by James Jinks
For all Mrs Thatcher’s sense of purpose and legendary work-rate, the trail from Polaris to Trident took over three years to complete. There were a number of reasons for this. One of the most important was a change of President from the Democrat Jimmy Carter to the Republican Ronald Reagan in January 1981. Carter was, as he had indicated to Callaghan in their beach-hut meeting, willing to provide Trident under the terms of the 1963 Polaris Sales Agreement but wanted Mrs Thatcher to delay completing the deal until he, Carter, had sorted out his difficulties in getting ratification of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II through Congress.83 With the change of presidency, the Reagan administration decided to move to the more sophisticated and powerful D5, causing the question to be reopened in Whitehall. At every stage Mrs Thatcher, to her credit, practised the 1950s Churchill model of nuclear decision making by doing the detailed work in a small Cabinet Committee before taking the final decision to the full Cabinet.84
At the first meeting of MISC 7 in late May 1979 she set the tone and pitch for what was to follow and conducted herself with characteristic briskness. First of all, she summoned a streamlined set of ministers: her deputy, the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw; the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington; and Francis Pym, Defence Secretary. There was no place for her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe. Interestingly – and unusually for Cabinet Committee records – the MISC 7 minutes reveal that these three were her Nuclear Deputies for the purposes of authorizing nuclear retaliation if the UK was under nuclear attack and she was dead or beyond reach. It is plain that Willie Whitelaw was second in the chain as the Cabinet Secretary had already sent him a note on the drills on 18 May. John Hunt, Mrs Thatcher told them, ‘would arrange a briefing for them to explain what was involved. It was important that Ministers themselves took part in exercises to practise nuclear release procedures so that they became familiar with them.’85
Her nuclear ministers had received the Duff–Mason Report, all three sections, as part of their briefing material for the meeting. The minutes contain no hint that she told them about the Callaghan bequest – though it would have been plain that such a substantial document could only have been prepared under the previous Government. Characteristically, Mrs Thatcher opened with no verbal foreplay:
THE PRIME MINISTER said that the starting point for their discussion must be that the Government was fully committed to maintaining an effective strategic deterrent. The question for consideration was what system should be the successor to Polaris: and to enable them to decide this they needed more information about the costs and the other implications of the alternative options.
Once more the Callaghan bequest was apparent in Mrs Thatcher’s preamble:
Much of this information could only be obtained from the Americans and it was proposed that a small team of senior officials should visit Washington. There were good reasons for thinking that President Carter would agree to such a visit.86
The customary choreography of the nuclear question, before 1979 and subsequently, was followed ‘in discussion’ (as Cabinet and Cabinet Committee minutes always put it) when:
it was noted that Trident C4 came out clearly in the officials’ study [Duff–Mason] as the preferred solution. But this would be a very expensive option and we would need to look very carefully at the possibility of going for something cheaper. It was essential therefore that the options should be examined and presented by officials without any implied ministerial backing for the C4 so that all the factors, including cost, could be taken into account when the decision was reached.87
When MISC 7 convened for the second time, on 10 July 1979, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, was included. Perhaps he had been excluded from the first because Mrs Thatcher was not going to appoint him as one of her Nuclear Deputies for retaliation purposes. It would have been odd if he had remained off MISC 7 given that cost – as always – is a potent factor in any nuclear-weapons procurement decision. The MISC 7 meeting on 19 September concluded that the Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile option, championed by David Owen in the previous Government, would not suit British needs. By the time MISC 7 was convened on 5 December 1979 ahead of Mrs Thatcher’s visit to President Carter in Washington, the factors in play surrounding a successor system to Polaris were caught vividly in a briefing prepared by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, for the Prime Minister. The underlinings on the text are the Prime Minister’s, not the Cabinet Secretary’s.
Armstrong’s opening sentence carried a great deal of freight:
BACKGROUND
This is a key decision, which will affect our most important means of defence over the next 40 years and thereby the basis of our international military posture, and will have major implications for the defence budget, and indeed for public expenditure, for at least the next decade.88
In terms of spending, Armstrong reminds Mrs Thatcher that Howe and the Treasury have agreed with Pym and the Ministry of Defence that up to 1983/84 (the planning horizon) the cost of Polaris replacement will come out of the Treasury’s Contingency Reserve rather than the Defence Budget (though the Cabinet did not yet know this, nor did the other members of MISC 7).
