Cold War: East Anglia E-Book

Jim Wilson OBE

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 284

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This is the story of how the Cold War impacted on the people of East Anglia. Had nuclear conflict broken out, the region would have found itself as the target of a Soviet strike for the simple reason that it housed the launch pad for not only the British deterrent, but also America's first line of defence. The book also examines the early development of the UK's nuclear arsenal, with ballistic and environmental testing of nuclear bombs at Orford Ness and storage and maintenance at one of the country's most secret sites, Barnham. Cold War: East Anglia reveals the secrets of the years of confrontation, and looks at what life might have been like had the Cold War turned 'hot'.

Leseprobe

To Judith, for her love, support and understanding

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I AM GRATEFUL to a number of people who have trawled their memories, in some cases almost as far back as sixty years, to recall their experiences in the early days of the Cold War, and how if the temperature of international relations suddenly worsened East Anglia would have faced up to nuclear conflict.

I am indebted in particular to Mike Allisstone, Wayne Cocroft, John Cogdale, Huby Fairhead, Roland Hall, David Heading, Leonard Hewitt, Tony Howells, Justyn Keeble, David Morris, Arthur Nichols, Peter Portanova, Ron Randell, Stuart Robathan, Bob Rudasill, Harry Teague MBE, Sam Tolley, Denis Tuttle and David Twyford.

I particularly want to thank Keith and Margot Eldred, owners of the former Barnham nuclear bomb store, now an industrial estate, where the UK’s first ‘Blue Danube’ nuclear weapons were stored and maintained in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in utmost secrecy. In conjunction with English Heritage, they are now ensuring that this unique memorial to the Cold War is preserved and kept as a historic reminder of those early threatening years of Cold War confrontation.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Glossary

Introduction

1 Operation Ju-Jitsu

2 Aldermaston-by-the-Sea

3 The Nuclear Pentagon

4 The Calendar Girl who made Cold War History

5 Life Beyond the Bomb

6 Spotting the Mushroom Clouds

7 Germ War ‘Guinea Pigs’

8 Peeping into Russia’s Backyard

9 ‘Broken Arrow’

10 ‘Who is Watching the People who are Watching our Nukes?’

Bibliography

Copyright

FOREWORD

THE IMPACT ON East Anglia of the ‘friendly invasion’ by the United States Army Air Force in the 1940s left a huge legacy which remains alive seventy years on. In many ways, the impact of the Cold War had a similar social and cultural impact on East Anglia. The region was a great deal more vulnerable to the potential horror of nuclear attack than those who lived through decades of nuclear tension probably realised.

East Anglia hosted the full range of Cold War sites. It was the launch pad for both the UK and America’s first response had the Soviet Union mounted a pre-emptive strike, as appeared frighteningly possible, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Certainly, East Anglia was in the cross-hairs of the USSR’s nuclear trigger – so many strategic targets were located in the region.

There is a growing realisation that the legacy of the Cold War in the region should be preserved in order that future generations can appreciate how it affected life in East Anglia. So much has already been lost, or is under threat, and preservation is an urgent issue. English Heritage is undertaking to save some of East Anglia’s iconic Cold War buildings and the National Trust has given protection to buildings at Orford Ness which were involved in the development of the UK’s first nuclear weapons, but much more remains to be done.

A measure towards preserving the legacy of the Cold War years is the study being undertaken by the University of East Anglia’s Centre of East Anglian Studies, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Much of the historical research into the Cold War has concentrated on high-level policy-making and military strategy. The UEA project hopes to focus more on the Cold War at a community level. As the outline statement of the project states:

The scale, significance and, most importantly, the impact of the gradual and rather secretive militarisation of the region in the period remains largely unchartered. This is a consequence of the secrecy of the Cold War itself, but also because the focus of the historians has been on the global Cold War, rather than the Cold War as fought at a local level. The front line of this ‘secret’ war lay in the heart of Britain’s regional communities, both rural – where nuclear weapons sites, listening stations, airbases and laboratories sprang up next to small villages and at the end of leafy lanes – and urban, where the rapidly expanding armaments industry drove the development of new towns. The consequence of this involvement was that villages and small towns across the nation faced the prospect of devastation at the hands of Soviet nuclear and conventional weapons that was unprecedented, even during the Second World War.

