‘National prestige’. The phrase ricocheted around Whitehall. The more relative economic decline chipped away at the substance of national power, the more neurotic Britain’s leaders became about clinging to emblems of power. None was more important than the bomb. In December 1962, after a series of miscalculations and mishaps, the country’s future status as a nuclear-weapons state hung on the outcome of a summit between Harold Macmillan and the young American president John F. Kennedy. The loss of the nuclear deterrent would require Britain to radically rethink its defence strategy. Much more importantly, what would Britain be without the bomb? In Macmillan’s mind, its loss would be a fatal blow to the country’s international standing.

Summit meetings of world leaders rarely change the course of history. They are choreographed for the cameras, their outcomes pre-cooked and pre-packaged in the dark back rooms of officialdom. The purpose of the final communiqué is to codify the choices made and decisions already taken. When Harold Macmillan left behind the winter chill of London in December 1962, his premiership rested on the hope that his talks with Kennedy in the warmer climes of the Caribbean would turn out to be the exception that defied the rule. And, for once, a summit did indeed rewrite the script. More, the American sale to Britain of the Polaris nuclear weapons system set a course for British foreign and defence policy for the next half-century and beyond. The nuclear deal that was struck underwrote Britain’s membership of an exclusive club and paid, in effect, its subscription fee as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. In the process Macmillan built a psychological prison from which his successors would never escape. When, in 2016, David Cameron announced that the government would purchase from the US the latest Trident nuclear missiles, he was merely renewing, as Margaret Thatcher had done before him, the bargain sealed by Macmillan beside the glistening waters of the Caribbean. No relationship has more closely defined Britain’s post-war place in the world than that with the United States. No other single encounter between its leaders did more to shape the terms of the relationship.

The crackling commentary of the Pathé news report on the two leaders’ arrival in Nassau paid unconscious homage to Britain’s global pretensions. The ‘Big Two’, it said, would be discussing how to shore up ‘a rapidly deteriorating Anglo–American alliance’. It might have added that Macmillan’s political future hung on the outcome. The month just passed had seen a string of bad by-election results for the Tories. Macmillan’s efforts to negotiate entry into the Common Market faced a French roadblock in the shape of President de Gaulle. And Washington’s apparent determination to cancel the Skybolt missile system it had promised Britain threatened to cut the ground from under Britain’s nuclear deterrent. ‘The Sunday press is hysterical about Europe, about Skybolt, about the Tory party,’ the prime minister wrote in his diary on 9 December.1 Three days earlier, he had felt under sufficient pressure to tell backbench MPs that he was ready to stand aside should they think this would solve the government’s problems. ‘This is the first time I have had to use this weapon,’ he wrote that evening.

Britain had been rudely confronted with the facts of global power just two weeks before the Nassau summit. Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, was an informal adviser to Kennedy. A scion of America’s East Coast establishment with a liking for well-tailored suits, he was also an Anglophile, well known and highly respected in Whitehall’s corridors of power and not out of place in London’s smartest salons. But Acheson, one of the principal architects of America’s post-war commitment to Europe, was above all a hard-headed foreign policy practitioner. He had always doubted his country’s interests were well served by talk of ‘special relationships’ with individual allies. During his time in the State Department he had heard of a departmental project to codify the ‘specialness’ of the relationship with Britain. He had ordered it to be halted and all the paperwork destroyed. How would other allies respond, he asked officials, if they thought Britain was getting special treatment?2

For all that, his intentions in addressing the West Point Military Academy at the beginning of December 1962 were not hostile. Most of his speech amounted to a set of reflections on the future of the transatlantic alliance and NATO. Wrapped up in the broader argument was a gentle warning to good friends in London. He had no inkling that his words would detonate like a bomb in London. ‘Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,’ Acheson said, in the most oft-quoted of his observations. Then came the wounding strike at the heart of the course Britain had set for itself since the war: ‘The attempt to play a separate power role,’ he explained, ‘that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a “Special Relationship” with the United States, a role based on being head of a “Commonwealth” which has no political structure, or unity or strength … this role is about played out.’

British prime ministers could not dictate the terms of the superpower relationship: ‘Great Britain, attempting to work alone and to be a broker between the United States and Russia, has seemed to conduct a policy as weak as its military power,’ Acheson said.3 Acheson was unaware of the febrile mood in London. In British terms, his words were devastating, and newspapers on the right and the left reacted angrily. The Daily Express declared the speech to be ‘a stab in the back’, and the Daily Telegraph called Acheson ‘more immaculate in dress than judgement’. The Daily Mirror went further, reminding its readers that the Americans had also written off Britain at the time of Dunkirk in 1940. Then, Franklin Roosevelt had been acting under the advice of the US’s ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, the father of the current president. The White House announced that Acheson had not been speaking for the administration. In an attempt to calm the waters Kennedy gave Macmillan the same message in a private telephone call. As Tory and Labour MPs alike joined the chorus of condemnation, however, the prime minister reacted publicly. In what was said to be a reply to ‘representations’ from the former Conservative minister Lord Chandos, Macmillan invoked Britain’s glorious history. Acheson was guilty of an error ‘which [had] been made by quite a lot of people in the course of the last four hundred years, including Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler’.4

Macmillan later confided in his diary that Britain would have looked stronger had it felt able to shrug off the speech.5 Acheson’s rebuke had drawn blood because he was speaking the truth. The more the British felt obliged to talk about their privileged position in the affections of the Americans, the more unequal the relationship appeared. The defence secretary Peter Thorneycroft grasped this following a series of fiery exchanges with his American counterpart Robert McNamara in the week before the summit. He could not, he said, ‘be seen to plead on my knees with the Americans’.

