Nuclear strategy in Western Europe
Healey’s Theorem
Strategies for nuclear weapon deployment in Europe
European perspectives on American-Soviet arms negotiations
Making strategic decisions
Changing attitudes toward nuclear deployment in Europe

Nuclear strategy in Western Europe

Interviewer

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?

Healey

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.

Interviewer

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?

Healey

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.

Interviewer

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.

Healey

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.

Interviewer

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?

Healey

It was very unsophisticated, really.

Interviewer

You've got to start again...

Healey

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.

Interviewer

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

Healey

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.

Interviewer

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?

Healey

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 -

Interviewer

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...

Healey

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.

Interviewer

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?

Healey

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.

Interviewer

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

Healey

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.

Interviewer

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?

Healey

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 -

Interviewer

That was in '55, actually.

Healey

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.

Interviewer

Can I go back to this flexible-response debate?

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 Mitterrand, 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.

European perspectives on American-Soviet arms negotiations

Interviewer

What was the British government's attitude when Mr. Nixon won the election in America and Mr. Kissinger started talking detente?

Healey

Well, I only talk about, uh, the British government, uh, because we were in power the first two years of Nixon. Uh, we were absolutely delighted, uh, I mean some of us had known Kissinger well for a long time ... I had myself since the middle '50's -- and, we thought, "At last America's going to take a rational approach to these problems of defense and foreign policy." And... we very strongly supported the, uh, movement towards detente, uh, and particularly admired the way in which, uh, Kissinger would, uh, dodge all the official channels to try to break deadlocks, something which he doesn't like anybody else doing, if you read his comments on Reykjavik. But, uh, those early days, I think, we were immensely impressed by... there was one area which I was consulted on, though not by Kissinger, by, uh, uh, Elliot Richardson, who was then assistant secretary of state. He came to me to talk about MIRVs, which didn't then exist, but the Americans were developing them, hoping to deploy them. And we both agreed, we should make a terrific effort to put that, uh, cat back in the bag, and have a battle on MIRVs in SALT I. But Kissinger strongly supported MIRVs, because he thought the Americans would have an impregnable lead there. He's totally reversed his position since then, because... they now see the Russian MIRVs as a main threat, uh, to American forces.

Interviewer

But what was an assistant secretary of state doing talking to a British defense secretary about that?

Healey

Well, it was a friendly talk -- I mean, one great thing with the United States is they're not stuffy about protocol. And so, uh, you know, if I go over now, I can talk to most of the people I want to meet, uh, almost as if I were a minister now. And they will tell me what's going on, and I think this is very sensible. I think in our country, we're far too stuffy about Chinese walls between departments, and so on.

Interviewer

But why was it something that you would have had as a British minister any particular influence? To what extent did the British government feel, once the SALT negotiations got under way, that it was sufficiently consulted? Did it feel it was, or it wasn't?

Healey

I think the, in these early stages, I think we were quite well consulted, and, uh, Richardson came over, uh, for consultation. Uh, I think... the great disappointment with Kissinger is that, in his writing as an academic he'd appeared more sensitive to Europe's concerns than any other American writer, but, uh, he liked to gather all power to himself. And, uh, he was not good really, consulting the Europeans on these issues; the "year of Europe," which he inaugurated as, uh, secretary of state was a laughable fiasco. Um, but of course, he didn't consult his own colleagues very much if he could help it. I mean, uh, the reason that we got the SALT I, and the ABM treaty was that, uh, he was prepared to go behind the back of his colleagues, and sort things out with Dobrynin, who is now in charge of Soviet policy in the Kremlin, and this back channel, as it was called, was extremely valuable, but of course you do need extremely able people doing that, and, uh, in Dobrynin and Kissinger, the superpowers had very able people, who were determined to try to make progress.

Interviewer

But it did involve a lack... if the American official channels and negotiators didn't know what was going on, then certainly the European allies didn't a lot of the time.

