So Mr. Healey, back in the early '50's, when you were a young labour MP specializing in defense, what were the European attitudes in general, and British attitudes in particular, to the presence of United States troops in europe? What were they seen as being essential for?

I remember during the early years after the war, Montgomery, who was the first NATO commander, saying he only wanted two American soldiers, one for the Russians to kill when they crossed the frontier, and the other for him to kill if the Russians missed the first one. In other words the American troops were basically seen as guaranteeing American nuclear retaliation, if the Red Army moved west, and at that time, all the Red Army needed to reach the Rhine was boots. It was really only after '54 that NATO's conventional forces began to be seriously built up. And now, of course, they're very formidable.

Do you think that at that time there were really 175 Russian divisions? Was the imbalance of conventional forces exaggerated in hindsight. Do you think?

It was exaggerated, without the slightest doubt, because the noun used for describing the size of the two conventional forces was "divisions," but of course, Russian divisions are very much smaller than the divisions in NATO and particularly, and very much less well equipped in those days than, uh, American divisions. There's still a great deal of argument about how you should compare the conventional strength of the two sides because, as you know, many of the Western weapons, like the aircraft, are capable of more sorties than the Soviet weapons; many of the Western pieces of equipment are much more effective, break down less often... but there's no question that in those early days -- NATO was set up, remember, in '49 -- there was very little attempt to match the Red Army. The Red Army was very large, and of course it was large partly to, uh, repress dissent in Eastern Europe. It was used for that purpose in Hungary in 1956. in East Berlin, I think in '53, wasn't it? and then ten years later in Czechoslovakia in '68.

It's been argued by some of the Russians that we've talked to for this program, that actually things worked the other way around. They were threatened by the United States atomic arsenal, and they felt that the only deterrent they had for that, until they built their own atomic reply, was the ability, very rapidly, to conquer Western Europe, so that they could threaten the United States.

I've never heard it from a Russian myself, and they didn't use it very much at the time. I think you've got to remember that the Soviet advance into Central Europe, on a line running from Stettin to Trieste, had been predicted by Karl Marx, in an article in the New York Tribune written in the late 1840's. In which he said that if Europe didn't stand up to the Russian menace, it would move forward to a line running from Stettin to Trieste and realize the dream of the Pan-Slavic philosophers throughout the ages. Whether the Russians ever seriously intended to move further west, uh, I don't know; the only thing is, of course, the temptation to take advantage of weakness was always there, and they did test Western resolve twice over Berlin. And they took more risk -- it's interesting -- in the first Berlin crisis, in the late '40's, than in the second one, in the late '50's.

Can we move on to nuclear strategy as it existed, or didn't exist, perhaps more accurately, in Britain in the '50's. You were opposed to the 1957 white paper, where Britain perhaps most openly relied upon pure massive retaliation. Why did you oppose it and what was the state of sophistication of the argument at that time?

It was very unsophisticated, really.

You've got to start again...

Uh, the, the, the debate in Britain in the '50's was, uh, primitive, you could almost say kindergarten stuff. Uh, the general feeling which, uh, Duncan Sandys had, that if you got the atom bomb, uh, nothing's going to happen that damages you anywhere, uh, this wasn't a view held by the Americans even in those days, and, at the same time as Kissinger was writing his seminal work in New York called Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, uh, a few of my friends and I were writing a small pamphlet for Chatham House on limiting nuclear war. And I'd written an article, actually, in Encounter magazine, called

The Bomb That Wouldn't Go Off,"

as far back as 1953. I think... it had been obvious from the moment that the Russians acquired nuclear weapons that the American readiness to respond to a conventional attack by dropping nuclear weapons on Moscow was limited, and when Chris Herter took over from Foster Dulles as American secretary of state, he actually said, as Kissinger and McNamara have said since, but he said it as secretary of state, in the United States administration, that he couldn't imagine any situation in which the United States would use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, unless its own survival were directly at state. Now, if I could just remind you of an experience I had -- we had a debate on all these questions in the late '50's, uh, when Macmillan was, uh, prime minister, and, uh, I referred to the risk that, uh, if there was a nuclear war involving NATO, it would be limited to Europe, that the Russians and the Americans would try to keep their own territory as sanctuaries, and, uh, the House of Commons rolled with laughter at this ridiculous idea, and I remember Julian Amory saying, "Is this the, what we mean by the European arms pool?" Now, of course, everybody worries about this very much indeed, especially after Reykjavik.

