Britain’s Thermonuclear Bluff

Letters

Vol. 14 No. 22 · 19 November 1992

From Denis MacShane

Norman Dombey and Eric Grove are wrong to argue (LRB, 22 October) that the US-UK nuclear special relationship prevents ‘a common European nuclear defence policy’ being agreed between Britain and France because the United States would not want its nuclear weapons secrets to be shared with France. In fact, the US has already given and gives France considerable help in the scientific and technical development of her nuclear arms. This was revealed in the latest volume of Giscard d’Estaing’s memoirs, Le pouvoir et la vie: I’affrontement, published last year. He describes a visit from Henry Kissinger in 1974, soon after Giscard became President of France. Kissinger wanted to know if Giscard would continue with the ‘special relations’ (nos rélations spéciales dans le domaine nucléaire) but Giscard had no idea what Nixon’s envoy was talking about. Later, his military staff informed him that France regularly sent her nuclear weapons experts to the United States, where a curious game took place. The French would describe the research they were undertaking and the Americans would indicate if it was a blind alley or not. Technically, the US did not breach the McMahon Act and gave only ‘negative information’ to the French, but according to Giscard, the American-Franco nuclear co-operation, which had ‘gone on for several years’, was invaluable in the successful development of French nuclear weapons. Naturally, all was conducted with the utmost secrecy and Kissinger and President Ford stressed repeatedly the need to keep the contacts utterly secret. At the moment of his successor’s investiture in 1981, Giscard says he informed Mitterrand about the US-France contacts. Mitterrand’s ‘long face nodded and he said nothing,’ writes Giscard.

Giscard’s memoirs are not backed up with any source references but it seems unlikely that he would have invented all of this in such detail. But if it is true, it does make a nonsense of the view that the Americans exclusively favoured the British in the development of nuclear arms and of the view advanced by Dombey and Grove that de Gaulle kept Britain out of the EEC chiefly because of UK military dependency on the US. De Gaulle’s views were more to do with the belief that Britain would not fully join in or accept the responsibility of the political and economic partnership implicit in the EEC. Looking at the Tories’ Maastricht convulsions, from Major’s original opt-outs to present absurdities, who is to say de Gaulle was wrong? Giscard’s account also suggests that the McMahon Act is no obstacle to joint Anglo-French nuclear arms projects in the context of a common European defence programme, should that emerge.

Finally, Giscard underlines the point about nuclear weapons that represents their biggest intellectual challenge. While President, he asked for an exercise to be simulated in which he would have to take a decision on whether or not to authorise their use. The French Army obliged with a realistic enactment involving Soviet thrusts causing massive French losses, and the commanders considered using nuclear missiles to halt the advance. Giscard writes that he would never authorise first use, but would be prepared to secure vengeance if France were attacked with nuclear weapons. Thus the nuclear dilemma. Weapons that cannot be used but dare not be left in the hands exclusively of other powers. Now that all nuclear weapons states are committed to the free market and to the economics of capitalism it should – shouldn’t it – be a lot easier to agree to get rid of them all.

Denis MacShane
Divonne, France

From Janet Bloomfield

Britain’s thermonuclear bluff continues to this day. The first Trident submarine HMS Vanguard was on its way from Barrow to Faslane when you published this important article. Rational people may fail to understand why we are persisting with the expenditure of £33 billion on this system when the Cold War is over. The UK Government is still as mesmerised as Macmillan was by the status that having the bomb seemingly confers. How can they convincingly argue against nuclear proliferation when they are acting as the ultimate role model for aspiring nuclear nations? Scientific reports have shown that the design of the Trident warhead is fundamentally flawed and dangerous yet they will be regularly transported up and down our motorways with the attendant risk of a catastrophic accident. It is time for public opinion to call the Government’s bluff and demand that the madness of Trident be stopped.

