Abstract
When Heath’s Conservative government entered office in mid-1970, it did so three years after the decision of the preceding Wilson government to withdraw from all British military bases east of Suez by the mid-1970s. Denis Healey, Wilson’s Defence Secretary, had been engaged during this period in restructuring the nuclear roles of all three services. The strategic deterrent role had passed from the RAF to the Royal Navy’s (RN) submarine branch, while the tactical roles of the UK’s 10kt nuclear bombs deployed by both services was undergoing a major evolution. At a technical level, the first-generation Red Beard bombs were being replaced by new, lighter, multi-purpose second-generation WE-177A weapons, whose production had started in 1969. Geographically, the Red Beards were no longer to be permanently stored in Tengeh in Singapore, and they were not replaced or carried by aircraft carriers operating east of Suez; for the first time, they were to be stored in West Germany. In short, British military strategy was henceforth to focus its nuclear forces on being a European state, rather than a global imperial state, a decision which the incoming government largely accepted and moved forward.
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Notes
Kristan Stoddart, Losing an Empire and Finding a Role: Britain, America, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1964–1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 225.
Christoph Bluth, ‘The Origins of MBFR: West German Policy Priorities and Conventional Arms Control’, War in History, Vol. 7, No. 2 (April 2000), pp. 199–224.
William Burr, ‘LOOKING BACK: The Limits of Limited Nuclear War’, Arms Control Today, Vol. 36, No. 1 (January/February 2006), pp. 41–44.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War also demonstrates this, with both Egypt and Israel equipped with Warsaw Pact and NATO weaponry. Stewart Menaul, ‘Reflections on the Middle East War 6–24 October 1973’, RUSI & Brassey’s Defence Yearbook 1974 (London: Brassey’s, 1974), pp. 149–161.
Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne (eds), A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005), p. 44.
Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Strategy and Counter-Surprise: Intelligence within BAOR and NATO’s Northern Army Group’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (January 2008), p. 107.
For more information see Panagiotis Dimitrakis, Failed Alliances of the Cold War: Britain’s Strategy and Ambitions in Asia and the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris 2011), pp. 131–134.
Humphrey Wynn, RAF NuclearDeterrentForces: Their Origins, Roles and Deployment 1946–1969 A Documentary History (London: The Stationery Office, 1994), pp. 550–555.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command would receive as little as 15 minutes’ warning of ICBM attack. Stephen I. Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1998), p. 216.
BMEWS and MIDAS, coupled with the Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar networks in the Northern US and Canada, would, it was hoped, give the United States a maximum of half an hour to launch a retaliatory response. C.J. Bartlett, The Long Retreat: A Short History of British Defence Policy 1945–1970 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972), p. 151.
For detailed information on the impact of ‘fire damage’, see Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Richard Moore, Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality: Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons 1958–64 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 53–57.
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. 51.
The best example of crisis management in the nuclear age remains Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Old Tappan NJ: Addison-Wesley, 1999). An excellent non-nuclear example is Keith Wilson’s account of British Cabinet discussions on the eve of the First World War, ‘The British Cabinet’s Decision for War, 2 August 1914’, British Journal of lnternational Studies, Vol. 1 (1975), pp. 148–159.
See also Samuel Williamson, ‘The Origins of World War One’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Spring 1988), pp. 795–818.
This line of reasoning can be found in rational choice theory/rational actor model approaches. For a discussion, see, for example, John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Reckless States and Realism’, International Relations, Vol. 23, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 241–256.
Maloney, Sean, ‘Fire Brigade or Tocsin? NATO’s ACE Mobile Force, Flexible Response and the Cold War’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (December 2004).
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© 2014 Kristan Stoddart
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Stoddart, K. (2014). National Strategy and Multilateral Priorities: British ‘Tactical’ Nuclear Operations, 1970–1974. In: The Sword and the Shield. Nuclear Weapons and International Security since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313508_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313508_5
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