Healey

No, I don't think they did; but then again, you see, I don't think many governments were sufficiently clued in to the issues to worry very much; they sort of left it all to the Americans, as they left nuclear strategy to the Americans. Uh, the, the big changes came, I think, with the run-up to SALT III. Uh, I think that, uh. . . Europe didn't regard itself as directly involved, so long as systems based in Europe were not involved. And, uh, the so called "gray area," what the Russians call "forward-based systems," the American aircraft and, uh, based in Europe or the seas 'round it, and the missiles too -- they really only began to come into consideration at the end of SALT II, and, uh, we spent a great deal of time in very close consultation with the Americans on these issues, uh, in the end of the Callaghan government.

Interviewer

But -- going back to SALT I -- the Soviets did in fact want to include FBS. What was the European reaction to that at the time?

Healey

Well... the Europeans were not keen, including the British government, although in the small group of ministers who considered these questions when they became actual, you know, in, uh, '78 and '79, until the election, we did come to the conclusion that forward-based systems should be included, and that we should put our own Polaris force into the arms negotiations. But, uh, the election came before this had really come to the boil, and of course, the invasion of Afghanistan really scuppered movement.

Interviewer

Right. But my understanding is that in fact this issue was discussed at the beginning of the SALT I negotiations as well. On that occasion the Russians eventually agreed not to include FBS. Do you remember that?

Healey

I don't, to be honest, remember that very well. Uh... but, I think what must be said is, there's always been, because of geography, a contradiction between Soviet and American interest. I mean, the Americans can... have always said, "We call strategic systems, systems, that can be launched from the Soviet Union to hit us." The Russians say, "It doesn't matter whether they, where they're launched from. If they can hit us, they're strategic." And the difference between the tactical and the strategic weapon is whether it hits somebody else, or hits you, like the difference between a recession and a slump, is when I'm out of work, a slump, and, I think, the, this was a fudge, the whole way through until SALT III... become inescapable then, and then of course, the thing got muddled up with intermediate nuclear forces. But there's still a basic problem between Russia and the United States, and America's allies, as to whether we tend to regard any Soviet weapon that can hit us in Western Europe as strategic, and the Germans are very conscious of that, even at very short-range missiles, you know, like the SS-22's and 23's. Uh, whereas the Russians say, "No, they're only strategic if they can hit the United States." On the other hand, they say anything based in Western Europe that can hit the Soviet Union is strategic, uh, even if it's not, uh, you know, launched from American soil. And, of course, there was never a very careful agreement about, uh, sea-based weapons, particularly, uh, submarines were carefully dealt with, the question of, uh, American bombers on American aircraft carriers, was never properly dealt with -- for some reason, they were regarded as forward-based.

Interviewer

What was the European response to Kissinger's -- the British response, anyway -- to Kissinger's declaration of "the year of europe" in 1973?

Healey

I think by that time... was a pretty hoarse laugh, really, because, uh, in his later years, Kissinger had become... less and less ready, really, to argue things through, uh, with the Europeans; one or two people he got on well with, uh, he got on well with Schmidt, in Germany, because Schmidt had been in this little group of people, both sides of the Atlantic, who'd been interested in strategic problems, for, since the mid, mid-50's. But, uh, I don't have the impression that he was terribly anxious to consult the others, and of course... the serious consultation on how you handle problems in the Third World, the Americans have always been very reluctant, uh; they tend to see the world, Kissinger particularly, as a Manichaean struggle between two superpowers in which local factors play no important role. Uh, the European countries, which have always had imperial responsibilities, know that, uh, you know, you can't understand what happens in Indochina, where the problems have existed for centuries, as simply a reflection of the, uh, struggle between Washington and, uh, Moscow. And I think the other great mistake that Kissinger made was thinking that any defeat for the United States by the Soviet Union, anywhere in the world, would lead to a chain reaction of collapse of confidence. He used to talk about the dominoes falling if America didn't get out of Vietnam with honor; well, America got out of Vietnam with dishonor, humiliated and defeated. But the only domino that's fallen in Southeast Asia since is a Communist domino, in Kampuchea. Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, uh, going on much as they did before.

Interviewer

One last thought, then... what was your feeling as you came back into office in 1974, with Nixon gone?

