Duncan Sandys, Unmanned Weaponry, and the Impossibility of Defence

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of East Anglia digital repository 1 Nuclear Belief Systems and Individual Policy-Makers: Duncan Sandys, Unmanned Weaponry, and the Impossibility of Defence Lewis David Betts This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (School of History, Faculty of Arts and Humanities) November, 2014 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 This thesis attempts to explore the influence that Duncan Sandys' experiences of the Second World War had on his policy preferences, and policy-making, in relation to British defence policy during his years in government. This is a significant period in British nuclear policy which began with thermonuclear weaponry being placed ostentatiously at the centre of British defence planning in the 1957 Defence White Paper, and ended with the British acquiring the latest American nuclear weapon technology as a consequence of the Polaris Sales Agreement. It also saw intense discussion of the nature and type of nuclear weaponry the British government sought to wield in the Cold War, with attempts to build indigenous land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and where British nuclear policy was discussed in extreme depth in government. The thesis explores this area by focusing on Duncan Sandys and examining his interaction with prominent aspects of the defence policy-making process. It argues that Sandys sought to navigate his way through this period of uncertainty by drawing heavily upon his experiences of the Second World War, and that this method of policy-making should be seen as a nuclear belief system unique to the individual, and therefore critical in understanding how British policy-makers approached the Cold War at the highest levels of government. 3 Table of Contents Introduction 6 Nuclear Belief Systems 8 The Role of the Individual 11 Thesis Structure 17 The Intellectual Foundations of Sandys' Belief System 20 The Second World War 21 In Opposition 35 The Historian 44 Conclusion 50 The Ministry of Supply and the Radical Review: 1953-54 51 The Radical Review 52 The Sandys Doctrine 56 Reaction 61 The Second Phase 66 Reaction 74 Conclusion 82 The 1957 Defence White Paper 84 The Political and Strategic Context 87 The Drafting Process 93 New Strategic Priorities 97 The Unmanned Weapons Threat 107 The White Paper 115 Conclusion 123 The Struggle Over the Nuclear Delivery System: 1957-1960 125 The Political and Strategic Context: Disarmament and Anglo-American 127 Relations Thor and the Independent Nuclear Capability 136 Sandys and Nuclear Independence 141 The Move to Polaris 148 The Admiralty and Setting the Agenda 150 The Conflict with Blue Streak 155 Conclusion 165 4 Blue Streak 167 Policy Implementation in the Aftermath of the 1957 White Paper 170 The 1958 White Paper and the First Period of Doubt 176 Sandys' Final White Paper 186 The Nuclear Deterrent Study Group and Emerging Alternatives 193 The End of Blue Streak 200 Conclusion 212 Conclusions 215 Bibliography 223 5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Richard Maguire and Camilla Schofield. I would also like to give special thanks to my mum, grandparents, and brother. I could not have done this without their support. 6 Introduction Unlike many politicians of his generation, Duncan Sandys has not been the subject of any detailed study. There have been no biographies, and he did not publish any diaries or memoirs.1 When not simply referred to in passing as Winston Churchill's son-in-law, the main recurring item of personal information offered in relation to his work is that which concerns his difficult character - something Harold Macmillan speculated might owe itself to 'German blood', and which caused Gerald Templer, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff during Sandys' first year at the Ministry of Defence, to physically attack him and refuse to speak to him for twenty years.2 Even Ian Smith, the formidable Rhodesian white minority leader with whom Sandys dealt with as Secretary of State for the Colonies, found him 'abrupt, even tending to aggressiveness' and 'completely devoid of those qualities of diplomacy and tact associated with British "statesmen"'.3 Where he has been discussed in direct relation to the policy-making process, historians have tended to neglect the influence that his experiences during the Second World War might have had on his policy preferences, albeit whilst occasionally accepting them as a non-specific influence.4 Martin S. Navias has written that the Second World War left a 'lasting impression' on Sandys: [T]o the extent that he considered himself well cognizant of the major changes taking place in the realm of military technology - especially when it came to missile and nuclear weapons and their implications for what was 1 In a 1996 book on the papers of former Cabinet Ministers it said 'Biographies are being prepared by Dr John Barnes of the London School of Economics, and by Duncan Sandys's son-in-law, Piers Dixon'. Neither appear to have been completed; Hazelhurst, C., Whitehead, S. and Woodland, C. (eds.), A Guide to the Papers of British Cabinet Ministers: 1900-1964 (Cambridge: University Press, 1996), p. 319. 