The further irony for Macmillan was that Acheson had done little more than put into blunter language the conclusions of the prime minister’s ‘Future Policy Study’. Macmillan’s response – the application to join ‘the Six’ in the Common Market – was his answer to the question about Britain’s future. In Macmillan’s design, the US and Europe would serve as the two, mutually supportive, pillars of Britain’s global role. The practice was not quite so straightforward. De Gaulle wanted Britain to choose. Neither the cabinet nor the Conservative Party had come around easily to an acceptance that Britain should throw in its lot with the French and Germans. Many still hankered after the Churchillian vision of concentric circles of power. Now, when he met Macmillan at Rambouillet, de Gaulle was preparing to block the path to Europe. The general would often cite an exchange he had had with Winston Churchill on the eve of the Normandy landings. If Britain had to choose between Europe and the open sea, Churchill had admitted, ‘she must always choose the open sea’. Now de Gaulle charged that Macmillan would not break free of Britain’s American shackles. The prime minister had found the encounter exhausting and depressing. De Gaulle reported to the French cabinet that his guest had been driven almost to tears. Macmillan knew he could not afford to return from the Bahamas with the ‘special relationship’ in a similarly sorry condition.

The two leaders who settled with their delegations into separate beachfront villas in Nassau were an unlikely couple. One was a patrician Scot born into a previous century. A high Tory, and a protestant, Macmillan was a decorated hero of the Great War – a conflict that was coming to its close when his interlocutor was born. David Bruce, the US ambassador in London, warned the president not to be misled by the conversational style; Macmillan was as hard-headed as they came. As for the dashing forty-five-year-old occupant of the White House, Kennedy’s background as a Catholic Irish American from Boston did not suggest a natural Anglophile. His wealthy businessman father had served as ambassador in London during the 1930s and had sided with Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. ‘Democracy is finished in England,’ Joseph Kennedy had remarked. At the opening of the 1960s, the young Jack carried the standard for modernity. No one would ever accuse Macmillan of being ‘hip’. Pre-summit nerves among officials on both sides underestimated both men – the guile of an old hand who understood the pull of history, and the youthful wisdom of a president who knew when to temper policy with politics. The tensions were noted by the veteran Sunday Times journalist Henry Brandon, who had reported on many such summits. Brandon sensed a mood of nagging exasperation and bitter indignation ‘such as I have never experienced in all the Anglo–American conferences I have covered over the past twenty years’.6

Macmillan’s pre-summit nerves were understandable. One by one, Britain’s pretensions to the great-power role it had enjoyed as one of the Big Three had crumbled. Now it faced another threat to its international prestige. As Ernest Bevin had insisted it should, Britain had built its own ‘bomb’, but the RAF’s ageing fleet of Vulcan bombers would soon go out of service. Britain’s own ‘Blue Streak’ programme to put nuclear warheads on homemade rockets had ended in expensive failure two years earlier. The government lacked the money and the technology to follow the Americans and Russians by building massive intercontinental ballistic missiles. How could it threaten – or deter – the Soviet Union if it lacked the means to use this most lethal of weapons? To remain a nuclear power, it needed an American delivery system.

Macmillan had no intention of surrendering this emblem of national prestige. His pitch, he decided in advance of the talks, would fall back on the notion of interdependence, which he had raised with Eisenhower in 1957. The West could confront the challenges of the modern age only if they acted in concert. But interdependence did not mean the sacrifice of national power. For Britain, this rested on the closeness of its relationship with the United States and its status as a nuclear power. Arthur Schlesinger, the American historian and a close associate of John F. Kennedy, understood the stakes. For Macmillan, he observed, the ‘special relationship’ and possession of a deterrent ‘were at once essential to Great Britain, good for Tories and adornments of his place in history’.7 As he arrived in Nassau, Macmillan understood that the statement released at the end of the talks would determine whether Britain could call itself a global player any longer. Kennedy had prepared diligently for the summit, at one point telephoning Dwight Eisenhower to clarify what his predecessor had promised during earlier discussions. He could not know that the decisions taken in the Bahamas would set the course for British policy well into the next century.

Flanked by the foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home and the defence secretary Thorneycroft, Macmillan said nothing of de Gaulle’s rebuff. He could not afford to expose his weakness. In Nassau, as at Rambouillet, the prime minister was the supplicant. De Gaulle had the power to shut Britain out of Europe; Kennedy had it within his grasp to shut down Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, an emblem of its status in the world. It had joined the ‘thermonuclear club’ with the explosion of an H-bomb in 1957. As Bevin had demanded, the device was stamped with the Union flag. But attempts to build a missile to carry a nuclear payload had ended in expensive failure. Blue Streak, commissioned in 1955, had been cancelled in 1960 without ever being properly tested. More recently, the Americans had raised serious questions over the suitability of their Skybolt system, which had been offered by Eisenhower after the failure of Blue Streak. By the time Macmillan reached Nassau, the last remaining credible option was the submarine-launched Polaris missile system. If Kennedy said no, the much-vaunted ‘special relationship’, rebuilt so painstakingly after the Suez fiasco, would be shredded. So too would be Britain’s claim that it continued to sit in the front rank of nations. Yes, Macmillan reflected, this was a summit that might well break him.

Despite their different backgrounds, Macmillan and Kennedy had struck up a trusting relationship. The wily Macmillan made the most of his American heritage and appointed David Ormsby-Gore, a close childhood friend of the president, as ambassador to Washington. Ormsby-Gore soon established himself as a White House insider, a rare foreign emissary with direct access to the president. Against all protocol, and to the irritation of Kennedy’s own staff, he was offered a seat on the presidential flight from Washington to Nassau. Kennedy’s advisers were unmoved by such connections – the United States, they judged, had nothing to gain from a deal with Macmillan. To the contrary, these hard-headed policymakers told the president, American interests argued against the perpetuation of a separate British nuclear capability. It was time, some thought, that Britain was put in its place.

*

The most powerful weapon ever invented might have belonged to Britain. The scientific breakthrough that gave the world the atomic bomb was made in a laboratory in Birmingham. In the spring of 1940, the German-born Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian-born Otto Frisch, both exiles from Hitler’s Europe, discovered how to create a chain reaction with a small amount of uranium-235, generating a huge explosion. The group would soon be joined by other refugees, including two French scientists who had produced pioneering work on a plutonium-based weapon. By the time the government-established MAUD Committee completed its top-secret report the following year, Britain was so far ahead in the nuclear game that when the information was shared with the Americans, Washington urged a pooling of resources.

