Interviewer: I WANT TO TALK FIRST ABOUT YOUR OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCES IN ARTILLERY.
Hunt: ...
Hunt: it was understood that we had to have them too, and that given that the Soviet army was, on the face of it, outnumbering us very considerably, you would have to use these against them if you were in danger of losing.
Hunt: And there wasn't too much...
Interviewer: WE HAVE TO WAIT 'TIL THE CAMERA'S RUNNING.
Interviewer: SO IF YOU COULD EXPLAIN FIRST OF ALL, FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD THAT YOU HAD EXPERIENCE OF IT YOURSELF, WHAT THE TACTICAL THINKING WAS OF HOW THESE AMERICAN ATOMIC ARTILLERY WEAPONS WERE TO BE USED.
Hunt: I think the first, the first thinking was that here was the option of making selective nuclear strikes, instead of the old massive strikes which were all available to us.
Hunt: So, you therefore, within the range of the weapon, contemplated using them against the troops in front of you, the airfields from which their aircraft came.
Hunt: So they were simply deterrent strikes; they weren't in the nature of war-fighting.
Hunt: That came rather later, when the weapons became smaller, and rather more discreet.
Hunt: But initially, they were rather big weapons, but a good deal smaller, of course, than the strategic ones.
Interviewer: BUT YOU DID HAVE THESE ATOMIC SHELLS, DIDN'T YOU, IN AMERICAN ARTILLERY UNITS ATTACHED TO THE VARIOUS NATO ARMIES?
Hunt: Indeed.
Hunt: But they came just a little later.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS THE IDEA FOR USING THEM?
Hunt: Oh, well.
Hunt: They came just a little later, and then the idea was very simple indeed.
Hunt: It was to be able to hit the enemy units against you.
Hunt: You would use a shell, for example, to...
Hunt: attack an armored regiment attacking you.
Hunt: To be able to destroy the people in front of you.
Hunt: It used to be called, in the jargon, "to stabilize the battle." To stop the battle being lost, at that point.
Hunt: And of course, obviously also politically, to give the other side time to think about whether they wanted to go on any longer.
Interviewer: AND THERE WAS A THING CALLED THE "PLASTIC BAG PHILOSOPHY." CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THAT?
Hunt: Yes, the "plastic-bag philosophy" was that within the limits of your conventional forces, you would contain the enemy when he came by defending, of course, in front of his advance, defending 'round the sides, and making a ring 'round him,: so to speak, and then obligingly putting a nuclear weapon in the middle of that plastic bag, if you couldn't hold him in any other way.
Interviewer: AND THAT WOULD RUIN HIS WHOLE DAY, I IMAGINE.
Hunt: It would ruin his whole day.
Hunt: I think it could well have ruined ours afterwards, but, I mean, that's as it may be.
Hunt: The first thing was better destroy him in that way than be destroyed yourself.
Interviewer: NOW, FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF COMMANDERS IN THE FIELD, HOW CERTAIN COULD THEY BE THAT WHEN THE CRUNCH CAME THEY WERE GOING TO BE ALLOWED TO USE THESE THINGS WHEN THEY WANTED TO USE THEM? WHAT WAS THE PROCESS FOR THAT?
Hunt: Well, the process — we'll come to it in a second — but certainly there was always the worry that you would have to get permission, obviously, from your own commander, your brigade commander, your divisional commander.
Hunt: There was a certain nagging worry that you might also have to, what we call, in American "eyeball," but no American would actually trust a British or a Belgian brigade...
Hunt: they'd want to come and look themselves.
Hunt: But having established that there was a need on your brigade front, or on your divisional front, then the request had to go all the way up to corps headquarters, and then eventually to Thacker, in the headquarters right at the rear.
Hunt: And at one and the same time, you sent the message '.up through your various headquarters, each to say, "Yes, these are the people that need it most," but an immediate one went right across those, straight to Thacker himself, so that he could presumably be contemplating whether he'd put that request back to the United States.
Hunt: Now, all of this was going to take time, one knew that perfectly well, and one of the real problems, inevitably, was, Will the enemy stay still while you're getting through all this? Will he still be there when you get permission?