The Conservative Government which came into office in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher faced a number of serious economic problems. From the Government’s point of view, in defence terms, the country was trying to do too much, with the certainty of not doing it well enough. Sustaining the entire conventional- and nuclear-weapons programme was projected to need at least £300m a year above NATO aims for a 3 per cent increase in real terms up to 1987/88. The Conservative Government set out to reshape the defence programme to a more sustainable and relevant structure and to assign to the new structure resource levels with sensible headroom to absorb inevitable cost growth and other such pressures.89
Would the cost of Trident after the planning horizon had concluded in 1983/84 fall on MOD (as is the case at the time of writing for the ‘Successor’ programme)? Armstrong’s next paragraph implies that if the Defence Secretary, Francis Pym, succeeded in bringing defence spending under control, the UK’s nuclear-weapons capability would avoid any serious cuts:
MISC 7 cannot resolve that point now [of where the cost will fall] and need not do so, provided that its members are prepared to agree that Polaris replacement is our top defence priority, and in consequence that, if we do not have the resources to sustain all four ‘pillars’ of the Secretary of State for Defence’s strategy, as discussed at OD [the Cabinet’s Oversea and Defence Committee] yesterday, this pillar will be the last to go.90
Armstrong outlined the six decisions ministers were facing, which have a timeless quality for anyone involved with the British bomb from the 1940s onwards:
Do we retain our strategic deterrent?
What should it be capable of doing?
Which weapon should we choose?
Number of boats
Foreign policy factors
Timing of announcement
He reminded Mrs Thatcher that in public she had committed her administration to replacing Polaris and that ‘It was MISC 7’s starting point at its first meeting in May that the Government was fully committed to doing so. But the Chancellor [Geoffrey Howe] was not present at that meeting and the seriousness of the issue is such that you may wish your colleagues to reaffirm that we do wish to stay in what is, for us, a big league …’ The next sentence has been redacted as has the entire following paragraph, which suggests they deal with the detail of what damage a ‘big league’ deterrent should be capable of inflicting. Armstrong backs the opinion of the Defence Secretary, Pym, that the C4 missile topped by MIRVs ‘clearly emerges as the best option, on both military and financial grounds. Details in “the revised Mason Report” [which has not been declassified] show that only this weapon will adequately meet the damage criteria. Cost is relatively low and reliable, because we should be acquiring a weapon which the Americans will be continuing to procure themselves, not one specifically designed for us.�
�91
As we have seen, the Duff–Mason Report (see here) identified four targeting options that would constitute an unacceptable level of damage to the Soviet Union. Assuming the Soviets remained within the limits of the 1972 ABM Treaty, a fleet of five submarines that could maintain two at sea at all times armed with a total of thirty-two Trident C4 missiles was required to meet the damage criteria identified in Option 1 (destruction of the main governmental organs of the Soviet state), while one submarine at sea, from a fleet of four, could meet the damage criteria identified in Option 2 (breakdown-level damage to a number of Soviet cities, including Moscow) and Option 3a (breakdown-level damage to a larger number of cities than in Option 2, but without Moscow or any other city protected by an ABM system) and 3b (grave, but not necessarily breakdown-level, damage to thirty targets without AMB protection).92 The Government was clearly aiming for a Trident force that could meet the criterion set out in Option 1, the targeting of specific sites and facilities within Moscow, such as underground command centres. The importance which the Soviet leadership attached to maintaining their administrative centre unimpaired was shown by its positioning of their ABM system around Moscow and the construction within the city of shelters hardened against nuclear attack for the hierarchy of the Party, the Government and the armed forces and their key staffs; and of alternate bunkered offices for redeployment if sufficient warning time was received, in an area some 600 kilometres from Moscow. Some ninety alternate bunkered offices had been identified, twenty-seven of which were for the major national and military leadership and those responsible for the operational control of the armed forces.93
Robert Armstrong’s section on the size of the Trident force and whether it should consist of four or five submarines is revealing. Five boats would push up the cost from £7bn to £8bn over twenty years and Geoffrey Howe was arguing ‘for the cheaper solution’. But the Cabinet Secretary nonetheless argued for five as:
A five boat force would give us some hedge against accidents; and barring these, it would enable us to have two boats on patrol at all times (your Nuclear Release exercise in October pointed up the disadvantages of only having one boat on patrol). The French are building their sixth ballistic missile submarine.94
In the flurry of memoranda exchanged between the MISC 7 ministers ahead of the December meeting there had been concern from Lord Carrington in the Foreign Office about the developing anti-submarine warfare threat from the Soviet Union. Pym, as the Cabinet Secretary reminds the Prime Minister, had pointed out that, in Armstrong’s words:
a five boat force (with two always on patrol) offers a far better bet against this threat because it is almost inconceivable that the Russians in this timescale will develop a capability to find and sink two submarines simultaneously. The fact is that the fifth boat would double the operationally available strategic deterrent, and diminish its vulnerability by a much greater factor, than two, for relatively modest extra cost.95
Robert Armstrong then addressed the question of the degree of UK dependence on the USA, which was a matter of some concern to the Prime Minister (and which will be covered in greater detail later in the chapter):96
A decision to go for C4 MIRV will keep us totally dependent on United States cooperation over a very long period. As with Polaris, once we have our boats and weapons, we shall have full operational independence in a crisis. But as with Polaris we shall be relying on the Americans not only for initial supply but also for continuing logistic support. If the latter were cut off at any time – and it would be dependent not only on successive Administrations but also successive Congresses – we could not keep going on our own for more than 6–12 months.97
