WILSON IN DEEP WATER
THE Labour Party is getting into deeper water over British nuclear weapons. Ever since the cancellation of Blue Streak in 1960, Mr. Brown and Mr. Gordon Walker have been saying that Britain could no longer be a serious nuclear power and so should drift gradually towards en- tirely conventional armed forces. But they worded their statements carefully, always leaving themselves the possibility of discovering once in office what they should know now—namely, that the RAF and the Royal Navy have, and can continue to have, effective nuclear arms. Mr. Wil- son seems to be less inclined to hedge his bets. He is giving what looks dangerously like an under- taking to abandon nuclear weapons altogether.
The argument that Britain should unilaterally abandon these weapons is being put in several forms. One school contends that by obtaining nuclear weapons the British Government has en- couraged their proliferation. Apart from the fact that there is nothing which can be done about this, there is not the slightest evidence that the Attlee-Churchill programme has encouraged anyone to embark on nuclear weapons, or that the French and the Chinese would be shamed by a British act of abnegation into giving a perman- ent monopoly on the world'S most effective weapons to the Americans and Russians. Strangely enough, those countries which might be affected by British moral opinions have shown themselves quite capable of renouncing nuclear weapons on their own. Indeed, if Britain's nuclear power has any effect on friendly nations who have the capacity to become nuclear powers in their own right, it is to give them one more reason for refraining from so expensive an enter- prise. Every serious government must recognise that it might one day face a nuclear threat; and a friend who is a nuclear power increases the chances of survival under threat and so decreases the need to buy expensive insurance. Perhaps rightly, Mr. Wilson cannot believe that we would ever alone give nuclear support to a beleaguered friend and he presumably thinks it inconceivable that we might ourselves be isolated by some twist of events. In this, his loyalty is not only to the American alliance as it is, but to what that alliance has not yet become. So total a faith is welcome in a man who occasionally looks as if he might be flirting with neutralism. But, in trying to unite the serious centre and right of his party with the nuclear disarmers, he is in danger of suggesting that we should become a client rather than an ally of the United States.
The question of nuclear weapons inside the alliance is part of the central political issue of NATO's future. Every decision must be judged by whether it leads to the larger objective—a permanent American commitment to Europe and an increasing sense of permanence and indivisi- bility in the whole NATO area. By abandoning her nuclear weapons, the British Government would be taking the wrong approach to the Americans and would almost certainly make the British people into worse allies. Now that the United States is at last trying to find some way to give Europe a larger share in the nuclear strategy of NATO, we should take the lead in developing realistic arrangements—as the Government is already doing with the multi- national force. In spite of their feeling that all would be for the best if they alone had the bomb, the Americans are not looking for weakness in their partners. (No Englishman means more to them than Sir Winston Churchill and it is his kind of Britain they cherish as an ally.) The trouble with Franco-American relations is not the French nuclear weapons programme but French resentment of American leadership and unwillingness to co-operate in creating a per- manent Atlantic union. The French bomb is de- signed to be an agent of French influence; ours is part of a total effort towards unity in NATO, and only insurance against isolation, By proving that it is possible for sovereign nations to unify their targeting and planning on every level, the British and American govern- ments have shown the right direction for the de- velopment of the alliance. Because Britain is a nuclear power, the United States has learnt to go beyond complete self-sufficiency in her re- lations with us. The great leap forward which is needed in NATO must constitute, in effect, the development of the same sort of intimacy be- tween the United States and her other European allies. If the Germans had a real share in the organisation and planning of the weapons which really defend them, they would not be looking for participation in token forces like the pro- posed multilateral NATO fleet. If the Americans follow the British lead in committing their prin- cipal strategic forces to NATO, the question of whose finger is on the trigger would become less important and the alliance could develop a uni- fied and well-understood strategy.
British abandonment of nuclear weapons could have another important effect, too little consid- ered in Washington. Opposition here to these weapons is strong enough to have forced the Labour Party into its present compromising position. But this opposition is held in check by
the sense that British defence policy requires these weapons. Nuclear weapons are ugly and un- attractive and a nuclear defence policy is difficult to sustain in countries where the noncomformist conscience is strong. To make them an American monopoly is to multiply the difficulty of defend- ing the strategy of NATO before the British pub- lic. Mr. Wilson is storing up endless trouble for himself and his successors.
Previous page