Healey

Uh, no, Johnson. Uh. . . '70 -- oh, '74....

Interviewer

Yes, and you came back in as chancellor.

Healey

Uh, I was on with Bill Simon, who was Nixon -- no, Nixon was still there.

Interviewer

Right.

Healey

Watergate happened after.

Interviewer

Okay. But SALT I had been signed, I think.

Healey

Oh, SALT, yes... SALT I... had been signed, uh...

Interviewer

Would you have expected, at that time, that now we can really go ahead and look forward to serious reductions in the superpower arsenal? Was that the kind of expectation?

Healey

I think I would have thought that; I would have wanted it, as Chancellor; but, I had one or two little local difficulties as chancellor of the exchequer to deal with; I'd inherited a situation with racing inflation, uh, a widening balance of payments' gap; a collapse of growth -- we'd had no growth in the previous three quarters. So I'm afraid I had to buckle down and try to sort that out before I could relax and take an interest in these other questions.

Interviewer

Okay. Thanks a lot.

Making strategic decisions

Interviewer

If you could just explain to us what your position was and how you still maintained an interest in defense matters under the Callaghan prime ministership.

Healey

Well as you know, I was defense secretary in Britain for six years since '64 till '70 and worked very closely with Bob McNamara from the United States and Helmut Schmidt was defense secretary then in Germany on the whole of set of problems to do with NATO nuclear strategy and of course, nuclear disarmament. And when I went back into government as Chancellor of the Exchequer in '74 for five years, um, besides being on the normal weekly meetings of the defense and overseas policy committee of the cabinet, Jim Callaghan, as prime minister, put me on a very small committee dealing with nuclear weapons problems which was not set up until I think 1977, mainly at the time uh, to consider our view on a comprehensive test ban treaty and our view as to whether the so-called forward based systems like the American bombers in Europe, and the British and French strategic um, nuclear forces should be included in SALT III. At that time we expected the SALT II agreement to be signed and ratified, and negotiations for another strategic arms limitation treaty to start the following year.

Interviewer

You've written a lot about military doctrine. From your experience as a defense minister, how seriously do you think politicians generally take military doctrines like that flexible response...

Healey

I think most politicians haven't the slightest idea what any of these words mean. And I'm sorry to say most countries, even the defense ministers who are the link if you like between this area of policy and the government, cabinet uh, are in office for too short a time really to bother mastering it. In many European countries defense ministers tend to be ex- uh, military people who hold their job as functionaries almost with very little political clout. Uh, in Britain, the conservatives had nine defense ministers in thirteen years uh, during the um... Macmillan uh, Heath period and Mrs. Thatcher's had uh, five in eight years. And defense strategy, for somebody who's not studied it at all in advance, is a very, very difficult thing to get hold of. The words are different from the words you use in normal life. It's almost as difficult if you like as learning word processing.

Interviewer

You've referred to a decision to deploy cruise and pershing missiles as being taken by a nuclear mafia. Why did you use that phrase?

Healey

Well, because since politicians don't have the time, energy and, sometimes capacity to master this area of policy, they tend to hand it over to a small group of middle-ranking officials and middle-ranking stop officers who concentrate on this issue and who form part of an international trade union or mafia of similar officials in other countries, and really, develop the whole thing entirely on their own without much reference to governments. And if governments are told about their decisions they normally rubber stamp them. They, they play a very little active role. Uh, it was different a little bit in my time because I'd been in the army for six years in the second world war, and incidentally, the disappearance from politics of people who've actual experience in fighting is rather important because if you've ever been a soldier say or a royal airman in a real war, you know that Murphy's Law is supreme. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. You always lose control of events when the fighting actually starts. But in my time, we had McNamara who played an important role in the second world war in the American strategic bomber survey. Like Paul Nitze uh, who had also played a similar role. Uh, we Hermut Schmidt in Germany and myself in Britain who had been writing and thinking about strategic problems in a small intelligentia mafia uh... from mainly, almost entirely Germany, Britain, and above all, the United States. So that in a sense we came into office at least knowing what the problems were and understanding the language.