Interviewer: SO HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT MIGHT HAVE TAKEN BETWEEN THE TIME YOU PUT IN THE REQUEST AND THE TIME YOU COULD DROP YOUR, FIRE YOUR GUN?
Hunt: I guess we used to think about two days.
Hunt: Do you see...
Hunt: I mean, one would like to have thought seven or eight hours, but that would have meant, I guess, that Thacker would had to have had some delegated power already.
Hunt: And the problem was not that one was thinking about all of them; it was thinking about the first ones.
Hunt: And when I say two days, I'm thinking of that first, difficult choice.
Hunt: Of course, afterwards, had they been used before then, I think you would get it much more quickly.
Interviewer: NOW, PRESUMABLY, ONCE THE PLUG WAS PULLED, AS IT WERE, THE AMOUNT OF MUNITIONS THAT THERE WERE AROUND, ONE WOULD HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF THESE WEAPONS BEING USED, ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
Hunt: Yes.
Interviewer: WHAT THINKING WAS GIVEN TO WHAT THIS WOULD DO TO THE GERMANS, FOR EXAMPLE?
Hunt: Well, of course...
Hunt: it's a little difficult to say that from the regimental-commander level.
Hunt: Certainly on our front, we weren't, so to speak...uh, planning to shoot them at areas in which there were Germans.
Hunt: But of course, in a wider context, a lot of these dropped right across the front would do devastating damage.
Hunt: But initially, I guess, people thought that we were really fighting the Russians and that is the first priority.
Hunt: I think it was really only when these exercises had taken place and one had seen how many weapons people notionally wanted to use, but it was suddenly realized that you were doing much more damage than was politically tolerable.
Hunt: And indeed it was arguable that it was indeed militarily sensible.
Interviewer: DO YOU REMEMBER ANY PARTICULAR EXERCISE THAT YOU TOOK PART IN WHERE THAT DAWNED ON PEOPLE?
Hunt: I remember exercises in which I took part.
Hunt: I confess that just for the second I can't quite remember the names of them; but yes, I remember them very well indeed.
Interviewer: CAN YOU DESCRIBE ONE OF THEM?
Hunt: Well, the battle would start in the usual way, with two sides fighting each other conventionally; you'd then be told that several divisions were in front of you, and you in your one division, or your own brigade, were going to be quite unable to hold them; you started off with conventional artillery fire and so on; and then came the point at which the artillery commander would have to decide what to do.
Hunt: And you would look at the type of the target, you'd look at the area involved, you'd decide what sort of yield you needed, at what height you wished to burst it, and you'd make a request to use a weapon, or two weapons, of that particular type.
Hunt: And 'away it would go, and the brigade commander, hard pressed, would repeat it and say, "Yes, fine." And then it would go up the chain.
Hunt: Now remembering that one was also competing against the needs of the next-door brigade commander, and you had so to speak to be in the worst part, to have any chance of getting it.
Hunt: Meanwhile, there you were, holding the enemy, or trying to.
Hunt: So that was the way in which it operated.
Interviewer: NOW AT THIS POINT, OF COURSE, UH, YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT SIMILAR WEAPONS BEING USED AGAINST YOU, PERHAPS YOU COULD TELL ME AT WHAT POINT YOU DID HAVE TO WORRY, AND WHAT EFFECT THAT HAD.
Hunt: We did not have to worry about the Soviet Union using battlefield nuclear weapons, relatively small yields, against us, really until quite the late '60s.
Hunt: Indeed, when flexible response came in and was adopted in the middle to late '60s, it was because the enemy had no ability to fire back, but it seemed a very reasonable strategy to adopt.
Hunt: You could counter their conventional forces with our nuclear weapons, but very shortly after that, the Soviet Union did get the capacity to fire back, and frankly once he could fire back, we didn't know what to do next.
Hunt: And we haven't really solved that problem yet.
Hunt: We simply haven't.
Hunt: And of course now, he has not only the ability to fire back, but rather more, and rather better weapons, than we have in that particular field battlefield nuclear weapons.
