Britain, the United States and the Reform of NATO Strategy, 1964–1966

Abstract

A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes … could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors – as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, ‘the survivors would envy the dead’. For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors.

President John F. Kennedy, Address to the nation on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 26 July 1963

The concerns outlined by Kennedy regarding the potential outcome of a Third World War remained unabated in 1964. The prospects for deep and lasting nuclear arms control measures were dim, and NATO Europe remained concerned that nuclear war could be initiated by the superpowers, with European governments marginalised both in the decision-making process and in the control of the physical hardware. These were issues to which the Labour government of Harold Wilson had immediately to address itself.