Duncan Sandys was one of the most significant British politicians of the 1950s, serving in successive Conservative administrations from 1951 to 1964, and holding a number of key posts. Most significantly, he was Minister of Defence at the time of the controversial 1957 White Paper on Defence, which set out a radical vison for the future of the British military, and would have profound effects on defence policy and the defence industry in the years that followed. Yet, unlike many politicians of his generation, Sandys has not been the subject of any detailed study. There have been no biographies published, and his personal memoirs remained unfinished, with entire sections incomplete or missing. 1 In the absence of any serious historical interest, and when not simply referring to him to in passing as Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, the discussion of Sandys tends to focus on his supposedly difficult character—we hear that Harold Macmillan thought that his prickly character might have been down to ‘German blood’, and that Ian Smith, the notably intransigent 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”’. 2

This lack of interest in Sandys means that we are left with an incomplete understanding of the man and his policy preferences. This book argues that this represents a significant gap in our knowledge, and that failure to properly understand Sandys weakens our comprehension of British nuclear policy-making since 1945. Sandys was an important figure in that field during the pivotal decision-making years that saw both the creation of British nuclear weaponry, and significant developments in British strategic thinking about how to use these new weapons, and it is only through careful analysis of how his approach to the Cold War was influenced by his experiences of the Second World War that several major decisions taken by Britain in pursuit of its independent nuclear capabilities can be properly understood.

Where Sandys has been discussed in direct relation to the policy-making process, historians have tended to neglect any meaningful analysis of the influence that his experiences and memories of the Second World War came to have on his policy preferences. Martin S. Navias has studied Sandys’ first year at the Ministry of Defence, writing that the Second World War had left a ‘lasting impression’ on him insofar as 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’. 3 Unfortunately, in framing Sandys’ experiences as having developed into little more than a loosely defined reference point, rather than a sincerely-held and intellectually coherent strategic concept, Navias’ analysis tends to misinterpret the motives behind Sandys’ decision-making by emphasising his ‘predilection towards cost-cutting’. 4 To date it has been this focus on spending reductions that has dominated what little discussion there has been of Sandys, which has led to some historians minimising Sandys’ role in the policy shifts laid down in the pivotal 1957 White Paper, where British defence policy was re-orientated to rely on the nuclear umbrella at the expense of other branches of the military.

Whilst Sandys is often credited with utilising his aforementioned abrasiveness to finally bring together the major themes of previous defence reviews, this interpretation merely perpetuates the idea that his policy choices were coldly logical reactions to existing defence debates and financial realities. 5 There was certainly a large degree of continuity in what Sandys proposed in 1957, but this book will contextualise that continuity by showing the part Sandys himself had played in setting the terms of those debates with the proposals he had put forward in 1953 and 1954 as the Minister of Supply during the so-called ‘Radical Review’. In showing that there was a degree of consistency in Sandys’ policy preferences over time, the economies he pursued can be seen as having been a significant aspect of his recommendations, but not something that was allowed to take precedence over what he considered to have been sound strategic concerns, the intellectual roots of which are to be found in his wartime reports for the committees tasked with defending Britain from unmanned German weapons. 6

Nuclear Belief Systems

The idea that memories of the Second World War had had an influence on early British nuclear policies is not new. In her official histories of the British nuclear programme, Margaret Gowing described the decision to go nuclear as having been ‘almost instinctive’, and based partly on the belief that ‘Britain as a great power must acquire all major new weapons’. 7 A. J. R. Groom and others thought likewise, conceding that although ‘there can be no doubt that a Soviet threat was perceived … this strategic argument was itself a function of the political question regarding the rôle of nuclear weapons in shoring up Britain’s position in the world’. This gave British nuclear capabilities a dual function as both the ‘means to deter Moscow and to influence Washington’. 8 More recently, Susanna Schrafstetter and Stephen Twigge have given particular weight to the specific memory of ‘standing alone’ in 1940, with nuclear capabilities being seen as both a symbol of Great Power status and as a protection against Britain ever finding itself in such a perilous situation again. 9