The British government decided to press ahead with an independent programme, badly underestimating the scale of the American effort. Within a year, having thrown its superior scientific and industrial resources into the Manhattan Project, the United States had taken a decisive lead.8 When Hitler’s advance brought the front line of the war to the Channel, Churchill agreed that the British team should be dispersed. Most joined the US programme, and some continued their work in Canada, a collaboration formalised by the Quebec Agreement in 1943. Neither nation, they agreed, would use such a weapon without the consent of the other. When US bombers caused unprecedented destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, they did so only after Britain had given formal approval. Leonard Cheshire, the RAF’s most decorated pilot, joined the airborne observation team that monitored the explosion at Nagasaki.

The war over, the Americans turned inwards. Congress passed the McMahon Act, which overturned all previous nuclear understandings with the United Kingdom and barred any future collaboration. The Soviet Union had its own nuclear project, and the key question for British policymakers was whether the United States would risk a nuclear conflagration in defence of Britain. Beyond that, of course, there was the issue of national prestige. Lord Cherwell, an adviser to Churchill, answered for much of the establishment: ‘If we are unable to make the bombs ourselves and have to rely entirely on the United States for this vital weapon, we shall sink to the rank of a second-class nation, only permitted to supply auxiliary troops, like the native levies who were allowed small arms but not artillery.’9 The imperative was to hold on to the nation’s global status.

Bevin’s insistence in 1946 that a British bomb be stamped with the Union flag fitted the national self-image. Many Labour MPs were still hoping for rapprochement with Moscow, but the Attlee government made a decision that none of its successors would challenge. Five years later, a mushroom cloud above the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia signified Britain’s entry into an exclusive club. Churchill, returned to power in the 1951 election, was initially hesitant about the test, but his scientific adviser William Penney had had no such doubts: ‘The discriminative test for a first-class power is whether it has made an atomic bomb and we have either got to pass the test or suffer a serious loss in prestige both inside this country and internationally.’10 By now the Soviet Union had exploded its own device, and with Attlee’s permission the United States had stationed nuclear-armed bombers at bases in the United Kingdom. Churchill, visiting the Queen at Balmoral, was asleep when the first British bomb exploded. It was only the beginning of the race.

The atomic bomb changed decisively the calculus of war. The advent of the hydrogen bomb a few years later threatened the very future of the planet. Barely a week after the first British atomic test, the Americans exploded the world’s first thermonuclear device on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The mushroom cloud rose more than forty kilometres into the atmosphere and the explosion produced a yield equivalent to more than ten megatons of TNT; ‘Little Boy’, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had yielded about fifteen kilotons. Britain had been kept in the dark about the H-bomb, but the price of great-power status had been raised. When the prime minister and the leader of the opposition clashed in the House of Commons over the relationship with Washington, Attlee’s demand of Churchill inadvertently betrayed the shared assumption about Britain’s post-war role: ‘The heads of the three states ought to meet,’ the Labour leader demanded. ‘The three states’ – no one could admit that in reality it was already two. Moscow would soon have its own H-bomb. Britain could not stand aside. ‘We must do it. It’s the price we pay to sit at the top table,’ Churchill told Edwin Plowden.11 By the time the chiefs of the armed forces had completed a comprehensive review of defence options in 1954, they felt confident enough to argue that ‘Our scientific skill and technological capacity to produce the hydrogen weapon puts within our grasp the ability to be on terms with the United States and Russia.’12 ‘On terms’, ‘the three’ – wherever you turned in Whitehall stood a politician or mandarin fretting about Britain’s waning global power.

Attlee, Churchill and, later, Macmillan at various times grew alarmed at the way the Americans set nuclear weapons alongside their conventional arsenal as instruments of war. In 1951, Attlee and Truman agreed on procedures for the use of those weapons based in Britain. The accord was reaffirmed during the following year by Churchill and Eisenhower. A joint communiqué stated that ‘Under arrangements made for the common defence, the United States has the use of certain bases in the United Kingdom. We reaffirm the understanding that the use of these bases in an emergency would be a matter for joint decision by His Majesty’s Government and the United States Government in the light of circumstances prevailing at the time.’13 Whether, in practice, an American president would wait for the permission of a British prime minister was less obvious.

The gulf in understanding was brought home to Churchill when he met Eisenhower in Bermuda in December 1953. Churchill, his private secretary John Colville noted, saw the H-bomb as ‘something entirely new and terrible’ – a threat to the very existence of the civilised world. By contrast, the president ‘looked upon it as just the latest improvement in military weapons. He implied that there was in fact no distinction between “conventional weapons” and atomic weapons; all weapons in due course became conventional weapons. This of course represents a fundamental difference of opinion between public opinion in the USA and in England.’14 Colville was right. This difference – amplified by the emergence in Britain of the growing Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – would inform nuclear diplomacy between the two capitals for the next decade. When war broke out in Korea, Attlee flew to Washington to seek a renewal of the wartime understanding that atomic weapons would be used only with the consent of both governments. Truman gave an assurance that Washington would ‘consult’ before taking such a decision.15 Attlee’s concerns were shared by his successors. Elaborate underground command centres were built at secret locations in the English Home Counties, and shelters across the United Kingdom. Nuclear drills were introduced and local authorities drew up plans of how to respond in the case of nuclear attack. This was a charade. The advent of the H-bomb meant that any nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union would lead to something approaching national obliteration.

For Churchill, an attempt to engineer a rapprochement between Washington and the post-Stalin leadership in Moscow would become something of an obsession. Its failure would lead him into retirement. Macmillan would pick up the baton, with sustained attempts to persuade first Eisenhower and then Kennedy to agree a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets. Attitudes in Washington seemed far less cautious. The mediating role sought in turn by Churchill and Macmillan in part reflected an eagerness to keep Britain at the top table of world powers, but it also showed an understanding that the costs of a superpower war would fall much more heavily on Britain than on either of the two main protagonists, a realisation that gave force to the rapid expansion of CND and the anti-nuclear movement.

