The Silent Deep

by James Jinks

  Amid frank and vigorously contested discussions, the Prime Minister delivered an emotional performance, speaking with a memory that ‘perhaps went back further than anyone else in the room’, as a veteran of two world wars, recalling the United Kingdom’s long struggle for freedom and the wartime partnership that had led to the development of the first atomic bomb.79 ‘There was not a dry eye in the house,’ remembered Sir Philip de Zulueta, Macmillan’s Foreign Affairs Private Secretary.80 Kennedy wanted to help, but many of his advisors were reluctant to make Polaris available, fearing repercussions in Europe and the collapse of the earlier policy that aimed to abolish independent nuclear capabilities. As a concession the President offered to continue with Skybolt, splitting its development costs equally between the two countries. Macmillan refused. ‘I observed that while the proposed marriage with Skybolt was not exactly a shot-gun wedding the virginity of the lady must now be regarded as doubtful,’ wrote Macmillan.81 If Skybolt was not suitable for the United States, it was not good enough for the United Kingdom.

  Washington’s unwillingness to make Polaris available bilaterally, as a straightforward replacement for Skybolt, was the most difficult aspect of the Nassau negotiations. Kennedy reportedly told Macmillan that ‘We did not mind too much about giving you Skybolt because we thought it might not work and in any case it would have been obsolete by 1970. But Polaris is an entirely different matter as it will last much longer.’82 As Polaris would last into the 1980s, the Americans felt they were perfectly entitled to press harder. Kennedy eventually accepted that Macmillan could have Polaris, but there was one condition: the United Kingdom would have to assign its new Polaris force to NATO. There would no longer be an independent British nuclear capability. Macmillan was unable to agree to such terms. He had to ensure that the independent control of the deterrent was clearly and unambiguously expressed, not only for himself, but for future Prime Ministers. He offered to assign Polaris to NATO ‘provided the Queen had the ultimate power and right to draw back in the case of a dire emergency similar to that in 1940’.83

  With time running out, the Prime Minister threatened to walk away. He told Kennedy, bluntly, that ‘if an agreement was impossible the British government would have to make a reappraisal of their defence policies throughout the world’.84 The threat of a deep rift in Anglo-American relations, a rupture in the special relationship, worked. On the final day of the negotiations the two sides agreed on a formula, a set of formal words that preserved the independence of the United Kingdom’s nuclear capability. Macmillan conceded that Polaris was ‘a different kind of animal’ and paid the ‘political price which the Americans demanded’ by agreeing to assign the UK’s deterrent to NATO.85 But the British government reserved the right to use its nuclear forces independently in circumstances ‘where Her Majesty’s government may decide that supreme national interests are at stake’.86 Macmillan got what he wanted and, contrary to what many of Kennedy’s advisors thought best, the young President had given it to him. ‘The Americans pushed us very hard,’ Macmillan wrote in his diary. ‘The discussions were protracted and fiercely contested. They turned almost entirely on “independence” in national need. I had to pull out all the stops – adjourn, reconsider, refuse one draft and demand another etc, etc.’87

  Yet what would constitute a ‘supreme national crisis’? In what circumstances would a British Prime Minister invoke the ‘supreme national interests clause’ and use the United Kingdom’s nuclear capability independently of NATO and the United States? Kennedy admitted that it was ‘difficult to conceive of such a situation’ but he acknowledged that if the British ‘were threatened with the bombardment of their island, they might feel they wanted to have the capacity to respond, or at least say they had the capacity, and if there was an attack, to respond’.88 Kennedy later cited to the French Ambassador both the Suez Crisis in 1956 and British action to support Kuwait against territorial claims by Iraq in 1961 as examples of how the ‘supreme national interests’ formula might be invoked.89 Some, such as Zuckerman, regarded any discussion of independent use of the United Kingdom’s nuclear capability as of no consequence. ‘If our Polaris force were ever used, we would never even know whether our missiles had struck,’ said Zuckerman. ‘There would be no newspapers to tell us, no television to show what had happened, and maybe no “us”, just the crews of those Polaris boats that had been at sea.’90

