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

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development in 1956: the English Electric P.1, the prototype of which

had ﬂown two years earlier and which was due to enter service with the

RAF in 1959, and which eventually did so in 1961; and the Saunders-

Roe P.177, which had not yet ﬂown, but which had a novel design

incorporating a rocket as well as a jet engine and which was intended to

fulﬁl RAF and Admiralty requirements for a high-altitude interceptor in

1960. The development of the P.177 was subject to strict cash limits

because the Treasury would not approve an increase until ministers had

completed reviewing the aircraft programme. The RAF dropped the

P.177 as a result of the 1957 Defence White Paper but the First Sea

Lord, Mountbatten, argued that if the P.177 was cut from the navy’s

programme the ﬂeet would be in the ‘ridiculous position’ of being

unable to defend itself against the up-to-date aircraft that the Soviet

Union could be expected to supply to countries with which Britain

might be engaged in a limited war. Nevertheless, Sand ys decided in

October 1957 that a new naval ﬁghter could not be afforded and, once it

became apparent that West German interest in the P.177 would not

lead to an order, the project was cancelled.

There were also two projects for night and all-weather ﬁghters: a new

variant of the Javelin which, being subsonic, was considered to be of

limited value and likely to be subject to delay, and was consequently

dropped; and a design for Operational Requirement (OR) 329, which

was still on the drawing board. A gap was anticipated between the

existing Javelin becoming obsolescent and OR 329 becoming opera-

tional, and consideration was given to ordering a Canadian supersonic

aircraft, the CF-105. Nigel Birch, the secretary of state for air, thought

in March 1956 that such a step would ‘have a most salut ary effect on the

British aircraft industry’, besides reducing the research and development

budget.

It was assumed that the CF-105 would have to be ‘anglic ised’

by being given British rather than American engines and avionics, and

the Ministry of Supply considered that the British aircraft industry could

not cope with both the CF-105 and OR 329. In the event neither project

survived the defence policy review. Surface-to-air (SAM) guided mis-

siles were under development and the RAF’s Bloodhound was due to

Minister of Defence to Minister of Supply, 17 Oct. 1957, DSND 6/6, and Sandys to

Prime Minister, 14 Nov. 1957, DSND 6/7, Churchill College, Cambridge; unsigned

copy of letter from Mountbatten to Sir Frederick Brundrett, Mountbatten papers (MB)

1/I106, Hartley Library, Southampton University. The story of the project can be

followed in the Treasury’s ﬁle on ‘Aircraft research controls: Saunders-Roe P.177’, T

225/646, TNA.

Birch to Walter Monckton (minister of defence), 20 Mar. 1956, DEFE 7/1128, TNA.

Information about aircraft projects drawn from same ﬁle. For the Defence Committee

decision, see minutes of meeting on 2 Oct. 1956, CAB 131/17, TNA.

The hydrogen bomb, the economy and decolonisation 285

enter production in 1957, but the Air Ministry did not expect the se new

weapons to ‘contribute signiﬁcantly’ to the air defence of the United

Kingdom until 1965 and argued that manned ﬁghters would still be

required after that date.

Nevertheless, Sandys’ Defence White Paper

announced in April 1957 that missiles would repla ce manned ﬁghters in

due course, and that all ﬁghter projects apart from the P.1 would cease.

A much reduced Fighter Command was given the restricted task of

protecting the bomber bases of the nuclear deterrent.

The debate about the role of ﬁghters continued through 1957–8. The

Air Staff emphasised the limited operational effectiveness of the

Bloodhound SAM, and pointed out that even more advanced missiles

would lack the range to deal with stand-off aircraft launching ﬂying

bombs from off shore or jamming radar and other el ectronics in the air

defence system. Sandys sought advice from Brundrett, the chief scientist

at the Ministry of Defence, and was told there was no hope of ﬁghters

preventing devastation by a determined enemy armed with hydrogen

bombs. Brundrett believed that no Soviet attack on the United King-

dom would occ ur until the Russians were in a position to launch a

simultaneous attack on the United States, with 1962 being the best

estimate. By 1963, he thought, it should be possible to deploy guided

SAMs that would be more efﬁcient than any ﬁghters , and he recom-

mended that Fighter Command, which cost £80 million a year, not

including research and development, should be scrapped, with some of

the resources saved being used to develop an efﬁcient system based on

missiles. The CAS, Sir Dermot Boyle, argued for a ﬁghter force of 280

aircraft to guard against a surprise, pre-emptive attack on the deterrent,

as well as against stand-off aircraft, and to provide a strategic reserve for

overseas operations. Sandys referred the matter to the chairman of the

Chiefs of Staff Committee, who happened to be an airman, Marshal of

the Royal Air Force Sir William Dickson. Dickson discounted the

danger of surprise attac k, but accepted the CAS’s other arguments and

advised that it would be possible, on military grounds, to defend a

reduction to 168 aircraft as soon as an effective missile system was in

place.