As we approach the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent end of the Cold War, this book is a contribution to recording some of the aspects of the Cold War in East Anglia told, for the most part, through the voices of people who were closely involved.

Jim Wilson OBE, 2014

GLOSSARY

ADOC – Air Defence Operations Centre

AFB – Air Force Base (USAF)

AFC – Air Force Cross

AWRE – Atomic Weapons Research Establishment

BCAS – Bomber Command Armament School

BMEWS – Ballistic Missiles Early Warning System

BPI – Bomb Power Indicator

CDEE – Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment

C-in-C – Commander-in-Chief

CND – Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

CRE – Central Reconnaissance Establishment

DERA – Defence Evaluation and Research Agency

DFC – Distinguished Flying Cross

EBI – Extended Background Investigation

ELINT – Electronic Intelligence

Flt Lt – Flight Lieutenant

Flt Sgt – Flight Sergeant

FOIA – Freedom of Information Act

FP – Fluorescent Particles

GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters

GZI – Ground Zero Indicator

HEROD – High Explosives Research Operational Distribution

IRBM – Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile

JIC – Joint Intelligence Committee

JIGSAW – Joint Inter-Services Group for the Study of All-Out War

Lt Col – Lieutenant Colonel

MT – Mechanical Transport

NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

NBC – Nuclear, Biological and Chemical

PM – Prime Minister

PRO – Public Records Office

PRP – Personnel Reliability Program

PV – Positive Vetting

QRA – Quick Readiness Alert

RAF – Royal Air Force

ROC – Royal Observer Corps

RSG – Regional Seat of Government

RSM – Radiac Survey Meter

SAC – Strategic Air Command

SACEUR – Supreme Allied Commander Europe

SALT – Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties

SDI – Strategic Defense Initiative

Sgt – Sergeant

SIOP – Single Integrated Operational Plan

Sqn Ldr – Squadron Leader

SW – Special Weapon

TEL – Transporter Erector Launcher

TNA – The National Archive

Wg Cdr – Wing Commander

UEA – University of East Anglia

UFO – Unidentified Flying Object

UKWMO – UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation

USAF – United States Air Force

USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

INTRODUCTION

We must not forget that by creating the American atomic base in East Anglia, we have made ourselves the target, and perhaps the bull’s eye of a Soviet attack.

Winston Churchill, 15 February 1951.1

It is a quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led to the end of the Cold War. A whole generation has grown up without experiencing the dread and anxiety of Cold War. Looking back over twenty-five years it is hard to recapture the mood that prevailed during those nervous Cold War years. We lived, particularly when tensions were highest, under a threat of nuclear annihilation, mutually assured destruction, the iconic four-minute warning, and a reliance on the protective power of a credible ‘deterrence’. Even though ‘Protect & Survive’ leaflets handed out by the government were widely derided, we had to believe official inferences that nuclear war was ‘survivable’. But declassified documents from the ‘secret state’ now prove that the effort to sustain public morale took precedence over the much gloomier forecasts produced by experts and scientists in Whitehall, which bore rather more relevance to reality. Deep in Whitehall, civil servants of the JIGSAW Group (Joint Inter-Services Group for the Study of All-Out War) were discussing the point at which a nation state would pass beyond any hope of revival and reach the stage of total breakdown.2

It was impossible to grasp the awfulness of what could happen. To have morbidly dwelt upon it would have made normal life through four decades almost impossible. So we all got on with our lives, pushing to the back of our minds the spectre of the possibility that the Cold War would heat up.

Yet every day, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the military prepared themselves to strike back with incalculable nuclear force. It was their job to think about and act out the unthinkable. If deterrence was to work – and thank God it did – the UK and its allies had to have the capability, and the political will, to deliver an overwhelming nuclear strike whatever the cost. ‘Quick Readiness Alert’ (QRA), to achieve just that, was practised daily on airbases across East Anglia, both British and American. Unimaginable nuclear strike power was available in the region to respond at less than fifteen minutes’ notice, twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year.