Janet Bloomfield
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,

Vol. 14 No. 24 · 17 December 1992

From Norman Dombey, Eric Grove

We are glad that Denis MacShane (Letters, 19 November) has raised the question of US policy with respect to nuclear co-operation between Britain and France. It is true that the US has provided France with informal help on her nuclear programme, but as MacShane points out, this help did not breach US Atomic Energy legislation. After over thirty years of US-UK collaboration any exchange of nuclear weapon design information between Britain and France would almost certainly breach that legislation as well as the US-UK agreement on nuclear collaboration for military purposes, unless the appropriate US authorities were to agree to the exchange. And that cannot be taken for granted. In fact Mr Heath was initially keen on nuclear collaboration with France during the negotiations of 1970-72 which led to British accession to the European Community. But Lord Carrington, then Secretary of Defence, persuaded him that there was no point in pursuing the matter because of ‘Britain’s difficulties of disclosing nuclear information received from the Americans’.

The problems of Anglo-French collaboration on nuclear weapon design and manufacture have been reviewed by Andrew Pierre in Nuclear Politics and more fully by Ian Smart in his Adelphi Paper of 1973. The main problem is that even where the warhead is said to be of British design – the warhead used in the Polaris Chevaline system, for example – it is almost impossible to establish that no design information originated in the US. If Britain wished to build a new warhead with the French based on that design for a new standoff missile, the US would be bound to point out to Britain that the design incorporated information of US origin.

A little-known precedent illustrates the point. In the late Sixties Britain was wanting to collaborate with Germany and Holland in setting up a uranium enrichment plant using centrifuge technology, which had been under development in all three countries. But Britain was planning to use a bearing and other components for the centrifuge which had some resemblance to components developed under its 1955 collaboration agreement with the US on civil nuclear energy. This agreement also contained a restriction on transfer to third parties of US-origin information. In spite of the peaceful purpose of the proposed plant, and the fact that the components proposed were substantially different from the original US designs, the US formally asserted a claim that US-origin information was involved. Lawrence Freedman discusses the incident in Britain and Nuclear Weapons.

In this case Britain successfully resisted the US and the Treaty of Almelo was finally agreed between the three countries in 1970. Britain argued that technology constantly evolves and that it was therefore necessary to have a cut-off in the development process after which any claim of national origin was pointless. While this was accepted by the US or at least not pursued further, we cannot imagine that the US would take a similar line over weapon design information. Indeed the ultimate penalty for transferring weapon design information to nationals of other countries without consent is still death under US law and the US has never worried overmuch about the extra-territorial applicability of its laws, as General Noriega would testify. So it is unlikely that Britain or indeed individual British officials would be prepared to reveal weapon design information to French nationals without US consent, and that consent would be difficult to obtain. It is possible, however, for Britain and France to collaborate on operational matters such as the targeting and deployment of nuclear weapons, or on the joint manufacture of a missile or other weapon delivery system, without asking the US for permission.

We should like to lake this opportunity to thank all those who corresponded with us about the article (LRB, 22 October). As a result we are able to fill in some gaps in the original version. We now have better evidence that Orange Herald, which was tested in front of journalists, was the large fission ‘fallback’. Lorna Arnold, in her official history of British tests in Australia, A Very Special Relationship, writes that after the Grapple series Britain had ‘an extremely expensive high-yield warhead for a ballistic missile’. ‘Extremely expensive’ indicates the ‘fallback’ which was ‘expensive in fissile material’, according to Cook’s biographers. The ballistic missile is Blue Streak and Morton’s official Australian history of Woomera, Fire across the Desert, identifies the Orange Herald test as the test of the Blue Streak warhead. We now estimate that this weapon would have had a yield of 300-500 kilotons. The fallback never went into production on account of the cancellation of Blue Streak.

We were not quite right about Yellow Sun Mark: I, the high-yield fission weapon which went into service in 1958. This was not the Orange Herald fallback, as it would have been too expensive. It must, therefore, have been a large Red Beard of around 100-200 kilotons. The smaller versions of Red Beard were tested in the Antler series at Maralinga in Australia in September and October 1957 and the high-yield version was tested as Grapple X at Christmas Island in November 1957: it was too risky politically to test such a large weapon in Australia.

Norman Dombey, Eric Grove
University of Sussex