Duncan Sandys and British Nuclear Policy-Making by Lewis Betts

Author:Lewis Betts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

9.‘Long Term Defence Policy: Note by the Prime Minister’; PREM 11/1778 PR (56).

10.Daalder, H., Cabinet Reform in Britain: 1914–1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 188–189; see also: Groom, British Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, pp. 205–207.

11.‘Strategic Implications of the Long-Term Defence Policy: Note by the Directors of Plans, 31 December, 1956’; DEFE 4/94, J.P. (56) Note 14.

12.One clue as to how Boyle felt comes from an exchange with Powell on the subject of compensation for those likely to be affected by force reductions. Powell had written to his civil service colleagues to say that Head had planned ‘that those who may have to be axed will be generously treated’, to which Boyle replied ‘I would have thought that if you do your business properly the number of personnel that suffer will be negligible’; Richard Powell to E. W. Playfair: 11 January, 1957 and Dermot Boyle to Powell: 16 January, 1957 in AIR 8/2157; however, unlike Slessor, who was completely devoted to strategic bombing, Boyle had more ambiguous allegiances to, and conceptions of, air power. Whilst he had spent much of the Second World War in heavy bombing roles, prior to becoming Chief of the Air Staff he had been Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command. Where the bombing aircraft upon which the British nuclear deterrent depended might have been expected to survive any post-Suez review of defence policy, any measure of colonial retreat that it might have advocated would have put British fighter strength at risk; DEFE 4/94, C.O.S. (57) 1st Meeting: 1 January, 1957.

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