Whatever people’s fears, this was not a game that Britain’s leaders thought they could opt out of. In 1954, Oliver Franks – public servant, scholar and ambassador in Washington between 1948 and 1952 – gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures, with ‘Britain and the Tide of World Affairs’ as his title. The world was in tumult, but Franks’s assessment of Britain’s role was clear: whatever the shifts in the geopolitical plates, ‘Britain is going to continue to be what she has been – a great power.’16 Three years later, in 1957, Britain would explode its own thermonuclear device. Britain’s global status and its bomb had become inextricably linked, and as Macmillan and Kennedy met in Nassau in 1962, Washington threatened both.

By the end of the 1950s, Britain was developing the capacity to produce thermonuclear warheads in sufficient numbers to meet its assumed needs. What was required was a delivery mechanism with the capacity to penetrate Soviet defences. American policy was set out in a secret paper produced by the White House National Security Council in April 1961, just months after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.17 The organising assumption was that the US national interest would be best served by securing control of the West’s nuclear arsenal. As long as Britain had the bomb, France, who had already tested a bomb in 1960, and Germany would want to catch up. ‘We must try to eliminate privileged British status … our minimum objective should be to persuade him [Macmillan] to commit his atomic warheads to the NATO atomic stockpile and his delivery weapons to NATO commanders. Beyond this we should try to move him to cease the production of fissable material for weapon purposes.’ Distilled, the message was that America alone should have a finger on the West’s nuclear trigger. Kennedy concurred with his advisers, adding a note to the paper: ‘It would be desirable for the British in the long run to phase out their nuclear deterrent, since their activity in this field is a permanent goad to the French.’

Macmillan, of course, was not party to such American deliberations and was relying on a deal he had struck with Eisenhower in 1960. Washington had sought access to a British port for its fleet of Polaris nuclear submarines, and the prime minister had offered a base at Holy Loch in Scotland. The quid pro quo for Holy Loch – for Britain’s willingness, in effect, to offer itself as a target for Soviet war planners – was the US’s readiness to supply Britain with its Skybolt air-launched missile system. Russia’s launch of the Sputnik satellite had propelled the world into the missile era. The US had reshaped its nuclear forces around Minuteman missiles scattered in silos across the vast deserts and prairies of the United States and submarines that prowled the deepest oceans carrying Polaris. The failure of Blue Streak left Skybolt as the only remaining option for Britain. Under development by the Pentagon, it promised to extend the life of the British deterrent well beyond that of the Vulcan bombers, which already looked vulnerable to Russian air defences.

By mid-1962, however, a series of failed tests was casting doubt on the viability of Skybolt. The air-launched missiles had run significantly over budget. If they worked, the technicians concluded, they were unlikely to be particularly accurate. Early autumn saw the Pentagon questioning publicly whether Skybolt would ever be cost-effective. There was no great alarm – for the Americans, it was an optional rather than vital programme. The British, though, began to suspect ulterior motives. Nothing was said directly to Macmillan’s government about the possibility of cancellation, but the mood music changed. Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary, gave a speech in which he set out publicly what senior policymakers were thinking privately. McNamara announced that the Kennedy administration was opposed to all ‘national’ nuclear forces within the Western alliance.18 The ‘all’ could only mean the British. Within the context of NATO, McNamara told an audience in Ann Arbor, Michigan, independent nuclear forces were ‘dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence and lacking in credibility as a deterrent’.

America’s own arsenal, of course, was inviolate. McNamara’s views were shared in the State Department and by Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. George Ball, the official charged with relations with Europe, was an enthusiast for European integration and feared that the British bomb would damage the process and give France an added incentive to develop its own independent force de frappe. Before too long, Ball and others argued, West Germany would also want the bomb. The fear that Bonn would renege on Konrad Adenauer’s promise not to pursue nuclear weapons research had become a recurring theme of American defence diplomacy. The State Department was particularly vociferous, with Ball arguing that supplying Polaris would encourage British ‘delusions’, hinder efforts to nudge it towards Europe and block progress against nuclear proliferation. In the summer of 1961, Kennedy wrote to Macmillan, explaining why he had decided to refuse French requests for help in developing its nuclear programme: ‘If we were to help France acquire a nuclear weapons capability, this could not fail to have a major effect on German attitudes … the likelihood that the Germans would eventually wish to acquire a nuclear weapons capability would be significantly increased.’ Any such move would ‘shake NATO to its foundations’19 and proliferation would become unstoppable. Kennedy was persuaded – particularly by Ball – that an extension of the UK’s privileged arrangement could damage Washington’s relationship with the rest of Europe, especially France. On that point, he was at least half right: de Gaulle’s decision to veto Britain’s membership of the EEC was followed by the expulsion of all foreign troops from France and the nation’s withdrawal from the military wing of NATO.

Washington’s alternative to national deterrents was the creation of a new multilateral nuclear force among America’s allies, to which the United States would commit part of its arsenal and to which Britain would assign its national force. The assumption was that this would be largely sea-borne, with crews drawn from across the Western alliance. One way or another, Washington wanted control of the West’s bomb. British defence strategists mocked the American idea for a multilateral force as a recipe for paralysis; it would be impossible to reach agreement across governments on the firing of such shared weapons. More to the point, a multilateral force would put an end to Britain’s privileged position as Europe’s only nuclear power. Macmillan protested to the president that in extremis, simply going it alone would be ‘better than putting a British sailor aboard ship to have tea with the Portuguese’.20 Britain, in other words, was not just another European ally.

