BOMBS AND VOTES WAYLAND YOUNG TWO SHILLINGS WAYLAND YOUNG is Editor of the International Quarterly Disarmament and Arms Control and sits in the House of Lords as Lord Kennet. He is rapporteur of the Defence Committee of the Assembly of Western European Union FABIAN TRACT 354 FABIAN SOCIETY 11 , Dartmouth Street, S.W.l Note.-This pamphlet, like all publications of the FABIAN SOCIETY, represents not the collective view of the Society but only the view of the individual who prepared it. The responsibility of the Society is limited to approving the publications which it issues as worthy of consideration within the Labour Movement. May, 1964 Bombs ond Votes WAYLAND YOUNG CONTENTS I. Defence at the Hustings 3 2. Nuclear Arms 5 3. Defence and Disarmament 11 4. Conclusion 20 I. Defence at the Hustings A A T least since 1956, Tory governments have adhered to a trivial and outdated defence and foreign policy. Not content with that, they have brought defence into the election campaign of 1964, which they need not have done. Not content with that, they have chosen to sing songs for the "independent deterrent" so halfbaked as to make it just about .impossible for the electorate to understand the real issues. And not content with that, they have so distorted their opponents' position that the Prime Minister has had to apologise to .the Leader of the Opposition. When he took over, Sir Alec Home first said he would make defence an election issue. A week or two later he said he would not, and i付 was reasonable to hope that his high office had sobered him up and he had thought better of kicking the safety of this people around at the hustings. A week or two later wisdom and discretion were once aga.in cast to the winds; it is now clear that he and his team are going to stump every TV set and every corner of the country with the jejune yippeeism of: "We've got it: we keep it. What about you?". One can see the .temptation. The Tories know that Labour is united in rejecting "the national independent deterrent", and the jingoist-ic, anti- UN, anti-disarmament policy which goes w.ith it. But they also know that it is only three or four years since we had a dispute in the Labour Par.ty between "unilateralism" in disarmament policy and "multilateralism". They know that the general formula by which the dispute was ended in 1961 was that a Labour Government would not do away with weapons it inherited, but would not "strive officiously to keep alive" independent nuclear forces into the indefinite future. But thev also know that there are still views in the Labour Party which range from a desire to fly the V-bombers into the Lake of Geneva :the day we rtake office, to a policy which, though it differs sharply from Tory policy on assigning forces to NATO, playing our proper part ｷin the UN, and building up conventional mobility, still would not give rise to any unconditional surrender either of weapons or of ultimate sovereign control over them. BOMBS AND VOTES It would have been better for the country if the Tories had not fallen for the temptation. It is not excusable, even at election time, to indulge in low-level partisan in-fighting on defence. Honest and competitive arguments, yes; but not over-simplification and misrepresentat-ion. lt is not excusable for two reasons. First, because it may convince nonspecialists, a class which includes many influential and loquacious people in the community, that there is really a cut and dried yes or no issue here, which "there is not. Such a mistaken conviction lowers the utiLity of public discussion ｷand may sometimes even make it dangerous. It is also inexcusable in terms of defence and foreign policy themselves. In the course of his campaign, Sir Alec Home does .not hesitate to describe the Labour Party as "unilateralist", and to accuse it of being ready to "deprive Britain of power" in a dangerous world. This is putting party above country (which even in the eighteenth century was recognised as the lowest form of political skulduggery) because the words of Sir Alec are heard not only in Britain but also in Washington and Bonn and Paris and, above all, in Moscow. If he tells foreign governments and peoples that Labour is shaky in its adherence to NATO, willing to throw away its arms, soft on communism and all the rest of it, some of this will stick and Labour will start i~s period of office amid the unnecessary distrust of Britain's friends and the unfounded expectations of Britain's adversaries that concessions can be easily obtained. He may think this line makes us less likely to win the election, but he does not seem to understand that, if we do win it, it may make us less capable of conducting Britain's foreign policy in the best interest of its people. It is not so much an anti-Labour line as an anti-British one; Sir Alec has not got .the breadth of political vision to see how to knock his adversaries without knocking the nation as a whole. It certainly is a grand way to go about serving your country, to trumpet to the world that your probable successors in office are dangerous and untrustworthy. But whatever TIOnsense the Prime Minister talks, we must not be needled into talking nonsense too. The Labour Party has been thirteen years without contact with the officiｷal pl;;tnners in this complicated and largely secret field; it is right that we should refuse to be drawn into detail. Labour supporters, whether Christian or not, would surely endorse the Resolution passed by the British Council of Churches on October 16th, 1963: "The Council, noting that over the whole range of problems posed by nuclear weapons there is a wide measure of agreement between the political