From January 1962, on operational V-bomber bases across the region, one aircraft per squadron was sitting on the runway around the clock, armed with a nuclear weapon, its crew ready to take off within fifteen minutes or less. The destructive power aboard each bomber was equal to all the bombs dropped on Nazi Germany in the whole of the Second World War. As one senior Whitehall mandarin, Sir Kevin Tebbit, who as Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence was close to war planning, and privy to the secret fears debated in Whitehall, recalled: ‘Hardly anyone died in the Cold War, but we lived on a daily basis with the risk that everyone might …’3

Nowhere in Britain was that comment more true than in East Anglia, as Winston Churchill, in his 1951 speech, recognised. As was so often proved, Churchill’s opinion was prescient. Harold Macmillan, who became prime minister in 1956, repeated Churchill’s assertion. When he signed the agreement with President Eisenhower to base American nuclear-tipped missiles on launch pads in East Anglia, he told a press conference that he was well aware the decision would make us the free world’s first nuclear attack target. ‘We can’t help that,’ he said, adding that if the missiles were ever fired it would mean the failure of all the purposes for which they were devised.4

East Anglia’s vulnerability was reinforced again in 1958, the year those first Norfolk Thor nuclear missiles became operational. A secret government paper presented to ministers made clear that: ‘The Russians, either using bombers or ballistic missiles when available, could mount a comprehensive attack on this country. It would be aimed in all probability at nuclear bomber bases [there were many in East Anglia] and offensive missile launching sites [again based largely in East Anglia], a total of 40 or 50 sites as a first priority …’5 The paper went on to say that even if there were no deliberate attacks on large centres of population, the size of the UK and the possibility of weapons going astray made it likely that towns and cities would be hit. If, as was expected, ground burst weapons were used, extensive areas of the country would be contaminated by fallout. A grim prospect, but of course the public were never told, for fear that morale would be destroyed.

There was also Macmillan’s rather blasé comment in his personal diary at the time of the Cuban crisis in October 1962: ‘To us who face 500 of these missiles in Russia trained on Europe there is something slightly ironical about these 20 or so in Cuba. But, as I told the President, when one lives on Vesuvius, one takes little account of the risk of explosions.’ For those of us living in East Anglia, Vesuvius was too close to home for comfort!6

While weapons, and the means to deliver them, developed and improved in their destructive power, in the frenzy of the arms race East Anglia grew more prominent as the ‘bull’s eye’ of the USSR’s UK target. The region was peppered with strategic bases. A nuclear world war – effectively a Third World War – would have seen the Soviets attempt to destroy them, if only to ensure their own survival.

East Anglia was home, during the Cold War years, to massive British and American nuclear force. It hosted the launch pads for the first operational nuclear ballistic missiles deployed in the West; the UK’s first generation of nuclear bombs were stored under armed guard and in considerable secrecy on the Norfolk/Suffolk border; the UK’s arsenal of early nuclear weapons was put through crucial ballistic and environmental tests at the Aldermaston Nuclear Research Establishment’s offshoot in Suffolk; and East Anglia was home to radar early warning sites scanning the skies for Soviet intruders. Fighter aircraft and surface to air missile batteries were poised on East Anglian bases to deter Soviet aircraft from approaching UK airspace. Risky spy flights over Soviet territory were launched from regional airfields, and there was probably much more from which the veil of secrecy remains to be lifted. No wonder the Soviets mapped East Anglia in some detail.

It is only now that national organisations set up to preserve our heritage are realising that something needs to be done to secure what is left of Britain’s tangible Cold War legacy before it is lost. Sadly, much has already gone. English Heritage and the National Trust have both taken steps to ensure that some of the iconic buildings in the region are protected so that future generations can appreciate what the Cold War meant to those who lived through it, the impact it had on East Anglia, and the significance of the Cold War in the region’s, and the country’s, history.

East Anglia played a remarkable pioneering role in the introduction of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, which held the balance of power and was the basis of bluff and counter-bluff between two opposing ideologies. The RAF’s armaments training school, from which nuclear weapons were first introduced into the V-Force, was based at Wittering in Cambridgeshire. Feltwell in Norfolk became the RAF’s ballistic missile training school. At Barnham, on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, the UK’s first nuclear bombs and their fissile cores were stored and serviced. Orford Ness, on the Suffolk coast, was the focus of tests crucial to the credibility of the UK’s nuclear strength. Elsewhere in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, British and American deterrent forces were deployed operationally.

