by James Jinks
Perhaps this was why the Chiefs put a stop to Mountbatten’s plans. When they next met on 6 October, Mountbatten was away overseas in West Africa and although the Acting CDS, General Sir Richard Hull, firmly believed ‘that the Chiefs of Staff should resist any attempt to abolish the British Strategic Nuclear Deterrent’, he thought that they ‘should reconsider their ideas on how best to present their views on the matter’.322 After further discussion, the Chiefs decided to hold back the paper with Mountbatten’s ‘face saving formula’ on converting the SSBNs to hunter-killers ‘for use if required’, as:
it would deploy their complete argument, and this might be premature since the attitude of a Labour administration could not be known for certain until it had gained access to the true facts of the matter. Furthermore, it would be tactless to present an in-coming Labour administration with a bald statement flatly opposing what had been a major plank in their Election platform.323
Instead the Chiefs came up with a new three-stage approach. First, they prepared a factual brief on British nuclear forces for the new Secretary of State. Second, they produced a paper that set out the case for retaining the nuclear deterrent that they would send to the Secretary of State in the event that the new administration advocated abolishing the deterrent. Third, they agreed that if the new Secretary of State refused to forward the second paper on to the Oversea Policy and Defence Committee, or if the Committee rejected it, the Chiefs would ‘exercise their prerogative and forward to the Prime Minister a third paper putting forward all the facts, and deploying all the arguments, some of which would best be kept in reserve for this purpose’.324 Great care was taken when preparing these papers. Paragraphs that were deemed ‘liable to infuriate a Socialist Minister and thereby spoil any good effect there may be from the main arguments’ were removed.325
On 16 October 1964, Labour won the general election with an overall majority of just four seats. Harold Wilson became Prime Minister, Denis Healey the Secretary of State for Defence, and Patrick Gordon Walker the Foreign Secretary. The future of the Polaris programme seemed very uncertain.
‘GO’ OR ‘NO GO’: DECIDING TO CONTINUE326
Wilson’s government was forced to confront serious economic problems during its first weeks in office, including an £800m balance-of-payments deficit, double what had been expected.327 Despite all the political grandstanding of the election campaign, the new government quickly decided to carry on with the Polaris programme. Shortly after the election Healey was informed that it was indeed possible to convert all five Polaris submarines to hunter-killers provided that a decision was taken during the course of the next few months and that ‘there would be no technical difficulties in finishing four boats as at present planned as SSBNs, with the fifth boat becoming an SSKN[SSN]’.328 He was also made aware – almost certainly by the anti-Polaris elements in the Navy – that ‘most of the senior admirals were reluctant to take on the Polaris force within their existing budget at the expense of other ships, and were uncertain whether they could find the additional skilled personnel to operate and service Polaris’.329
According to Healey, all of this was ‘unexpected news’. When he went to deliver it to Wilson and the new Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, they both told him ‘not to let other members of the Cabinet know’ as they ‘wanted to justify continuing the Polaris programme on the grounds that it was “past the point of no return” ’.330 There appears to be a parallel here between Wilson’s ‘past the point of no return’ justification and Mountbatten’s ‘face-saving formula’.331 Mountbatten told the Chiefs on 5 November of his efforts to encourage the government ‘to retain, in some form, our independent nuclear capability’.332 He had written to the new Prime Minister three days after the election, setting out the case for maintaining the deterrent.333 He also claims that he sought ‘an opportunity for private discussion of the matter’ and that ‘after some three hours of closely reasoned argument, Mr. Wilson declared that he was fully convinced of the necessity for Britain to maintain her independent strategic nuclear deterrent’.334
Did Mountbatten continue to privately pursue his ‘face-saving formula’ as he so often did in many other areas of foreign and defence policy, much to the annoyance of many of his colleagues? To do so would not have been out of character. As Zuckerman has noted, ‘When Dickie wanted something to happen, big or small, he would use all his wits, his guile, in whatever way seemed appropriate and get it done’.335 Healey told Wilson and Gordon Walker that when the time came, he would go along with the deception and not reveal the true position.336 Given the uncertainties, he later said, citing the Cuban Missile Crisis and the first Chinese nuclear test on 16 October 1964, ‘we felt, on the whole, it was wise to continue with [Polaris]’.337 He strongly believed that ‘once the United Kingdom had become a nuclear power, it could not turn its back on nuclear power’.338 Wilson always maintained that he ‘kept the Polaris submarine programme because production was beyond the point of no return’.339
Why did Labour keep Polaris specifically? ‘The basic reason was that the deal which Macmillan had got out of Kennedy was a very good one,’ explained Healey. ‘It was a very cheap system for the capability it offered.’340 But cost was not the only factor. ‘The real question was whether it was worth continuing with a programme whose real value lay in the ability to have a handle on the Americans.’341 This mistrust of the Americans and a determination to maintain a measure of British influence in Washington was also driving Wilson’s thinking, as he admitted in 1985:
I didn’t want to be in the position of having to subordinate ourselves to the Americans when they, at a certain point, would say ‘we’re going to use it,’ or something of that kind … We might need to restrain the Americans, if we learnt about new things that could happen of a devastating character.342
There was also the problem of the NATO Multilateral Nuclear Force, or MLF. Labour and the Conservatives had both strongly opposed the MLF since it was first proposed in the late 1950s. Healey regarded it ‘as militarily unnecessary, economically wasteful and politically dangerous’.343 As the Americans showed every sign of being determined to press ahead with nuclear-sharing schemes after the October 1964 election, keeping Polaris gave the government a bargaining tool that it could use to influence discussions about the MLF proposal; it would also help maintain influence in the Alliance and a veto over any possible use of the new force. In the days following the election, the British advanced as an alternative to the MLF the Atlantic Nuclear Force (ANF). The ANF would consist of the British V-bombers (excluding the aircraft that were needed for commitments outside the NATO area), the British Polaris submarines, at least an equal number of United States Polaris submarines (these forces would be ‘nationally manned and not mixed manned’) and some kind of smaller mixed-manned, jointly owned element, in which the non-nuclear powers could participate. France could also sign up if it wished to do so.