Sandys had been keen to disband all ﬁghter squadrons in the

United Kingdom that were not required for operational training and

‘The CF-105 and P.177 in the air defence of the United Kingdom’, 5 Apr. 1956, DEFE

7/1128, TNA.

Cmnd 124, paras. 17, 62.

‘The air defence of the United Kingdom’, n.d., but position in ﬁle indicates Sep. 1957;

Brundrett to Sandys, ‘Air defence – to be or not to be’, 25 Sep. 1957; Dickson to

Sandys, ‘Retention of ﬁghters for defence of the deterrent’, 24 Nov. 1958, DEFE 7/

970, TNA.

Arms, economics and British strategy286

backing for overseas ﬁghter squadrons. However, Macmillan found the

Secretary of State for Air, George Ward, and the CAS ‘in a very excited,

resigning mood’ at the Defence Committee on 23 December 1957 and

it was agreed on the 31st that manned ﬁghters must for the present be

retained in the United Kingdom for defensive purposes.

The P.1 was a successful interceptor but when Healey became min-

ister of defence in 1964 he found overseas forces still relying on the

obsolescent Hunter as a tactical ﬁghter-bomber. On Air Staff advice, he

ordered the American McDonnell Phantom, a land-based or shipboard

aircraft capable of both the interceptor and strike roles. Despite the

prognostications of the 1957 White Paper and Brundrett’s ad vice, no

major air power relied completely on SAMs, partly because missile

systems can be evaded by low-ﬂying or stand-off aircraft, and partly

because the ﬁghter has ad ditional air-superiority and tactical support

roles. Moreover, from the late 1950s manned ﬁghter aircraft were armed

with air-to-air guided missiles and provided a more ﬂexible defence

system than SAMs, which were analogous with anti-aircraft guns in their

limited mobility. Although SAMs became an essential part of an air

defence system, air forces comparable in size to the RAF were largely

equipped with ﬁghters or ﬁghter-bombers, and the RAF’s balance of

bombers to ﬁghters was anomalous even in comparis on with the

superpowers.

The notion that thermonuclear weapons would provide a cheap, long-

term deterrent was put forward by the Air Defence Sub-Committee in

July 1954: once both sides had sufﬁcient nuclear weapons to annihilate

the other, there woul d be no need to build more.

While this argument

was true of thermonuclear warheads, it was not true of the delivery

systems ava ilable in the 1950s. Aircraft were vulnerable to interception,

and land-based missiles to a pre-emptive strike, unless placed in

underground silos. Deterrence based on fear of mutual destruction

depended on the development of an invulnerable delivery system, and

the technical problems of maintaining the credibility of the deterrent

proved to be a continuing strain on research and development resources.

Development of medium bombers to carry nuclear bombs was delayed

by a shortage of scientiﬁc personnel, and this problem was made worse

by the decision to produce two deﬁnitive types: the Avro Vulcan and the

Handley Page Victor, which entered service in 1957 and 1958 respec-

tively, in addition to the interim Vickers Valiant in 1955 (all three being

Sandys to Secretary of State for Air, 26 Nov. 1957, DSND 6/7, and Sandys to

Prime Minister, 28 Apr. 1958, DSND 6/12, Churchill College, Cambridge; Harold

Macmillan diary, 23 Dec. 1957, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence, p. 189.

The hydrogen bomb, the economy and decolonisation 287

known collectively as V-bombers). The Select Committee on the

Estimates enquiring in 1956 into the supply of military aircraft was

persuaded by witn esses from the Air Ministry and the Ministry of

Defence, and the head of Handley Page, that the decision to develop the

Vulcan and Victor to the same operational requirement was justiﬁed by

the need to ensure that the best design was available for what was, after all,

the most importan t aspect of defence policy.

However, this argument

overlooked the insurance provided by the Valiant, which overlapped in its

period of service with the Vulcan and the Victor, and which was broadly as

satisfactory as the Mark I versions of these aircraft until it developed metal

fatigue problems in 1964. The Select Committee also neglected the

problem of obsolescence. With hindsight, one can see that it might have

been better to employ scarce research and development resources on the

problem of extending the effectiveness of the deterrent in the 1960s rather

than in producing two medium bombers to the same speciﬁcation.