2 Macmillan, H. and Catterall, P. (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: Prime Minister and After, 1957-66 (London: Macmillan, 2011), p. 128-29; Templer regarded Sandys as 'an interloper with little grasp of strategic issues in general or the heritage of the British Army'; Navias, M. S., '"Vested Interests and Vanished Dreams": Duncan Sandys, the Chiefs of Staff and the 1957 White Paper' in Smith, P. (ed.), Government and the Armed Forces in Britain, 1856-1990 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1996), p. 223. 3 Smith, I., The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (London: Blake, 1997), p. 58. 4 C. N. Hill refers to Sandys as the 'strongest political personality' in his history of the British rocket and space programme, yet references to his background are limited to his having 'made an early reputation for himself during the war in the context of German guided weapons', and makes no mention of how this period influenced his outlook; Hill, C. N., A Vertical Empire: The History of the UK Rocket and Space Programme, 1950-1971 (London: Imperial College Press, 2001), p. 19. 7 known as "global war" - and well aware of the natural conservativeness of the defence departments.5 As a result of this, Navias writes that Sandys arrived at the Ministry of Defence in January 1957 'with a record indicating a predilection towards cost-cutting, reliance on nuclear deterrence and missiles, and a willingness to override service sensitivities'.6 However, Navias frames Sandys' policy-making in terms of this 'predilection towards cost-cutting', rather than examining the extent to which the reductions in expenditure and manpower he became associated with were actually an incidental (but useful) by- product of the policies that he constructed for other reasons. To this end he credits Sandys with recognising 'the poverty of Britain's resources' in order to defend him against charges of lacking an appreciation or understanding of defence policy.7 A. J. R. Groom was another who sought to minimise the role of Sandys' intellectual contribution towards the policies of 1957, writing that much of 'the lines of policy that were to lead to the Sandys Defence White Papers' had evolved from 1951 onwards.8 There was certainly a large degree of continuity in what Sandys proposed in 1957, but Groom fails to cite Sandys as having provided an important voice in the defence debates during those years, or mention that his White Papers drew heavily on the proposals he had put forward in 1953 as the Minister of Supply during the so-called 'Radical Review'. This thesis will argue along a different line, and suggest that when this consistency in Sandys' policy preferences is properly taken into account, the economies he pursued can be seen as having been a significant aspect of his recommendations, but not as something that was allowed to take precedence over what he considered to have been sound strategic concerns. 5 Navias, M. S., '"Vested Interests and Vanished Dreams"', p. 219. 6 Navias, M. S., Nuclear Weapons and British Strategic Planning, 1955-1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 140. 7 Ibid., pp. 248-49; Richard Moore follows a similar course to Navias in writing that Sandys' preference for unmanned weaponry 'reflected in part his involvement in the activities of the wartime Crossbow committee' (although he never expands on this and its direct effects on the policy-making process) having previously framed the White Paper as the result of Sandys following the 'logic' of instructions to reduce the defence budget and 'in particular to bring peacetime conscription to an end'; Moore, R., Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality: Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1958-64 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 9-11 and p. 254. 8 Groom, A. J. R., British Thinking About Nuclear Weapons (London: Frances Pinter, 1974), p. 92; Desmond Wettern accuses Sandys of attempting to replace conventional forces with 'a still unproven nuclear deterrent system', but provides no background information as to what could have sent him down this course, and makes no mention of his previous opposition to certain naval programmes as Minister of Supply; Wettern, D., The Decline of British Seapower (London: Jane's, 1982), p.

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