Interviewer

I'll just ask you about the term intelligentia mafia. And the period that we're really looking at involving the cruise and pershings. Everybody now said that it started with Schmidt's speech, the ISSS in 1977. What do you think was really on his mind when he made that speech? What was his major concern?

Healey

Let me say two things. First of all, Helmut Schmidt, for whom I have the greatest admiration -- I think he was the last great statesman in Europe; we haven't got any at the moment -- uh, he had a disconcerting habit of thinking aloud about a problem without thinking the problem through. Uh, and the reason he thought aloud about this problem was that he had been dreadfully let down by President Carter over the neutron bomb. Uh, Carter had... uh, persuaded Schmidt that the neutron bomb should be deployed in Germany. Schmidt had gone through hell persuading his own cabinet to accept this. And then Carter suddenly decided not to deploy it at all. So Schmidt disliked and distrusted Carter, and he didn't like what he saw as the risk that the Americans would fail to protect Europe in their arms negotiations against a threat from the east, and he was particularly worried when the Russians started deploying the SS-20, very accurate uh, multi-warheaded missile in place of the old SS-4s and 5s. And he referred in broad terms to this as a danger, in a speech in London although I'm told that the particular words in this speech were written into the text at the last minute in the taxi from the German embassy by the man who was then his advisor on foreign affairs, later ambassador in London, Mr. Ruethe. And uh, he didn't know then what he wanted NATO to do, but Carter was determined that he should say what he wanted. Uh, in a way it was Carter's revenge on Schmidt for Schmidt's rude remarks about Carter. And the whole period -- I was chancellor of the exchequer in the Callaghan government -- uh, neither we nor the Americans could get Schmidt to say precisely what he wanted Western Europe to do. He finally made up his mind, as you know later in the summer, and that was the beginning of the dual-track decision. But I think it's important to recognize that this argument between politicians was started by European politician, Helmut Schmidt who was then chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, was running parallel with an argument inside the mafia which was a very theological argument. Now, when McNamara and I were defense ministers in the middle '60s we had a long argument in NATO about how to replace the doctrine of massive strategic nuclear retaliation with something which was palatable to the Americans in terms of risk. Uh, McNamara really wanted to do without nuclear weapons altogether in the defense of Europe. The Germans didn't want to move from massive retaliation. I tried to develop a compromise between them which was the doctrine of flexible response in which NATO would fight with conventional weapons until it was in danger of being overrun and maximize its conventional capability, and then introduce nuclear weapons in stages, giving the Russians a chance at each stage to stop or see NATO escalate. Um. And the NATO officials who went to work on this policy after we developed it was one of the few examples where politicians played the central role in developing a strategy. They took it very seriously and they said you've got to have enough rungs on this ladder of escalation, and there'd be something missing unless there were land-based missiles in Western Europe parallel with the land-based missiles which would hit Western Europe from the Soviet Union. And this group, the high level group as it was called, was essentially the NATO mafia I was talking about. They wanted these weapons whether or not the Russians had SS-20s as a matter of fact, and that has become very clear in the argument over the double-zero option as it developed. So far as the politicians are concerned, like uh... uh, Callaghan, Mrs. Thatcher, uh, Schmidt, Chancellor Kohl and uh, Carter uh, the important thing was the SS-20. It was a new, very accurate missile which uh, posed a much more serious threat to Western Europe than its predecessors. Uh, but for the po-- for the military and the intellectual mafia, it wasn't the point. The point was they felt that there should be something between uh, shorter range battle, and battlefield nuclear weapons and the uh, long-range weapons. You see, at that time and since, the NATO supreme allied commander has had allocated to him a lot of warheads from America's Poseidan and NATO Trident submarines to deal with any local threat. But the mafia didn't believe that that was enough. And their decision to go for land-based missiles was independent of the SS-20. On the other hand, the politicians could only sell the uh, deployment of cruise and pershings in Western Europe uh, by reference to the threat from the SS-20 so that when in the end the Russians agreed to get rid of all medium and short-ranged missiles uh, the... defense mafia was left very, very unhappy indeed. And then NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, General Rogers, made this very clear that uh, whether or not the Russians had the SS-20s, Western Europe needed land-based missiles and the British government took the same position initially until they realized it was so un... it was so unpopular in the coming British general election they decided to fall into the other option.