The administration’s tough stance did not go unnoticed in the American media. ‘The government of the United States,’ the Washington Post declared in an editorial on 15 December, ‘has handled its relations with Great Britain with little consideration for British feeling and not much evidence of real concern about the British position.’ That said, McNamara recognised privately that the prime minister faced serious political troubles, and the secretary of state Dean Rusk wanted to avoid an open breach with the British. His attachment to the notion of a ‘special relationship’ was pragmatic rather than sentimental. It was the best Washington had as a result of its weak ties to de Gaulle and Adenauer. ‘The secretary [Rusk] said he wasn’t against the special relationship until he could see something better to take its place,’ one official note recorded.21 Those just below him in the department’s Bureau of European Affairs took a more uncompromising line: it was time Britain owned up to its diminished status. So the American side landed in Nassau with three potential offers for Macmillan: the US would press ahead with the Skybolt programme, with the cost shared with the UK. Macmillan could have Hound Dog, a missile system already in service with the United States Air Force, though it would need considerable adaptation to operate from British aircraft. Or Britain could take its place as a member of the new multinational nuclear force that Kennedy was seeking. All three options fell below Macmillan’s ambition.

*

The Caribbean had become a regular venue for Anglo–American summits. The Americans did not have far to travel, and the British could say they were meeting on ‘British’ soil. With ministers and officials in tow, these gatherings would often run on for two or three days. In a world without twenty-four-hour rolling news and digital communications, leaders had the time to work through extensive agendas. Kennedy and Macmillan had met previously in Bermuda. Those talks had gone well, though the president had later grumbled that the water in the rather cramped governor general’s mansion had been insufficiently hot for a decent shave. The British valued relaxed beachfront settings for the sense of informality and intimacy. They put the leaders beyond the noise of Westminster and the glare of political Washington. Macmillan liked to charm. Nassau would demand his best performance.

Macmillan’s demand was simple: a missile system that could deliver Britain’s home-grown nuclear weapon, thus allowing the country to assume its place on the front bench of world powers. That meant Polaris. He did not dare contemplate rejection. One question could never completely be resolved: how ‘independent’ could such a system be? Under what circumstances could a British government make a unilateral decision to fire such missiles? Though he was viscerally opposed to the idea of a multilateral nuclear force, the prime minister was prepared to compromise, as long as he would be able to say on his return home that Britain had safeguarded its nuclear independence.

The State Department’s minutes of the negotiations at Nassau22 convey Macmillan’s determination and desperation. The prime minister began, this report notes, with an emotional appeal, recapping the history of Anglo–American cooperation and pointing out that the bomb had started out as a British project. Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed it should be a cooperative venture, but in 1946 the McMahon Act blocked British participation. Britain had been generous a decade later, the agreement to allow the United States to base its submarines at Holy Loch a token of its good faith.

The appeal was accompanied by a pre-emptive strike against Kennedy’s concerns, particularly the fear that Washington’s other European allies would react badly to a new Anglo–American deal. Saying nothing of his recent blunt exchanges with de Gaulle, Macmillan said he was sure that the implications of a nuclear deal for Britain’s Common Market application would be ‘frankly, absolutely none’. One question, the US note recorded, was whether the switch from Skybolt to Polaris would upset other allies. The prime minister thought not: ‘If it did, we could make some gesture. All these things we were discussing were gestures, in a sense, since the only reality was US power.’ This was an admission no British prime minister before or afterwards could make publicly. When push came to shove, Washington decided.

Kennedy’s opening gambit was to suggest that Skybolt could be revived as a jointly financed project. The missiles were less than accurate and air-launched nuclear weapons were an imperfect deterrent, but for a modest investment – $100 million was the figure he had in mind – Britain would get a capability that would meet its needs at least until the early 1970s. The president returned again and again to the dangers of proliferation, though he was prepared to consider giving Britain access to the Hound Dog system, which could be adapted for its Vulcan bombers. Macmillan had no intention of buying into a project that the US military had deemed a failure, and nor would he accept Kennedy’s assessment that a Polaris agreement would encourage proliferation. He conceded that Germany was ‘dangerous’, but felt the international threat was not comparable to that of the 1930s because of the emergence of the two superpowers.

Macmillan wove desperation into a thinly veiled threat. Drawing a parallel with the isolation Churchill had faced in 1940, he said he faced the same dilemma – whether ‘to chuck it, or go on’. This comparison was far-fetched by any standard – Churchill had been facing an enemy that had swept aside all before it, while Macmillan confronted rejection by an ally – but the prime minister was unabashed. There were plenty of people in Britain, he told the president, who thought the defence budget could be better spent on things such as higher pensions. Without a deal in Nassau he would have to consider whether to press on alone and build a British missile system from scratch. For its part, the United States should consider what sort of ally Britain would be if the Labour Party came to power.

Macmillan ended with an ultimatum that exaggerated the alternatives to Polaris. He would first try to press ahead unilaterally, cutting military spending in the Far East to pay for a British programme. Such a course, he expected, would lead to ‘a deep rift with America’. Expectations that Britain’s conventional forces could carry the burden of defending Europe would be impossible to meet. If Macmillan determined Britain could not stay in the nuclear club? He would resign. The United States would then find itself dealing with a succession of ‘Gaitskells’, a reference to the Labour leader’s support for multilateral nuclear disarmament. This argument went back and forth over two days, interspersed with discussions that ranged from the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir to China’s place at the United Nations. As far as the British side was concerned, all roads led to Polaris.

In the end, Kennedy relented. Macmillan could have Polaris, and at a price the British delegation took to be entirely reasonable. The bargaining, however, was not over. America’s missiles would come with strings attached. The president insisted that the submarines carrying Polaris were assigned to the command of NATO. No one – least of all the Germans – could be left in any doubt that these weapons were at the disposal of the alliance rather than Britain. Macmillan had anticipated the demand when he made his opening pitch, stating that ‘he would be prepared to put in [to NATO] all of his part of a Polaris force, provided the Queen had the ultimate power and right to draw back in the case of a dire emergency similar to that in 1940’. Kennedy proposed a tougher form of words: ‘Only in the event of a dire national emergency – an emergency in which it might be necessary to act alone – an emergency which we cannot envisage and which we all trust will never occur – would Her Majesty’s Government be faced with a decision of utilizing such forces on its own – of course after adequate notice to all its partners.’ The defence secretary Thorneycroft was outraged and advised Macmillan to break off talks. Calmer voices soon prevailed, and after further negotiation a new formula was agreed: Polaris would be supplied on the understanding that it would become part of a NATO multilateral nuclear force. ‘The prime minister made it clear that except where HMG may decide that supreme national interests are at stake, these British forces will be used for the purpose of international defence of the Western alliance in all circumstances.’23