In addition to this ‘soft’ cultural aspect, historians such as Ian Clark and Nicholas J. Wheeler, who have sought to re-introduce strategic calculations into the debate, have written that ‘an essential part of any history of British strategic thought in the nuclear age [is] to document the elements of continuity within it’. 10 This feeds into the use of so-called ‘strategic cultures’, and, in their recent history of British nuclear policy-making, John Baylis and Kristan Stoddart have used ‘ideational factors’ (‘beliefs’, ‘culture’, and ‘identity’) to provide a ‘more helpful insight into the process of nuclear decision-making’, and elsewhere they have summarised the uniquely British ‘nuclear belief system’ as having consisted of six major concerns. These were: the necessity of nuclear weapons as a guarantor of national survival; the fear of ‘adversaries or potential adversaries’ acquiring them; as a contingency in case ‘even the closest of allies might not come to Britain’s assistance in times of crisis’; to impress and influence the United States; the belief that Britain had ‘an inalienable right’ to be a nuclear weapons state; and as a confirmation of Great Power status. It was these ideas and beliefs of what has been characterised as a relatively small policy-making elite (in the political, military, and scientific spheres) that they suggest shows ‘ideational, more than materialist, factors have been at the heart of British nuclear policy’. 11

This conception of a ‘nuclear belief system’, as characterised by Baylis and Stoddart, still has deficiencies owing to its nature as something to be subscribed to collectively, whether in a department of state or as a more general mood. When they stress the ‘importance of shared values’, the tenets of any particular idea become too wide-ranging to properly account for its intellectual origins. 12 Just as when Peter J. Katzenstein argues that ‘security interests are defined by actors who respond to cultural factors’, it becomes comparable to how Graham Allison explained the nature of governmental business, where ‘deliberate choices’ are overshadowed by ‘large organisations functioning according to standard patterns of behaviour’. 13 This all serves to present a monolithic type of belief or culture, a kind of organisational memory, whether departmental or strategic, that simply exists as a non-specific influencing factor on those who happened to have encountered it. Martin Ceadel gives a good example of this when he cites ‘defencism’ as having been the main cultural factor at work during Cold War, describing it as a collective belief system where the policy-making elite generally subscribed to the idea that ‘war can be prevented for indefinite periods, and that diplomacy as well as military force plays a part in achieving this’, resulting in the prevailing belief that ‘The best to be hoped for is … an armed truce’. 14

The main drawback of defining beliefs and cultures as a general will in this manner is that it restricts the space for individual initiative. In his work in expanding the field of British nuclear culture, Richard Maguire has gone further, claiming that ‘Beyond a general acceptance that the West needed some form of nuclear force to face the Soviet threat, there was no single, or even dominant, structure of explanation among the politicians, scientists, civil servants and military officers who discussed British nuclear weapons.’ From this, Maguire argues that nuclear policy-making ‘drew upon individual experience, political and social tradition, understandings of technology, and specific Cold War experience’. 15 If this was the case, then it should be acknowledged that within the policy-making ranks not all experiences carried equal weight, and John Simpson has written that, whilst nuclear decision-making remained firmly in the control of the ‘Prime Minister of the day and selected members of Cabinet’, politicians generally ‘found themselves limited in their understanding … by their lack of detailed knowledge’, leaving them ‘increasingly dependent upon advice from officials’. 16 In light of this, the interaction between experiences and those policy-making processes that sought to ensure a more methodical approach is of particular interest. This is especially so when analysing policies devised to maintain Britain’s supposed responsibilities as one of the victorious parties in the aftermath of the Second World War. Due to the extensive mobilisation of British society that the Second World War required, almost everybody serving in any policy-making role throughout the 1950s and 1960s had previous war experiences to draw upon. This is the main reason why the defence backgrounds of politicians as individuals, where they can be discerned, deserves further study.

