by James Jinks
The fact remains that the plant is of British design, for which the Americans bear no responsibility whatever. Equally, however, it would be churlish and unrealistic not to recognise that it is based on American information and experience. We cannot spell all this out in too much detail without infringing security as agreed with the Americans; in particular we cannot say we are procuring any items from America.257
Newell was ‘tempted to make use of the analogy that e.g. the fact that Sir Winston Churchill had an American mother does not make it difficult for us to regard him as very typically English’, but admitted that ‘the analogy could break down’.258
THE FIFTH SUBMARINE
When, in January 1963, the Cabinet’s Overseas Policy and Defence Committee decided to order four submarines and postponed a decision on a fifth, it ‘expected to have two boats permanently at sea from a force of four’ and a deterrent capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on 15–20 Russian cities.259 The operational availability of the Polaris force depended on factors such as reactor core life, inter-patrol maintenance periods, the time taken to refit the submarines by overhauling and replacing machinery and equipment, crew training and weapons trial requirements. The frequency and length of time to refit the submarines were two of the most important factors. When the original four-submarine decision was taken the Royal Navy had no experience of refitting nuclear submarines. It had to rely on information from the SPO, which at that time ‘lacked experience’ of refitting Polaris submarines.260 Thus information and analysis it provided to the Royal Navy were ‘hypothetical’.261 By the end of 1963, the initial ‘availability figures’ had been ‘disproved’ and the SPO had ‘revised (sharply upwards)’ its estimates of likely refit times.262
Armed with this revised American information the Polaris Executive embarked on ‘exhaustive studies’ which revealed that with a fleet of only four submarines, two could be kept on station for around 250 days. For the remaining sixteen weeks, split into periods of one month or more, it would only be possible to keep one submarine on station – the Royal Navy could not meet the government’s deterrent criteria as one submarine was only capable of providing a seven- or eight-city deterrent. And, obviously, should something happen to that submarine on patrol, the UK would be left without a deterrent. Only with a fleet of five submarines could two submarines (carrying a total of thirty-two missiles, providing a twenty-city deterrent, comparable to that of the V-bomber force) be kept on station at all times.263 The larger force would also provide a margin against unforeseen events such as an accident or an act of sabotage. Mackenzie was concerned about the ‘inevitable pressures’ a four-boat fleet would impose on those tasked with operating the submarines and was determined to reduce the pressure ‘to tolerable levels’.264 A fleet of four submarines, he later said, ‘was basically unsound’, as it ‘would impose, in peace time, an unnecessarily high degree of stress and strain on sea-going crews and base staff alike’.265 He ‘maintained that the Polaris force should consist of five … instead of four’ as ‘only in this way could the constant credibility of the deterrent be totally guaranteed’.266
The Admiralty Board supported these arguments. Although constructing an additional submarine would delay the resumption of the hunter-killer programme by 6–9 months, increase the financial pressure on the Admiralty and ‘exacerbate’ an already severe manpower problem (a fifth boat required an extra 45 officers and 360 ratings), the First Sea Lord, Sir David Luce, accepted that the Navy’s ‘inability with four submarines to keep more than one submarine on station at certain times of the year would not be a very seamanlike method of operation’.267 The Vice Chief of Naval Staff concluded that ‘in spite of the formidable problems arising from the manpower requirements, the sounder military solution is to have five boats’.268 But the Board recognized that any decision went beyond mere operational considerations.269 The debate over the size of the Polaris force went to the very heart of the arguments for Britain’s nuclear deterrent, as Jellicoe explained to Thorneycroft on 2 December 1963:
