June Directive’, as it came to be called,

was to remove the facade of agreement bet ween the Chiefs of Staff in the

Global Strategy paper. The First Sea Lord, Sir Rhoderick McGrigor,

continued to ins ist on the necess ity of preparing for a war of more than

six weeks; the new CIGS, Sir John Harding, pointed to the role of the

army in Cold War conﬂicts as well as a major war; and Slessor’s suc-

cessor as CAS, Sir William Dickson, had to defend the proposed size of

the medium bomber force. There was a limit to the extent to which

ministers could override the professional judgement of the Chiefs of

Staff, and the concept of a period of ‘broken-backed’ warfare survived

into the 1954 Defence White Paper.

102

Indeed, the Adm iralty received

powerful backing in the Defence Committee in October 1953 from

Churchill, who was unwilling to see old ships, perhaps especially the

‘King George V’-class battleships, in reserve scrapped, as they would be

100

John Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence: British Nuclear Strategy 1945–1964 (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 153–60; Ian Clark and N. J. Wheeler, The British Origins

of Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 174, 178–82.

101

Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence, p. 165.

102

Statement on Defence 1954 (Cmd 9075), PP 1953–54, xxii. 471–96, para. 13.

The impacts of the atomic bomb and the Cold War 269

useful in what he called ‘the broken-backed warfare that is likely to

succeed the ﬁrst atomic phase of a future war’.

103

Sandys questioned the value of aircraft carriers in 1953, on the grounds

that their functions could be carried out more economically by land-based

aircraft. However, as at the time of the Inskip review in 1937, budgetary

pressures created an alliance between the navy and air force against the

army. In December 1953 Dickson accepted the Admiralty’s argument

that two ﬂeet carriers were a small price to pay for having a say in

American naval strategy. In return, McGrigor told the First Lord of the

Admiralty that Britain needed an effective air force, but that the army

could be greatly reduced, as soon as ‘other arrangements could be made

on the continent of Europe’.

104

The ‘other arrangements’ presumably

included the prospect that the tactical atomic weapons mentioned in the

1952 Global Strategy paper would, when they became available three or

four years hence, make possible reductions in conventional land forces.

On the other hand, the Air Staff, holding out for 240 medium bombers,

was vulnerable to the charge that it did not know how many it needed,

given the refusal of the Americans to divulge which targets were already

covered by the US Strategic Air Command.

105

By the end of the ﬁnancial year 1953/4 Britain still lacked a coherent

global strategy that struck a balance between atomic and conventional

weapons. Another radical review would be required in 1954, and then in

the light of a quantum jump in the power of nuclear weapons owing to

the successful development by the Americans of the hydrogen bomb.

Nevertheless, the prospect of Britain having its own atomic bomb, and

the need to reduce demands on the metal-using industries and the

budget, had created a ﬂux in which new ideas about deterrence could be

developed, with consequences for vested interests in the armed forces

that could only be delayed by bureaucratic politics.

Summary

Notwithstanding her economic difﬁculties, Britain continued to main-

tain a considerable scientiﬁc-military-industrial complex after the war.

The Attlee government committed Britain to a major nuclear research

and development programme, which limited the supply of scientiﬁc and

technical labour available for other projects , including guided missiles.

103

Cabinet Defence Committee minutes, 10 Oct., CAB 131/13, cited in Grove, Vanguard

to Trident, p. 95.

104

First Sea Lord to J. Thomas, 23 Dec. 1953, ADM 205/93, cited in Baylis, Ambiguity

and Deterrence, p. 168. See also Grove, Vanguard to Trident, pp. 93, 98–107.

105

Ball, Bomber in British Strategy, pp. 91–2; Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence, pp. 171–2.

Arms, economics and British strategy270

The British aircraft industry appeared to be backward compared with its

American and Soviet counterparts, but this was mainly because the

expectation that the maximum danger of war lay in the future, about

1957, led to a gap in British development and production of a number

of important weapons systems. The timing of up-to-date strat egic

bombers was linked to the development of the British atomic bomb,

which, althoug h ﬁrst tested in October 1952, would not be ready for

operational use until about 1956. Meanwhile Britain was wholly

dependent on the United States for nuclear deterrence.