The power of a US President or a US Congress to finish off the UK as a ‘big league’ nuclear-weapons state, almost certainly for ever in both practical and political terms, was clearly laid out. Sir Hermann Bondi, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, 1971–7, made the same point even more tersely when interviewed in 1988:
If the Americans were to tell us at one stage, ‘we will go on for another twelve years but not a day longer’, we can adapt. If the Americans say tomorrow, ‘All we do now for you will stop’, then it won’t be many months before we don’t have a weapon.98
In the intense privacy of his brief for Margaret Thatcher in December 1979, Robert Armstrong did not exhibit steel-clad confidence in the United States as a nuclear provider. ‘We cannot foresee,’ he told her:
how Anglo-United States relations will develop over the next 40 years. It is impossible to be as confident of continuing support for a quarter of a century ahead in 1979 as it was in 1949. But they have not so far either let us down or used our dependence as a means of pressure. In any case, we have no real alternative. Going it alone would be prohibitively expensive. That only leaves co-operation with the Americans or co-operation with the French.99
The French always put in an appearance when the nuclear-weapons question is under discussion in Whitehall, only (so far) to be dismissed as a deterrent partner for a variety of reasons. In late 1979 they were these:
The French. To avoid later recrimination it is important for your colleagues to be clear that they are choosing the American rather than the French alternative and why. In the light of your decision with President Giscard on 19 November our preference will come as no surprise to him. Our basic reason for not choosing the French alternative is that it would almost certainly give us a less effective weapon at greater cost. If we were convinced that we should base our long term decisions on the hypothesis that the American connection was likely to decline, and the French connection to become our predominant international link, then we should arguably go into partnership with the French. Politically and economically it would be a more evenly balanced partnership, but it would seriously worry the Germans, it would pose great problems with the Americans, on whom we remain dependent for keeping Polaris going through the 80s. And is France’s long term reliability inherently greater than the Americans’?100
The Armstrong memorandum underscores the degree to which a nuclear-weapons procurement decision is like no other ministers make, not only because of their awesome power, but also because, given the lifespan of nuclear-weapons systems, nothing (apart from civil nuclear decisions) matches its long-term nature.
Armstrong concluded by pressing C4 MIRV on a five-boat force as the preferred option and the sequence (MISC 7; then full Cabinet) of consulting ministers (he urged, interestingly, that the full Cabinet be told Mrs Thatcher was approaching President Carter ‘but in the interests of security not of the choice of system’).101 It appears that ministers agreed to defer a decision on four or five submarines. We don’t have the detailed minute of the MISC 7 discussion on 5 December as it was ‘recorded separately, and … retained by the Secretary of the Cabinet’ and is retained still.
Just as in Polaris days, heated discussions about the size of the Trident force continued throughout 1980. The Treasury was deeply opposed to a fifth submarine and in June 1980 Geoffrey Howe wrote to Thatcher and questioned the ASW case for the fifth submarine.102 The Chiefs of Staff were also divided. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Terence Lewin, a naval officer by background, recalled the long and tortuous arguments over the fifth Polaris submarine in 1964 and argued strongly for a five-boat Trident force. He was firmly backed by the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, while the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Edwin Bramall, and the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Michael Beetham, supported five in principle but remained deeply concerned about costs.103 The Chiefs feared ‘that the government would eventually settle, given all the financial problems, for a three boat force, which would stretch operating cycles to the absolute limit in order to keep one on patrol, and allow no margin at all for the slightest unserviceability if the continuity of deterrence – and therefore its credibility – was to be maintained’.104
In November 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. Among the new administration’s fir
st decisions was to accelerate the development of US strategic nuclear forces, one of which was the production of the new Trident D5, a three-stage solid-fuel ballistic missile. It is 13 metres long and over 2 metres in diameter, weighs 60 tonnes and has a range of up to 7000 nautical miles. In flight its length is increased by the activation of a two-metre aerospike which reduces drag during its journey through the Earth’s atmosphere. Each missile is capable of delivering up to twelve Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles. The D5 was due to phase into the US Navy so that by the middle of the 1990s the Trident C4 would have been removed from the US armoury, almost exactly the moment when the Royal Navy’s Trident fleet was due to enter service. This left the British with a considerable dilemma. The UK now ‘faced a choice between two unattractive alternatives; C4 would have all the penalties of uniqueness, while D5 would be better and costlier than we needed, would involve the financial risks of an untried system, and would increase the dollar content of the overall programme’.105
Trident D5 offered superior performance over both Chevaline and the Trident C4. The Chevaline system operating in the Atlantic could only attack targets in the Soviet Union west of the Ural Mountains. The greater range of the D5 would allow the UK to attack targets across the Soviet Union, even when operating from the Clyde Estuary and the Norwegian Sea, and targets west of the Ural Mountains from as far away as the US eastern seaboard.106 The greater range also gave the Royal Navy a vast increase in operating areas in which it could hide its submarines. Very roughly, the difference between the areas in which Trident D5 and Polaris could be fired was ‘something like a ten to one ratio’.107 ‘The additional sea room which the long range of Trident gives us is a very useful property for the system,’ said Rear-Admiral Grove. ‘We look forward to the increased sea room.’108