Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  The woman whom the Red Army newspaper had nicknamed the Iron Lady would have agreed with every word. Yet Mrs Thatcher’s reputation as the woman who laid the foundations for victory over Communism is a bit exaggerated. It is certainly true that no Prime Minister for years had spoken so fervently about the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil. But when it came to the nuts and bolts, there was more continuity between Mrs Thatcher and her predecessors than is often realized. It is a common fallacy, for example, that she loved spending money on defence. In fact, defence spending as a proportion of the total budget barely increased during her early years as Prime Minister, and actually declined in the second half of the 1980s. Her strategic priorities – Britain’s position in West Germany and its nuclear deterrent – were exactly the same as those under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. Even her decision to order the submarine-based Trident nuclear weapons system was inherited from Callaghan, who had first approached the Americans about it in January 1979. He had picked his moment carefully, sneaking across to Jimmy Carter’s beach hut while they were at a summit in Guadeloupe. It is hard to imagine Mrs Thatcher doing that.

  Like Callaghan, Mrs Thatcher kept nuclear decisions to a trusted group of senior colleagues. On 10 February 1981 her Defence Secretary, John Nott,fn1 warned her that ‘two-thirds of the Party and two-thirds of the Cabinet were opposed to the procurement of Trident’ – almost certainly because, at a projected cost of £5 billion, it was so expensive. But Nott thought they should get it anyway. So did Lord Carrington, who added that ‘failure to acquire Trident would have left the French as the only nuclear power in Europe’. As it happened, this was exactly what Carter had told Callaghan in Guadeloupe. And Mrs Thatcher herself was in no doubt. As she told the Commons a few months later, buying Trident ‘makes it clear that we are resolved to defend our own freedom’.4

  But there was now a bigger issue than Trident. At the end of 1976, the Soviet Union had started deploying its new SS-20 missiles. Each SS-20 had three nuclear warheads, which could be aimed at different targets. Because they were carried on the backs of trucks, they could be kept on the move, making them hard to track down. But from Britain’s perspective the really frightening thing was that, because they were only ‘intermediate’ missiles with a range of about 3,500 miles, they posed little threat to the United States. In other words, the Kremlin could use the SS-20s to destroy a major European city without necessarily provoking an American response.

  West Germany’s Helmut Schmidt, who would be first in the firing line, was horrified. So was Mrs Thatcher. As her first Defence Secretary, Francis Pym, noted, this was a ‘key test of NATO’s collective will to ensure its security’. So on 12 December 1979, NATO agreed that West Germany would take delivery of 108 short-range nuclear-armed Pershing II missiles and ninety-six Cruise missiles. Britain would take 160 Cruise missiles, while the Italians would take 112 and the Dutch and Belgians forty-eight each. Since these missiles were not due to arrive until the end of 1983, the Kremlin still had a chance to withdraw the SS-20s. Realistically, though, that was not going to happen. Cruise was coming.5

  To her critics, Mrs Thatcher’s decision to accept the Cruise missiles was a reckless betrayal of Britain’s interests. For the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Cruise was a ‘visible symbol of subjection’, turning Britain into a ‘prime target’ in the next world war. But even if this were true, what was new about that? As The Times pointed out: ‘For nearly 30 years, Britain has been a base for nuclear warheads on manned aircraft and missiles operated either by British or American forces.’ Indeed, in some ways the explosion of anger following Mrs Thatcher’s decision now looks a bit odd. If Jim Callaghan or Denis Healey had faced the same challenge, they would undoubtedly have made the same choice.fn2 In the early 1980s, anti-nuclear literature often pictured the nation caught in the Soviet crosshairs, suggesting that Mrs Thatcher had turned it into a target. But Britain had been a prime target for decades. Even in the Wilson years it had already been the most heavily armed nuclear state in Western Europe, with well over a hundred American facilities of various kinds. If war had broken out at any time since the 1940s, Britain would have been in the firing line. So in that respect Cruise made no difference at all.