Abandoning Polaris would therefore have created more problems than it solved. Wilson knew, as he later admitted, that the deterrent ‘had an emotional appeal to the man in the pub’.344 His real problem was with the Cabinet, which included a number of ministers who were vehemently opposed to nuclear weapons. When the question of continuing was put before the full Cabinet on 26 November, it was so bundled together with the ANF proposals that the majority of ministers endorsed the decision to continue without any objections.345 The ‘face-saving formula’, that construction of two of the submarines ‘was already sufficiently advanced to make it unrealistic to cancel the orders’, worked.346 Even left-wing members of the Cabinet such as Frank Cousins, the Minister of Technology, Anthony Greenwood, the Secretary of State for the Colonies and a founding member of CND, and Barbara Castle, the Minister for Overseas Development, all of whom ‘were noted for their fervent campaigning in past years for unilateral nuclear disarmament’, endorsed the decision.347 The only consistent opposition to keeping Polaris came from George Wigg, the Paymaster General, and Alun Chalfont, the
Minister for Disarmament.348 Others kept their doubts private. Richard Crossman, the Minister of Housing and Local Government, was struck by Wilson and Healey failing to see how retaining Polaris was ‘incompatible with our election pledges because they would claim that our Government was consciously giving up the attempt to have an independent deterrent’.349
To secure the Cabinet’s approval, Wilson proposed reducing the number of Polaris submarines ‘to make it clear that we no longer contemplated the maintenance of an independent nuclear force’.350 He had already convened a special Cabinet committee (MISC 16) on 11 November 1964 – the smallest ever group of Cabinet ministers to discuss nuclear-weapons questions. There, he along with Gordon Walker and Healey all agreed that:
three submarines would represent the minimum force which would be acceptable to us in the event of the dissolution of the NATO Alliance … The provision of three submarines alone would not make it possible to guarantee that there would always be one United Kingdom submarine on station, but since it would be a part of the agreement that an equivalent number of United States submarines would be committed to the force, sufficient coverage would be provided.351
But this went against the advice of the Chiefs of Staff, who argued that while three submarines were militarily sufficient as a contribution to the ANF because they would end up operating alongside an equal contribution of US submarines, such a small fleet would not constitute a viable national force as an insurance against the break-up of NATO, due to the inability to keep one submarine continuously at sea.
The Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir David Luce, advised Healey that it was ‘nearly, but not quite’ possible to keep one submarine on patrol at all times if the size of the fleet was reduced from five submarines to just three. A three-submarine Polaris fleet would have left ‘no margin for unforeseen contingencies’ and put the Navy ‘in a straightjacket without any days, let alone weeks, to spare’. ‘It will not just be accidents which will break the cycle,’ explained Luce, ‘it will be wearing out or dislocation to the machinery from time to time, however good the workmanship and the maintenance.’ He was also concerned about the crews, ‘however good the officers, it will be the very devil to keep up the morale of the men who are doing these very long patrols, unless they are convinced that the job is effective and convincing’.352
Not everyone shared this view. The Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff (ACNS), Sir Michael Pollock, a gunnery officer who would later become Flag Officer Submarines, argued that ‘whether we like it or not’ the Navy was probably going to end up ‘with a three boat Polaris force committed to an ANF’. He did not believe ‘that a three boat force could not provide an independent national deterrent’ and felt that now the Navy was ‘faced with this probability … the proposition deserves re-examination’.353 In his view:
We have allowed ourselves to become mesmerised with the American method of operating these boats in their present function of ‘bastion of the West’: as an independent British force operating nationally after the breakdown of the North Atlantic Alliance there would be no question of them fulfilling this function: all they would be required to do would be to make it clear that the UK could not be trampled on without a price to be paid.354
Pollock argued that it was ‘quite unnecessary to maintain two or even one boat constantly on patrol’ as it was ‘inconceivable that the type of circumstances in which we would require to use this deterrent independently of the Americans could arise without a preliminary period of greatly heightened tension between this country and the USSR’. This, he argued, allowed the UK to ‘disregard the possibility of a pre-emptive strike from a “clear sky” – which is the only justification for the present pattern of operating’.355 He recommended operating a three-boat force ‘on more naval principles’, which would allow ‘at least two’ to be on station within forty-eight hours, ‘which could then maintain a patrol over a period of tension lasting two months – surely a sufficiently long period in which to resolve a crisis of the nature which might have caused them to be sailed initially’.356
This was very much a minority view. The Navy would have found it very difficult to maintain a credible and continuous second-strike capability with only three submarines. Establishing sensible and efficient operating cycles with such a small force would have been very complicated. The efficiency and rapid response required of the Polaris system depended on it being maintained at a state of high readiness on a regular cycle by efficient, highly trained crews. Alternative operating arrangements, based on deploying a submarine or submarines in times of tension, were not attractive and in some cases could have escalated crisis as a potential aggressor might interpret the sailing of a submarine during a crisis as an act of aggression.357
At a major defence meeting on 21 and 22 November 1964 at Chequers, attended by senior ministers concerned with defence issues together with their Permanent Secretaries and the Chiefs, ministers agreed that two submarines were inadequate to achieve ANF objectives and that five ‘was unnecessarily high’.358 There was considerable support for a force of three submarines, as it represented the ‘contribution best calculated to achieve the political objectives in negotiation’ and ‘the maximum saving for the United Kingdom economy’.359 George Brown, First Secretary of State, who was ‘at first inclined to cancel the Polaris programme altogether’, felt that because three submarines:360
would not represent a credible independent deterrent, it would make it apparent that we had abandoned any idea of regaining independent national control at any time in the future and had committed ourselves irrevocably to an international force. While this admittedly did not provide full national insurance should NATO break up, not only did the latter seem most improbable, but even if it were to happen we could not hope to maintain our national security alone, but should be bound to seek the negotiation of alternative alliances.361
Healey disagreed. He favoured ‘the retention of our capability to recover the force to national control, as an insurance against the break-up of the NATO Alliance’.362 He argued that ‘national importance was attached to the maintenance of one submarine always on station’ and that a ‘force of three submarines would not enable us to achieve this and the sense of national purpose would therefore suffer’.363 But he was unable to carry all his colleagues.
By December, it was becoming increasingly difficult to postpone a decision on the size of the Polaris fleet, as the fifth submarine was due to be ordered in January 1965. Vickers was complaining that that ‘uncertainty’ about the government’s intentions towards Polaris was ‘seriously impeding their efforts to recruit and hold labour’.364 Healey pressed Wilson to make a decision.365 On 29 January 1965, the OPDC decided to cancel the fifth submarine. Debate then centred on the fourth. Ministers agreed that the ‘strong financial arguments for reducing the force to three submarines were reinforced by political considerations’ – namely that it would ‘more clearly demonstrate the Government’s policy of not retaining an independent nuclear deterrent’ – and came to the ‘general view that these arguments were outweighed by other political and defence considerations’. Healey argued, successfully this time, that it was by no means certain that the proposals for the ANF would succeed and that the country’s negotiating position would be far stronger with four submarines; a smaller force would also jeopardize a plan to deploy the submarines in the Far East. He also used some of Mackenzie’s earlier operational arguments such as the ‘strain on personnel concerned’ and how ‘seeking to maintain one submarine always on station from a force of three’ would be ‘harmful to morale’. It was the possibility of an incident or accident disabling one of the submarines that had the most impact on the discussion. In summing up, Wilson noted that ‘there was general agreement that the balance of argument was in favour of a force of four submarines, having regard particularly to the weakness of our position if one of a force of three were involved in an accident’.366
The Navy accepted the decision.367 However, Mackenzie
was very disappointed. ‘In my heart,’ he later wrote:
I continued to believe that keeping a fifth submarine in the programme would have been a wiser decision: the additional cost would have been small, and the advantages to all who had to operate and maintain the force would have been immeasurable. I believe the true reason for its cancellation was political, not financial: a sop to the Left Wing of the Labour Party. All that their clamour achieved was to lay an almost intolerable burden on the men, and women, responsible for the efficiency of the deterrent.368