a proper judgement of this difficult issue largely turns on whether one regards the British POLARIS fleet primarily as a contribution to the Western deterrent as a whole or whether one views it primarily, albeit in the last resort, as an independent national deterrent. If one takes the first view, then I really do not think it makes a lot of difference if there are four or five British boats. The difference between 45 and 46 SSBNs in the Western POLARIS deterrent force is obviously quite marginal. But if one takes the second view, then the difference is of a quite different order of magnitude. Here something may turn on whether we need a 15 or 20 city independent national deterrent or whether we can do with less. All in all, however, I do not myself think that anything less than two POLARIS submarines ‘on station’ all the year round constitutes a credible independent deterrent. The logic of this is that if we regard the British POLARIS force primarily as an independent deterrent, then we should plump for the five rather than the four boat concept.270
The Chiefs of Staff certainly recognized the military case for a fifth submarine but they continued to harbour considerable doubts about its expense, deciding that ‘no more money should be spent on the Polaris Force than was necessary to achieve a credible deterrent’.271 They advised Thorneycroft that they were unwilling to ‘exacerbate the manpower problem’ in the Royal Navy and were ‘unwilling to accept the inevitable reductions elsewhere which would result from the expenditure on a fifth boat’.272 In a democracy, they wrote, ‘the final decision on whether to have a fifth submarine was, and must remain, a political one’.273
At the ministerial level there was considerable disagreement. Initially, Thorneycroft agreed ‘with some reluctance’ with the Chiefs’ advice and concluded that ‘we should not add the fifth boat to our programme’.274 The Chancellor, Reginald Maudling, and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, John Boyd Carpenter, were also ‘both strongly opposed to a fifth Polaris submarine on financial grounds’.275 However, the Prime Minister, now Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a firm believer in the deterrent ‘and Britain’s ability to use it independently’, took a different view.276 During a visit to Washington in January 1964, he discovered that the US intended to propose an international ‘freeze’ on nuclear delivery vehicles.277 Although he was assured that the Royal Navy’s Polaris fleet would ‘escape being caught’ by the US proposal, there were wider implications.278 If the freeze were implemented, the NATO Alliance would still enjoy nuclear superiority over the Soviet Government. However, if NATO collapsed and the United States withdrew from Europe the Soviets would enjoy permanent superiority over the UK and French nuclear arsenals.279
When Douglas-Home returned to the United Kingdom he told the Cabinet that the proposed freeze made ‘it even more essential that we should be seen to retain an independent capacity to inflict an unacceptable degree of nuclear damage upon an enemy’.280 In order to reinforce the case for the fifth submarine and to convince those ministers who continued to oppose it, he deployed an entirely new argument that aroused what Michael Quinlan, a former Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, called the ‘national gut feeling’.281 France had started to develop its own indigenous submarine-based deterrent, which was going to consist of five submarines. Douglas-Home argued that if the freeze became a reality, the French could end up with a superior nuclear force. ‘We should not wish to be inferior to the French,’ he said.282 The perception of inferiority to the French had and still has the ability to ‘twitch an awful lot of very fundamental historical nerves’.283 Despite concerns about cost and opposition from the Treasury, the Cabinet approved the fifth submarine on 25 February 1964.284
The day after the Cabinet approved the fifth submarine, the Director General Ships, Sir Alfred Sims, presided over the laying down of the first 100-ton prefabricated circular keel of the lead submarine at the Vickers shipyard. This small but important milestone, Mackenzie later recalled, ‘was a momentous, even historic moment achieved on time’. It was a ‘signi
ficant indication of progress’ and ‘an encouraging augury for the future’ which showed the country and indeed the world that the programme was on schedule.285
But just as physical construction of the submarines was beginning, the Polaris programme was becoming a controversial political issue.