Among Britain’s defence strategists, Polaris was presented as an insurance policy. In 1962, Britain sat under the American nuclear umbrella. The Thor missiles, submarines and nuclear bombers sited in Britain by the United States carried the clear implication that a Soviet attack would inevitably draw American retaliation. As Macmillan pointed out to Kennedy, however, circumstances could change. A future US president might baulk at risking an all-out Soviet nuclear strike against New York and Washington if Britain were attacked. And there was a third possibility. Even if future administrations were indeed ready to honour commitments made to Britain, Moscow could miscalculate. The Soviet Union might launch an attack on Britain in the mistaken belief that the United States would sit on its hands rather than risk a much wider conflagration. The existence of a British deterrent, capable of inflicting devastation on Moscow and perhaps a dozen other Soviet cities, would be a guard against such miscalculation.

The question left hanging was whether the Nassau agreement would allow for sufficient independence of action in such circumstances. Macmillan knew the language was ambiguous. He was nervous of the response in London, where opponents would condemn the claim of ‘independence’ as a mirage. Such was his concern that the cabinet was convened in London under the chairmanship of Rab Butler, the first secretary of state, to review the wording. Ministers had mostly been kept out of nuclear decision-making from the moment that Attlee’s government had decided to secure the bomb, but Macmillan needed political cover. He got it – but not without some equivocation. The official cabinet minute shows ministers congratulating the prime minister on ‘persuading the president to move away from the original United States positions’.24 The joint wording had the effect, in the prime minister’s mind, of ‘giving us the sole right of decision on the use of our strategic nuclear forces’. The foreign secretary and defence secretary, with him in the Bahamas, concurred. Yet the cabinet minute shows that some ministers were not entirely content. The communiqué, these ministers said, seemed ambiguous in its meaning. Was it saying that Britain had the right to withhold its nuclear weapons from the alliance in a case of supreme national interest? Or did it permit the United Kingdom to use the deterrent in cases other than the defence of the Western alliance? ‘It was clear’, the cabinet minute continued, that ‘the prime minister intended the exception to cover both cases. If he were free to make this interpretation public, with the consent of the president, this would safeguard the principle of independence; but there would be advantage in clarifying the terms of the statement and removing the ambiguity.’ Across the Channel in France, de Gaulle was committed to an independent nuclear capability, the force de frappe.25 Clarification of Britain’s position, the cabinet concluded, ‘was especially important in view of Western European opinion. We might easily suffer from the growth of a suspicion that our military independence was, or might be, less secure than, for example, that of the French.’

By the time these misgivings reached Nassau, Macmillan had concluded that it was unlikely he would be able to secure any further concessions. He would have to make the best of what he had. The government had rescued the future of Britain’s nuclear deterrent and would buy Polaris at cost, making a small contribution to the research and development outlay shouldered by the United States. Britain would also lease its airbase on the island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, to the Americans. Macmillan was satisfied, writing in his diary: ‘We have had a tremendous week – three days of hard negotiations, nearly four days in reality. The Americans pushed us very hard … Whether parliament and the country will think we have done well or badly, I cannot yet tell. Yesterday’s press was quite good (except of course Lord Beaverbrook’s). Today’s is very bad.’26 ‘The sell-out’, screamed Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. ‘Macmillan’s nuclear folly’, echoed the Daily Herald. Ministers had been obliged, as they would be many times in the decades to come, to recognise the limitations of British power, but much of the media found the adjustment harder to make. Macmillan’s diary entry gives a fair-weather description of the compromise. ‘Broadly I have agreed to make our bomber force (or part of it) and our Polaris force (when it comes) a NATO force for general purposes. But I have reserved absolutely the right of HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] to use it independently for “supreme national interest”. These phrases will be argued and counter-argued.’ That said, ‘the cabinet did not much like it [the agreement]’.27

By the accounts of the Americans, Macmillan had got the best deal on offer – a better agreement than some on his own side had expected and one more generous than the officials and presidential aides on the other side of the table had wanted Kennedy to concede. The president’s advisers had urged him to tough it out. Another prime minister probably would have failed in Nassau. To a great extent, Macmillan depended on persuasion and trust. The dynamics of great-power relations are generally ruled by interests rather than sentiment, but there are occasions when history is written by personal chemistry as much as by the facts of relative power.

So why had Kennedy given ground? His adviser Richard Neustadt thought that whatever the leaders’ backgrounds, ‘in temperament, taste and wit, the two were strikingly compatible’. 28 The prime minister had worked hard to build the relationship. His links with Eisenhower had been close, and Macmillan had continued to nurture them with Kennedy. When Eisenhower visited London in August 1959, the prime minister personally supervised the schedule. An open-topped white Rolls-Royce was borrowed from the Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr so that president and prime minister could be driven together in style to a service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Macmillan had followed Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 with a stream of letters and suggestions. Sometimes they had an element of ‘Greece-to-Rome’ pomposity – the prime minister’s initial papers were dubbed a ‘Grand Design’ for the future of the West – but the goal was to position Britain as the president’s most reliable ally. Macmillan had reflected on the task before Kennedy’s inauguration: ‘With Eisenhower there was the link of memories and a long friendship. I will have to base myself now on trying to win him [Kennedy] by ideas.’ Just two months before Nassau, the world had looked into the chasm of nuclear Armageddon following Washington’s discovery that Moscow had sited nuclear missiles in Cuba. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had pushed back against an American military that was pressing for strikes against the missile sites. More than once he picked up the telephone to London to rehearse his arguments for a diplomatic settlement with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Macmillan had offered sympathy and support. Kennedy had appreciated both the reassurance and the absence of lectures. Against all precedence, David Ormsby-Gore had been invited to sit in on the White House crisis meetings.29