The major economic problems were the overhang of debt from the

war, which weakened sterling, and labour shortages, which made it

difﬁcult to compete in export markets. Conscription contributed to the

labour shortage. Rearmament was in direct competition with exports for

the products of the metal-using industries, and the reby adversely

affected the balance of payment s on current account. Britain was able to

spend as much as she did on defence only as a result of American loans

or grants to relieve the shortage of dollars. The Chiefs of Staff recog-

nised that a weakening of Western economies through excessive defence

expenditure would be to the advantage of the Communists, but this

recognition did no t reconcile them to the ﬁnancial ceilings that the

Treasury atte mpted to impose.

The formulation of global strategy was marred by inter-service rival-

ries, but there were real difﬁcu lties with uncertainty in international

relations. Technological developme nt was rapid and unpredictable. The

1952 Global Strategy paper was the ﬁrst to be based on acceptance that

enough atomic bombers would get through to make nuclear deterrence

effective, but still made provision for greater conventional forces than

the Treasury believed were compatible with a sound economy. In

some respects the situation was similar to 1937, when the Treasury’s

doctrine of the fourth arm of defence helped to shape the Inskip

Report. The Radical Review of 1953 pointed the way to greater

economies than the Chiefs of Staff could agree on, and before a global

strategy based on the atomic bomb could be settled, the nature of

nuclear warfare was transformed by the development of American and

Soviet hydrogen bombs.

The impacts of the atomic bomb and the Cold War 271

6 The hydrogen bomb, the economy

and decolonisation, 1954–1969

Introduction

The period covered by this chapter begins with the Churchill government’s

decision in the summer of 1954 to produce a British hydrogen bomb,

and ends with dep endence on the Ame rican Polaris system to deliver

it. The Americans exploded their ﬁrst therm onuclear device on

1 November 1952, less than a month after the ﬁrst British atomic bomb

test, and between 1 March an d 13 May 1954 they carried out a series of

tests showing that they had mastered the techniques of making hydrogen

bombs. A hydrogen bomb falling on a city could kill a million people,

compared with the 50,000 fatalities to be expected from an atomic

bomb. The Russians detonated a thermonuclear device in August 1953

and their ﬁrst true hydrogen bomb in November 1955.

The major

consideration put forward by Churchill in Cabinet for developing a

British hydrogen bomb was the effect it would have on Britain’s inﬂu-

ence in world affairs, and therefore on her ability to preve nt precipitate

action by the United States.

The belie f that Britain should have such

inﬂuence was shared by the Leader of the Opposition. When the gov-

ernment’s decision was belatedly announced in the annual Defence

White Paper in 1955, in terms that left no doubt that Britain would use

the deterrent rather tha n submit to Communism, Attlee remarked that,

in his experience, possession of nuclear weapons did have an effect on

the rulers of other countries.

The advent of the hydrogen bomb led to even more radical changes in

defence policy than those set out in the 1952 Global Strategy paper, but

enhanced nuclear deterrence was not the only factor. John Baylis

has remarked on the extent to which British strategy was driven by

For a full account of these developments, see Lorna Arnold, Britain and the H-Bomb

(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

Cabinet conclusions, 8 July 1954, CAB 128/27, TNA.

Statement on Defence (Cmd 9391), PP 1954–55, x. 475–504; 537 HC Deb., 5s, 1954–55,

c. 2175.

272

economic considerations from the time that Anthony Eden became

prime minister in Apri l 1955.

In June 1956, in a submission to a

Cabinet committee reviewing future policy, the Treasury argued that

successive governments had tried to do too much since the war, with

the result that the bala nce of payments had been weak and sterling

crises frequent. What had been achieved had been possible as a result

of American loans and grants, but these were ending and would have to

be repaid. The Treasury looked for major savings in public expenditure,

including defence, in order to strengthen the balance of payments.

The Treasury’s arguments were powerfully reinforced by experience in

the Suez crisis later in 1956, when the Americans were able to force

the Eden government to stop the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt by

the simple expedient of withholding support for sterling (see pp. 303–4).

