Interview with Denis Healey, 1986 [Part 2 of 3]
Summary
Denis Healey was the British secretary of state for defense from 1964 to 1970 and chancellor of the exchequer from 1974 to 1979. In his interview conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: “The Education of Robert McNamara,” Healey begins with a comparison between Soviet and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conventional military strength. He reflects on the period in which he was defense secretary under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. He recalls the opposing interests of Germany and the United States with regard to nuclear strategy, explains his “Healey theorem” of deterrence, and clarifies France’s position that alliances can’t coexist with nuclear weapons. Healey also assesses U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara’s quest for tidy solutions to “insoluble” nuclear problems. Healey elaborates on France’s opposition to the notion of “extended deterrence” and on his own role in persuading NATO to adopt “flexible response” strategy. He traces the evolution of his military analysis of massive retaliation, describes his collaboration with McNamara in developing flexible-response doctrine, reiterates the expectation that SALT III would follow shortly after a ratified SALT II Treaty, and shares how he ultimately lost faith in flexible response. He also discusses the extraordinary growth of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, Britain’s response to the proposal for a Multilateral Force in the early 1960s, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s distrust of U.S. president Jimmy Carter, and his own opposition to U.S. Euro-strategic missiles. As a fellow defense intellectual, Healey was encouraged by national security adviser Henry Kissinger’s appointment: he was sure that détente could move forward. He admired Kissinger’s boldness in dodging “all official channels … which he doesn’t like anybody else doing,” but he was disappointed by Kissinger’s failure to consult with allies. For the future, Healey believes that there should be fifty-percent reductions in strategic and conventional weapons, particularly when “one side or the other has superiority.” He also advocates a “nuclear-free corridor” to avoid accidental war.
Topics
Nuclear weapons, Nuclear arms control
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Transcript
Healey’s Theorem
Interviewer:
You were essentially trying to hold the middle between the Germans and the Americans in this argument, ferocious argument...
Healey:
With the French right outside.
Interviewer:
Could you just summarize for us the German-American positions on the argument about flexible response?
Healey:
On the whole, I think, the Americans have always wanted to limit their nuclear liability in Europe, and to try to find an alternative. Or, if there had to be nuclear weapons used in Europe, try to find a way of using them which didn't involve them being dropped on the United States. And that's just as true today as it was 20... 30 years ago. The Germans had taken exactly the opposite view. Uh, they don't want a limited nuclear war fought in Germany, even in East Germany, never mind West Germany. They don't want a conventional war fought again in Germany; they remember too keenly the disaster of the last conventional war, which was child's play compared with what a new conventional war would be. So they believe in nuclear deterrence, pure and simple. What they really believe is, as long as you've got plenty of American forces in Germany, the Russians won't dare to attack if there's any chance whatever of the Americans responding by dropping nuclear weapons on Moscow; that's basically it. And I always used to define the NATO dilemma in terms of what I call the Healey theorem: it... only takes a 5 percent credibility of American retaliation to deter an attack, but it takes a 95 percent credibility to reassure the allies; on the whole... the argument inside NATO has been directly to try to narrow the gap between the degree of credibility needed for deterrence, and that needed for reassurance. But the difficulty is that the Germans are not really interested, if they can avoid it, in no early use, no first use of nuclear weapons -- they would like to go back to massive retaliation. I'm talking, not about every single German, but the, the basic approach of most German governments. Helmut Schmidt, when he was defense secretary, was an exception.
Interviewer:
What was the French part in this debate during the mid-'60's? Have you got any anecdotes?
Healey:
Well, the French approach, in those days, was one of, of cynical indifference to an argument which they thought was about a problem which could never be solved, because they didn't believe that alliances could exist, uh, could coexist, with nuclear weapons. The shift in French policy came much later on, largely under Mitterand, when he actually began to say, "Well, we're not going to have any cruise weapons; but we're very anxious everybody else in Europe should have them." But, in the days when I was defense secretary, the, the French affected a pretty fair indifference to all these arguments inside NATO.
Interviewer:
Can you remember any particular anecdotes? I think there was one about somebody reading a newspaper during one of the meetings.
Healey:
Well, don't forget that the French actually left NATO, so they didn't participate in any of the discussions within the military organization of the alliance. Uh, I remember having, I liked to make jokes at these meetings, because I think that usually committee meetings, uh, are far too serious and solemn, and I once ribbed, uh, Couve de Murville, when France was still in NATO attending a NATO council meeting, about the inconsistencies in the French position, and, uh, he refused to shake hands with me, and I had a difficult period of about 90 seconds, in which I finally got him to smile again. I mean, the French were terribly solemn about their own position; they didn't like people joking about it at all, but they were extremely scathing and cynical about the position of everybody else.