  As for Britain’s supposed subjection to the Americans, the reality is more complicated. Many CND activists invoked Orwell’s Airstrip One, while the feminist writer Angela Carter claimed that Britain was now ‘a moored aircraft carrier for instruments of destruction’. But it was not as if the wicked Americans had forced their weapons on to their unwilling colonial subjects. In reality, Mrs Thatcher and Helmut Schmidt had begged for Cruise and Pershing, because, like Clement Attlee and Konrad Adenauer before them, they were worried that a revival of American isolationism might leave Western Europe defenceless. Indeed, for Mrs Thatcher the problem with the Americans was not that they were so domineering but that they were so flaky. ‘I feel the real urgency to stiffen up Washington,’ the anti-Communist historian Robert Conquest told her in August 1979. She underlined it in green ink.6

  Cruise’s critics did, however, make one unanswerable point. Because Britain did not own the missiles and had not paid a penny towards them, there was no ‘dual key’ system. In theory the Americans could launch a nuclear strike without even bothering to tell Downing Street. So why didn’t Mrs Thatcher press for a dual key? After all, Washington had offered it. The answer came down to money. If Britain wanted a dual key, it would have to buy the missiles outright, for at least £1 billion. On top of that, no other European country had asked for a dual key. If Britain demanded one, then everybody else would want one, and the idea of a united deterrent would fall apart. For Mrs Thatcher, then, a dual key would create more problems than it solved. In any case, since 1952 there had been a vague agreement that Washington would never strike from British soil without a ‘joint decision’ by both governments. So perhaps she did not need a dual key anyway.7

  To many people, though, these sounded like excuses, and at the end of 1982 John Nott urged Mrs Thatcher to think again. Without dual control, he wrote, they were ‘very vulnerable politically to the charge of hazarding the UK for an American system’. Even Nott had doubts about their allies’ reliability, remarking that if Britain had a dual key, ‘I shall certainly then sleep more safely in my bed.’ And evidently he was not the only Conservative who had trouble sleeping. At one point thirty-five MPs signed an early day motion in the Commons calling for a dual key system. So in early 1983 Mrs Thatcher’s senior ministers returned to the issue. Once again, though, they decided against it, since it ‘would be expensive, would delay the deployment of the missiles … and would be seen as evidence of distrust of American intentions’. In the Commons Mrs Thatcher insisted that it was irrelevant because ‘no nuclear weapon would be fired or launched from British territory without the agreement of the British Prime Minister’. But the public unease never went away. When Mass Observation asked Carol Daniel if there was anything she disliked about Americans, one of her first thoughts – after ‘the way they talk’, naturally – was ‘the fact that they have basses and nuclar bombs [sic] in this country and hold the key’.8

  Francis Pym announced the details of the Cruise deployment on 17 June 1980. After a bit of haggling, the Americans had agreed to use the disused airfield at RAF Molesworth, in Cambridgeshire, and the US air base at RAF Greenham Common, near Newbury in Berkshire. In Newbury the local Labour Party immediately denounced the decision. The town, said its former parliamentary candidate, Joan Ruddock, was now ‘in the front line’, and when Pym addressed a public meeting at Newbury Racecourse, he was heckled with cries of ‘Let’s disarm!’ and ‘Get back to your bunker!’ In general, though, the reaction was pretty muted. When a reporter from The Times tried to gauge the attitude on the streets, few people had strong views either way. Even the committee set up to protect Greenham Common said they were not in principle opposed to Cruise missiles, although a spoke
swoman agreed that it was frightening to think of Newbury being a ‘prime target for attack’.9

  When The Times returned to Newbury nine months later, the mood had barely changed. In the interim, Joan Ruddock had been trying to drum up support for the Newbury Campaign Against Cruise Missiles, but it was hard going. By March 1981 her campaign had only eighty-two paid-up members and seventy-five ‘interested supporters’, and this in a town of more than 20,000 people. Newbury was a prosperous, contented sort of place, solidly Conservative since 1910, the worst possible place to recruit supporters. Most people recognized that it would have been a Soviet target anyway, because of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at nearby Aldermaston, the Royal Ordnance Factory at Burghfield and the American base at Welford. Not even the news that, in the latest NATO war game, Newbury had been destroyed by a nuclear warhead seemed to shake the town’s complacency.