parties, urges that, in a matter of such profound importance to .the whole nation, differences should not be exaggerated for electoral purposes". But the Tories have chosen so to exaggerate, therefore we must defend ourselves agains.t their attacks, and try to raise the debate to a sensible level. BOMBS AND VOTES 2. Nuclear Arms Both Parties are Unilateralist T T HE maｷin burden of these attacks .is that Labour is "unilｷateralist", in the sense of intending the unilateral nuclear disarmament of this country. That is the bluntest form of it, and it's the one the Prime Minister himself is given to. A more sophisticated version is that the Labour Party believes in "graduated unilateralism", or "having a smaller bomb for a shor.ter time". They base this charge on Labour's distaste for the Nassau agreement under which the US agreed .to sell us Polaris missiles to put in British-built submarines. Labour's actual policy has probably been put most precisely by Denis Healey in the House of Commons on 26th February: "I cannot say yet whether or not we will cancel the Polaris submarine. What I will say is that we will certainly not continue the programme in its capacity as an independent British force and, secondly, jf we decided that there was no alliance requirement for a British Polaris component we would not have the slightest difficulty in converting these submarines into hunter- killer submarines, a programme .of certain and immediate value to .the British Navy and to nati.onal defence which has been set back five years by the Polaris programme." The Conservatives say that if Labour does decide not to buy the missiles (and the Nassau Agreement only permits Britain to buy them; it does not bind us to) then, since the V-bombers will not last for ever, Britain will have no "independent" nuclear deterrent. The reality is very much more complicated. For one thing, independent is a highly relative word. The government assures us, and we have no right .to doubt them, .that these missiles will be, in the last resort, under unfettered British national control. That is to say, we will no.t rely on American communications systems to fire .them. The Nassau Agreement also uses .the words "on a continuing basis", and this presumably covers spares and servicing. But we do not know whether it includes the purchase of successive future generations of Polaris missile. The "fourth generation" Polaris missile is now being designed in the US. This will be a 90 per cent new bird, to use American language, and it will be several inches wider. It will therefore require a complete remodelling of the middle section of the submarines if we get it. Now let us see what we can learn from government estimates of the cost of the Polaris force. In the Commons Defence Debate of 25th February, Mr. Thorneycro~t said: "We have come firmly to the conclusion that we should have a fleet of five boats and we intend .to have such a fleet. This is a formidable deterrent. It would mean even then -even with five boats and taking into account all the nuclear weapons and armouries of all kinds that we need-that the proportion .of nuclear to conventional in our defence spending will remain substantially under 10 per cent. "The best estimates I can make are that in 1964-65 the propor.tion will be 8.4 per cent; in 1965-66, it will be 7.6 per cent; in the later 1960s, about 8 per cent; and in the 1970s it will sink to less than 5 per cent, because bythen the capital expenditure on the submarines will have been completed, as the capital expenditure on our V"bombers has been completed already. We shall simply be reduced to running costs." BOMBS AND VOTES Five per cent in .the 1970s; this is the costing for the system of which the .Prime Minister said in the Commons on March 24th: "The Government of a country has to have a defence policy not for this year or next year but for twenty years ahead". So what about the fourth generation missiles? And what about the next generation of independent deterrent forces other than submarines? There has never in the history of man been a weapons system that remained valid for ever; since 1945 five years operational service has been -tolerable, and ten years good. The nuclear-powered submarine will become vulnerable in time; on precedent, :the late 1970s might not be too unrealistic a date for this to happen. When ｷit does, if there is no arms control, America and Russia will go on to .the next thing. It might be military space systems, it might be fixed missile emplacemen:ts under the sea, it might be an anti-missile umbrella defence system. It might easily be something the layman has never yet heard of. It will certainly not be cheap. Moreover, it takes 10-15 years to design a weapons system, and the Americans are already at work on the possible systems for 1975-1985. Where is the ConservMive plan to keep Britain abreast? Where is the Tory defence policy for "twenty years ahead"? Where are the realistic financial forecasts of the price of "independence" in the late 1970s? Nowhere: we shall come down .to 5 per cent nuclear spending, and stay there. The Conservatives, then, plan to "phase out the independent deterrent" only a few years after they allege Labour intend to. If Labour believes in "graduated unilateralism", the Conservative Party believes in slightly more graduated unilateral1sm. Nuclear and Conventional The whole Conservative system of nuclear accounting is in fact pretty obscure, and may perhaps be clictated more by the wish to keep down the ostensible proportion of nuclear to conventional than by the duty to give a true picture to the public. In the quotation above Mr. Thorneycroft can be seen proudly