Interviewer: HOW DID IT STRIKE YOU THAT THE AMERICAN ARMY THOUGHT ABOUT THESE THINGS? WAS THERE A DIVISION OF OPINION WITHIN THE AMERICAN ARMY, AS IT SEEMED TO YOU AT THAT TIME?
Hunt: Yes, I guess there has always been a broad division of opinion, in that the American army was almost always more ready for war-fighting, of any sort, than we were; even conventionally the American army in a sense was quite happy to fight back to the Pyrenees — that didn't make much appeal to the Germans, of course, or to any of the rest of us.
Hunt: So it's fair to say that the American army did not particularly want to use nuclear weapons; it would have gone to fight a long conventional war.
Hunt: But when nuclear weapons were also being contemplated, then there was a strand of opinion running through that army, which treated them really like a larger form of firepower, and certainly contemplated war-fighting, at least in theory.
Hunt: Now I don't believe any commander on the ground was wedded to that, but it was a lot in American thinking at that time, that these were war-fighting weapons.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THOSE OF THE REST OF YOU IN THE NATO ARMIES WHO WERE BEING SUPPLIED WITH THESE WEAPONS, AND THE AMERICANS.
Interviewer: DID YOU FEEL THAT YOU KNEW ALL YOU NEEDED TO KNOW? THERE WAS ENOUGH INFORMATION COMING OUT...
Interviewer: OR NOT?
Hunt: Oh, yes, at most levels we had all the information we wanted; I mean, we were trained, for example, in American schools, in Texas — we knew about the weapons.
Hunt: We were trained...
Hunt: handling them, and so on.
Hunt: We knew very well who were the American custodians of the nuclear warheads.
Hunt: We had no problem at that sort of technical level at all.
Hunt: The difference was, the political control, which lay entirely in American hands, and...
Hunt: with American commanders right at the very top.
Hunt: So there was a certain difference, there.
Hunt: Now, in the early stage, of course, we didn't have our own delivery systems at all, so we had American ones to cover our front.
Hunt: And then of course in the late '50s, or mid-'50s, when we got them, those American units went back home again.
Hunt: But at all times, naturally, the warheads were American.
Interviewer: IT MUST HAVE BEEN STRANGE, THOUGH.
Interviewer: FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE BRITISH ARMY BEING DEPENDENT ON SOMEBODY ELSE TO SUPPLY THE WEAPONS THAT IT'S APPARENTLY RELYING ON.
Interviewer: DID THAT SEEM TO YOU AT THE TIME AS PERHAPS A COME DOWN FOR THE BRITISH ARMY?
Hunt: No, not really...
Hunt: because, we were in a transitory stage really; nuclear weapons were relatively new; people were acquiring them, the British army, or rather the British were developing their own nuclear weapons.
Hunt: And at that time, in the late '50s, the British were indeed developing a tactical nuclear weapon.
Hunt: It didn't actually happen in the end; but we would have had a tactical nuclear weapon, with our own warhead.
Hunt: Whether that was desirable or not's another matter.
Hunt: But...
Hunt: we ran out of money, and decided then to stay with the double key, you know, the American warhead British-manned system.
Interviewer: IS IT YOUR IMPRESSION, EITHER FROM WHAT YOU KNEW THEN OR FROM WHAT YOU KNOW NOW, THAT THE NUMBERS AND TYPES AND EVERYTHING OF TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS THAT CAME INTO EUROPE BETWEEN, SAY, '55 AND '65, VERY LARGE NUMBERS, WAS THAT PROCESS ADEQUATELY CONTROLLED, IN YOUR VIEW?
Hunt: I guess the control lay entirely in American hands, and there was no denying that the eventual number the...
Hunt: was far beyond anything that one needed.
Hunt: It was made up, of course, of mines, also nuclear warheads on anti-aircraft artillery, but the great bulk of it was for the short range, or relatively short range, systems, and there were far too many.
Hunt: But now remember that the nuclear artillery, the short-range nuclear artillery, had a range of only 15,000, 16,000 yards, in its ordinary conventional role.
Hunt: But to cover the front with nuclear weapons, you had to have nuclear weapons available for every gun, and that gave you very many more weapons than you might need overall, just in order to have them, at every point on the front.