The Role of the Individual

The analysis of policy preferences as products of experiences and beliefs is a well-worn area of interest, particularly when the results of those experiences and beliefs prove to have acted as a restrictive force. One example of this would be the virtual consensus that has emerged to cast Macmillan’s years as the Member of Parliament for Stockton-on-Tees, from 1924 to 1929 and then again from 1931 to 1945, as having been a ‘prime conditioning factor in his domestic political thinking throughout the rest of his career’. 17 In a similar vein, Jeremi Suri’s Henry Kissinger and the American Century sought to show Kissinger’s policy preferences as having been shaped by his experiences of wider cultural shifts. The rise of Nazism, which forced his family out of Germany, taught him that democracies required ‘decisive leaders’ and ‘protections against themselves’; and his status as a Jewish immigrant allowed him to rise through ‘tradition-bound institutions’ which valued ‘outsiders’. Consequently, ‘Having witnessed the violent “collapse” of a society filled with morally self-righteous figures, Kissinger defined his career as a response’, leading him towards measures that ‘insulated the day-to-day management of foreign policy from public interference’. 18

Over the course of his biography, Suri does not shirk from criticising the inherent rigidity of such an approach, claiming that Kissinger struggled with ‘challenges from people he did not understand’, and that he failed to deal with ‘ideas that ran against his basic assumptions and experiences’. 19 Barbara Keys has built upon this contention, contending that Suri and other biographers of Kissinger tend to treat their subject ‘above all as an intellectual’, and as a ‘rational actor’, relatively unaffected by day-to-day concerns. Keys therefore devotes particular attention to the relationships that Kissinger painstakingly forged with Soviet diplomats, arguing that they serve as the best explanation for him remaining ‘obsessively wedded to bipolarism’, when, had he lived up to his much-vaunted realism, he would have recognised that the world ‘was entering a new era of multipolarity’. 20 Even though Kissinger embraced the new state of affairs to the extent that he was still able to function in his capacity as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Keys writes that his ‘habit of approaching problems through this bipolar “cage” exacerbated instead of resolved them’, citing his misreading of the Indo-Pakistan War (1971) and ‘consistently overestimating Moscow’s influence over Hanoi’ as examples of this. 21

This idea of an intellectual ‘cage’ is particularly interesting, and similar in some respects to previous studies of the ‘operational code’, which began with Nathan Leites’ A Study of Bolshevism. This early attempt to ‘portray the spirit of the Bolshevik elite’ by analysing the writings they came to live by concluded that only somebody who ‘lives to conduct politics’ could become a leading Bolshevik, and Leites argued that, by subordinating a ‘multi-dimensional life’ to their politics, Soviet ideology (rather than normal human functions) was the one constant influence behind their actions. 22 Much like general definitions of beliefs and cultures, this was too broad an approach for accurately discerning the motives of policy-makers, and it was left to later political scientists to expand the idea. Ole R. Holsti’s case study of John Foster Dulles, the United States Secretary of State (1953–59), was influential in this regard. 23 By looking through Dulles’ statements regarding the Soviet Union during his period as Secretary of State, Holsti found that Dulles was often forced to manipulate information to make it sit more comfortably within his carefully-constructed world view, and to fit his image of the Soviet Union. 24 Holsti noted that this could be problematic from a policy-making perspective, and in a later study he analysed Dulles’ well-documented interpretation of history that left him ‘unburdened by doubts about the righteousness of his policies, the sinfulness of his enemies, or the “immorality” of those who would remain neutral in the conflict of good versus evil’. 25

This study of Sandys is primarily concerned with the effect that his individual experience had in the nuclear policy-making process, but this has to be situated within the procedures associated with the defence policy of a democratic society. Furthermore, it suggests that it needs to take account of the differing levels of status within the policy-making process that Sandys carried according to his various roles. Alexander L. George wrote that ‘operational code beliefs’, whilst serving as a ‘set of general guidelines’, are unable to ‘unilaterally determine the individual’s choices of action’ due to the existence of ‘other variables’. 26 The ‘other variables’ had also been considered by Holsti, who found that the most rewarding situations for ‘detailed investigations of decision makers’ beliefs’ to be situations characterised by ‘Nonroutine situations’, the need for “Long-range policy planning’, and where ‘the situation itself is highly ambiguous’. 27 Holsti was also able to identify situations where an increased responsibility was placed on the individual, having been relatively isolated from collective decision-making procedures, as providing fertile ground for the use of individual beliefs in the policy-making process. 28 This echoed earlier work by Sydney Verba, who discussed how personal preferences were more likely to be called upon in more ambiguous situations where established procedures and group input were less apparent. 29

