The Preferential Relationship 1957–1962

Abstract

Despite the trauma of the Suez crisis, both Britain and the United States moved very quickly in the latter part of the 1950s to repair the alliance. A realization of the harmful effects of the clash over Suez together with a deterioration in the relations with the Soviet Union helped to bring the allies closer together again.¹ Significantly the symbols of the renewed determination to work together were particularly evident in the defence field. The progress made in 1954 and 1955 in the atomic energy field was maintained and in 1958 the McMahon Act was finally repealed, returning Britain to the kind of wide-ranging collaboration with the United States which she had enjoyed during the war and which she had worked so hard to re-establish after 1946. After the earlier problems, atomic energy was now not only in line with the other aspects of the alliance but provided the most important manifestation of the return to a close partnership.