Hunt: And that applied, of course, within the range of every other weapon, too.
Hunt: So, a lot of weapons, therefore, were simply there to give you coverage everywhere, and not with the idea that you should use them all at the same time.
Interviewer: OR INDEED AT ALL.
Hunt: Or indeed at all.
Hunt: Yes.
Hunt: Indeed at all.
Hunt: We were absolutely clear that these were weapons of last resort; and were, when they were first used, our position would not after that be a particularly healthy one.
Interviewer: DO YOU THINK IT'S FAIR TO SAY THAT THE PUBLIC DEBATE, OR EVEN THE POLITICAL ATTENTION OF THOSE AT THE TOP IN NATO COUNTRIES WAS ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY FOCUSED ON STRATEGIC SYSTEMS, OR IN THE BRITISH CASE, OF V-BOMBERS AND SO ON AND THE REPLACEMENT FOR THEM AND THE THOR MISSILES AND THOSE KINDS OF THINGS...
Interviewer: THAT THERE WASN'T VERY MUCH UNDERSTANDING OUTSIDE THE MILITARY.
Interviewer: WOULD THAT BE A FAIR STATEMENT?
Hunt: I think it's reasonably fair, but with certain exceptions.
Hunt: Because when, for example, General Norstadt started to develop the concept of the pause to be able to use nuclear weapons to give the other side pause to think, that came along...
Hunt: around the same sort of time that these weapons were beginning to appear, and so, in the theory, I mean, academia and so on, there were people who understood full well what these shorter-range weapons were about.
Hunt: But nonetheless it was still an elite argument.
Hunt: In this country, frankly, very little discussed indeed, just in the odd institute and that's about all.
Hunt: But there was fairly wide coverage in the United States.
Hunt: But for many years, I guess another ten years or so, it mainly was in the military, and the defense academics, of whom there are relatively few.
Interviewer: WHAT DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE SOVIET UNION AT THAT TIME, AS A "THREAT," IF ONE CAN USE THAT WORD, AND DO YOU THINK THAT WHAT YOU KNEW, IN HINDSIGHT, WAS ACTUAL, OR EXAGGERATED?
Hunt: Well, at all times, it's not, so to speak, what the threat is, it's what you think it is.
Hunt: And...
Hunt: the conventional wisdom was that the Soviet forces grossly outnumbered ourselves, and I think there's something to support that.
Hunt: We were not convinced that the better weapons and the better aircraft we had were an effective exchange for the very much larger numbers.
Hunt: So, the prevailing feeling always was that we are facing an extremely heavy threat, which will be very lucky indeed to contain it.
Hunt: And given that we only have very little depth, in West Germany anyway, that we'll have extreme difficulty in not being beaten, and therefore, the small nuclear weapon which came on the battlefield, looked a bit like a six-gun.
Hunt: It was the equalizer, it made up for the difference between your strength and his.
Hunt: And I'm sure that was the prevailing feeling, and if you go back a little earlier, say, into the '50s, certainly we serving in Germany felt that we were the chicken's neck --- I mean, we really there were forward, with no conceivable chance of defending ourselves conventionally.
Hunt: We simply didn't have those forces.
Hunt: This...
Hunt: before, you see, even the German army was built up.
Interviewer: NOW, DURING THE FLEXIBLE-RESPONSE DEBATE, THE BRITISH ARMY WAS NEVER ABLE, IS THIS RIGHT, IN THE '60S...
Interviewer: HOW LONG COULD THE BRITISH ARMY HAVE FOUGHT, EVEN AFTER FLEXIBLE RESPONSE WAS ADOPTED? DURING THAT PERIOD, IF THERE HAD BEEN A WAR, WHAT LENGTH OF TIME WAS THE BRITISH ARMY EQUIPPED TO FIGHT FOR?
Hunt: We were equipped to fight probably for 30 days or thereabouts, but that is not really the issue.
Hunt: The issue is, what sort of warning do you get, what sort of forces are brought against you, and how long can you actually hold? And I guess the average time that people had in their minds was four days, five days, six days, seven days, of that order, before you were in real trouble.