British defence policy-making throughout the 1950s was characterised by such scenarios, and ambiguity was ever-present as policy was organised and re-organised in a strategic environment subject to rapid technological development and seemingly never-ending financial pressures. 30 George argued that ‘an actor’s beliefs’ are more likely to be found in ‘policy preferences’ than the ‘option he finally chooses’, owing to the variables he cites (‘domestic politics, organizational considerations, the necessity of compromise, etc.’), making preference, rather than final decisions, the ‘dependent variable’ in detecting the part played by beliefs in any decision. 31 The relevance of this to Sandys is that, whilst his policy preferences were only taken up in part whilst he was the Minister of Supply, he was the first Minister of Defence to be given overall control (subject to Cabinet approval) over both the broad direction of British defence policy and of decisions relating to equipment. This effectively gave him full control over the review of Britain’s strategic posture, making his personal policy preferences, and their intellectual origins, of paramount importance in any analysis of policy-making during this period. Further, determining the impact of beliefs on ‘decisional choices’ requires two things. One is tracing in detail the ‘steps in the process’; another is the identification of consistency between beliefs and decisions, which is first established on ‘relevant behavioural data from his prior life history’. 32 Between his Second World War service and his rise to policy-making roles, Sandys provided clear ‘relevant behavioural data’ in the form of public statements and literary interpretations (some of questionable accuracy) concerning his experiences defending Britain from unmanned German weaponry. These statements are utilised here to provide an idea of what informed his policy preferences.

This approach to problem-solving also encroaches upon the idea of ‘political myth’, which is similarly relevant to Sandys’ policy-making decisions. Henry Tudor defined myth in this context as an ‘interpretation of what the myth-maker (rightly or wrongly) takes to be hard fact’:

It is a device men adopt in order to come to grips with reality; and we can tell that a given account is a myth, not by the amount of truth it contains, but by the fact that it is believed to be true, above all, by the dramatic form into which it is cast. 33

Paul Fussell famously described memoirs as a ‘kind of fiction’ dependent upon ‘continuous implicit attestation of veracity or appeals to documented historical facts’. 34 Fussell was writing with reference to memories of the First World War, and the usefulness of the ‘negative myths’ surrounding it which has recently been addressed by Dan Todman, who argues that the ‘changing circumstances’ of Britain between the wars ensured that these myths ‘retained an explanatory power’ that guaranteed their ‘survival and eventual dominance’. 35 The ‘explanatory power’ of Sandys’ own myth-making is crucial to understanding the consistency in his personal belief system, and its importance in allowing him to determine its usefulness during periods of difficulty. Equally so, the failure of experiences in determining policy in its final form is equally deserving of further analysis, as Sandys certainly came to understand his wartime experiences in a fashion that differed from reality, which affected his approach to solving problems in the policy-making process. In this respect, the myth he created around his wartime experiences proved useful. This brings us back to what has been said about ‘nonroutine’ and ‘ambiguous’ situations providing the most appropriate circumstances for the use of personal belief systems in the policy-making process, and how we seek to contextualise Sandys and his policy preferences.

Chapter Outline

To show how Sandys had a significant effect upon British nuclear policy, this book follows the development and utilisation of his policy preferences in chronological fashion. However, in order to stay within designated word limits, it is unable to address his policy preferences in full, or to provide a general biographical study. Instead, focus is given to what can be directly linked to his experiences of the Second World War, namely how his strategic concept emanated from his ideas about unmanned weaponry. Where otherwise significant issues such as conscription, colonial withdrawal, civil defence, and naval warfare are discussed, it is strictly in relation to how Sandys himself linked them to his primary policy preferences, such as his suggestion that Hong Kong did not require a colonial garrison as China could be deterred with strategic nuclear weapons, or his consistent opposition to the Royal Navy attempting to increase its role in plans for global warfare.

Chapter two starts by looking at Sandys’ wartime activities and how he later interpreted the role he had played in defending Britain from unmanned German weaponry. By following his actions through official documents and related histories, and then comparing these with his later interpretations of events, it can be shown how Sandys came to exaggerate his contribution to the war effort by retrospectively assigning a greater importance to his campaigns against the V-1 and V-2 at the very time when his policy preferences were beginning to have an influence on official policy. Chapter three follows this by showing how Sandys first applied the perceived lessons of his war experiences to the policy-making process, arguing for a radical overhaul of British defence policy in 1953 and 1954 that would have seen Britain base its security on the descendants of the German weapons that had so impressed him a decade earlier.

Chapter four covers Sandys’ first few months at the Ministry of Defence in 1957 as he put the 1957 White Paper on Defence together. When he arrived at the Ministry in January, Sandys was explicitly charged with overseeing the kind of thorough rethink he had previously advocated, and given increased powers to force it through. This concentration of power in the Minister of Defence came at a moment when the British government was entering a period of uncertainty and upheaval following the Suez Crisis (29 October–7 November 1956), which allowed Sandys to draw heavily upon his personal experiences and conceptions of warfare when reformulating British defence policy, provoking outrage in doing so. In this section it is argued that by this point Sandys had developed a coherent strategic concept based upon the idea of unmanned weaponry proving impossible to defend against, and, by analysing his public statements and the many different drafts of the White Paper, his determination to deviate as little as possible from this core idea becomes apparent.

Chapter five maintains this focus in exploring what might be seen as the ‘negative’ aspects of Sandys’ willingness to utilise his war experiences as a policy-making tool. Having triumphantly published his White Paper in April 1957, Sandys immediately found it difficult to implement its main recommendations, as mounting costs and technological problems combined to see him gradually lose control of the situation, until he eventually found himself sidelined by those eager to move away from what they considered to be a problematic weapons system (Blue Streak) and the policies that he and the government expected to base upon it. This section addresses his time at the Ministry of Defence following the publication of the 1957 White Paper, and how Sandys attempted to balance giving proper consideration to alternative nuclear weapon systems without wishing to provide the government with an excuse to lessen its commitment to Blue Streak and what he considered a meaningful definition of nuclear independence.

Finally, chapter six is devoted exclusively to Sandys and Blue Streak, the British-built, land-based ballistic missile system he hoped would provide the nation with an independent nuclear capability beyond the lifespan of manned bomber aircraft, and the failure of which he would become personally associated with. By following Sandys’ involvement with the Blue Streak programme across both the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Aviation, where he watched on as it was cancelled as a weapon system, he emerges as somebody willing to have done everything in his power to ensure that Blue Streak was a success, including resorting to underhand methods, to the extent that he ended up being the only minister willing to defend the programme before it was cancelled in April 1960, bringing to a close the policies that he had based his defence plans upon.

Notes

  1. 1.

    His memoir consists of a ‘Preliminary Outline of Contents’ and some early drafts of several sections, but most of the proposed sections were simply marked ‘not yet written’; Duncan Sandys Memoirs (28 January 1982); the Papers of Duncan Sandys, Lord Duncan-Sandys (1908–1987); Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge; DSND 23/1.

  2. 2.

    Macmillan, H. and Catterall, P. (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: Prime Minister and After, 1957–1966 (London: Macmillan, 2011), pp. 128–129; Gerald Templer, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff during Sandys’ first year at the Ministry of Defence, regarded Sandys as ‘an interloper with little grasp of strategic issues in general or the heritage of the British Army’. He shunned speculation and simply physically attacked him before refusing to speak to him for twenty years; 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; Sandys remembered Templer as a ‘fish out of water in Whitehall’, adding ‘When, at a lunch party twenty-two years later, I said: “Hello, Gerald”, he replied: “Duncan, I still have no wish to speak to you”’; Sandys Memoir, 17/A/5; Smith, I., The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (London: Blake, 1997), p. 58.

  3. 3.

    Navias, M. S., ‘“Vested Interests and Vanished Dreams”’, p. 219; similarly, 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.

  4. 4.

    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’; Navias, M. S., Nuclear Weapons and British Strategic Planning, 1955–1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 140.

  5. 5.

    Navias credits Sandys with having recognised the ‘poverty of Britain’s resources’ in defending him against charges of having lacked an appreciation of strategy; Ibid., pp. 248–249; 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, 1958–1964 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 9–11 and p. 254; A. J. R. Groom said the ‘lines of policy that were to lead to the Sandys Defence White Papers had evolved from 1951 onwards’; 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. 172.

  6. 6.

    David French has written that Sandys’ ‘ideas about the right shape of defence policy had begun to form in 1953, during his period as Minister of Supply’. This book argues that the formation of these ideas began many years before; French, D., Army, Empire, and Cold War: The British Army and Military Policy: 1945–1971 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 159.

  7. 7.

    Gowing, M., Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, Vol. I (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 184.

  8. 8.

    Groom, British Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 576; see also: Pierre, A. J., Nuclear Politics: The British Experience with an Independent Nuclear Force, 1939–1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 304.

  9. 9.

    Schrafstetter, S. and Twigge, S., Avoiding Armageddon: Europe, the United States and the Struggle for Nuclear Nonproliferation, 1945–1970 (Westport: Praeger, 2004), pp. 213–214.

  10. 10.

    Clark, I. and Wheeler, N. J., The British Origins of Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 18; see also: Henry S. Rowen and Philip Bobbitt, who have both written about the ‘extension of strategic bombing’ and the ‘orderly continuation, by more effective means, of the strategic bombing campaign’; Rowen, H. S. ‘The Evolution of Strategic Nuclear Doctrine’ in Martin, L. (ed.), Strategic Thought in the Nuclear Age (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 137; Bobbitt, P., Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 21; ‘The emergence of SAC (Strategic Air Command) was rooted in Air Force Experience. The air planners were all veterans of the bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan … and believed that the Air Force must serve as the nation’s new first line of defense’; Rosenberg, D. A. ‘The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960’ in Miller, S. E. (ed.), Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 130; see also: Morgan, P. M., Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 7.

  11. 11.

    Baylis, J. and Stoddart, K., The British Nuclear Experience: The Roles of Beliefs, Culture and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 1; Baylis, J. and Stoddart, K., ‘The British Nuclear Experience: The Role of Ideas and Beliefs’, in Diplomacy and Statecraft, 23:2 (2012), p. 331 and pp. 343–344; ‘Atomic weapons were believed to be vital for Britain to go on playing its traditional role of protecting universal values of international peace and freedom. This is what Britain did’; Baylis and Stoddart, The British Nuclear Experience, p. 33.

  12. 12.

    Baylis and Stoddart, The British Nuclear Experience, p. 4.

  13. 13.

    Katzenstein, P. J. ‘Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security’, in Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Colombia University Press, 1996), p. 2; Allison, G. T., Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), p. 67.

  14. 14.

    Ceadel, M., Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 72; similarly, Wolfram Kaiser writes that an ‘excessive prestige orientation’ afflicted British political elites following the Second World War, and that this was particularly noticeable in the Conservative governments of 1955–1964 where ‘background influences … were strengthened considerably by Britain’s relative decline and its perception by the political elite’ which ‘was still largely a socially cohesive group with a similar educational background, and … an inherently conservative mental framework for policy-making’; Kaiser, W., ‘Against Napoleon and Hitler: Background Influences on British Diplomacy’ in Kaiser, W. and Staerck, G. (eds.), British Foreign Policy, 1955–1964: Contracting Options (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 117 and pp. 127–128; Michael Blackwell has considered the post-war Labour government, writing that the ‘leaders of the Labour Party … and the Foreign Office mandarins … shared the same world view’. Whilst their educational and social differences were sometimes stark, they were ultimately taught by the same ‘Whig teachers’ to revere the British Empire. Thus Blackwell explains the ‘broad consensus on foreign policy issues that Labour and Conservative governments have traditionally demonstrated’; Blackwell, M., Clinging to Grandeur: British Attitudes and Foreign Policy in the Aftermath of the Second World War (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 163.

  15. 15.

    Maguire, R. ‘“Never a Credible Weapon”: Nuclear Cultures in British Government during the Era of the H-Bomb’ in The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 45, No. 4 (December, 2012), p. 521.

  16. 16.

    Simpson, J., The Independent Nuclear State: The United States, Britain and the Military Atom (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 232–234; see also: Clark and Wheeler, The British Origins of Nuclear Strategy; Gowing, Independence and Deterrence; and, for an American perspective, Schilling, W. R. ‘The Politics of National Defense: Fiscal 1950’ in Hammond, P. Y., Schilling, W. R., and Snyder, G. H., Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962); this could even be due to the particular working methods of an organisation, as Julian Lewis has written. He praises the success of the Joint Staff system in being able to provide ‘straight answers to straight questions’ reasonably quickly because of the ‘standard format of its procedures’. This compares favourably with the Foreign Office at the end of the Second World War where, lacking in such structures, policies emerged ‘haphazardly according to which individual bestirred himself on a given question at a given moment’. He quotes Kim Philby as writing ‘It was facile then [1940], as it is now, to speak of a Foreign Office view. There are a lot of people in the Foreign Office and quite a few views’; Lewis, J., Changing Direction: British Military Planning for Post-war Strategic Defence, 1942–1947 (London: The Sherwood Press, 1988), p. 338.

  17. 17.

    Horne, A., Macmillan, 1894–1956: Volume I of the Official Biography (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 73–74; see also: Fisher, N., Harold Macmillan (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 25, 366, and 369; Sampson, A., Macmillan: A Study in Ambiguity (London: The Penguin Press, 1967), p. 22; D. R. Thorpe: ‘His searing experience was the Depression in pre-war Stockton, and this, together with his affinity with Keynesian ideas, hung heavily over the way he thought about financial policy’; Thorpe, D. R., Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010), pp. 616–617. This approach to understanding the economic policies of Macmillan as Prime Minister has also led some historians to suggest his memories of interwar poverty ‘governed his thinking for longer than was appropriate’, preventing him from addressing the signs of economic decline that became apparent during his period as Prime Minister; Fisher, Harold Macmillan, p. 154; see also: Charmley, J., A History of Conservative Politics, 1900–1996 (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 156. For his part, Macmillan had repeatedly made statements such as ‘I shall never forget those despairing faces … They wanted work. The British economy was indeed sick, almost mortally sick’; Macmillan, H., Winds of Change: 1914–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 285.

  18. 18.

    Suri, J., Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 8–14 and p. 247; see also: Starr, H., Henry Kissinger: Perceptions of International Politics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984); David Jablonsky has made a similar attempt at understanding Churchill as a war leader. To Jablonsky, Churchill was to become the ‘quintessential example of a leader in total war’, having ‘inherited the basic tension of that era (Victorian) between emotional, often irrational romanticism and earnest, rational pragmatism. To this were added general Victorian beliefs in such shibboleths as the British Empire and the Whig version of history … Compounding all that were the personality traits formed by a boy raised in patrician elegance, but cruelly neglected by his parents’; Jablonsky, D., Churchill, the Great Game and Total War (London: Frank Cass, 1991), p. 185.

  19. 19.

    Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century, p. 248.

  20. 20.

    Keys, B. ‘Bernath Lecture–Henry Kissinger: The Emotional Statesman’ in Diplomatic History, Vol. 35, No. 4 (September, 2011), p. 589 and p. 602.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., p. 603.

  22. 22.

    Leites, N., A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1953), pp. 15–16.

  23. 23.

    Holsti, O., ‘The Belief System and National Images: A Case Study’ in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 6, No. 3 (September, 1962), pp. 244–252.

  24. 24.

    ‘Contrary information (a general decrease in Soviet hostility, specific non-hostile acts) were reinterpreted in a manner which did not do violence to the original image. In the case of the Soviet manpower cuts, these were attributed to necessity (particularly economic weakness), and bad faith (the assumption that the released men would be put to work on more lethal weapons). In the case of the Austrian State Treaty, he explained the Soviet agreement in terms of frustration (the failure of its policy in Europe), and weakness (the system was on the point of collapse)’; Ibid., p. 249.

  25. 25.

    Holsti, O. ‘The “Operational Code” Approach to the Study of Political Leaders: John Foster Dulles’ Philosophical and Instrumental Beliefs’ in Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. III, No. I (March, 1970), p. 139.

  26. 26.