Before Polaris-armed submarines took over the main nuclear deterrent role, the UK’s nuclear armoury relied on the ‘V-Force’ and the ‘Thor’ missile force which were extensively based in the region. In a very real sense, East Anglia was the front line for the defence of Europe.

It was also America’s first line of resistance or attack. Until the USA managed to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles which could be fired from silos on the American mainland, nuclear armed missiles on East Anglian launch pads would constitute a powerful element of America, and the West’s, initial strike force. East Anglia hosted America’s first means of defence. The region was where America’s first overseas stores of nuclear bombs were located. As early as June 1950, just after the Korean War had broken out, President Truman approved the transfer of eighty-nine atomic bombs to bases in East Anglia. As the military director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, put it: ‘If there are to be atomic bombs in the world we [America] must have the best, the biggest, and the most.’7 All this added up, undisputedly, to East Anglia being Churchill’s ‘bull’s eye’.

In the Cold War’s early years, before the Berlin Airlift, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff approved America’s first nuclear age war plan directed at the Soviet Union, code named ‘Halfmoon’. It assumed that war would start in Europe and, because the Soviet Union had greater strength in manpower and conventional warfare, the United States would rapidly lose a series of crucial land battles. Unable to hold Western Germany, the US Army would be forced to fight a retreat across Europe to seaports in France and Italy where, in operations reminiscent of Dunkirk, they would be evacuated by the American Navy. Fifteen days after the first shots had been fired America would launch a counter-attack from airbases in East Anglia, dropping up to 133 atomic bombs aimed at seventy Soviet cities. Pentagon officials warned the American Chiefs of Staff that the Soviet response would be ‘a devastating, annihilating’ nuclear counter-attack on the UK. East Anglian airbases would be the first destroyed. Denied ‘front-line’ bases close to continental Europe, America would be forced to use bases in Egypt, Iceland, Greenland or Alaska from which to continue their nuclear attack.

But a strike from Russia was not the only nuclear threat East Anglian towns and villages faced. The reliability of the electronic, mechanical and explosive components of America’s early nuclear bombs was uncertain, and US experts were fearful a nuclear bomber crash during take-off would pose a substantial risk to a large area in the vicinity of one of America’s Norfolk or Suffolk airbases.

The Mark 3 bomb was labelled by experts too dangerous to be flown in its fully assembled state over American territory. However, the US Strategic Air Command put no such safety restrictions on the Mark 3 being flown over British soil. Facilities to assemble the bombs were secretly built at Sculthorpe and Lakenheath. Should war occur, the intention was for American B-29s to fly from the States to East Anglia with partially assembled Mark 3s. At Sculthorpe and Lakenheath the plutonium cores would be inserted and then the B-29s would take off and head for their targets in the Soviet Union. If one of the bombers crashed during take-off, and the B-29 was notorious among pilots for its handling problems, the RAF base and neighbouring East Anglian towns and villages stood a high risk of obliteration.

Recognising that this was a real possibility, the Americans looked for widely spread sites in the countryside of Norfolk and Suffolk where atom bombs could be stored, on the basis that if one exploded others in storage would survive. This was particularly true when US authorities decided that to store the bombs in the UK without their nuclear cores would mean an unacceptable delay in mounting an offensive operation in a real emergency, so the cores too were sent for storage alongside the bombs on regional bases.

The electrical system of the Mark 3 was powered by a car battery. To change it, the weapon had to be largely taken apart. Its plutonium core radiated so much heat that if it was left in the bomb for too long it would start to melt the weapon’s delicate explosive lenses. Assembling the weapon was hazardous; a stray wire, a spark caused by static electricity, or an inadvertent human error could have ended in disaster.

