Abstract
In 1961, a British official writing about the complex “dual-key” arrangement for the control of U.S. nuclear weapons on British soil struggled to determine the best course of action if trans-Atlantic communications failed during a crisis. “It might be desirable,” he wrote, “to seek an assurance from the president that in the event of such a failure, a suitable United States authority in this country would have the power to release United States weapons and warheads to us.” If no release was forthcoming, “we could get hold of the bomb even if it meant shooting the American officers concerned.”
The amazing thing about the nuclear relationship between Britain and the United States is that these words, and the situation they describe, sound ridiculous. For decades, the British and U.S. governments have trusted each other not only with their nuclear secrets, but with a remarkable degree of control over their nuclear destinies. But as these two books illustrate, the relationship has never been free from tensions or problems.
In Nuclear Rivals, Septimus H. Paul, a history professor at the College of Lake County in Illinois, provides a detailed account of the most difficult period in the relationship, the war years and the immediate post-war period when the United States sought to preserve a monopoly over atomic weapons. Although the book covers some familiar ground— focusing on presidents, prime ministers, and influential government advisers—Paul is the first to quote extensively from both British and American declassified documents, and his book suggests some new interpretations. The book takes a fresh look at the roles played by Gen. Leslie Groves, the wartime head of the Manhattan Project, and President Roosevelt's scientific advisers Van-nevar Bush and James Conant. Paul emphasizes the significance of the treachery of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, British diplomats who spied for the Soviet Union until their defection in 1951 during a crucial stage in talks on atomic cooperation; most other writers have argued that earlier “atom spy” cases, notably that of Klaus Fuchs, had a more serious impact. The author also points out, as few writers have, that the American public and press were solidly against sharing atomic secrets with the British.
Nuclear Rivals highlights the ease with which congressmen and other U.S. officials were able to forestall initiatives to help Britain's atomic programs. “One of the ironies of this drawn-out controversy,” Paul writes, “was that it took place against the backdrop of a close Anglo-American cooperative effort to contain worldwide Soviet expansion.” That situation is reminiscent of the current missile defense controversy: At a time of unprecedented strength, it's easy for a big country to disregard the concerns of its friends.
The book's weakness is its narrow focus. Official policy in Washington may have been to deny atomic assistance to the British, but there were already wider, more informal relationships between the armed forces of the two countries that contradicted this policy. The two air forces were working together on plans for strategic atomic bombing, a fact hardly noted in official documents; in 1948, the U.S. military debriefed British and Canadian military staffs about its strategic air plan; and British scientists continued to work at Los Alamos even after Congress had legislated against atomic cooperation. Paul treats these aspects of the relationship in passing, if at all, and his careful, scholarly account of high-level policy-making suffers as a result.
In contrast, Planning Armageddon by Stephen Twigge and Len Scott, two British nuclear scholars, is chock full of operational detail as well as political debate. The authors fill a significant gap in the literature about Britain's nuclear weapons establishment, and they do it with some style—each chapter begins with a quote from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
Twigge and Scott describe how the British solved command and control problems—not by hardening communications or adopting a launch-on-warning posture, as the United States and the Soviet Union did, but by pre-delegating command authority to the military. The authors also highlight the ambiguity of many aspects of British command and control, describing everything from the constitutional position of the monarch to the custodial arrangements for nuclear warheads and the techniques used to communicate with the prime minister outside London. Other writers, basing their command and control analyses on the U.S. and Soviet programs, have assumed that “young nuclear powers” will try to keep tight civilian control over nuclear weapons. Twigge and Scott's revelations about British command and control raise interesting questions about the stability of new nuclear arsenals in India and Pakistan. But the authors argue that, far from being unstable, British command arrangements were commend-ably workable.
The authors unearthed new documentary evidence in their study of the command and control aspects of the Anglo-American relationship. The Murphy-Dean Agreement of 1958, for example, formalized existing understandings on the use of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Britain—it was to be “a matter for joint decision.” At least one historian has argued that no such agreement existed.
The book also describes the status of British nuclear forces during the Cuban missile crisis. On October 27, 1962, at the height of the crisis, the Royal Air Force went to “Alert Condition 3”—during which the maximum number of aircraft are armed and ready for operation—two hours after the prime minister told the chief of the Air Staff that “he did not wish Bomber Command to be alerted.” President Kennedy was not informed. Few earlier accounts of the crisis have touched on this hidden British dimension.
The “interdependence” of the British and American deterrents during the Cold War has been exaggerated by some writers in the past, and there is no doubt that Britain's contribution was numerically insignificant. But if Twigge and Scott are correct in claiming that U.S. missiles could in practice have been alerted, armed, and fired by British officers— and that Britain relied on U.S. communications to give orders to its nuclear forces in the Far East—a more complex picture of this interdependence emerges.
In addition, Planning Armageddon includes chapters on nato command and control, defense communications, early warning systems, and intelligence. The book will be valuable to students of Britain's nuclear forces and the command and control of nuclear weapons. It is also a must read for anyone interested in once-hidden secrets of the Cold War.
Nuclear Rivals is not as racy, but it will be of interest to students of U.S. nuclear decision-making in the 1940s and the “bureaucratic politics” theory of international relations. Both books reveal much about the Anglo-American nuclear relationship—the closest international friendship of the Cold War, but one that is still a source of surprise for historians.