in the 1960s did, at the most important levels of daily operations and long-term acquisitions, save the Royal Navy from a slippery slope of retrenchment after the policy of withdrawal started to bite.
The Nassau Agreement, as a treaty negotiated by President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan and signed December 22, 1962, provided the United Kingdom with the Polaris ballistic-missile capability, using British warheads, and the US Navy with a long-term lease arrangement for a submarine base at Holy Loch in Scotland. The meeting in the Bahamas also meant the end of the US AGM-48 Skybolt nuclear missile program, a system that the Royal Air Force would acquire as a result of an earlier agreement between Macmillan and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Royal Air Force maintained a tactical nuclear capability with its V-bomber force and later with the Tornado aircraft. However, the Royal Navy was now the lead service for the independent deterrent. This was in spite of earlier misgivings by such senior Americans as Robert McNamara and Dean Acheson, who had questioned the wisdom of the United States enabling the United Kingdom to have a viable deterrent. They pointed to the failures of the UK Blue Steel standoff missile system and Blue Streak intermediate-range ballistic missile, as well as to technical difficulties with the AGM-48 Skybolt system, which the United Kingdom planned to purchase.
As the Cold War heated up, the two navies became closer and closer in collecting, analyzing, and sharing intelligence and providing information for not just operational use but also, equally critically, the task of staying ahead of the technological curve and ensuring that the acquisition process received the very latest high-level threat inputs. The intelligence staffs of both navies created in the 1960s a bedrock of highly classified cooperation at all levels of the intelligence space. Nowhere was this more evident than in the underwater domain.
Intelligence sharing went hand in glove with technology exchange. The Royal Navy was the recipient of enormous largesse by the US government and especially the nuclear navy created by Admiral Hyman B. Rickover: nuclear submarine technology, which augured the beginning of the longest US-UK industrial relationship, that between the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics at Groton, Connecticut, and Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering (later acquired by British Aerospace) at Barrow-in-Furness. Underscoring this exchange was the extremely sensitive trading of acoustic intelligence (ACINT) and other special intelligence (SI). We will address this in detail later; the point here is that the impact on both navies’ defense postures, and indeed on the nations’ prime strategic posture at the national level, was such that the two services would march in step not just for the duration of the Cold War but also for the quarter-century after the Berlin Wall was torn down.
In spite of all the changes in both countries’ defense organizations and all the turmoil of the UK withdrawal from east of Suez, the US Navy and the Royal Navy remained at the end of the 1960s tightly bound. This was a unique institutional relationship within two separate institutions, indeed constituting a state within two states, built not just on agreements and high-level security arrangements but equally on personal relationships, trust, and the abiding connectivity brought by at-sea operations, by facing a common threat on a daily basis. No such relationship has ever been enjoyed by other US and UK institutions or within the much wider context of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or other major international agreements, treaties, and alignments that the two countries have.
Limited War in the Nuclear Era
Impact on the US Navy and the Royal Navy
There have been countless studies since World War II on nuclear warfare theory—the fine 1959 book by the man dubbed the “American Clausewitz,” Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, comes immediately to mind, as does the work of Philip Winsor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and, more latterly, the work of Franklin C. Miller in the United States. There is indeed a whole separate lexicon associated with how the opposing nations of NATO and the Soviet Union developed nuclear-warfare theory, deterrence postures, and indeed the very plans for executing nuclear warfare at various levels of escalation. Brodie was the father of the West’s understanding of the critical value of second-strike capabilities in nuclear deterrence theory. Brodie’s thinking impacted significantly the nuclear capabilities and postures of the US Navy and the Soviet navy. Brodie, for instance, made the singular observation that “thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to prevent them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”
The ending of the Cold War would seem prima facie to have ended that era. However, logic and common sense say otherwise, since the key nations that were the nuclear powers between 1945 and, technically, August 29, 1949, in the case of the Soviet Union (the day the USSR detonated its first nuclear device) are still in existence and have nuclear arsenals. In spite of the various nuclear arms-limitations agreements, the threat of nuclear war is still there. Other nations may acquire nuclear weapons in due course. The ongoing diplomacy to constrain Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons nation exemplifies the position of the Western nuclear-weapons “have” nations to prevent the “have not” nations from acquiring these weapons of mass destruction (WMD). From our seventy years of international relations in the nuclear age (1945–2015) one factor is self-evidently clear, that all conventional warfare is by definition limited warfare if conducted by one or more of the nuclear-weapons-owning nations.
As we proceed to look at the US Navy and the Royal Navy in the fifty-five years from 1960, one key factor has to be assimilated. It is simple and perhaps obvious at one level, but still necessary to articulate: that both navies became nuclear-powered navies and both navies became the guardians of their nation’s independent nuclear deterrents. These sea-based systems were on board submarines, and though the US Navy built and still builds nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (CVNs) and had nuclear-powered cruisers (CGNs) in the early part of our period, the submarine became the primary platform in nuclear deterrence strategy. The CVNs were nuclear-weapon capable, as were the Buccaneer aircraft of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, and both navies had other nuclear weapons: the nuclear depth bomb, for example. However, it is the submarine that is the mainstay and workhorse of the deterrent forces, with manned bombers and land-based missile systems (in the case only of the United States today) filling support roles. The first leg of the US triad is still today the ballistic-missile-firing Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, and in the United Kingdom the Vanguard-class SSBNs have the same role as just a single leg. This basic fact is to be coupled to one other crucial fact, that nuclear-powered attack submarines have a service life of approximately thirty years–plus (the new US Virginia-class SSN has an infinite unrefueled life; its reactor never requiring refueling during the hull life of the submarine) and are stealthy, covert, and persistently present in the oceans and littorals of the world. It is clear that the nuclear submarine has a very special place in what follows.
All warfare is therefore limited unless the absolutely inconceivable but by definition always possible event of a nuclear exchange between major-state adversaries occurs or a third party (terrorist) or surrogate nation uses a nuclear device. The umbrella of nuclear protection for the West has been in position since the advent of nuclear deterrence theory. Tactical nuclear weapons, whatever posture changes their advent has brought, and whatever their yield, remain incontrovertibly weapons of mass destruction. The wars, conflicts, campaigns, counterinsurgencies, counterterrorist operations, and a plethora of other naval operations (such as the “Cod War” and the Beira Patrol in the case of the Royal Navy, operations in Central America in the case of the US Navy, and relief and humanitarian assistance, counterpiracy, counterdrugs, counter-weapons and -human trafficking in the case of both navies) of this period are overshadowed by the immensity and cost of both waging the Cold War at sea and the sustainment of the undersea nuclear deterrent posture. At one level the intensity and complexity of continuous forward-deployed