So it didn't register as a danger at all with the tory party that time.

No, I, I think there were some people, uh, I mean, on the military side, Jack Schlesser, who'd been a, an air marshal in the second world war, uh, Tony Buzzard, who'd been director of naval intelligence, uh, a few military people, particularly Sir John Eldridge -- they're all pointing to the weakness of a policy of pure nuclear deterrence. But, uh, people didn't listen to them very much in Britain -- uh, I belonged to that little group too; Helmut Schmidt did in Germany, and of course there was a growing number in America -- and, uh, when I got the money for the International Institute of Strategic Studies, uh, out of the Ford Foundation, uh, the day that the Russians sent the Sputnik up, when I happened to be at a meeting with some Americans, including one of the key figures in the Ford Foundation, and they were absolutely stupefied by what had happened, and I think serious thought and systematic thought about these terrifying problems didn't really begin very much in Europe in, until that date.

Could we move on to the early '60's, when you were still in the opposition, but there were two big debates going on, one a public one involving the CND Britain -- the CND, the peak of the peace movement, of course that's very much an internal labour party debate, in which you had your own position. But you opposed, while you were in opposition, the Nassau agreement, and the decision for Britain to continue its own deterrent with American submarines. Why did you oppose it, and why did you change your mind when you got into office?

Well, the reason I opposed it was that we thought at that time it might be possible for the countries which hadn't got nuclear weapons that were capable of producing them, to form what we then called a "non-nuclear club," and restrict the possession of nuclear weapons, practically, to the United States and the Soviet Union. Uh, one of the weaknesses of that policy was that, uh, the moment de Gaulle took over in France, uh, the French were absolutely determined to base the whole of their defense policy on strategic nuclear retaliation against any direct threat to France, but of course, by the same token, they didn't believe that it was possible to have a meaningful alliance once nuclear weapons existed, and they left NATO, and they expelled American conventional as well as nuclear troops in NATO headquarters from France. The reason we changed our view, after we got in, I think was first of all, one of the submarines was practically complete; the other one was halfway through. It was a very cheap system, and we thought there was some advantage, and I used to argue this in Parliament at the time, in having one, more than one focus of decision in NATO, that if the decision, uh, were left exclusively to the United States, it might not be as credible as if one European country had weapons as well. But in those days, we were still... believing that it was possible to limit the use of nuclear weapons in war; this had always been an obsession of mine way back in the early '50's. And, uh, as you know, McNamara and I persuaded NATO to drop the policy -

I'd like to come on to that a little later, if I may... if you can just go over once again, without going into such detail about the French, why you opposed it...

Well, I think... I, I, I think the other reason was that we believed that we could have a decisive influence on NATO policy, and through that, on American policy about the use of nuclear weapons, providing we were in the game ourselves, and I think it can be argued that when I was defense secretary, we did have that sort of influence. We did act, if you like, as a bridge between non-nuclear Europe in NATO and the American superpower.

Because the French very much felt that there was an Anglo-Saxon club that ran NATO precisely because it was a nuclear club. Do you think that there was some truth in that view?

No, I think it's quite untrue -- I think if the French had chosen to stay in NATO, uh, they could have formed part of this group. And there was a time when de Gaulle himself talked in terms of France exercising that influence. The real trouble was that the French believed, and I think still do, that nuclear weapons make alliances unfeasible, because nobody's ever going to use nuclear weapons except in its own defense. They didn't believe in what the Americans call the concept of extended deterrence, and of course, many Americans don't really believe in it either. Henry Kissinger's told us he never believed in it, although he's also told us he'd pretend to believe in it again, if he were ever a minister in an American government again.

Britain was torn at in both ways on that argument, wasn't it?