In the mid-1950s it was reasonable to assume that a medium bomber,

equipped with radio countermeasures, and ﬂying just below the speed of

sound, could evade interception, especially given the vast air space that

the Soviet air force had to defend. However, thought was being given as

early as 1955 to how to extend the V-bombers’ operational effectiveness

against improvements that could be expected in Soviet air defences by

1960.

It was proposed to replace free-falling bombs with a rocket-

powered, guided bomb with a range of a hundred miles. A development

contract for this weapon, Blue Steel, was placed in March 1956 but

there were delays, partly because the main contractor, A. V. Roe, had no

previous experience of designing and manufacturing missiles. Even after

Blue Steel was accepted into service in December 1962 there were

doubts about its effectiveness. By 1962 Soviet air defences had

improved so much that the Mark 2 V-bombers, which had entered

service in 1960–1, would ﬁnd it difﬁcult to penetrate to within a hun-

dred miles of many of their targets. Moreover, the best way in which to

protect the deterrent from a pre-emptive attack by Soviet bombers or

long-range rockets was for the V-bombers to take off within minutes of a

warning that such an attack was coming, but Blue Steel, with its liquid-

fuelled rocket engine and elaborat e guidance system, was much harder

to maintain in a state of readiness than a free-falling bomb.

The idea of supplementing the V-bombers with surface-to-surface

ballistic missiles with a range of 1,000 miles had led in 1955 to an

Select Committee on the Estimates, The Supply of Military Aircraft, PP 1956–57, v. 351,

paras. 46–52.

Much of what follows is based on Wynn, RAF Nuclear Deterrent.

Arms, economics and British strategy288

operational requirement for what became the Blue Streak IRBM. Blue

Streak was similar to the American Thor missiles. However, whereas Tho r

was stationed above ground, Blue Streak was to be deployed in under-

ground sites. Inevitably a missile system operating from ﬁxed sites lacked

the ﬂexibility of manned bombers, and the Air Ministry did not anticipate

dispensing with the latter. In July 1957 Blue Streak was regarded in the Air

Ministry as the most important military project in the country, but by mid-

1958, in the light of the Anglo-American Thor agreement, questions were

being asked in the inter-service Defe nce Board about whether it would be

cheaper to obtain Thor without political restrictions, and to use research

and developme nt resources thereby released from the Blue Streak project

to collaborate with the Americans on a Polaris-type, soli d-fuel rocket.

Like Thor, Blue Streak used a liquid propellant and took longer to prepare

for take-off (increasing its vulnerability to a pre-emptive strike) than a

solid-fuel rocket would do. In September 1958 the Minister of Supply was

asked by the Cabinet’s Defence Committee to arrange for work on Blue

Streak to be unobtrusively retarded.

In mid-1959 the Minister of Defence, Sandys, on the advice of his

permanent secretary, Powell, established an independent British

Nuclear Deterrent Study Group, with representatives of the three ser-

vices, the Foreign Ofﬁce and the Treasury, under Powell’s chairman-

ship. The group compared Blue Streak with two American ballistic

missiles, the submarine-launched Polaris and the air-launched Skybolt.

Rising estimates for the costs of research and development and of

underground silos hardened the Treasury’s opposition to Blue Streak,

and the Chiefs of Staff were in favour of a mobile system. Once Presi-

dent Eisenhower had indicated to Macmillan in March 1960 that

Skybolt would be available on satisfactory terms, the Defence Com-

mittee took the decision to cancel Blue Streak as a weapons system. The

vulnerable Thors were taken out of service by the end of 1963.

The long-term viability of the V-bomber force depended upon Amer-

ican willingness to continue with the development of Skybolt because the

Hound Dog stand-off cruise-type missile, which was currently in USAF

service with Boeing B-52 heavy bombers, was too big for British medium

bombers, and the British cancelled development of a longer-range version

of the Blue Steel powered bomb. However, as early as October 1960 the

Chief Scientiﬁc Adviser at the Ministry of Defence, now Sir Solly

Zuckerman, was expressing fears about the future of the Skybolt

programme. The Minister of Defence, Watkinson, asked Mountbatten,

as CDS, for advice on the relative merits of Polaris and a British powered-

bomb project, Pandora, which could be launched by a supersonic bomber

being developed for the RAF, the TSR-2. Mountbatten said he could not

The hydrogen bomb, the economy and decolonisation 289

see how the government could gamble again on a weapons system that

had yet to leave the drawing board and he strongly recommended that the

dollars that the Treasury had earmarked for Skybolt should be used to

purchase Polaris should Skybolt fail. Polaris, he pointed out, would

remain a viable deterrent for twenty or thirty years as there was no pro-

spect of a breakthrough in anti-submarine warfare to counter its second-

strike capability.