By 1950, some of these hazards to East Anglian populations were marginally reduced. America’s Mark 4 implosion bomb was in full-scale production. It was much safer than previous designs, could be assembled in two hours, and incorporated a number of features to prevent premature detonation. Its nuclear core was stored in the aircraft’s cockpit and inserted through a trap door into the bomb in mid-flight. As long as the core was kept physically separate from the rest of the bomb it was impossible for a plane crash to cause a nuclear explosion.

When, in 1949, the Soviet Union announced that it too was a nuclear power, the consequences for the UK were clear. There was now no doubt that Britain, and particularly East Anglia, as America’s forward nuclear base would be first to be targeted. There was no other way the Soviet Union could strike back against the US. It lacked both aircraft carriers and bombers of sufficient range to make a direct attack on North America, but Soviet bombers were perfectly capable of reaching Britain.

The situation was also crystal clear to the American Government. The safety of the US depended on American nuclear capacity in East Anglia. The USAF Secretary, Thomas K. Finletter, sent a revealing top secret memorandum to the US Secretary for Defense on 7 July 1950. He wrote:

We are dependent at this moment almost entirely on the availability of UK bases for the launching of our strategic countermeasures. I haven’t any real doubt that the British will come along if we do get engaged in war. But the question is when. I do not like at all the fact that we are almost entirely dependent on the UK … I know the British well enough to know that sometimes they can be very slow; and this strategic countermeasure is something we cannot afford to be held up while the British Cabinet is debating about things.8

The other side of the coin was expressed in the same year by the British Chief of Air Staff: ‘The present situation,’ he wrote, ‘whereby the United States could launch atomic bomb attacks on Russia making use of United Kingdom bases and facilities (without consultation) is intolerable.’9

These chapters tell a large part of the story of Cold War East Anglia. Had a nuclear world war broken out, it would have been the population of East Anglia who would have been among the first in the firing line. This seemed terrifyingly likely during events like the blockade of Berlin; the erection of the Berlin Wall; Khrushchev’s deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba; and in the 1980s when, in answer to the USSR basing SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe, American Cruise missiles were stationed in the UK.

What would have happened to the civilian population, and the contingency planning to determine how those who survived could have been governed had it ended in nuclear conflict, is an important part of the Cold War East Anglia story. The GovernmentWar Book provided for Regional Commissioners who were equipped with draconian powers to rule their shattered fiefdoms after a nuclear strike; even though it is clear that government experts concluded that the survival of the nation state, given the scale of death and devastation, would be questionable. In fact, the British Medical Association estimated that 33 million people would be killed in a Soviet nuclear attack.

One hundred and ten small subterranean bunkers, scattered across East Anglia and staffed by volunteers from the Royal Observer Corps, would be feeding data to the UK Monitoring and Warning Organisation and would have triggered public warnings of where the mushroom clouds erupted. Their job would have been to record the power of the explosions and track the path of radioactive fallout across East Anglia, hoping to prepare any who had survived to face the horrors of the ‘nuclear winter’ that would follow.

A nuclear world war is unimaginable but, as the scientists and civil servants whose job it was to plan for it knew, so too was its aftermath. How effective such a warning and recording system would have been under nuclear attack is a matter for conjecture. Truly, in an area like East Anglia, where prime targets were multiple, the survivors would probably have envied the dead. But the UK Government, in planning for nuclear conflict, had to envisage life after the bomb, even though East Anglia’s strategic importance was so obvious that the prospect of large parts of the region surviving could never have been considered high.

Throughout the Cold War, UK governments agonised over a central question that had particular relevance in East Anglia – what measure of influence or control could the UK government exercise over an American president determined to use American military bases in the UK from which to launch a nuclear attack? To what extent did the formal understandings between the American and British Governments give the UK a veto on American action launched from British territory?

From the American side there was an insistence on ‘loose understandings’ to avoid placing any limitation on a president’s ‘freedom of action’. Successive British prime ministers, not unnaturally, sought a guarantee that they would have a voice or a veto in any nuclear attack decisions mounted from British territory. Whether there was ever a ‘cast-iron’ resolution to this crucial question is open to doubt.