Well, it was a very good... good idea to try and have it both ways, in my opinion. If you, you know, as they say about riding two horses: if you can't ride two horses at the same time, you shouldn't be in the bloody circus.

Let me get back to Robert McNamara coming in in 1961 and '62, and the whole discussion about tactical nuclear weapons escalation, all those things that he brought in with him. Perhaps we could start with talking about tactical nuclear weapons. What awareness was there in Britain or inEeurope, amongst political-defense circles, of the numbers, the types, the tactics, everything concerning tactical nuclear weapons in Europe in the late '50's, early '60's?

Well, in the middle '50's, when Kissinger wrote this book and I produced this Chatham House booklet, um... we believed, Kissinger as well as the British people concerned, that it might be possible to fight a limited nuclear war, and the analogy would be rather like a war at sea. But when exercises were held in Germany -Carte Blanche was the most famous one, I think, in the late '50's -

That was in '55, actually.

Uh, 50... in the middle '50's, yes, um... and the assessment of the exercise leaked out -- it wasn't published, of course, by NATO -- uh, it turned out that about half the population of the United States, uh, had been destroyed, so, the idea that you could fight that sort of tactical nuclear war was clearly bunk. Uh, McNamara, right from the moment he took over, with some very able intellectuals, who previously worked, in many cases, at the Rand Corporation in California, really believed with Herter that, um, strategic retaliation against a conventional attack in Europe wasn't on, and he made a famous speech at Ann Arbor and Chicago, uh, indicating that this was his view. Nobody in Europe really listened to him. But when I became defense secretary two years after him, in 1964, um, I was deeply interested in this; it had been a, an obsession of mine for ten years, so, um, I talked to McNamara about the problem, we agreed to set up a nuclear planning group inside NATO to try to compel NATO defense ministers at least to consider the problem. And, uh, we set up a Euro group inside NATO, to give the European side of the alliance a little bit more weight, and the concept of flexible response was the first change in NATO's strategy, really, since 1949, when we tried to get away from the idea of automatic massive retaliation, uh, as Foster Dulles appeared to believe in, to, uh, a ladder of escalation, in which you wouldn't use nuclear weapons until your troops were being overrun; you would build up your conventional forces to be certain that you'd never need to use nuclear weapons except against a major, deliberate invasion, and then you would use them in discrete steps. And that policy, which was adopted in '66, largely as a result of pressure, or influence on McNamara and myself, is still there, although the world is totally changed since then. We all know now that the concept of limiting nuclear war is for the birds, that, uh, electromagnetic pulses from nuclear explosions will make the command and control of nuclear operations impossible, and in fact, McNamara and I discovered in the nuclear planning group that we couldn't actually get the European members of the alliance to agree about any use of nuclear weapons in practice, even on the use of atomic demolition munitions -- nuclear landmines, which in some parts of the NATO area, like the passes leading from the Soviet Union into Turkey, could be used with no collateral damage at all. And, uh, as I say, the extraordinary thing, to me, is that NATO's gone on with this policy, which is believed, I think, seen to be fatally flawed, simply because, um, people will not get down to it and, uh... I think one problem which is worth stressing is that... nuclear strategy is tending to be the preserve of a defense intelligentsia. The original concepts were developed outside government, in think tanks in the United States, to a smaller extent in Europe, and very few defense ministers really interest themselves in the problem; they're mostly on their way up or their way down in their government; we've had nine defense ministers in 13 years in the, uh, conservative governments up to 1964; we've had, I think, five in the last seven years... in, in Britain under the conservatives. On the continental countries, usually defense ministers in those days tended to be chaps who'd been fighter pilots in the last world war and would protect the interest of the RAF or, if they'd been naval officers, the Navy; and, it's still the case, I'm afraid, that serious thinking... at the government level, about nuclear weapons, is very limited. I've noticed in discussions in Britain recently, for example,- that even as defense secretaries Mr. Heseltine and later Mr. Young... didn't seem to know the most basic facts about the British nuclear systems.

Can I go back to this flexible-response debate?