The Search for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Abstract

If the fate of the British deterrent was one half of the Anglo-American nuclear problem in the Kennedy-Macmillan era, the other was the search for a nuclear test ban treaty. Harold Macmillan’s personal role in this field makes for what is at once a fascinating, paradoxical and problematical study. On the one hand, as we have seen in the previous chapter, he was tenacious in his pursuit of an ‘independent’ nuclear capability for Great Britain. On the other, he was a persistent advocate of détente, disarmament, and a ban on nuclear testing. Of course, this paradox could easily be resolved by recourse to a Machiavellian explanation. One might argue that Macmillan’s approach was governed solely by domestic electoral considerations. So, on the one hand, Macmillan wanted to play to that segment of public opinion in Britain which was wedded to the nation’s role as a great power by stressing the importance of the independent nuclear deterrent. On the other, he wanted to steal the clothes of the peace lobby by advocating disarmament and an end to nuclear testing. The latter policy could of course only be pursued in earnest once Britain had completed her own programme of nuclear tests by the middle of 1958.¹ Although his behaviour can be made to fit this interpretation, it still seems incomplete. It is difficult, for example, to dismiss all of the evidence of private soul-searching over the question of the impact of the nuclear arms race on the future of mankind as a simple attempt to mask his true motives from his contemporaries and from the historical record.² The terms of his 5 January 1962 appeal to Kennedy, in which he spoke of ‘humanity … setting out on a path at once so fantastic and so retrograde, so sophisticated and so barbarous, as to be almost incredible’, reflect more than eloquence in pursuit of political calculation.³