The State Department’s George Ball attributed the Nassau agreement to a mutual feeling of ‘great warmth’ between the two leaders: ‘My own view is that Kennedy simply responded to the despairing cry of a politician in distress, a kind of fellow feeling.’30 Arthur Schlesinger remarked that the two men got on ‘as if they had known each other all their lives’. Neustadt later prepared a detailed assessment of the Skybolt Affair and subsequent deal. His judgement was that Kennedy had faced ‘an impassioned older man embodying a valued weaker ally who invoked in his own person a magnificent war record, an historic friendship and a claim upon our honour – in Eisenhower’s name – to say nothing of one politician’s feeling for another’.31 In the arguments before Nassau, Neustadt concluded, ‘Robert McNamara and Peter Thorneycroft had spoken different languages; these two [Macmillan and Kennedy] spoke the same.’ The prime minister’s skill had been in playing at once on ‘our friendships and fears’. Ormsby-Gore, a frequent visitor to the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, was a pivotal figure in building trust. The official and social sides of his relationship with Kennedy almost merged in the ambassador. To some around the president, he was a cuckoo in the American camp – an impression that was confirmed when he joined the president’s Christmas party in Florida following the Nassau meeting.

Kennedy secured from Macmillan public assurances that the acquisition of Polaris would not be used as an excuse for further cuts in Britain’s conventional forces, a reflection of what was to become a constant complaint of the Americans – that Europe was ‘free riding’ on their defence spending. Why should the United States invest in the defence of the continent if the Europeans themselves were not prepared to play their part? In December 1962, however, the immediate challenge for the president came from the French. The US administration wanted the Europeans to integrate their efforts in order to solidify the Western alliance against the Soviet Union. It also wanted to discourage nuclear proliferation – above all to Germany. Eager to avoid charges of favouritism, and in an attempt to square the circle, the White House offered de Gaulle the Polaris system on roughly the same terms as provided to Britain. The French president slammed the door – even as he prepared to put an end to Macmillan’s attempt to join the European Community.

De Gaulle made the strategic case for an entirely independent bomb that Macmillan and the British could not admit. ‘In case of a general atomic war,’ he said, ‘there would inevitably be terrible and mortal destruction for both countries. In such conditions, no one in the world and in particular no one in America can say whether or where or how or to what extent American nuclear weapons would be used to defend Europe.’32 Maurice Couve de Murville, de Gaulle’s foreign minister, marked out the contrast between Britain and France: ‘We never imagined our deterrent as anything other than a French deterrent … Britain never imagined that its deterrent could be built without the help of the US; that means inevitably without it being controlled by the US.’ Of course, de Murville’s ‘controlled’ was a word that Macmillan and each of his successors would never admit. What was clear – and the oddity was apparent – was that Britain had, in effect, bought an American nuclear system as an insurance policy against a decision in Washington to withdraw the US nuclear umbrella. In the end the symbolism provided by the escape clause in the Nassau accord was enough for the British prime minister. De Gaulle decided that to depend on a deterrent that had been made in America would by definition mean it was less than wholly independent. The French, strangely enough, were following the path marked out by Ernest Bevin: they would have the Tricolour stamped not just on their bombs but on the missiles that would take them to their targets. Britain would have to live with the ambiguity. To the extent that the bomb was an emblem of national prestige, Macmillan thought the doubts manageable. That France had tested a weapon in 1960 (and China would follow in 1964) made it all the more important that Britain remain a nuclear power. If not one of three, then it would at least be one of five – each of them permanent members of the UN Security Council.

For all that, the sensitivity remained. Henceforth no British government would refer to the nuclear deterrent without first prefacing it with the word ‘independent’ – an insistence that in its way served only to underline their doubts about the circumstances in which Britain could act without American consent. Twenty years later, when Margaret Thatcher wrote to Ronald Reagan seeking to replace the ageing Polaris with the US navy’s Trident missiles, the ghosts of Nassau were still in the room. In 1980, the then president Jimmy Carter had agreed to sell the Trident I system to the UK. By 1982 the US navy had opted for the more advanced Trident II. It was this that Thatcher now requested, but she had to be mindful of the Nassau conditions. ‘Like the Polaris force, and consistent with the agreement reached in 1980 on the supply of Trident I missiles,’ Thatcher wrote, ‘the United Kingdom Trident II force will be assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; and except where the United Kingdom Government may decide that supreme national interests are at stake, this successor force will be used for the purposes of international defence of the Western alliance in all circumstances.’33

Thatcher also felt obliged to echo Macmillan’s commitment to maintaining Britain’s conventional forces:

Reagan’s reply followed the same template. ‘The United States’ readiness to provide these systems is a demonstration of the great importance which the United States government attaches to the maintenance by the United Kingdom of an independent nuclear deterrent capability,’ he said. Then came the strings: ‘I attach great importance to your assurance that the United Kingdom Trident II force will be assigned to NATO and that the economies realized through cooperation between our two governments will be used to reinforce the United Kingdom’s efforts to upgrade its conventional forces. Such nuclear and conventional force improvements are of the highest priority for NATO’s security.’35

More than three decades later, in the summer of 2016, David Cameron’s government replayed the routine when parliament approved the construction of four new submarines to carry the latest American version of the Trident missile system. ‘The nuclear deterrent’, the prime minister told a NATO meeting in Warsaw, ‘remains essential in my view, not just to Britain’s security, but as our allies have acknowledged here today to the overall security of the NATO alliance.’36 Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the British government’s reasoning was as it had been in 1962, when the world had teetered on the edge of nuclear conflagration.

Some in parliament raised questions about the nature of the deterrent. Did Britain still need a system that provided, in the jargon of the navy, ‘continuous at-sea deterrence’ (CASD) – at least one submarine ready, at a moment’s notice, to fire a fusillade of nuclear missiles at an enemy? The Liberal Democrats, in coalition with Cameron’s Conservatives between 2010 and 2015, leaned towards a cheaper, cruise missile-based deterrent. Others questioned whether Britain still needed the assurance of CASD. Even with a bellicose Vladimir Putin in Moscow, the prospect of a surprise nuclear attack was remote. By opting for three submarines rather than four, the government might have saved billions of pounds, but the prime minister pressed ahead regardless.