The Defence White Paper in April 1957 embodied both nuclear and

economic arguments. On the one hand, scientiﬁc advances had funda-

mentally altered the basis of military planning; on the other, Britain’s

military power and inﬂuence in the world depended ‘ﬁrst and foremost’

on the health of its economy. Consequently, conscription was to be

phased out and the proportion of national income devoted to defence

reduced in order to release labour and resources for the export trades.

The 1957 Whit e Paper made no attempt to reduce Brit ish overseas

commitments, although the Commonwealth had been evolving with

decolonisation. The implications for defence policy of independence for

the African and remaining Asian colonies, which was to occur between

1957 and 1964, had been the subject of Cabinet discussions in 1954. A

two-tier Commonwealth, with the upper tier restricted to countries

capable of making a signiﬁcant contribution to their own defence, was

considered and rejected on the grounds that the other countries would

secede rather than accept second-class membership. In practice it was

already the case that India, Pakistan and Ceylon did not receive as much

information from the United Kingdom on defence matters as Canada,

Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Central African Federa-

tion, and it was anticipated that the existing practice of conﬁning dis-

cussions to countries willing to accept military commitments for mutual

defence would apply to new Commonwealth members.

It was realised

that the Commonwealth would not unite behind Britain in the Cold

War in the same way as the Empire and Commonwealth had done in

Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence, p. 230.

‘The future of the United Kingdom in world affairs’, PR (56) 3, 1 June 1956, and PR

(56) 30, 20 July 1956, CAB 134/1315, TNA.

Defence: Outline of Future Policy (Cmnd 124), PP 1956–57, xxiii. 489.

Cabinet conclusions, 7 Dec. and 22 Dec. 1954, CAB 128/27, TNA.

The hydrogen bomb, the economy and decolonisation 273

two world wars, and that the way ahead lay through British m embership

of regional security pacts: NATO (of which Canada was also a mem-

ber); the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), formed in

1954 with a membership including Australia, New Zealand and Paki-

stan, as well as France, the Philippines, Thailand and the United States;

and the Baghdad Pact, formed in 1955, linking Turkey, Iraq, Iran and

Pakistan, which became the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO)

after Iraq withdrew in 1959. The United States was not a member of

CENTO but took part as an observer and contributed to the interna-

tional staff and budget.

Decolonisation was designed to secure friendly relations with succes-

sor governments. In 1954 Britain had 45,000 troops in Malaya to comba t

the rising by Commun ist guerrillas that had begun in 1948. By the time

Malaya became independent in 1957 the emergency was virtually over

and Britain accepted responsibility for the country’s external defence.

In 1961 the possibility that the self-governing colony of Singapore

might elect a left-wing government hostile to the maintenance of

the British base there led to a scheme to bring Singapore int o a

pro-British Malaysian Federation, incorporating Malaya, Singapore and

the British colonies of Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei. Britain

extended to the new federation the defence agr eement originally made

with Malaya, and when President Sukarno of Indonesia tried to assert

territorial claims in Borneo in December 1962 British and Common-

wealth troops were deployed in small-scale jungle ﬁghting in what was

called the ‘confrontation’ until peace was made in August 1966.

Although British prestige was damaged by the Suez crisis in 1956, there

was no precipitate retreat from the Middle East. Britain had treaties or

other obligations for the protection of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the

Trucial States, and Muscat and Oman, as well as the Aden Protectorate.

A rebellion against the Sultan of Muscat and Oman was suppressed with

British assistance in 1957. An Iraqi threat to Kuwaiti independence in

1961 led to the despatch of British troops and warships to secure

Kuwait’s continued membership of the sterling area and a supply of oil

on favourable terms. The initially close relationship with former African

colonies was brought out by the willingness of the Conservative gov-

ernment in 1964 to respond to the requests of the governments of Kenya

and Uganda to send small forces to deal with civil unrest and military

mutinies, an action approved by the incoming Labour Secretary of State

for Defence, Denis Healey.

As we shall see, it was only with reluctance

that the Labour government of Harold Wilson decided during the

Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 279.

Arms, economics and British strategy274