  The government was not taking Newbury for granted, though. During Pym’s most recent visit he had taken questions from residents anxious about the repercussions of Cruise. Two things particularly bothered them. Would flights to RAF Greenham interfere with the local racecourse? And would they affect farm animals? Horse racing and animals: the British never changed. Fortunately, Pym was able to calm their fears. Nothing, he said, would disturb the people of Newbury. Yes, the missiles were on their way. But life would go on as usual: quiet, peaceful and unchanging. After all, it was not as if hundreds of protesting women were going to descend on Greenham Common.10

  By the time Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had declined to the point of outright irrelevance. At its peak two decades earlier, CND had attracted tens of thousands of people to its annual marches. But détente had taken its toll. By 1979, with just four employees and barely 2,000 members, it was less a national movement than a pacifists’ club. There were many more regular Dungeons & Dragons players than there were CND members – and most people had never heard of Dungeons & Dragons. When the organization’s general secretary, the Catholic priest Bruce Kent, went to Rugby to address a meeting that summer, not a single person turned up.11

  But as the international mood darkened, CND’s fortunes picked up. By the beginning of 1980 peace groups were already on the march in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and West Germany. And although CND’s rallies never matched the crowds who poured into the streets of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Bonn, it could hardly fail to profit from the changing mood. That spring, more than four out of ten people told a poll for Radio Four that they thought war was likely in the next ten years. And what if war did come? In a letter to The Times, the military historian Michael Howard warned that the government ought to be investing far more in civil defence, to show the Kremlin that Britain was not afraid of a fight. His letter struck a chord. The country’s lack of readiness for war, agreed a Times editorial on 19 January, was a ‘lethal failure of duty’. ‘Other countries’, it said sternly, ‘persuade members of the public to enlighten themselves on the means of survival in the unlikely event of nuclear attack. In Britain, a Home Office booklet “Protect and Survive” remains unavailable.’12

  At this point, most people had never heard of Protect and Survive. Later, it became the subject of countless paranoid myths, but the real story was pretty mundane. The government had been producing civil defence leaflets since before the Second World War, and Protect and Survive dated from the mid-1970s. Although it was never meant for general release, there was nothing sinister in that. As the Home Office minister Leon Brittan told the Commons in February 1980, it was ‘not a secret pamphlet, and there is no mystery about it. It has been available to all local authorities and chief police and fire officers and to those who have attended courses at the Home Defence College at Easingwold’. The reason it had never been made public, Brittan explained, was that it had been commissioned specifically ‘for distribution at a time of grave international crisis when war seemed imminent, and it was calculated that it would have the greatest impact if distributed then’.

  By this stage, the Home Office was already besieged with demands to see the pamphlet. The Times, too, received dozens of letters from interested readers. Some people even went to the Stationery Office to ask for it; one was told that it was ‘restricted’, another that The Times had been ‘naughty’ in publicizing it. At last, the Home Office bowed to the pressure of the market. In May 1980 Protect and Survive went on sale, priced at a very reasonable 50p. In the Commons, Willie Whitelaw claimed that since ‘most houses offer reasonable protection against radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions’, which was patently untrue, the booklet showed that ‘protection can be substantially improved by a series of quite simple do-it-yourself measures’. How strange, then, that so many people were still worried about the bomb!13

  At the heart of Protect and Survive’s terrifying reputation was the accompanying series of public information films, narrated by the actor Patrick Allen, which were released in March in a special edition of Panorama. On paper they sound almost boring: ‘Nuclear Explosions Explained’, ‘Materials to Use for Your FallOut Room’, ‘Water and Food’, ‘Sanitation Care’. Even the advice, which was widely condemned as woefully inadequate, is not especially frightening. There is a lot about biscuits, mattresses and bin-bags of soil, and an awful lot of stuff about toilets. But the only really grim episode is the last, ‘Casualties’. ‘If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room, move the body to another room in the house,’ Allen says sternly. ‘Label the body with name and address, and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets … The radio will advise you what to do about taking the body away for burial.’ But if the radio goes dead and you have been staring at a corpse for five days, the best thing is to dump it outside. ‘You should bury the body for the time being in a trench or cover it with earth’, Allen says, ‘and mark the spot of the burial.’