THE 1964 GENERAL ELECTION
Harold Wilson had taken over leadership of the Labour party a month after the Nassau Agreement was signed. In the twenty months that followed, Labour, as Wilson later wrote, ‘opposed the decision, and opposed still more the pretence that Britain had an “independent” nuclear weapon’.286 The party certainly spent much of the almost two-year period between the signing of the Nassau Agreement in December 1962 and the general election in October 1964 criticizing the Polaris programme and the government’s obsession with the independent nuclear deterrent, much to the annoyance of the Conservative government. When Douglas-Home became Prime Minister on Macmillan’s resignation in October 1963, he had pledged, in his first speech to the House of Commons, to put the whole question of Polaris and the future of the nuclear deterrent before the electorate at the next election.287 When the two parties released their manifestos shortly before the start of campaigning in September 1964, the Conservatives declared that ‘Britain must in the ultimate resort have independently controlled nuclear power to deter an aggressor’ and that ‘Only under a Conservative Government will we possess it in the future.’288 Labour appeared to adopt the opposite position:
The Nassau agreement to buy Polaris know-how and Polaris missiles from the USA will add nothing to the deterrent strength of the Western Alliance, and it will mean utter dependence on the US for their supply … [Polaris] will not be independent and it will not be British and it will not deter … We are not prepared any longer to waste the country’s resources on endless duplication of strategic nuclear weapons. We shall propose the re-negotiation of the Nassau agreement.289
The government had started to prepare for a possible election confrontation over Polaris immediately after Douglas-Home became Prime Minister. When Lord Jellicoe succeeded Lord Carrington as First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1963, he was surprised at how much of the controversy surrounding Polaris was ‘based on a widespread ignorance of the facts’.290 This ignorance was, Jellicoe said, ‘dangerous, especially in the present political situation’ and he informed Thorneycroft that he intended ‘to bring the facts about the British Polaris submarine force home to a wider audience – in Whitehall and in the Navy as a whole’.291 He attempted to lessen the controversy surrounding the programme. A number of Conservative politicians were concerned that the name of the first submarine, HMS Revenge, was inappropriate. ‘These strike me as most excellent names,’ Jellicoe explained to Le Fanu:
But I have some doubt about the order. I suppose that Revenge is about the best name for a ship which one could possibly have. Nevertheless, I am inclined to wonder whether we would be really wise to Christen SSBN 01 Revenge. The essence of the British Polaris fleet is deterrence and the concept of Revenge seems to me to imply that deterrence would have failed. I am a little bit inclined to feel that those who are opposed to the concept of a British deterrent would find this grist to their mill.292
The Royal Navy promptly renamed the first submarine Resolution.293 Revenge was consigned to the last submarine in the hope that by the time it was launched in 1969, much of the controversy surrounding the Polaris programme would have passed.
The prospect of a new government cancelling the programme was very attractive to those in the Royal Navy who continued to harbour reservations about it. Zuckerman noted in his memoirs that ‘some of the Navy Chiefs had cautiously assumed that the new Government would scrap Polaris’, especially those who believed that Polaris was having a very real impact on the ‘proper’, conventional Navy.294 When Peter Nailor, a civil servant who served in the Polaris Executive, was conducting research for his analysis of the Polaris programme, The Nassau Connection, eight out of eleven ‘very senior people’ he interviewed, who had not been directly involved in the programme, used precisely the same words when asked about its impact: ‘a frightful chore’.295 He could only conclude that there was a ‘strong current of feeling’ among senior officers that the programme was having a detrimental effect on the naval service.296
The government put enormous ‘political pressure’ on Mackenzie to press on with the programme so that a Labour Government would face ‘quite a large bill should they decide to cancel it’.297 He was told to redouble ‘efforts to keep the programme forging ahead’ in the hope that ‘if enough progress could be achieved and sufficient money firmly committed by the time of the election, the future would be more assured’.298 The technical departments in Bath were told to spend as much money as possible. ‘Apart from being a good management technique,’ Jack Daniel later recalled, ‘it was, in part, to make it more costly and difficult for a Labour government to cancel the Polaris programme.’299 The Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston also came under considerable pressure to conduct the test of the Polaris warhead before the election, ‘in September or as soon as possible thereafter’.300 Eventually, Labour’s negative campaigning came to have an ‘immobilizing effect’ on the programme and the Polaris Executive was ‘hard put to it to maintain the momentum which the programme required’.301 Mackenzie later referred to a ‘never-ending fight against anything that could cause the programme to falter’.302 There was ‘no doubt’, he later wrote, ‘that the wide publicity given to Labour’s views in the run-up to the election gave rise to doubts and fears amongst many, in industry and elsewhere, whose wholehearted co-operation was critical to the Polaris programme’.303