Strategies for nuclear weapon deployment in Europe
Interviewer:
Now, the flexible response which McNamara actually proposed in 1962, was essentially, as he's made clear since, getting close to a no-first-use policy. he wanted...major barriers between the use of conventional and tactical nuclear weapons, and more firebreaks between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. He now says that the flexible-response doctrine that was adopted in 1966, '67, 14-3, was a complete fudge, a very diluted version of his original thinking. Have you got any comment on that?
Healey:
Well, I think that Bob McNamara was never as good as a minister as he was as a, an intellectual. I mean, it was under him that the American nuclear arsenal in Europe reached its peak. He allowed the military-industrial to pour more and more battlefield nuclear weapons until... you know, they were stuffed to the gills with it. And there are only, I think, now a third as many as McNamara introduced into Europe. He, for God's sake, was the American defense secretary at the time. What I think is true is that he never really believed in nuclear deterrence, but... flexible response, as he finally agreed... was a compromise between the German position and his position in the United States, if you like, a fudge that, my experience, especially in nuclear questions, is that... many of these problems are intellectually insoluble. What you hope to do, as with many problems in life, is to survive the problems rather than solve them intellectually, and Bob always believed a little bit too much in tidy solutions. He also believed in numbers, which is a great mistake, because, uh, verbs and adjectives and nouns are much more important than numbers in the real world.
Interviewer:
To what do you attribute this really rather astonishing growth in tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, and to what extent do you think that it was, in a meaningful way, controlled...?
Healey:
Well, it wasn't controlled -
Interviewer:
Could you start with a sentence on that?
Healey:
It was... yes. Uh... I think that the United States arms factories were producing these tactical nuclear weapons, the rate of production rose year by year; and surprisingly, although McNamara in most of the field was extremely good at controlling American defense spending and trying to relate defense production to meaningful strategic objectives. In this area of tactical nuclear weapons, he never attempted to exercise control at all. You mustn't forget, either, that during the whole of this critical period in NATO, the United states was obsessed with the problem of Vietnam. The, McNamara used to fly to meetings with the NATO council direct from Saigon, in this sealed bomber, which Al Haig refused to fly to the Falklands, saying, you know, "It has no windows," and we used to have breakfast together, and then he'd start applying himself to the problems of NATO. But, you can't read Kissinger's memoirs, for example, which are the most comprehensive about this period, although he was here under, he was there a few years later after McNamara had gone, without realizing the extent to which the whole of the American political machine in the foreign and defense fields was dominated by this tragic blunder of their entanglement in Vietnam. To which incidentally nuclear weapons turned out to be totally irrelevant. I think I'm right in saying the Americans lost about as many people in Vietnam as they have in Europe, but they never seriously contemplated using nuclear weapons there.
Interviewer:
But to come back to this growth of tactical nuclear weapons, what were the main dynamics?
Healey:
Well, there was no control, is the simple point; there was no strategy for using these weapons, and when I became defense secretary in Britain, this is '64, we still had an absolutely unbelievable situation, in which the ... defense ministers would agree force goals, the number of troops and so on which each country should provide, at a meeting every December, knowing that their chancellors of the exchequer and prime ministers would cut these force goals heavily; but the NATO commanders planned their operations on the assumption the force goals would be met, knowing that they wouldn't be. And the first big job I had coming to this Augean stables of NATO was to say... from now on, we're going to base our plans on what we've got, and not, not what, not what you'd like us to have. But that didn't start until 1966, and as I say, I think in the field of nuclear weapons, the factories were pouring these things out, the ships were bringing them over, or the aircraft were putting them in Europe, and of course a large part of American manpower in Europe was tied up in protecting these. Even today, when the number of tactical, battlefield nuclear weapons has been greatly reduced since McNamara's days, uh, I see a NATO general quoted in, uh, The Economist the other day as saying that they could produce a division of extra troops for NATO, the Americans, if they didn't tie all these people down, uh, protecting their nuclear stockpiles in Germany.
Interviewer:
We've talked to various military people in the British armed forces. There's a strong tendency in the British forces, as opposed to the Americans, to say, "oh, well, we never really thought about the strategies -- the chaps up in the ministry of defense did that, and we got our orders, and that's all there was to it." Do you think that's the case, or was nobody thinking about it?
Healey:
Oh, no, the, the minister of defense did have target plans, uh, for the B Bombers and, uh, you know, for example, where we had the bomber base in Cyprus in those days, they had, uh, uh, target plans there, which had to fit in with the single integrated operational plan, uh, which was, uh, at Omaha. And I remember when I was taken to Omaha and shown this on a big screen by McNamara I said, "Now can I see your own national targeting plans?" Dead silence.
Interviewer:
Do you think it was different?
Healey:
Oh, yes, of course. Um, but, as I say, the terrible thing about the baroque arsenal of nuclear weapons is that... they tended to be, the, the strategy and policy for employing them tended to be hied off to a little Mafia of middle-ranking officials and staff officers, who had really no contact with the world in which the decisions, in reality, would have to be taken. I think I was the first defense secretary in my time who actually took part, as defense secretary, in the annual exercise which involved nuclear release. And I can tell you it taught you a great deal about the reality of things, especially if you'd been a soldier yourself, as I had.