The agreements, such as they were, stem from December 1950, and talks between Clement Attlee and President Harry Truman.10 Three American B-29 bomber groups had moved into East Anglian bases at Marham, Lakenheath and Sculthorpe in June 1948. Truman told the British PM that he would not use British bases to launch a nuclear attack without consulting London, unless the United States itself was under attack. When Attlee asked for that to be put in writing, Truman refused, declaring ‘if a man’s word wasn’t any good, it wasn’t made any better by writing it down’. The British pushed for language spelling out that consultation was to be included in the official communiqué. Truman and his top advisers refused. They agreed only to a statement saying that the United States ‘intended’ to keep the British Government ‘informed’ of any developments affecting use of their UK-based nuclear weapons.

By 1950, American strike aircraft were based at seven UK bases, including those in East Anglia. After further talks the Americans agreed that British ministers could refer to a ‘joint decision’ when explaining this very sensitive policy to the House of Commons, but still refused to define exactly what those words meant.

A communiqué prepared for talks between Churchill and Truman, when Churchill became prime minister in October 1951, confirmed: ‘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’. But the Americans insisted on qualifying this by the phrase ‘in the light of the circumstances prevailing at the time’. The communiqué stated that consultation would take place ‘if British bases were used and time permitted’.11 The language contained a clear escape clause, and Washington continued to reject British proposals to reaffirm the personal commitment that Truman had made to Attlee.

The issue assumed significant relevance to East Anglia after Harold Macmillan became prime minister. At the Bermuda Conference in March 1957, agreement was reached between Macmillan and President Eisenhower for the deployment to the UK of American Thor IRBM nuclear-tipped missiles. East Anglia was the location of the first complex of launch bases.

Thor required two keys to be inserted to fire it. One, the ‘war/peace key’, armed the nuclear warhead and was always in the possession of an American officer. The other, which activated the launch process, was held by an RAF launch controller. The rationale was that Thor could only be launched by agreement between the two governments and on the instructions of both the president and the prime minister.

When the Soviets gained a head start in the race to develop long-range rockets, with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the possibility of a ‘bolt from the blue’ pre-emptive nuclear missile strike became a greater threat than ever. Macmillan wanted to ensure clarity about the ‘decision to launch nuclear retaliation’. The outcome of talks was the Murphy-Dean Agreement of June 1958. The agreement was set out in a classified document entitled ‘Procedures for the Committing to the Attack of Nuclear Retaliatory Forces in the United Kingdom’.12 The document, only released in 1997 in a heavily redacted form by the US Government, enshrined the understanding about ‘circumstances at the time’. It spelled out the process of decision-making that would take place under two different scenarios – a longer-term warning of attack, labelled ‘strategic’, and a short warning of imminent attack, labelled ‘tactical’. In the latter case it authorised the US commander-in-chief of Strategic Air Command, on his own initiative, to launch nuclear armed aircraft from British bases to proceed to a specified ‘hold’ line without receiving ‘further definite instructions’.

The process of ‘joint decision’ for firing the Thor rockets was far less clear: once unleashed there was no way of clawing a missile back, and Thor was peculiarly vulnerable on its launch pad to a Soviet first strike. How separate instructions from both the White House and Downing Street could have been flashed giving clear instructions to the US and UK personnel, on remote Thor launch pads in East Anglia in the inevitable chaos of an unexpected but dire threat, remains unclear and unspecified.

When, in 1983, American Cruise missiles were being deployed in the UK as part of a policy intended to match the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe, and public concerns in Britain were rising, the Murphy-Dean Agreement was still being referred to in secret discussions inside the UK Cabinet as the benchmark for control arrangements between the two governments. To reopen the issue, it was stated, ‘would be seen as a lack of confidence in the good faith and good judgement of the US administration’.13 Washington was deeply concerned at any suggestion that understandings over the principle of ‘joint decision’ should be amended to refer to ‘joint control’. In US law there could be no acceptance of any dilution of the power of an American president as commander-in-chief of American forces, even if those forces were based on the sovereign territory of a foreign land.