Interviewer

You've written that flexible response is no longer a tenable position. Why do you say that?

Healey

Well there are many reasons. First of all, those of us who devised flexible response didn't realize at that time, although many of the scientists did, that the first explosions of nuclear weapons on the battle field would black out communications for hundreds of miles around. And therefore you'd lose control of the battle. And for this reason alone uh, the gradual escalation from one level of nuclear weapons to another was nonsense. Uh, secondly, it became clear when we looked at the various options, the ladders on the... lad... uh, steps on the ladder of escalation in the nuclear planning group which we set up inside NATO to consider these matters, that nobody was really keen on any steps. I mean, the first step would have been the explosion of nuclear land mines, the so-called atomic demolition munitions which would be placed in areas where they'd cause very little collateral damage. But even the Turks wouldn't agree to placing these ABMs in unoccupied mountain defiles. And the Germans would never agree to having them exploded on German territory so that went out of the window. And I don't believe NATO's ever reached agreement on how they would fight a nuclear war at any level. And I think anyone who's had experience of real war knows that the idea that when literally millions of people are being killed, uh, you can control a battle is nonsense. And then I think the, the sizing argument is that... even if you could control the number of explosions and the place where they took place on a bat... battlefield, we know from the Chernobyl disaster, that it can cause gravely damaging consequences, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of miles away. And if, as is all too likely, and we've been told by NATO commanders that any use of nuclear weapons is likely to escalate into all-out nuclear war, well the scientists now tell us if you have all-out nuclear war uh, life may become impossible throughout the northern hemisphere, and everybody would be affected whether they're involved in the fighting or neutral. And so that whole approach to the problem I think is a busted flush.

Interviewer

...What caused you to loose your faith in flexible response?

Healey

Well I lost my faith in flexible response really towards the end of my period uh, as defense secretary, round about 1970 when I found in the meetings we had of the nuclear planning group that we couldn't really reach agreement on even the first step of the ladder. And this feeling developed steadily over the years for the other reasons I'd come in to. I think you've got to recognize a central point about nuclear weapons. They've only been used twice in war. They were used by a nuclear power which only had at that time two weapons against a non-nuclear power to accelerate victory. They've never been used since then. They've never been used for war fighting. And nobody really can know what would happen. We all, those of us who take this seriously, wrestle with the problem, its moral dimension, its military dimension, its political dimension. And we often start by making mistakes. Uh, Henry Kissinger and I who were among the first people on our side of the Atlantic to worry about this problem in the early '50s, only ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We believed at that time and wrote to our shame that it was possible to fight a limited nuclear war in Europe. It would be just like a conventional war but on a bit larger scale. Now within two years each of us had abandoned this view and one of the worries about nuclear weapons is that the uncertainties attending theories about their use are bound to remain unless you fight a nuclear war, but after nuclear war there'll be nobody to learn the lesson it teaches.

Interviewer

In the '80s, this whole debate about the cruise and pershings, particularly in Europe, they broke the bipartisan consensus and the political one about nuclear defense and about NATO. Why do you think that happened?

Healey

Well, first of all, there was the purely military argument Many people uh... thought there was no military case for deploying these medium-ranged missiles on land in Europe. NATO had done very well without land-based missiles for twenty years. Nothing had essentially changed uh, since the uh, Apollo and Thor missiles were taken out of Western Europe following the Cuban Missile Crisis. And even the Uh. Reagan administration's initial view was that it was not uh, militarily necessary to deploy them. Mr. Perle clear in an unguarded moment, uh, an interview with the <>Boston Globe</> way back I think in 1982 or 1983. The second thing was that the argument used by many people, especially governments, was that while they may be no good... militarily, but they're very important because they strengthen the nuclear link between Western Europe and the United States. Now, I took exactly the opposite view. Uh, I thought and many people in Germany did and some in America, that the only rationale for putting these missiles in Europe was that the Americans might be more ready to authorize their use in Europe because they could keep America as a sanctuary. In other words, it raised the possibility of a limited nuclear war in Europe alone and decoupling the American deterrent. And I remember making this point at um, an American-German meeting uh, in New York at the end of '79 when I was free to tour, after we'd lost the election. And a German friend coming up and saying to me, "Please, never say that in public because it's cutting the ground from underneath Helmut Schmidt's feet." And so uh, I agreed not to say it again in public until uh... he'd lost the election and was on the back benches. And as you know, I argued it very strongly in the debates in Britain in the following year.