When told by President John F. Kennedy at the

Nassau conference in December 1962 of the Pentagon decision to cancel

Skybolt, Macmillan insisted that Polaris be made available instead.

However, there remained the problem of how to stretch out the effec-

tiveness of the V-bombers, as British Polaris submarines could not be

operational before 1968 or 1969. The Air Staff decided that from 1965

V-bombers would have to ﬂy low below enemy radar, using modiﬁed

Blue Steel missiles, although both bombers and missiles had been

designed originally to operate at high altitudes. In the event, successful

low-level ﬁrings of Blue Steel were not achieved until 1967, only two

years before the V-bomber deterrent was replaced by Polaris.

The TSR-2 was planned to replace the Canberra light bomber from

1965. Although explicitly not intended to replace the V-bomber, the

TSR-2 was designed to be capable of long-range penetration of enemy

territory, as well as of a short-range strike/reconnaissance role, and, like

the Canberra, it would have nuclear capability. The TSR-2 was a very

advanced aircraft and so expensive as to be an obvi ous target for the

Treasury. Estimates of the research and development costs rose from

about £90 million in September 1960 to between £175 million and

£200 million in May 1963, and to between £240 million and £260

million twelve months later. When Healey became defence minister in

October 1964, he discovered that TSR-2, which had begun its ﬂight

trials only the previous month, required at least three years’ more

development before it could be operational. He persuaded the Air Staff

to forgo TSR-2 by promising to purchase the contemporary American

F-111 tactical strike aircraft in its place, but pressure to reduce defence

expenditure in the wake of sterling devaluation led to the cancellation

of the F-111 order in 1968.

The RAF continued to operate the

obsolescent Canberra into the 1980s.

Harold Watkinson to CDS, 31 Oct. 1960; Mountbatten to Zuckerman, 1 Nov. 1960,

and ‘Record of conversation between the Minister and the CDS on 15 November

1960’, MB 1/J311, Hartley Library, Southampton University.

Healey, Time of My Life, p. 273; Sean Straw and John W. Young, ‘The Wilson

government and the demise of TSR-2, October 1964–April 1965’, Journal of Strategic

Studies, 20 (1997), no. 4, 18–44; Wynn, RAF Nuclear Deterrent, pp. 501, 504, 523–43.

Arms, economics and British strategy290

There were other examples of cancelled projects and of the RAF and

FAA having to rely upon obsolescent aircraft. Despite growing emphasis

on air mobility for the army as an alternative to reliance on ﬁxed bases

abroad, the RAF lack ed a satisfactory long-range transport aircraft until

Healey bought the American Lockheed Hercules ‘off the shelf’ in 1965

at a third of the unit cost of the British HS-681 project. For maritime

reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare the RAF continued to use

the Avro Shackleton, a piston-engined descendant of the Lancaster

dating from the 1940s, which only began to be replaced by the Hawker

Siddeley Nimrod, a development of the Comet airliner, in October

1969. The cancellation of the P.177 in 1957 left the FAA relying on the

subsonic Sea Vixen all-weather ﬁghter in the late 1960s, by which time

the Soviet Union had supers onic strike aircraft in service. The P.1154

supersonic vertical-take-off-and-land ing (VTOL) ﬁghter project was

cancelled in 1965 and replaced by the conventional American Phantom,

but the latter’s entry into service was delayed by the decision to ﬁt it with

a British eng ine. The FAA did receive a new shipboard strike aircraft in

1962, the Blackburn NA-39 Buccaneer. Designed in 1954 and ﬁrst

ﬂown in prototype form in 1958, the Buccaneer was subsonic and relied

upon ﬂying low to evade radar detection. Mountbatten tried to persuade

the RAF to adopt the Buccaneer instead of the more advanced,

but much more expensive, TSR-2, but the Air Staff believed that the

Buccaneer did not offer a sufﬁcient improvement on the Canberra.

Naval weapons

The Buccaneer, with its capacity to carry nuclear weapons, was central

to the Admiralty’s vision of the aircraft carrier as the modern equivalent

of the capital ship. In a remarkable paper, dated 2 Ma rch 1954, the

Admiralty set out its views on expected trends in naval weapons down to

the end of 1965.