  What made the Protect and Survive films so chilling was the incongruity of the style. Every episode opens with a childish animation of a mushroom cloud. Indeed, they feel strikingly similar to the children’s programmes made at the same time, in the mid-1970s. Perhaps the producers did this deliberately because they were keen not to terrify people, but the overall effect is not unlike the toddlers’ favourite Bod (1975): the slow pace, the simple animation, the bright colours, even the funereal narration. What is more, Allen often seems to have borrowed his voiceover from a Blue Peter presenter. ‘First, choosing a fallout room,’ he says slowly, as though speaking to an audience of 6-year-olds. ‘And now a reminder about your inner refuge … Make a lean-to with wood … Here is a list of the most important things you will need.’ You half-expect him to start talking about double-sided sticky tape.

  Protect and Survive was a gift to CND. As one activist recalled, the furore ‘pushed the concept of nuclear war into every living room and kitchen. Suddenly, the thing became very close, very menacing.’ The historian E. P. Thompson, fast becoming the face of the new disarmament movement, rushed out a pamphlet of his own, Protest and Survive, which argued that the nuclear arms race had made ‘the extinction of civilised life upon this island’ a serious probability. Now CND rallies were attracting not dozens of people, but thousands. At the end of May 1980, a march in London drew 15,000 people, the largest turnout for years. There were skinheads, punks and Buddhist monks, a lone Scottish piper and the leader of the West German Green Party; ‘women’s lib and gay lib; and the Superior Brass Band’. ‘For sheer variety’, the Guardian said happily, ‘it was hard to beat.’14

  By now CND was working closely with the left of the Labour Party, which had long been sympathetic to unilateral disarmament. On 22 June 1980, five days after Pym had confirmed the details of the Cruise deal, Labour’s National Executive Committee organized a march through central London. Despite horrendous rain, another 15,000 people turned up, and even sceptical observers were reminded of the Aldermaston marches. Tellingly, both Callaghan and Healey stayed away, but Michael Foot, Tony Be
nn and Neil Kinnock were much in evidence. The hard-left MP Jo Richardson made a speech in rather dubious taste, suggesting that the only cut worth making would be to ‘Mrs Thatcher’s throat’. Still, Benn thought it had been a ‘jolly day’, so that was all right.15

  Two decades earlier, Labour’s disagreements about unilateral disarmament had almost torn the party apart. But the left had never abandoned their opposition to nuclear weapons, and in the summer of 1980 they had the upper hand. When, in July, the National Executive discussed CND’s next anti-Cruise march, Shirley Williams insisted that they ‘shouldn’t have anything to do with CND’, while Callaghan ‘supported her and said we were a world party’. But in a revealing sign of the mood, their colleagues voted to support the march. ‘I will never agree to unilateralism, whatever the Party says,’ Callaghan said defiantly. But his party no longer cared. By now at least a hundred Labour MPs were sympathetic to CND, and the anti-nuclear and anti-NATO votes at October’s party conference set the tone for the next three years. In 1981 the conference again voted to scrap Cruise, Trident and Polaris, and in 1982 they voted to get rid of Cruise, close the American bases and adopt a ‘non-nuclear defence’ policy. By now the activists and the leader were singing from the same hymn sheet. Only hours after succeeding Callaghan in November 1980, Michael Foot had made his priorities clear. It was ‘vital’, he said, for Labour to embrace nuclear disarmament: ‘The dismantling of those weapons is essential for the survival of our world.’16