Changing attitudes toward nuclear deployment in Europe

Healey

Now, a lot of people like myself uh, oppose the uh, cruise pershing deployment for military and political reasons. But the fact that there was a large number of people both sides of the Atlantic within what you might call a consensus who were very unhappy about the decision of course made it a wonderful issue uh, to be exploited by the people who were against nuclear weapons under any circumstances. And the cruise pershing uh, deployment decision was of course grist of the mill of the uh, anti-nuclear movement on both sides of the Atlantic. And they naturally exploited their opportunities to the maximum. But I think it should be said too that the contradictions in which NATO strategy was becoming involved uh, over the cruise decision did need a lot of people, including myself, to think again about the whole nuclear problem. I'd always taken the view that you couldn't actually use nuclear weapons in war. I wrote an article for <>Encounter</> magazine along these lines called The Bomb That Wouldn't Go Off in uh, the early '50s. And uh, many of us who'd been led by circumstance um... particularly the unpredictability of Soviet policy after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the invasion of Hungary, the invasion of Czech... Czechoslovakia uh, came to rethink our approach and of course it became much easier to think fresh about it when the Russians were clearly rethinking their approach and particularly when uh, Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union because he has carried out the revolution in Soviet strategic thinking which I would like to see copied in western strategic thinking.

Interviewer

There's probably going to be an INF treaty signed... What do you think should be the next step after that?

Healey

Well in the nuclear field the obvious next step uh, should -- uh, will be uh, a fifty percent cut in strategic nuclear weapons and continental weapons, and I hope that that will concentrate uh, on the weapons which destabilize the balance between Russia and the United States by uh, presenting what one side believes to be a first-strike capability. Uh, and that would be the SS-l8 missiles in the Soviet Union, multi-warhead very accurate missiles and in the United States the MX and the Trident D5. And I suspect that they will move into the center of the argument. But oddly enough I think the most important thing, especially for us in Europe, is to concentrate on battlefield nuclear weapons and conventional forces. What worries me very much is that by accident really, uh, American and Russia started the breakthrough by talking about intermediate nuclear forces. But if a war happens it'll happen by accident. And accident is much more likely, a nuclear accident uh, if uh, NATO has got a very large number of very short-range uh, battlefield weapons right up against the front line. One was for howitzers which can only fire you know a few miles. And the important thing I think is to get them out of the way and I think there's a lot to be said for uh, having a nuclear-free corridor both sides of the dividing line, both Germanies. Uh, and uh, as you know, there's varying support for that in many countries but so long as Russia is thought to have a big preponderance, particularly of tanks in Eastern Europe, uh, the West European governments will be reluctant to see nuclear disarmament in Europe go very far. So in an odd way I think that the most important single thing now is not so much nuclear disarmament but to make a success of the talks which the Russians have offered and NATO has accepted in principle to cut uh, conventional forces in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, well back into European Russia and to get rid of any area where one side or the other has a superiority by abolishing the superiority. That would get rid of the Soviet tank superiority and what depressed me in the early year -- months following the development of the INF talks is the inability of the NATO governments to get their act together so that uh, there's been no really effective response to the proposals made by the Warsaw pact in the correspondence to Gorbachev.

Interviewer

A lot of the NATO governments are still very determined to hold what they would call a nuclear fire bait. They're determined to prevent these negotiations going below the six hundred kilometer range. What do you think that is?