The news of the American hydrogen-bomb tests

came too late to inﬂuence the paper, which, however, assumed that

atomic weapons would be plentiful; that the importance of air attack

would increase; but that long-range detection of submarines and tor-

pedo countermeasures would reduce the underwater threat to surface

ships. It was predicted that by the 1960s carrier-borne aircraft would

carry nuclear weapons and would contribute to the strategic air offen-

sive; aircraft and 200-mile-range anti-ship missiles would have begun to

Healey, Time of My Life, p. 272; Wynn, RAF Nuclear Deterrent, pp. 505–14; Ziegler,

Mountbatten, pp. 553, 586–8.

‘The Navy of the future’, 2 Mar. 1954, ADM 205/102, TNA.

The hydrogen bomb, the economy and decolonisation 291

replace guns as offens ive weapo ns; and new light ﬂeet carriers would

carry VTOL ﬁghters to supplement ship-borne anti-aircraft missiles and

to attack enemy airﬁelds. It was expected that the number of aircraft

carriers in commission would increase from the current total of six to

nine in 1965: seven able to operate all naval aircraft, and two light ﬂeet

carriers for VTOL aircraft, with two more light ﬂeet carriers building. In

the event, there were only seven aircraft carriers in 1965, of which two

were commando carriers, equipped with helicopters only, and VTOL

aircraft with ﬁxed wings had yet to enter service.

In line with the navy’s long-standing preference for offensive rather

than defensive measures against submarines, the pap er predicted that

the importance of convoy escort would decline over the next decade.

Instead, the emphasis would be on the interce ption of enemy sub-

marines by offensive patrols by surface vessels or anti-submarine sub-

marines, and on air and missile attacks on enemy submarine bases.

There was little in this vision for the traditional battleship, or even

cruiser. It was expected that the total of these big-gun vessels, including

those in reserve, would be reduced from twenty-eight in 1954 to seven

in 1965. In the event there were no battleships and only ﬁve cruisers in

1965. The numbers of destroyers and escort vessels were also expected

to fall, from a total of 257 in 1954 to between 160 and 185, including a

new class of ﬂeet and convoy air-control and air-warning ships. In the

event, there were only ninety destroyers and frigates in 1965. The one

category of ship that the 1954 paper predicted would increase markedly

in numbers was coastal anti-mine vessels, but, as will be noted below,

the Admiralty had to sacriﬁce this planned increase for ﬁnancial reasons,

and numbers fell from 214 in 1954 to 134 in 1965. It was expected,

rightly, that ship-bo rne helicopters would come into service by the

1960s for both anti-submari ne and anti-mine work.

In a particularly prophetic passage, the paper noted that the deploy-

ment of nuclear weapons at sea would present the Soviets with harder

targets than vulnerable bases in the United Kingdom, and put forward

‘the possibility of the development of ship-launched ballistic rockets of

considerable range which will carry atomic warheads and land accu-

rately’. The se rockets might be launched by surface ships or subma rines

but, ‘if the launching ship were submersible, her vulnerability to enemy

attack would be reduced’. Nuclear-powered submarines might be

operational by 1965. In presenting this vision of what the Polaris system

was to achieve, the Admiralty was careful not to trespass too much on

Air Ministry preser ves. It was noted that seaborne ballistic missiles

might have a range of 1,000 miles or less, and that ‘the strategic air

offensive will thus still primarily be conducted by aircraft’.

Arms, economics and British strategy292

Aircraft carriers were large, expensive ships, and the cost of the FAA,

£70 million in 1954, was of the same order as Fighter Command (£80

million in 1957). Unsurprisingly, both carriers and the FAA were the

targets of economisers in Whitehall. In 1954 the Swinton Committee,

which had been set up by Chu rchill to scrutinise the defence budget in

the light of the advent of the hydrogen bomb, recommended that air-

craft carriers be manned and equipped for an escort role only, and

suggested an investigation into the future strategic role of the FAA and

longer-term plans for the development of new types of naval aircraft.

The Admiralty riposte was that on ly heavy ﬂeet carriers, with their full

complement of early-warning, anti-submarine, ﬁghter and strike air-

craft, could counter the threat to shipping from the Soviet surface ﬂeet.

The NA-39, the future Buccaneer, with its proposed 800-mi le range for

high-level anti-ship attacks and 400-mile range for low-level attacks on

land targets, was ideal for both a major war and a limited war. It fell to

Macmillan, who became minister of defence in October, to decide

whether to support the carriers, and he did so, after the Admiralty had

conceded economies by cutting its mineswe eper programme.