An extraordinary paragraph in the Cabinet papers released in 2013 suggested: ‘In the unlikely event that in a crisis the President appeared unwilling to fulfil his obligation to consult the UK Government it would in the last resort be possible for British personnel at the base to be ordered to take action which would make it virtually impossible for the Americans to launch their weapons.’14

However, the Cabinet papers on specific nuclear release procedures for the Cruise missiles, and the ‘understandings’ between the US and UK Governments on their use and the UK bases that housed them, which became the target of sustained protests by the Greenham Common women’s camp, still remain secret, retained in classified Cabinet Office files.15

Those who remember the 1940s, the Battle of Britain and the threat of invasion, recall what seemed at the time to be the ‘miracle’ of deliverance. The Cold War, and its ending a quarter of a century ago in the wake of the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall, and without the horror of nuclear conflict, ought to be looked upon as an even greater deliverance. But in the twenty-first century, unfortunately, we still live in a world from which the spectre of nuclear threat is by no means lifted. That is the Cold War legacy.

According to the Ministry of Defence, the number of nuclear weapons that remained across the globe in 2013 was well over 17,000.16 The Cold War years imposed a chilling threat and, for those who lived through them, the insecurity has never quite gone away. Despite the ever-present chill that nuclear war could be just around the corner, the Cold War did imply a kind of stability. Today’s world, in contrast, is terrifyingly uncertain.

Notes

1 Hansard, 15 February 1951.

2 Public Records Office (PRO), DEFE 10/402. ‘Note on the Concept and Definitions of Breakdown’, 10 June 1960.

3 Sir Kevin Tebbit, ‘British Security Policy from Cold War through Peace Dividend to Force for Good in the World; A Personal Experience’, first Peter Nailor Memorial Lecture, Gresham College, 2001.

4 Bermuda Conference, March 1957.

5 The National Archives (TNA), CAB 134/1476. ‘Form and Duration of a Future War’, 19 March 1958.

6 Catterall, Peter (ed.), The Macmillan DiariesII, entry for 4 November 1962.

7 Schlosser, Eric, Command and Control (London: Allen Lane, 2013), p. 75.

8 USAF Secretary Thomas K. Finletter memo to US Secretary of Defense, 7 July 1950.

9 Marshal of the RAF Sir John Slessor, 1950, quoted in Campbell, Duncan, The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), p. 34.

10 ‘Use of Atomic Weapons’, Attlee-Truman Agreement, Truman-Attlee Conversations, December 1950. Record Group 59, Department of State Records.

11 Memorandum of Conversation, Truman-Churchill Talks, ‘A) The Strategic Air Plans and the Use of Nuclear Weapons’, January 1952, National Security Archive.

12 The Murphy-Dean Agreement, ‘Procedures for the Committing to the Attack of Nuclear Retaliatory Forces in the United Kingdom’, 7 June 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.

13 TNA, PREM 19/979. ‘Proposed basing of US ground launched missiles (GLCM) in UK’, October 1982–Sept 1983.

14Ibid.

15 TNA, PREM 19/980. ‘Nuclear Release Procedures; Understandings between US and UK on use of Nuclear Weapons of Bases’.

16 Philip Hammond, Secretary of State for Defence, July 2013.

1

OPERATION JU-JITSU

WHY WERE RAF crews in the early 1950s flying deep into Soviet airspace from Norfolk, in American reconnaissance planes disguised with British roundels? Even RAF and American colleagues who were not in a discreet ‘need to know’ group were puzzled. It was some fifty-six years later that the true story of the RAF crews of the innocently named ‘Special Duties Flight’ was revealed. Like American colleagues who flew military reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union, they operated under the motto ‘alone, unarmed and unafraid’.

In the mid-1950s, RAF Sculthorpe, near Fakenham, was the biggest USAF base in Europe with some 10,000 personnel. It was home to the 47th Bomb Wing, equipped with the swept wing B-45 Tornado bomber with its six jet-turbine engines, part of America’s tactical nuclear force. It also housed, in the pre-spy satellite days of the Cold War, a squadron of America’s 19th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing, flying the reconnaissance version of the Tornado. The B-45 Tornado was the first multi-jet engine bomber in the world with the capability of being refuelled in mid-air and therefore able to undertake hazardous missions intruding way beyond the Iron Curtain. The reconnaissance version had a special pod installed in its bomb bay which contained a series of specialist cameras.