![]() ![]() Meanwhile, the significance of the Special Relationship continued to gather weight in the minds of British strategic planners. The USSR was now run by committee, headed by a first among equals who could be deposed (as indeed Nikita Kruschev was in 1964) it was perhaps more stable and less likely to launch a surprise invasion, but deadly crises could still arise through miscalculation. It made a certain sense, when the chief occupant of that city was a hyper-paranoid dictator with proven territorial ambitions the point was to make the cost of direct aggression against the UK unthinkably high.Īfter 1960, however, the direction of British strategic nuclear thought shifted. ![]() Their job, in accordance with established strategic bombing doctrine and the balance of terror theory, was simple: destroy Moscow. Prior to 1956, the British nuclear deterrent had the goal of preventing the USSR from threatening the UK by promising a nuclear counter-attack, in the absence of third-party support: it was independently built and operated, carried by the independently designed and operated V-bomber force. The British response was, "we can no longer act alone without American support, so we need to preserve a good relationship with the Americans at all costs." What to do? To paint with a very broad brush, the French response was, "we cannot rely on the perfidious Americans to back us up: we need to preserve the capability to act independently at all costs". In 1956 the political elite in both the UK and France faced a crisis after the Suez crisis effectively slammed on the brakes on British imperial influence east of the Nile the USA had asserted the primacy of its own interests. A post-war consensus saw the British government devote significant resources to developing nuclear weapons, and indeed the first British A-bomb test took place in 1952.īut the UK was the head of an empire in long-term decline. The Conservatives hated and feared the threat of Soviet communism the Labour Party leadership hated and feared the Soviets even more (as first cousins once removed in the family tree of left wing ideology, they were seen as class traitors by the first generation of Bolsheviks). Nor were the British political elite necessarily opposed to this. In any US/Soviet war scenario, the UK played a critical role. ![]() It had proven, during the second world war, to have a vital strategic role as America's unsinkable aircraft carrier and resupply depot, moored 50 kilometres off the coast of Europe. The term "balance of terror" was coined by the time the USA and USSR began to gradually step back from the brink in the mid-1970s with the SALT arms limitation talks, the US nuclear forces were targeting individual sub-post-offices in Moscow with quarter megaton nukes. And in the meantime, better ways of destroying strategic targets came along: the H-bomb made possible the destruction of just about any hardened target, and then of an entire capital city. ![]() The focus switched from the A-bomb to the delivery system-first strategic bombers, then ballistic missiles, and finally cruise missiles and artillery. But then it turned out to be surprisingly, dismayingly easy for other countries to build such devices. The A-bomb promised to shorten wars by making it possible to destroy strategic targets such as weapons factories and armoured divisions with a single strike. For which we can ultimately thank General Douhet for his theory of air power and the idea that shock and awe would cause civilian populations to rapidly cave in time of war. In an era of total war, the Manhattan Project (and its British counterpart, Tube Alloys, which was merged with it in 1943) seemed like a necessity, payback and escalation in the wake of the Blitz. The A-bomb, in 1945, must have been truly shocking a device that could, with a single bomb, inflict as much damage as a thousand bomber raid. ![]()
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