Some senior officials around Cameron expressed deeper concerns. The austerity budgets that followed the 2008 global financial crash had seen defence badly squeezed, and the nuclear deterrent promised to take more and more from a shrinking allocation. When Macmillan met Kennedy in 1962, defence spending accounted for more than 6 per cent of Britain’s national income; by the time Cameron opted for modernisation, the figure was barely 2 per cent. The army, the navy, the Royal Air Force – all had faced severe cuts. Another thirty years of Trident would impose a further, persistent squeeze. ‘Top-of-the-range nukes and no soldiers,’ one high-ranking official in the Ministry of Defence remarked privately of the Trident decision.

Others in Whitehall raised the issue of independence. Cameron wanted a new form of words that would give greater credence to British freedom of action, but the Americans were clear that was not on offer. Beyond the assignment of the submarines to NATO, the Nassau arrangement had created a technological dependence on the US that France would never have accepted. Cameron’s agreement also included provision for American servicing and refurbishment of the missile system. The Americans controlled the software and the missiles could be serviced only at a US facility. Did this really give the prime minister a free hand in the event of a national emergency?

This was not the British bomb as Bevin had imagined it, and nor did it match the independence of the French one. Peter Westmacott was Britain’s ambassador in Washington when Cameron negotiated the terms that would keep Trident operational until 2060. Beyond the assignment to NATO, he said, there were other constraints on Britain’s freedom of action. The missiles were not only built in the US but for the lifetime of the systems would require servicing and maintenance at the Kings Bay naval submarine base in Georgia. As for independence, Westmacott highlighted a contradiction. ‘We may want to remain as a power with what we call an independent nuclear deterrent, but we have long since given up the option of doing that without the Americans. We are dependent on them for it to work.’37 Westmacott, who also served as ambassador in Paris, drew a contrast with the French nuclear force. ‘The French [nuclear system], on the other hand, functions independently, even if they’ve worked with the Americans on upgrading some of their warhead technology.’ So why did British politicians not seem to have a problem with the fact that Polaris and Trident were not independent? According to Westmacott, ‘They pretend it is. And, of course, there isn’t actually an American finger on the trigger.’ The American historian Kenneth Waltz was scathing. A deal struck ‘to put the “great” back into Great Britain turned England into a nuclear satellite of the United States’.38

This was the prison Macmillan had constructed, from which his successors were either unwilling or unable to escape. Prime ministers continued to offer a strategic case for Polaris and Trident, but the political reality was that possession of nuclear weapons had become inextricably tied up with official notions, and public perceptions, of national prestige. No subsequent prime minister would dare challenge Churchill’s assertion in 1954 that the bomb was ‘the price we pay for sitting at the top table’; to suggest that Britain should give up the deterrent was to admit that it was no longer a front-rank power. Other governments, it was said, would then ask why Britain should hold on to its permanent seat on the UN Security Council when the other four permanent members were all nuclear powers.

Nuclear disarmament, wrongly but fatally, became a synonym for political and military weakness. For a brief period during the early 1980s, the Labour Party under Michael Foot shifted in that direction. It fought the 1983 general election on a platform of unilateral disarmament. But Foot’s policy was tainted by a wider perception that he was unwilling to sustain strong military forces. Margaret Thatcher secured a landslide victory and Labour, under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair, concluded that it had best embrace the bomb. No one would say that Germany was any less safe for its lack of such a weapon. But Britain, of course, was not Germany.

NOTES

1 Catterall, The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II, p. 523.

2 Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 385.

3 For a detailed account of the Westpoint speech, see Neustadt, Richard, ‘Dean Acheson and the Special Relationship: The West Point Speech of December 1962’, Historical Journal, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1990), pp. 599–608.

4 Ibid.

5 Catterall, The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II, p. 523.

6 Neustadt, Alliance Politics, p. 52–3.

7 Louis, The Special Relationship, p. 91.

8 Ibid., pp. 118/19.

9 Ibid., p. 120.

10 Hennessy, Having It So Good, p. 182.

11 Ibid., p. 329.

12 Ibid., p. 339.

13 See the National Security Archive, ‘Consultation Is Presidential Business: Secret Understandings on the Use of Nuclear Weapons’, NSA Electronic Briefing Book, No. 159.

14 Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 345.

15 Garnett, British Foreign Policy Since 1945, p. 119.

16 Louis, The Special Relationship, p. 105.

17 Lamb, Richard, The Macmillan Years, 1957–1963: The Emerging Truth, John Murray, London, 1995, p. 298.

18 See Neustadt, Alliance Politics, p. 38.

19 Office of the Historian, Letter from Kennedy to Macmillan transmitted via outgoing telegram, Department of State, to US Ambassador, London, 8 May 1961.

20 Neustadt, Richard, E., Report to JFK: The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective, Cornell University Press, New York, 1999, p. 134.

21 Ibid., p. 77.

22 Office of the Historian, Department of State, 20778, Memorandum of Conversation, 19 December 1962.

23 John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, ‘Kennedy–Macmillan Joint Statement, Nassau, 21 December 1962’.

24 National Archives, Cab. 128/36 (62), 76th Conclusions, 22 December 1961.

25 Charlton, The Price of Victory, p. 283.

26 Catterall, The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II, p. 527.

27 Ibid., p. 528.

28 Neustadt, Alliance Politics, p. 35.

29 Louis, The Special Relationship, p. 97.

30 Charlton, The Price of Victory, p. 294.

31 Neustadt, Alliance Politics, p. 111.

32 See Lamb, The Macmillan Years, 1957–1963, p. 319.

33 Margaret Thatcher Foundation, ‘Letter to Reagan (Trident nuclear deterrent)’, 11 March 1982.

34 Ibid.

35 Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, ‘Letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom Confirming the Sale of the Trident II Missile System to the [sic] Her Country’, 11 March 1982.

36 Press conference at NATO summit in Warsaw, 9 July 2016.

37 Interview with author.

38 Garnett, British Foreign Policy Since 1945, p. 152.