Interviewer:
There's an American gentleman we're talking to who's said that there was a tremendous dichotomy in the American army about tactical nuclear weapons, which is that in terms of their politics, the inter-service rivalry back in the Pentagon, they needed nuclear weapons or they weren't in the game, and the only place to deploy army nuclear weapons was Europe. But Most of the generals in Europe didn't want to use them because they realized -- does that...?
Healey:
You, you cannot find a general responsible for troops planning to fight a battle with nuclear weapons, and the center of opposition to nuclear strategy in the services has always been in the Army. Uh, General Maxwell Taylor, who's head of the American army, wrote a book severely critical of nuclear strategy, called The Uncertain Trumpet, 30 or 40 years ago. And, uh, the opposition in this country has come from the arm-, army, Mike Carver for example, a field marshal with a very distinguished war record, um, says he doesn't think nuclear weapons have any role except to deter the use of nuclear weapons by the other side. Uh, but of course the Air Force loved nuclear weapons, because they tend to be mainly responsible for dropping them. What's tragic, I think, in the United States, is that they haven't begun to integrate with the armed services. You know, during the, uh, landings in Grenada the head of a ranger battalion, who wanted to call up naval support, found his communications weren't compatible with naval communications, so had to go to a call box off the beach and ring up the naval headquarters in Carolina to order the bombardment. And this sort of thing goes on all the time. The only reason the F111's were used to bomb Tripoli is that the American Air Force wanted a part of the act, same as the British Air Force sent the V bombers at colossal expense down to bomb the airfield, uh, in the Falklands, and not one of their bombs actually hit the runway.
Interviewer:
When you were in opposition in the early '60's, the United States was very concerned that France was not going to be stopped in getting its bomb, and the German response, especially while Strauss was still around, was going to be, "Well, in that case, we want one too." Was that something that worried the labour party?
Healey:
It did worry us, but I think the worry was greatly exaggerated, because the one certain thing, particularly since Brandt introduced the Ostpolitik, is that no German government of any party even wants anything to do with the decision to use nuclear weapons, and, uh, and this is a... absolutely constant thing.
Interviewer:
Was that so clear in 1959, 1960 when Franz Joseph Strauss was defense minister... when de Gaulle... was saying, "Without our own deterrent, we can't rely on the American one"?
Healey:
It, it wasn't, it wasn't so clear then, but, uh, we believed that this was a problem, the problem of nuclear sharing, which was one of those you have to survive, as we have survived it, rather than try to solve, and the Americans thought up this weird idea of the multilateral force at sea, which would have nuclear weapons totally under American control, but an Italian cook, uh, and, uh, you know, a, a British driver, and that sort of thing, and... we called it "artificial dissemination," and my first job as defense secretary was to go to Washington with Harold Wilson, and sink the multilateral force. It was called "George Bull's last stand," and nobody now thinks it would have been a good thing to go ahead with, and I think many of the things we want to scupper now, in the Labour Party, when we've succeeded, nobody will want to restore.
Interviewer:
What was the British attitude toward multilateral force?
Healey:
We thought it was crazy. We thought it was a, a phony answer to a non-problem, and we were right.
Interviewer:
Why do you think the Germans were a little bit enthusiastic about it?
Healey:
I don't think they were enthusiastic about it; in fact, they didn't weep any tears, uh, when it was torpedoed. Uh, similarly, the French tried to control German rearmament within a European defense community, which was really a multilateral army, and that was defeated in the French Parliament -- the Germans didn't really weep tears over that. And the imagination boggles at the thought of trying to command and control and equip such an army now. But I think a lot of, as I say, "phony solutions" were found for false problems in those days. But the world has moved on; there've been enormous changes in political perceptions in Europe as well as in weaponry. And of course in both sides of Europe.
Interviewer:
You were seen, especially by the CND activists in and outside of the labour party, as having in a sense betrayed them by continuing to adopt the British deterrent...?
Healey:
Yes, I think in those days the CND was essentially a movement of moral protest against the obscenity of nuclear weapons as such. And, they never liked people like me, although they tried to get me to found it, you know -I was involved in the talks which led to the foundation of the CND -- because I regarded nuclear weapons as being a problem inside the world which you had to think hard about. The argument in those days was like, a little bit like the argument these days about AIDS. There're lots of people who say that, you know, it's absolutely immoral to discuss the situation in which, uh, AIDS is, uh, contracted. In those days we didn't know about AIDS. I used to compare the problem of venereal disease, which is an unpleasant problem, but somebody's got to think about it. And of course the poor old defense secretary's the chap who's got to try to think realistically.
Interviewer:
Very nice...
Healey:
And I still try.
Interviewer:
Fine. Great.
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