getting the proportion lower and lower; from less than ten per cent right down .to five per cent. It has long been a Conservative point 1hat "our nuclear arm" costs less than ten per cent of the whole defence budget. Leave aside the question of how the development cos.ts are spread out over .the annual "less than ten per cent" running costs, there remains the question: what precisely is our nuclear arm? In 1he Air Estimates Debate in the Commons this year, the Government stated that the costs of TSR2 were not included. If this is so, "our nuclear arm" must simply be the V-bombers and rtheir crews and supporting staff. But these are far from being the only nuclear weapons in the British forces. Besides .the new TSR2 which has recently been assigned a nuclear role, there are the old Canberras, the carrier-borne Buccaneers and Sea Vixens, and .the American "tactical" nuclear weapons under dual control in the British Army of rthe Rhine. It has long been the despair of the British Army and of all men of good sense that these weapons would have .to be used within a few days of a full scale conventional attack in Germany; our conventional power is so small it would be that or defeat. At long last prodding by the Opposition, by the press, and by ｷthe United States has managed to get the Tory government to do something about ordering BOMBS AND VOTES new equipment. They have not proved capable of doing anything about manpower. That has been done by West Germany, which is building up a big army with conventional capacity alongside ours. But what German policy gives with one hand it takes away with the other; as their army grows, so do ｷthey increasingly insist that defence must take place right forward M the Iron Cur.tain. There must be no retreat (which is comprehensible enough if you live there) and that means resort to nuclear weapons at once. So it is unfortunately still true that if there were a major Russian attack, the whole BAOR would be fighting a "tactical" nuclear war within a day or two; it is trained to, and it has to plan to. Are the "tactical" nuclear weapons of BAOR included in this "less than 10 per cent"? And the cost of all the soldiers who would have to fight nuclear if at all? And the carrier borne forces? And in ｷthe forecas付s of expenditure coming down to 5 per cent of the total, are the replacements for the present obsolescent "tactical" nuclear weapons with the army and nuclear bombers with the Navy and Air Force included? If they are, the goods must be made of caJrdboard and the men must be starving. If they are not, the Government is misleading the country. There is no "nuclear arm" in the Bri付ish forces. The most powerful units of all three forces are nuclear, nuclear as well as conventional. A Labour Government would build up our conventional capacity so that deterrence should operate at the conventional level in the defence of Western Europe, as well as at the nuclear level. The Conservative Pariy, as we have seen, prefer to go on just a few years longer with the "independent deterrent" and inflammably weak conventional forces and then, presumably, fall out of the game after having spent a lot more money and annoyed everybody a great deal in rthe meantime. Now let us look at what good an independent nuclear capacity actually does for us. Outside Europe, it is as much of a millstone as an advantage. Every .time major British units (V-bombers, Canberras, especially carriers) turn up in a threatening manner round Asia and Africa, whether the cause is good or bad, a country which feels menaced by them cannot tell whether or not they carry nuclear weapons. Such a country must therefore assume that ｷthey do, and may therefore be 付empted to call on another nuclear power, Russｷia now, perhaps China later, to come to its assistance with a nuclear counter threat, whether by declaration (as at the time of Suez) or by actually bringing in planes. There is ｷreason .to believe that the British force which sailed up the Persian Gulf in December 1961 to deter Iraq from a-Hacking our oilfields in Kuwait could not have beaten the Iraqi forces without using nuclear weapons, and there is every reason to believe they may have been prepared to use them. If this was so, then it was a direot nuclear threat. Such a situation is obviously extremely dangerous and should never be allowed to occur. The United Nations is Us The recent run of useful and honourable interventions by British troops in the ｷthree new East African countries, in Malaysia, and in Cyprus are object lessons in what can be done. But to hear the Government electioneer BOMBS AND VOTES ing about them you would think the Uganda mutineers had been rounded up with Polaris missiles fired from the depths of the Indian Ocean and that the communities in Cyprus had been kept apart by large numbers of contour- hugging bombers shaving the treetops twice as fast as sound at dead of night and firing salvoes of multimegaton stellar-inertial guided missiles complete with decoys and electronic penetration aids. It was lightly armed common sense which saved the day in these places. Cheap, tough, portable weapons; and above all mobility. The first rule in this sort of operation is if you get there at once you don't have to shoot. But even these interventions, successful and useful as they were, had under a Conservative government to be "national". Labour would work towards a position where British forces would be able to put on blue armbands swiftly and conveniently whenever this was in UN and British interests. It should be a source of pride, not embarrassment, when British troops <~~re able to take part in executing the lawful decisions of ｷthe