  Not everyone was convinced that the independent deterrent had been preserved. Sir Robert Scott, the MOD Permanent Secretary, protested about the ‘very serious risks’ of the Polaris deal.91 He persuaded Zuckerman, who ‘had looked very happy with the Polaris Agreement’, to co-sign a document stating that the claim that the UK deterrent remained ‘independent’ could be made only with difficulty – particularly as a cardinal feature of Kennedy’s policy was to deny his allies independent nuclear forces.92 The UK would be spending vast sums of money contributing to a multilateral force, the object of which was political rather than military. They also pointed out that by committing to Polaris the UK would lose some of its freedom of action in deciding how best to support NATO militarily, both in the nuclear and in the non-nuclear field. The note was delivered by hand to Thorneycroft, their departmental minister, who seems to have ignored it. The only minister who ever referred to it was Julian Amery, the Minister of Aviation. ‘One day,’ he said to Zuckerman, ‘you will be proud of that Minute; not that it has made any difference.’93

  George Ball described the Nassau conference as ‘one of the worst prepared … in modern times’.94 The product, the Nassau Agreement, was ‘intolerably vague’, written in ‘the worst drafted language anyone had ever seen’.95 It has been described as a ‘monument of contrived ambiguity’ and the attempt to reconcile interdependence with independence remained a source of continuing difficulties over the next two years as the two countries disagreed over what exactly had been agreed.96 In the long term, this unpreparedness worked to Britain’s advantage. Zuckerman, for example, with remarkable foresight, insisted that the phrase ‘on a continuing basis’ be added to the section of the agreement governing the transfer of Polaris, thus making it ‘legally straightforward’ to transfer future US Fleet ballistic systems, such as Trident.97 David Ormsby Gore, Macmillan’s Ambassador in Washington, and a close personal friend of Kennedy’s, concluded that Nassau was a ‘compromise that no other ally could have achieved’.98 It was important not just because it saved a quasi-independent British deterrent, but because it served as ‘evidence of the continued closeness of Anglo-American relations’.99

  However, there was a price. Failure to clarify or even raise certain issues created problems for both governments and their navies. At the geopolitical level, in 1963 the French President, Charles de Gaulle, vetoed Britain’s first application to join the European Economic Community, citing Nassau and the reassertion of the special Anglo-American nuclear relationship as one of the many reasons why the United Kingdom was not yet committed to the European project.100 At the technical level, because there were no representatives from the US Navy or its Special Projects Office present at the conference, ‘professional/technical subjects were hardly discussed at all’.101 Little, if any, attention was given to the implications of the agreement for the Royal Navy. Le Fanu was ‘certain that the Prime Minister and the … Ministers at Nassau [Alec Douglas-Home, Foreign Secretary, and Peter Thorneycroft, Defence Secretary] do not give a damn about anything except getting an “independent deterrent” as quickly and as cheaply as possible’.102 Macmillan had succeeded in securing Polaris, but the ‘detail had not been worked out … it had been postponed to a later date’.103

  Le Fanu met McNamara briefly after the signing of the agreement. McNamara ‘was keen to force on as hard as he could go’ and wanted an Admiralty mission to travel to Washington immediately to begin technical talks and resolve ‘the many grey areas of the Nassau agreement’.104 Le Fanu reported that McNamara was ‘unimpressed’ with the Admiralty’s proposal for a dual-purpose subm
arine: ‘tinkering with the 16 missile module meant trouble’ and operationally, he argued, rightly, that it was:

  contrary to the whole US philosophy, by which submarines emerged from their base, are lost in the ocean without making any transmission on [wireless telegraphy] for 60 days, when they return to base. He is frightened that the Hybrid Concept would pinpoint the submarine’s position when taking part in its secondary function and allow shadowing and destruction by an enemy.105

