Defence Committee

Cabinet s Defence Committee was not kept regularly informed of the atomic programme and was not asked to take a decision on it until 1950, and then only because the Chiefs of Staff had recommended some delay in the interests of accelerating other weapons projects. It was not, of course, unprecedented for a prime minister to reserve sensitive defence matters to himself and an inner circle of ministers and advisers. Churchill had excluded the Cabinet from important discussions on the atomic bomb, and much else, during the war. 

Cabinet Defence Committee minutes, 10 Oct., CAB 131/13, cited in Grove, Vanguard to Trident p. 95. 

Birch to Walter Monckton (minister of defence), 20 Mar. 1956, DEFE 7/1128, TNA. Information about aircraft projects drawn from same file. For the Defence Committee decision, see minutes of meeting on 2 Oct. 1956, CAB 131/17, TNA. 

In mid-1959 the Minister of Defence, Sandys, on the advice of his permanent secretary, Powell, established an independent British Nuclear Deterrent Smdy Group, with representatives of the three services, the Foreign Office and the Treasury, under Powell s chairmanship. The group compared Blue Streak with two American ballistic missiles, the submarine-launched Polaris and the air-launched Skybolt. Rising estimates for the costs of research and development and of underground silos hardened the Treasury s opposition to Blue Streak, and the Chiefs of Staff were in favour of a mobile system. Once President Eisenhower had indicated to Macmillan in March 1960 that Skybolt would be available on satisfactory terms, the Defence Committee took the decision to cancel Blue Streak as a weapons system. The vulnerable Thors were taken out of service by the end of 1963. 

D. R. Serpell to B. D. Fraser (third secretary. Treasury), Strategic bomber force , 30 July 1957, enclosing memorandum by T. Blig of same title and date, PREM 11/1773 Defence Committee minutes, 2 Aug. 1957, GAB 131/18, TNA. 

R. W. B. Clarke, Defence Committee Wednesday 27th July 25 July 1960, CLRK 1/ 3/1/2, and Clarke to Sir William Armstrong, Defence East of Suez 1 Mar. 1963, CLRK 1/3/2/4, Churchill College, Cambridge. 

Defence Committee, 7th Report Gulf Veterans Illness, HMSO (April 2000). 

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