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35 Foreign Aff. 551 (1956-1957)
British Defense Policy

handle is hein.journals/fora35 and id is 561 raw text is: FOREIGN AFFAIRS Vol. 35 JULY 1957 No. 4 BRITISH DEFENSE POLICY By Sir John Slessor HE recent British White Paper on Defense has been de- scribed as a momentous shift in policy, a radical change in strategic concept, an agonizing reappraisal. For this the wording of the Paper may itself be partly responsible, with its talk about a revision of the whole character of the Defense plan and the biggest change in military policy ever made in normal times. So perhaps the first thing that should be said about the White Paper is that in fact it is no such thing. It intro- duces no basic revolution in policy, but merely rationalizes and (probably for the first time) explains in admirably intelligible form tendencies which have long been obvious and policies most of which successive British governments have accepted and urged upon their Allies for some years. This should be qualified in one respect, one on which unfortunately the White Paper itself is least clear and is even ambiguous, namely the nature of the total war envisaged if the deterrent fails to deter. This is a basic question affecting the function of all three serv- ices, though more particularly (but by no means exclusively) that of the Navy. And the fact that it is not squarely faced con- stitutes to my mind the major element of uncertainty about the British view on strategic policy, an element which seems to have been obscured in the minds of our Allies by other doubts and fears, notably about our attitude to NATO. In one paragraph the White Paper says that reinforcements which would not be ready for action in less than three months would be of little value in nuclear war; in another it says that the nuclear battle might not be immediately decisive and therefore we must be able to de- fend Atlantic communications against submarine attack. In other words the White Paper to some extent still tries to have it both ways, with the inevitable result that it does not have enough either way.

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