World Authopity. A Government spokesman recently said: "There is no magic in calling in the United Nations". The comment is wonderfully unimagina- tive. The Conservatives always feel the UN as they, a sort of unwelcome and untrustworthy rabble unfortunately set in authority over a wise and responsible us. But the United Nations is us: Britain is as much a member as all the dreaded Asians and Africans. An active UN policy would be based not on the idea of calling in the UN, but on that of working in it. British forces, joined by some others, have now at last become UN forces in Cyprus. It ought to have been done long ago. And there is magic in it; the magic of custom. The more it is done, othe more likely it is to be done and the quicker we shall get to a stage where nations no longer intrude on one another except by the consent and approval of the consuHative organ of all mankind, the United Nations. (fo send troops at the invitation of the other government is not, of course, "intrusion".) Britain, with her experience, especially in Africa, and with the useful peace-keeping type forces she has already in some measure and could have in greater, can do a lot to bring on this day by showing active willingness. Arms Control and Top Table And this brings us to the central fault of all Conservative defence and foreign policy; it has no long term objective, or none visible to the naked eye. It may be tha:t Conservative ministers devote five minutes thought a year to what the world is to be like when the third millenium of our era begins, just a generation from now, but if so they do not translate their thoughts into policy. All that appears is drift on the important things, like disarmament, detente, and aid to poor nations, and factional cussedness on the unimportant ones like blasting ahead with those bought "independent" Polarises. In the United States, for instance, arms control planning is so far advanced that the Defence Department now allows as overheads in its weapons procurement contracts sums which the arms manufacturer spends on plans for diversifying so as to get away from dependence on arms production. This is just an example of the different climate of planning which prevails in a country where the government has a long term objective and means to get there. BOMBS AND VOTES Contrast this with Sir Alec Home on the "Top Table". His point has so often been answered that we need not delay long over it here. He says if we don't have national control over the Polaris missiles we shall not "sit at the top table". The expression seems to come from a world of footling arrogance where nitwit potentates receive the "respect" of ordinary people, who then turn away and wink. It can only be an invitation to other countries to acquire their own nuclear weapons which, as the Prime Minister has presumably forgotten, both Russia and America are trying to prevent. There's room enough at the 1op table; the spread of nuclear technology sees to that, and the sa付isfied prattle of Sir Alec Home attracts other countries to take the empty chairs. There are many top tables in the world, if that is the way one is going ｷto think: top tables of science, of the arts, of decent domestic government, of economic and technical help to poorer countries, even, come .to that, of peaceful and constructive policies in general. It is more interesting and satisfying to "sit at" any of those top .tables, and a thousand times more useful for everyone else if one does, than to think only of the overladen and rickety "top table" of military power. The Prime Minister is fond of saying we were at the Test Ban negotiations, and signed the treaty first along with America and Russia, because we had nuclear weapons. This is true. But two points remain to be made. First: to test and then sign a ｷtreaty stopping testing is only one way to contribute to stopping testing. The other way is never to have tested Second: ｷwhen we were there, it was no.t :our having tested that helped .to clarify the issues and thus to make possible the signing of the partial ban; it was our highly developed seismology, and we could have had that without testing. Most of .the good was in any case done a1 Geneva, where we were one of eighteen, not of three, before the private negotiations began. "SkiUed Teams" Again, while the American government pays people to think about how to stop making arms, .the British Government makes election politics with industry out of the alleged need to keep right on making them. On March 3rd, 1963, Mr. Thorneycroft said that if Britain were beaten out of having her independent deterrent, it would be for all time, because skilled workers, once dispersed, could never be brought together again. When the Tories talk about our being "beaten out of the independent deterrent" or "laying down our nuclear arms" they must mean Labour's misgivings about buying the Polaris missiles. Labour would probably continue to build the submarines. The skilled teams required for that, including those for the nuclear propulsion unit, would not be dispersed at least until the end of the construction programme. (What would happen to them then, under the Conservatives, on 5 per cent of the defence budget, we are not told.) The skilled teams who used to work on missile circuitry, and this is the field of military technology which is advancing most rapidly at the moment, were of course disbanded or turned over to civil work by the Conserva付ives some time since; for the "independent deterrent" we are relying on .the American teams which build the circuitry we have to buy from them. The skilled teams who might BOMBS AND VOTES have been called together to work on