  Macmillan had also dealt an unintentional blow to the dual-purpose submarine by failing to ask if the Navy could hire US Polaris submarines as an interim measure. Even if the US had agreed to loan submarines to the Royal Navy, whether this would have worked on the practical level was highly questionable. Macmillan’s brief for Nassau pointed out that the President would most likely ‘encounter difficulties with the Atomic Energy Committee (and especially Admiral Rickover) and perhaps with some sections of Congress’.106 It would also have been difficult to sell to the public and Parliament. As the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, George Brown, eloquently pointed out, ‘You can rent a telly, you can rent a car; but, good God, you cannot rent a nuclear independent deterrent.’107 Politically, it was now imperative to get Polaris operational as quickly as possible while also finding an alternative means of filling the ‘gap’ in the deterrent capability.108

  The Naval Staff had been given ‘broad assurances’ that its existing naval programmes ‘would not be swayed’ by going for Polaris. But as there was no money in the Navy’s ten-year long-term budget and ‘whatever immediate safeguards we may make, it might become a long term drain on our money and resources’, distorting the balance of the service, just as the Naval Staff had always feared.109 Polaris was successful in the US Navy because it was ‘devised and built by true believers’.110 It was imperative that the senior Naval Staff replicated this enthusiasm and set an example to the rest of the Fleet. Le Fanu had warned in 1960 that:

  neither the organization I have suggested, nor any other, will work unless the whole Navy, in and out of uniform, is brought to realize that although a successful POLARIS submarine programme may wound the fleet, an unsuccessful one will kill it, and that once given POLARIS we must unite to make it a success. A Polaris programme will be a challenge to our resourcefulness, our brains and our energy but above all it will be a challenge to our leadership.111

  Caspar John knew that uniting the Navy was going to be difficult. The Nassau Agreement brought to the surface a distinct ‘undercurrent of opposition to Polaris’.112 Vice Admiral Sir Aubrey Mansergh took to the pages of the Naval Review to complain about:

  the unpalatable task that the Navy seems shortly to be stuck with … the Admiralty (if such an institution is to survive the changes) is destined to wage a constant, and probably losing battle against the Treasury to prevent the ‘deterrent force’ swamping and distorting the ‘balanced fleet’ … If this is a good bargain the writer will eat the editorial hat.113

  For Polaris to succeed the Board had to quickly alleviate such concerns. John wrote to the senior Admirals in the Royal Navy that, though ‘the die is now cast and it is up to us to go full speed ahead, and to make the greatest possible success of this vital new task that we have been given’, he was determined to preserve the Navy’s existing plans, secure the necessary money and manpower, and ‘get across that the Polaris programme is quite outside our normal naval task, and that the latter must go on as before’.114 But John, the first naval aviator to be First Sea Lord, was in reality deeply unenthusiastic. While professionally he had advised Macmillan to purchase Polaris, privately, as his biographer has pointed out, ‘Caspar was not in the least enamoured by the prospect of having to accept the responsibility to deploy Britain’s nuclear deterrent.’115 Shortly after the Nassau conference he made the following entry in his diary:

  A filthy week … this millstone of Polaris hung round our necks. I’ve been shying off the damned things for 5½ years. They are potential wreckers of the real Navy and my final months are going to be a battle to preserve some sort of balance in our affairs.116

  The Admiralty was about to embark on what was to become the largest programme it had delivered since the Second World War, an undertaking of immense magnitude and complexity. Implementing it heralded vast unknown problems, all of which would have to be identified and then solved over the coming months. Did the Royal Navy have the capacity and indeed the talent to meet the challenge it had been set by the Government? One thing was certain, as Le Fanu noted, ‘We are now “IN” Polaris in a big way. We are in the big time.’117

