Abstract
When Edward Heath came to power in June 1970 he was looking for a fresh start for Britain’s nuclear policy.1 As long ago as 1966 he had publicly advocated a pooling of effort between France and Britain in the nuclear field. He has been described as ‘an autocratic Prime Minister, intolerant of dissenting advice and rigid in his ways’.2 In a series of lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1967 (the Godkin Lectures), Heath had called for ‘a nuclear force based on the existing British and French forces which could be held in trusteeship for Europe as a whole’.3 In his considered view, this pooling of effort would form the basis of ‘an eventual European defence system’.4 Two years later, in an issue of the international journal Foreign Affairs, he expanded on this proposal by calling on the:
non-nuclear countries of Europe … [to join] with Britain and France in a Consultative Committee which would have exactly the same relationship to the Joint Anglo-French Deterrent as the so-called McNamara Committee [this became the Nuclear Planning Group (NPG)] has to the U.S. deterrent…A scheme of this kind would not in any sense be anti-American; indeed because of the provisions of the various British agreements with the U.S. in this field it could not be implemented without American support.5
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Notes
Edward Heath, The Course of My Life (London: Dumpton Gap, 1998), p. 488.
John Campbell, Edward Heath: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), p. 319.
Edward Heath, ‘Realism in British Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 1 (October 1969), pp. 39–50.
Lord Carrington, Reflect on Things Past: The Memoirs of Lord Carrington (London: Collins, 1988), pp. 252–253.
Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2000), pp. 331–332.
Harold Macmillan, Riding the Storm 1956–1959 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 313–341.
Piers Ludlow, Negotiating the Gaullist Challenge: The European Community, 1963–1969 (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 166–173, 174–198;
Melissa Pine, Application on the Table: The Second British Application to the European Communities, 1967–70 (University of Oxford: DPhil Thesis, 2003), pp. 240–246. Quoted in Helen Parr, ‘Anglo-French Nuclear Collaboration’, pp. 5–6.
This intelligence of Soviet military dispositions through satellites, spy planes, and human intelligence (HUMINT) was key to UK strategic nuclear targeting. Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London: HarperCollins, 2010), pp. 277–364.
This view is based on several conversations conducted with Lorna Arnold, formerly the official historian of the UKAEA. For early examples of this high regard see, for example, Lorna Arnold, Britain and the H-bomb (Basingstoke: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 2001), pp. 195–220.
Beatrice Heuser, NATO, Britain, France and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949–2000 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 95.
Conversely, the Franco-American nuclear defence relationship was reforming under the guidance of the Nixon—Kissinger axis in the US and by the more open-minded Pompidou in France through realpolitik. Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘Le Président Pompidou et les relations entre les Etats-Unis et l’Europe’, Journal of European Integration History, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2000), pp. 111–146. The author is grateful to Dr Helen Parr for providing this reference along with a translation.
This assistance was provided under the 1961 Act according to Congressional testimony: Robert Norris, Andrew Burrows and Richard Fieldhouse, Nuclear Weapons Databook Volume V British, French and Chinese Nuclear Weapons (Boulder: Westview Press/Natural Resources Defence Council, 1994), pp. 191–193f. 67.
Ullman, Richard, ‘The Covert French Connection’, Foreign Policy, No. 75 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–33.
Robert Gildea, France since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 178–204.
William Burr argues that the offer of covert collaboration with France had a two-fold purpose: first, to prevent or forestall an entente nucléaire between Britain and France; second, to add to the strategic weight of the Western alliance, as there were concerns that the USSR had an ‘assured destruction edge’ vis-à-vis the United States. William Burr, ‘The Nixon Administration, the “Horror Strategy” and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer 2005), p. 48.
Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London: Fontana, 1990), pp. 217, 237–238.
The relationship between the UK’s Polaris improvement programme and the ABM Treaty is comprehensively covered by John R. Walker, British Nuclear Weapons and the Test Ban 1954–1973, Britain, the United States, Weapons Policies and Nuclear Testing: Tensions and Contradictions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 293–348,
and John R. Walker, Britain and Disarmament: The UK and Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons Arms Control and Programmes 1956–1975 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 214–262.
MBFR proposals resulted in a series of East—West dialogues aimed at reducing conventional forces in the Central European Theatre to an equitable but much lower level and are discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 7. See also Christoph Bluth, The Two Germanies and Military Security in Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
Thomas Robb, ‘Henry Kissinger, Great Britain and the “Year of Europe”: The “Tangled skein”’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 24, No. 3 (July 2010), pp. 297–318. See also Hennessy, The Prime Minister, pp. 350–351.
On the management of Polaris, see Peter Nailor, The Nassau Connection: The Organisation and Management of the British Polaris Project (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1988).
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© 2014 Kristan Stoddart
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Stoddart, K. (2014). The Heath Government, France, and the Not So Special Relationship, 1970–1974. In: The Sword and the Shield. Nuclear Weapons and International Security since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313508_2
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