Healey

I-- You've got a very interesting thing that's developed since the uh... INF talks began. And that is that the German government, although it's one of the most right wing governments in European terms of domestic policy, wants to get rid of the battlefield nuclear weapons. It wants to get rid of this fire bait because the weapons that are left are those that can only kill Germans. They'd be exploded on the soil of Western Germany or Eastern Germany and from this point of view, West Germans make no distinction. The uh, East Germany is in the common market. It's regarded for practical purposes as Germany. And uh, the French and the British on the other hand uh, are not too worried providing the nuclear weapons are there and uh, in their view, they think the Russians are w... unlikely to risk anything so long as nuclear weapons are likely to go off. So that in a way this issue is splitting Western Europe between Germany and France and Britain. The other thing of course is the French and British governments are terrified that if the movement towards nuclear disarmament in Europe goes then further, then their own strategic forces are bound uh, to be under pressure. And this terrifies Mrs. Thatcher and it terrifies the French government.

Interviewer

Could you just tell us what was your position about the Eurostrategic missiles, that whole theory that they existed.

Healey

Well I was always against it. I went through, in Cabinet office records of the meetings I attended and uh, uh, I strongly opposed the idea of creating a Eurostrategic balance because I thought it would decouple the United States and Western Europe and this view was held by our little group.

Interviewer

Up until the start of this debate, and I suppose really we're talking about 1977... There'd been a complete quiescence in governments of whatever part about nuclear issues. Nobody had ever really debated or made public statements about this... Why do you think that was?

Healey

Well I think let sleeping dogs lay partially. And part is that the governments didn't really know or care very much what was going on as I explained earlier. They tended to leave the whole thing to um... the uh, mafia of officials and staff officers and not worry. When I was defense secretary on the other hand um, I used to debate these things in Parliament, used to surprise people very much. I would talk about you know, NATO strategy and debate. But the interesting thing was that uh, I think people welcomed the fact that there was an open discussion on it.

Interviewer

But to go back to something you said earlier. For the politicians, they needed the existence of the SS-20 to justify what was for other people a purely doctrinal theory. Why do you think that mismatch occurred? Do you think it's impossible for the politicians actually to get out and argue for the doctrine?

Healey

Yeah. I, I did it when I was a poli... I was defense secretary for uh, six years and I argued my case in public, in Parliament, in speeches, at the Royal United Services Institute, at the [Berkunde] in Germany of course um, in the United States. I think politicians must be prepared to argue these points because if politicians won't argue the things honestly and not in comic strip fashion the way that Mrs. Thatcher has tended to argue it, then of course the argument is entirely in the hands of people who don't take defense as such all that seriously.

Interviewer

Don't you think Mr. Healey, that it's an enormous problem for the labor party in government that it has not kept the electorate very well informed about a variety of important issues.

Healey

Well I think we kept the uh... electorate very well informed indeed if I may say so. Uh, I mean I wrote and spoke a great deal about it um, right from the moment I started taking an interest in the early '50s. Uh, when I was defense secretary from '64 to '70 um, I talked about it the whole time. As I say, in Parliament and outside. I think you've got silence under the conservative government that followed which was a great pity but I went on talking about it myself even then.

Interviewer

Okay--

Healey

I mean, I mean Fred Mulley for example who is uh... uh, defense secretary under... Uh, and uh, Fred Mulley who I think was a very good defense secretary and uh, Jim Callaghan, when I was chancellor of the exchequer, he talked and wrote about it a great deal. He wrote a brilliant book, I think, on um, nuclear strategy in Western Europe. But I'm afraid the real trouble is that the media weren't interested. And you see, you're talking in a vacuum if the television companies take no interest in what you're saying and the newspapers don't report it.