Never-

theless, the growing size of naval aircraft and the need to ﬁt SAM sys-

tems meant that replacement carriers would have to be larger and more

expensive than the navy’s existing carriers, and considerable difﬁculties

were encoun tered between 1960 and 1966 in designing vessel s that

could be afforded with the funds likely to be available.

Battleships survived the search for economies for longer than might

have been expected. Perhaps in deference to Churchill’s predilection for

big guns, the Swinton Committee recommended that a reduction in the

number of cruisers in commission from ten to eight be made to allow

Vanguard to have a full crew complement. The Defence Committee

decided in November 1954 that Vanguard should be retained in com-

mission, and a long, active service se ems to have been envisaged because

she was sent for a major reﬁt. However, it was the Admiralty that took

the initiative in recommendin g in August 1955 that she be placed in

reserve. The navy was short of manpower, and ratings with electrical

skills were needed for HMS Girdleness, the ship that was to conduct

trials for the ‘all-important’ Sea Slug SAM system. It would only be

possible to bring Vanguard into commission by trans ferring the crews of

two anti-submarine frigates, and the Admiralty advised against this

See Grove, From Vanguard to Trident, pp. 111–15, for a fuller account of this

bureaucratic battle.

Anthony Gorst, ‘CVA-01: a case study in innovation in Royal Navy aircraft carriers,

1959–66’, in Richard Harding (ed.), The Royal Navy 1930–2000 (London: Frank Cass,

2005), pp. 170–92.

The hydrogen bomb, the economy and decolonisation 293

course. Any sentimental attachment for battleships did not outweigh the

priority given to anti-aircraft and anti-submarine warfare. The Admir-

alty advised the Defence Committee that Vanguard had ‘undoubted’

value against ‘Sverdlov’-class cruisers and would still be available in

reserve for this role. The future of battleships came up again at the

Defence Committee in March 1956, when it was decided that the four

‘King George V’-class battleships would be kept in extended reserve,

but tha t three of them would have to be scrapped in a few years and only

one would be preserved for longer by being ‘cocooned’.

It was only

after the advent of Sandys as minister of defence in 1957 that the bat-

tleships succumbed to budgetary restrictions. The King George V and its

sister ships were scrapped in 1957–8, and Vanguard followed in 1960.

The French navy took the same view about the cost-effectiveness of

battleships: its last two were paid off in 1959 and 1961 respectively.

With no battleships available, cruisers were the only big-gun vessels

that could be used for ‘showing the ﬂag’ in overseas stations. However,

in discussion in the Defence Committee in November 1955 one m in-

ister (not identiﬁed in the minutes) asked whether modern destroyers

were much less impressive than cruisers for this purpose.

The ‘Dar-

ing’-class destroyers completed in 1952–4 displaced 2,800 tons, about

half the size of a light cruiser of the ‘Dido’ class. The counter-argument

offered by the Admiralty was that cruisers would be indispensable for

launching ship-to-ship guided missiles. Britain had not completed any

cruisers since 1945, but work had been resumed in 1954 on the 9,500-

ton ‘Tiger’ class, using hulls launched in 1944–5. The Admiralty also

wanted four completely new guided-weapons cruisers costing £15

million each. In the event the ‘Tiger’ class, completed in 1959–61, were

the last big-gun ships built for the Royal Navy, armed with 6-inch

automatic weapons, and as early as 1965 work was begun to convert

them to helico pter carriers. The projected 18,000-ton missile cruisers

were too expensive to ﬁnd a place in the naval estimates. As the older

cruisers were scrapped, general-purpose frigate s of 2,300 tons were used

for showing the ﬂag. Considering that Sir John Fisher had thought in

1904 that ocean-going destroyers of about a third of that displac ement

would be adequate for the purpose,

it is hard to see this particular

economy as evidence of decline. Moreover, once the Suez crisis in 1956

had shown the need for a maritime force capable of rapid reaction to

‘Defence policy’, C (54) 329, 3 Nov. 1954, CAB 129/71; Defence Committee minutes,

25 Aug. 1955, CAB 131/16, and 2 Mar. 1956, CAB 131/17, TNA.

Defence Committee minutes, 4 Nov. 1955, CAB 131/16, TNA.

Sir John Fisher, ‘Naval necessities’, 21 Oct. 1904, FISR 8/4, Churchill College,

Cambridge.

Arms, economics and British strategy294