Britain spent the 1950s building three superb bombers and then discovered it had nothing worth putting in them.

El Vulcan, el Victor y el Valiant were designed to fly over the Soviet Union and drop free-fall bombs. By the time they were in squadron service, Soviet surface-to-air missiles had made flying over the Soviet Union a way of dying. Britain needed a stand-off weapon, and then a missile, and then another missile. Two of them were cancelled.

The consequence was that the British nuclear deterrent stopped belonging to the Royal Air Force and started belonging to the Royal Navy. It has never gone back.

The problem with flying over Russia

Britain had been working on Blue Steel, a rocket-powered stand-off missile, since 1955. The idea was sound: launch a hundred miles out and let the missile fly the last leg, so the bomber never entered the worst of the defences.

By 1960 Blue Steel had not entered service and was already looking dated. British intelligence assessments from the early 1950s had warned that Soviet SAM development would make the V-bombers dangerously vulnerable during the 1960s, and that was proving right on schedule. A Blue Steel Mark 2 was considered. The RAF looked at it and decided to pin its hopes on something American instead.

Running alongside was Blue Streak, Britain’s own ballistic missile. It worked as engineering. Its problem was that it burned liquid propellant, which meant it had to be fuelled before launch, which meant it took long enough to prepare that a Soviet first strike would catch it sitting in its silo. A weapon that only works if you shoot first is not a deterrent; it is an invitation.

In February 1960 the cabinet decided to cancel it.

British Pathé newsreel of Blue Streak. The rocket outlived its military role and went on to fly as the first stage of the European Europa launcher.

Betting the deterrent on somebody else’s missile

Having cancelled its own missile, Britain needed a replacement quickly, and Macmillan went to Eisenhower in March 1960 to get one.

The answer was Skybolt: a two-stage ballistic missile slung under a bomber’s wing, launched at altitude, giving the aircraft a thousand miles of stand-off. Eisenhower agreed to sell 144 of them. Britain would fit its own warheads. In exchange, the United States Navy got Holy Loch in Scotland as a base for its Polaris submarines.

It was, on paper, an excellent arrangement. The V-bomber force stayed relevant, the missile was American-funded, and Britain kept an independent deterrent without paying to develop one. The in-service date was the end of 1963. Vulcan XH537 was flying with dummy Skybolts under its wings.

The flaw in the arrangement was that Britain had made its entire 1960s deterrent depend on an American programme over which it had no control, and which the Americans could cancel for reasons that had nothing to do with Britain.

Which is exactly what happened.

British Pathé on Skybolt in 1962, filmed before the cancellation.

December 1962

In November 1962 British officials were warned that cancellation was likely. Robert McNamara had looked at Skybolt’s test record and its cost and concluded the Americans did not need it: they already had Minuteman going into silos and Polaris going to sea. An air-launched ballistic missile was an expensive solution to a problem the United States had solved twice over.

For Britain it was not a redundant programme. It was the whole deterrent.

The timing could hardly have been worse. The Cuban Missile Crisis had ended a few weeks earlier, during which Macmillan felt he had backed Kennedy loyally and been consulted rather less than he expected. Now the Americans proposed to cancel the weapon Britain had reorganised its entire nuclear posture around, and the news reached London through the press before it arrived through diplomatic channels.

Kennedy and Macmillan met at Nassau in the Bahamas over three days in December. What Macmillan needed was not a missile but a demonstration that the special relationship meant something. What he got, in the agreement concluded on 21 December 1962, was Polaris.

Skybolt was formally cancelled the following day.

What it actually cost

On the surface Nassau looks like a rescue. Britain lost a missile it had not paid for and gained a better one.

Underneath, it was a transfer of institutional power that has lasted more than sixty years. Polaris goes in a submarine. A submarine belongs to the Navy. From the moment the ink dried, the Royal Air Force was on a path towards handing over the strategic deterrent it had held since 1945, and in 1969 it did exactly that.

The V-force did not disappear — it moved to low-level conventional and tactical work, and the Vulcan had one extraordinary late outing over the Falklands — but the job it had been designed and built for was gone. The three bombers had been conceived to carry Britain’s bomb to Moscow. They ended up as a conventional strike force whose most famous mission was bombing a runway in the South Atlantic.

There is a second cost, less often counted. Cancelling Blue Streak in favour of an American weapon, then losing the American weapon, taught Whitehall that depending on Washington for a delivery system carried a specific kind of risk. It did not stop Britain doing it. Trident is American too. But the phrase “independent nuclear deterrent” has done a great deal of heavy lifting ever since December 1962.

The report Kennedy commissioned

The affair rattled Washington enough that Kennedy asked Richard Neustadt to find out how an administration had managed to blindside its closest ally by accident. Neustadt was given the files and interviewed senior officials on both sides. His report went to the President in November 1963 and stayed classified until 1992.

It remains the fullest account of how the crisis happened, and its answer is not conspiracy but something more familiar: two governments, each assuming the other understood what a decision meant, neither checking.

Blue Streak, meanwhile, refused to die quietly. Having been cancelled as a weapon, it was repurposed as the first stage of the European Europa satellite launcher, and flew in that role. Britain’s abandoned ballistic missile spent its second career trying to put Europe into orbit.

Sources: Richard E. Neustadt, Skybolt Report to the President, 15 November 1963 (declassified 1992); Vulcan to the Sky Trust; UK National Archives; US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1961–63; British Pathé.

A modern assessment of Blue Streak and what Britain gave up when it cancelled the programme.