  PLANNING FOR POLARIS

  The Nassau Agreement ‘sparked off an explosion of activity within the Admiralty’, where many saw Polaris as a threat, believing that ‘a strategic nuclear force would require a sharp downgrading of other valued parts of the service’.118 Carrington and John both sought to reassure the Royal Navy that the budgetary consequences of the programme would not be culled from the surface fleet. The January edition of the Admiralty’s monthly news bulletin pointed out that while the addition of Polaris was ‘a great day for the Navy’ it ‘must not cause us to lose sight of the fact that this is a defence burden that is to be accepted as an addition to present tasks’ and that ‘whatever may be decided about the composition and size of this force, one thing is certain: the traditional role of the Navy remains unchanged’.119 But both Carrington and John must have known that Polaris was going to change the Navy: it would upset traditional procedures and habits, and would force the Naval Staff whose minds were concentrated on the surface fleet, the future carrier and Mountbatten’s proposals to reorganize the MOD (by the amalgamation of the three service ministries into the Ministry of Defence) to think in an altogether different way, and about an entirely unfamiliar role. The Navy’s reputation would rest on its ability to complete a programme more demanding than anything it had undertaken since the end of the Second World War. The challenge was to ensure that all the elements – the submarines, the missiles, the base, support facilities, the training of crews, logistics – everything came together at the right time, an undertaking that necessitated what would now be called project management of the highest order.

  Admiral Le Fanu’s 1960 report was dug out, examined in detail and found to provide firm foundations on which further action could be based.120 The Admiralty recommended the creation of an organization along the lines outlined in Le Fanu’s 1960 report, ‘something in the nature of a full time Project Team, under a leader, with senior representation from the Professional Departments and from the Secretariat’.121 The Flag Officer Submarines, Rear Admiral Sir Hugh Mackenzie, was appointed to run the programme and was told that he would have to spend ‘at least five years in the saddle’, running it through to completion.122 ‘If you say “no”,’ John told him, ‘I’ll twist your arm until you bloody well scream’.123 He had little choice but to accept. When he first arrived in Whitehall, on New Year’s Day, 1963, to head the Polaris Project Team, known as the Polaris Executive, he was assigned an empty room in the North Block of the Old Admiralty Building, ‘empty, that is, except for a chair and a large desk, on which sat a telephone not yet connected, no staff, no paper-work … an unusual and perplexing situation’.124 He spent most of January assembling an ‘initial nucleus’ of officers and civil servants in London and Bath.125 New arrivals often spent their first weeks ‘owning sometimes a desk, sometimes a chair and sometimes a telephone but never all three together’.126 The ‘initial nucleus’ spent the first few weeks operating out of two rooms and a closet but a common sense of purpose and comradeship quickly grew out of the ‘bustling chaos’.127 As Mackenzie put it, the Polaris Executive was:

  the cornerstone on which the whole project ultimately depended: for supervision and direction, for ensuring financial support and, when or where necessary, for fighting battles with higher authority and gaining political approval. In time of major difficulty or crisis – which were many in the early years and never finally disappeared – it was
where ‘the buck stopped’.128

  Having an identifiable individual, a central authority, initially located in the Admiralty, followed by the MOD Main Building, with an overall view of the programme and the right of access to members of the Admiralty Board, became extremely valuable in obtaining prompt solutions and maintaining the drive of the programme.129 Mackenzie quickly secured the backing of the Admiralty Secretariat, the Admiralty’s highly efficient civil servants. The new Admiralty Secretary, Sir Clifford Jarrett, appointed in January 1961, and his civil servants were ‘enthusiastic that their Department should not be found wanting on a national task’.130 Jarrett recognized that ‘if the Polaris programme was to be completed on time, very radical measures were needed in order to bring this about’.131 The Admiralty’s technical departments in Bath were reorganized, changes that were disruptive but necessary and ‘fundamental to the success of the entire project’.132 Polaris was so complex that Mackenzie and the Admiralty Board had to repeatedly stress to the Treasury, the MOD, even the surface fleet, Submarine Service and Fleet Air Arm, that it was going to be the ‘biggest’ project the Royal Navy had ever undertaken.133 When a paper entitled ‘What’s So Special about the Polaris Programme?’ was circulated to government departments in early March 1963, it stressed that: