number 1 - Centre d'études et de recherches européennes Robert ...

The Bomb and Europe 73
in December 1962, namely to sell Polaris missiles also to the French provided that
once operational, their force de frappe would be fully integrated into a multilateral
NATO nuclear force and only withdrawn and used independently when "supreme
national interests" were at stake, as it was put in the Anglo-American agreement.
Macmillan was content with theoretical sovereignty over the use of the British
deterrent. 32 As a symbol of independence and influence, it was primarily intended
for domestic political consumption; or, as Kennedy once remarked to Bundy, "a
political necessity but a piece of military foolishness". 33 Only in the wake of
McNamara's speech of June 1962, in which the American Defence Secretary had
appeared to condemn the existence of any non-American independent nuclear force
within the Atlantic Alliance, did Macmillan find out that even though he was
legally entitled under the bilateral arrangements with the US to press the button, no
serious operational plans whatsoever existed for a possible independent use of the
British deterrent. 34 This was more than five years into Macmillan's premiership,
and it was highly typical of the British approach.
De Gaulle, on the other hand, was increasingly aiming at full independence not
just over the use of the future French deterrent, but also over its technical development
and production. The "qualified independence", which the British enjoyed visà-vis
the Americans, was not acceptable to France, as the French Armed Forces
Minister Messmer explained to the British Defence Secretary Thorneycroft during
a bilateral meeting in October 1962. 35 Although this did not exclude the possibility
of cooperation with the Americans and the British on targeting or early warning
systems, for example, the force de frappe had to be "fully independent for all time",
meaning that it should never be dependent on any other government's strategic
planning or goodwill to provide successor weapons systems. 36 In this respect at
least, the French made their position very clear during numerous bilateral Anglo-
French meetings at ministerial and official levels in 1961/62. When he left for his
Nassau talks with Kennedy, hoping to secure the survival of the British deterrent,
Macmillan must thus have known that the solution he sought for Britain would inevitably
be rejected by de Gaulle, if it was offered to him by the US government. To
fight for it nonetheless merely helped the Prime Minister to deceive Kennedy into
believing that the Polaris agreement with Britain would not shut the door on the
enlargement of the Community.
There is a second reason why it was unlikely that American concessions on the
nuclear front would have enabled Britain to join the EEC, and that is that from the
British perspective, support for assistance to the French within the Kennedy administration
came from the wrong side for the wrong reasons. While the State Department
was strictly opposed and had basically determined the line taken by Kennedy
in May 1961, the Pentagon, rightly believing that the French would acquire a nuclear
deterrent anyway, came out more and more in favour of cooperation during
32. For British nuclear policy cf. L. FREEDMAN, Britain and Nuclear Weapons, London 1980.
33. JFKL Orals, Bundy, quoted in HORNE, Macmillan II, p. 439.
34. De Zulueta to Macmillan: PRO PREM 11/3709 (24 June 1962).
35. Thorneycroft to Macmillan: PRO FO 371/163516/24 (24 October 1962).
36. PRO FO 371/163516/23 (17 October 1962).