This was especially apparent when it came to the two shipbuilders, Vickers and Cammell Laird. Both were certainly expecting cancellation and each sought assurances from the Navy about the operation of the Shipbuilding Break Clause that was written into the contracts.304 Recruitment became a problem. Both shipyards struggled to hold on to and recruit skilled workers ‘as a result of the political uncertainty’.305 In Barrow, the Vickers workforce realized that because of the importance of the programme they could effectively blackmail the management by striking.306 Polaris also became an important local-election issue in Barrow. Conservative Head Office bombarded the town with vast amounts of campaign material: ‘No Polaris, no Barrow. Do not take a gamble. Polaris means peace for Britain, prosperity for Barrow’; ‘Hands off Polaris. Britain has 50 million lives in danger. Barrow has 4,000 jobs in danger’; ‘Wilson’s anti-Polaris means a defenceless Britain and a destitute Barrow’; ‘Polaris is Britain’s only sure defence in the 1970s. Barrow is building this defence.’307 The local Labour MP, Walter Monslow, a seasoned campaigner, who had been involved in no fewer than seven general elections, remarked that he had ‘never known such scare tactics as those indulged in’ by the Conservatives.308 They ‘had a tone of jingoism at its worst’.309
In Whitehall, the Chiefs of Staff were certainly expecting cancellation.310 The CDS, Lord Mountbatten, was ‘dismayed’ at the position Wilson had adopted.311 On 29 September, he assembled the Chiefs and told them that he wanted a paper that he had commissioned in 1962 ‘on the importance of the retention of the United Kingdom independent nuclear deterrent’ updated for use ‘in the event of a new Government proposing to abolish this force’.312 In his view, the Chiefs ‘were under a moral obligation to put the military aspects of the problem without delay to any Government which might consider abolishing our independent deterrent’.313 Mountbatten firmly believed that Wilson would cancel the programme if he became Prime Minister:
On the subject of the independent nuclear deterrent however the Leader of the party was known to be in favour of abolition; the majority of the party were in agreement and abolition was included in their election manifesto. There was nevertheless a body of opinion in the party who were uncertain on this point and it was possible that, if a strong case could be made out for retention, Labour policy on the subject could be reversed, pro
viding that a face-saving formula could be found.314
Mountbatten thought that ‘the best method of achieving this lay in convincing an incoming Labour Government that the Polaris submarine project was so far advanced that very large nugatory expenditure and impracticable conversion problems would arise if any attempt was made to convert the Polaris submarines (SSBN) into Hunter Killer submarines’.315 He proposed that the Chiefs should prepare and personally sign a paper which stated that:
it was the traditional responsibility of the Chiefs of Staff of the Services to defend these Islands against all forms of attack, and recall that this responsibility had originally been discharged by the Royal Navy with the Army in support, and then by the Royal Air Force up until the advent of the thermo-nuclear weapon. The paper should go on to say that now and in the foreseeable future the Chiefs of Staff saw no way of continuing to discharge this defence responsibility except by the possession of a nationally controlled nuclear deterrent force, of such a capability that it could inflict upon any aggressor such a degree of damage as to outweigh any possible benefit which he might obtain from his aggression. The paper should conclude by asking that if the Government wished to do away with our deterrent force, they should formally absolve the Chiefs of Staff from further responsibility for the defence of the United Kingdom against attack.316
Such an approach would have almost certainly set the Chiefs on a collision course with a new government.
There were two problems with Mountbatten’s ‘face-saving formula’. First, the Polaris programme was not that far advanced. Cancellation was entirely feasible and the ‘beyond the point of no return’ argument, as Zuckerman notes in his memoirs, ‘varies arbitrarily case by case [in the] defence world’.317 The second problem was that the submarines could still be converted into hunter-killers. In July 1963, Sir Alfred Sims had told the Admiralty Board that it would be possible ‘technically to complete this ship in the hunter/killer role’, but that the submarine ‘would be longer and less manoeuvrable than the Valiant’.318 In March 1964, Treasury officials were also told, by the naval architects in Bath, that ‘If necessary, it would be possible to remove this [the missile] section or construct these boats without it, although it would be by no means a simple job and there would be a certain amount of waste space since there would no longer be any need to house various computers and firing equipment.’319 There were even plans for conversion. To satisfy his curiosity, Jack Daniel had removed the missile system from the submarine and rejigged what was left of the design to produce a balanced SSN with the minimum waste of ordered materials and equipment. He had also drawn a profile and plans of a submarine that was about 30 feet longer than Valiant and named the HMS Harold Wilson.320 ‘In the current political climate we thought it to be a good joke,’ Daniel later wrote. ‘It was shown to a few friends in the Naval Staff and put away.’321