Interviewer

There was a serious increasing concern. Tt was in Germany and this country and also in United States when, if you like, the justification for the neutron warheads started to be made. And yet, the planning for fighting a nuclear war in Europe, or the conception that it might be possible... one wonders why suddenly in 1977 it became actually, as far as public opinion was concerned, it became a significant shock. Do you think that the whole question of nuclear weapons as a... is actually kept secret from the public? --

Healey

No. I don't think so at all. I think it's the fault of the people who write articles and leading articles. Everything is publicly available. One interesting thing I discovered when I started writing about this myself shortly after the last world war ended was that nearly all the facts were available in the United States which were regarded in Britain as deadly secrets. I remember once telling the story -- When I went to the defense ministry in 1964 uh, I was given a list of the things which was so secret I must forget I'd even heard of them the moment after being told. And one of the secret things was the actual physical configuration of the Polaris submarine. Well, the following week I happened to be in New York on business and I went into a toy shop and I bought a scale replica of the Polaris submarine made by the Mattel toy company. And uh, you know, there is no excuse whatever for the public to claim ignorance. The facts are there. And uh, they've always been. I got the Institute of Strategic Studies set up um, in the later '50s before I became defense secretary and uh, that published monthly uh, digests of articles from the world uh, defense establishment on all these problems uh, an annual on military strategy and on the military balance. Uh, it's frankly the inertia, laziness of the media which uh, prevented the uh, public from being fully aware of what was available and I think the tragedy which arose from that is that the running tends to be made by people who were not terribly interested in defense perhaps thought there was no Soviet threat at all uh, and indeed there was no danger of war, never mind whether it came from the Russians or anybody else, but that nuclear weapons were uniquely uh, morally horrible. And shifted the argument into what I've always regarded as the extremely barren and... dangerous fight between unilateral and multilateral disarmament when the real issue is to get disarmament and sometimes unilateral action will be the best force and sometimes multilateral negotiations. But it's become like an argument in the um, church in the middle ages between the unilateralists and the multilateralists. I'm glad to say that that's beginning to go and the evolution of Labor Party's policy in the last year or so I think has shown this.

Interviewer

[question inaudible]

Interviewer

My personal political life in some ways is being dominated by the nuclear bomb. When as a soldier at the end of the war in Europe I heard the Americans had dropped bombs on Japan my personal feeling like that of millions of other soldiers, sailors and airmen was thank god. That means we're not going to have to go out to Japan now and fight another war then. And for several years the... total revolution in politics and strategy which nuclear weapons were going to introduce were little understood. But many people got very concerned shortly after the war, including myself, mainly for moral reasons because there was a new dimension of horror -- the death of millions of noncombatants. And there were groups in America who were worrying about it. There were groups in Britain. Uh, very oddly assorted collection of chaps, myself uh, the Bishop of Chichester, uh, a leading Methodist called uh... uh, Allen Booth, uh, Jack Schlesser who'd been head of Walton Air Force and the ex-head of naval intelligence, Tony Buzzard. We got together and we held a conference on the problem. Some of us, including Pat Blackett, a Nobel physicist, wrote a book for Chatham House called <>On Limiting Nuclear War</>. This was in the early '50s. At the same time Kissinger was working in the United States. And there were paragovernmental institutes like the Rand Corporation whose job was to think about these things, who were doing a lot of work. And Helmut Schmidt who'd been in the army. He's just about my age. Right through the war started getting very interested in the problem. He wrote a book about it in the late '50s. And then we set up an institute in Europe to organize thinking in the Institute of Strategic Studies and I got the money for it out of the Rockefeller Foundation the very day that uh, the Sputnik went up. And the Americans at the meeting of that were so worried they were a pushover to provide the money. And since then there's been an enormous amount of very intelligent writing about the problem uh, by academics uh, by military people and by some politicians, Helmut Schmidt in Germany, myself, Kissinger in the United States. The tragedy is that the... newspapers took comparative little interest in these problems. Defense correspondents tended to write only about what regiment was due for the chop, uh, what company would get this or that aircraft contract. And the strategic problems were largely ignored although all the material was there for it. This is no longer true. I mean, you have some very good people writing regularly in the press. Uh, but this was a comparatively recent thing. It developed partly in the '60s and I've tried to encourage it a lot myself by uh, uh, putting money and resources into the military. Think tanks like the uh, uh, Imperial Defense College and the Joint Services Staff College uh, raising their level and allowing the people there to write things for the public. And this was worthwhile. The difficulty I think was to get the people who dominated the media to recognize the importance of the problem.