    George, A. L. ‘The Casual Nexus Between Cognitive Beliefs and Decision-Making Behavior: The “Operational Code” Belief System’ in Falkowski, L. S. (ed.), Psychological Models in International Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1979), pp. 103–104.

  27. 27.

    Other fruitful scenarios were those involving ‘Decisions made at the pinnacle of government’, ‘Circumstances of information overload’, Unanticipated events’, and ‘Circumstances in which complex cognitive tasks … may be impaired’; Holsti, O. ‘Foreign Policy Formation Viewed Cognitively’ in Axelrod, A. (ed.), Structure of Decision: The Cognitive Maps of Political Elites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 30–31.

  28. 28.

    Holsti, O., ‘The “Operational Code” as an Approach to the Analysis of Belief Systems’ in Final Report to the National Science Foundation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977), pp. 16–18.

  29. 29.

    Verba, S. ‘Assumptions of Rationality and Non-Rationality in Models of the International System’ in World Politics, 14 (1961), pp. 102–103.

  30. 30.

    Richard Way, who served as Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, said it was surprising how long it was before Britain really embarked on any proper defence planning, claiming ‘Every year we had an absolute crisis’ trying to reorganise existing plans to fit immediate financial constraints. Richard Powell, who had been the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence during Sandys’ period in charge agreed, adding that after the 1952 Global Strategy Paper there were only really annual revisions designed to contain things. Sandys was the first person who ‘sat down and tried to think out what the future was’; the recordings of the conference held at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London on 1 July 1988 (reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives); NHP/SR1; see also the ‘fundamental lack of agreement amongst political and military leaders … had important implications for British foreign and defence policies’. Baylis, J., Ambiguity and Deterrence: British Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 360.

  31. 31.

    George, ‘The Casual Nexus’, p. 104.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., p. 105.

  33. 33.

    Tudor, H., Political Myth (London: Pall Mall Press, 1972), p. 17.

  34. 34.

    Fussell, P., The Great War and Modern Memory (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 310.

  35. 35.

    Todman, D., The Great War: Memory and Myth (London: Hambledon Comtinuum, 2005), p. 223; Jean Peneff has described the ‘mythical element in life stories’ as being the result of a ‘mental construct which, starting from the memory of individual facts which would otherwise appear incoherent and arbitrary, goes on to arrange and interpret them and so turn them into biographical events’. It is claimed that such myth-making is ‘common in all societies’, but is ‘especially widespread in societies undergoing rapid development and change’; Peneff, J., ‘Myths in Life Stories’ in Samuel, R. and Thompson, P. (eds.), The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 36; Richard Carr offers a relevant example of this in writing that young Conservative politicians who had served in the First World War sought political benefits from ‘constantly speaking of a generation wiped out, and selling themselves to a grieving public as the living embodiment of lost sons, brothers and fathers come election time’, which had the effect of propagating the stubborn image that their war had been a disaster; Carr, R., Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War: The Memory of All That (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 7–8; Martin Francis has described how Ian Smith in Rhodesia, with support in London from Douglas Bader, used ‘the myth of the wartime flyer’ to ‘reassert racial hierarchies in both the disintegrating empire and the metropole itself’ through ‘a process of selective denial and extensive refashioning, not least the expunging of non-whites from the dominant memory of the RAF at war’; Francis, M., ‘Men of the Royal Air Force, the Cultural Memory of the Second World War and the Twilight of the British Empire’ in Grayzel, S. R. and Levine, P. (eds), Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2009), p. 192; see also: Simon Ball’s claim that the different generations of policy-makers in Macmillan’s government, which he divides between those who had missed out on the First World War, but had grown up in its aftermath, and those who had entered politics in the 1930s. These tensions ‘had some impact on policy-making’, but more importantly ‘shaped how men understood what had happened’. Macmillan, who was ‘above’ these tensions as the only member of his government to have fought in the First World War ‘created the view that the post-war generation … had worked in an honourable and statesmanlike fashion’, whereas the younger men ‘had acted like selfish prima donnas’; Ball, S. ‘The Wind of Change as Generational Drama’ in Butler, L. J. and Stockwell, S. (eds.), The Winds of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonisation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 96–112.