Hunt: In short, before you might need to threaten nuclear weapons.
Hunt: So those sort of...
Hunt: day, those sort of time periods.
Hunt: Now, if everything went right for us, sure, it'd be two weeks.
Hunt: If everything went wrong for us, it might be two days.
Hunt: There are all sorts of different factors, which you simply can't accurately forecast.
Hunt: But days.
Interviewer: AND WOULD IT BE FAIR TO SAY THAT FLEXIBLE RESPONSE EFFECTIVELY BROUGHT IN THE IDEA THAT NUCLEAR WEAPONS WOULD NOT BE USED UNTIL ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY TO AVOID DEFEAT?
Hunt: The idea of flexible response was to make you more flexible, to give you more options, then just relying on nuclear weapons.
Hunt: By definition, that meant being conventionally stronger, And that movement towards being conventionally stronger was certainly going on in the late '50s.
Hunt: Now, it began to be affected somewhat by the Americans taking troops away to go to Vietnam; that cut across it...
Hunt: later on.
Hunt: But, yes, there was the wish to be stronger in order to put off the time when you had to use them.
Hunt: But, as you well know, the Europeans didn't want to be too strong; they wanted to be clear that nuclear weapons might have to be used, and they weren't, therefore, at all keen on having a purely conventional defense.
Interviewer: WHAT IS THE TERM YOU USED...?
Hunt: Conventional insufficiency.
Interviewer: THAT'S RIGHT...
Hunt: The notion of...
Hunt: well.
Hunt: You start off by trying to defend yourself conventionally.
Hunt: If you cannot, then you're forced to rely on nuclear weapons.
Hunt: Now what you want to put into the Soviet mind is that the danger of nuclear weapons is always there.
Hunt: So if you've built up your own conventional strength to the point at which it looks as if you are ready and willing to contemplate a purely conventional war, then the threat of nuclear weapons would recede in the Soviet mind.
Hunt: Therefore, what the Europeans wanted was to have conventional forces stronger, but not too strong.
Hunt: They wanted this gap, what has been called the doctrine of "conventional insufficiency", to make quite sure that the Russians would realize we weren't quite strong enough conventionally, and therefore might well be forced to have nuclear weapons in use.
Interviewer: SO, IN 1961 OR '62 THE MCNAMARA WHIZ KIDS CAME OVER TO START BRIEFING PEOPLE IN EUROPE ABOUT THE NEW IDEAS OF FLEXIBLE RESPONSE AND SO ON.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO THAT?
Hunt: It was of course, just a little later than that, but we were first of all told in effect, "Now look, if you sit still and you look at the blackboard you will begin to see the arguments we're painting and when you see them, you'll understand them, and when you understand them you'll share our point of view." And of course we went for the first part of it, but not the second.
Hunt: We regarded them as kindergarten briefings.
Hunt: We simply didn't want to sit there and be told all of these simplicities.
Hunt: Which in the end, one didn't take at all.
Hunt: So we found the Whiz Kids intolerably arrogant intellectually.
Hunt: Not all that attractive as individuals, a lot of them, and frankly, they caused a great deal of difficulty.
Hunt: And particularly, above all, with the French.
Interviewer: WHY PARTICULARLY THE FRENCH?
Hunt: Well, the French don't like to be lectured to by anybody, and the French have very strong views on...their own...
Hunt: doctrines, their own strategy, and they simply regarded the French as not understanding the Euro—I'm sorry, they regarded the Americans who came over as really not understanding the problem in Europe at all, but seeing it purely from their point of view.
Hunt: And one of the phrases used, was they want us...uh, to be...
Hunt: conventionally stronger in order to fight for longer.
Hunt: They want to trade European space for American time.
Hunt: And we don't want to trade...
Hunt: European space.
Hunt: Another point made by the French was that flexible response means flexibility going backwards.
Hunt: It means that you defend for longer and then again, made no appeal...
Hunt: when you fought back across Germany towards France.
Interviewer: SOME OF THOSE WHIZ KIDS WHO WE HAVE INTERVIEWED FOR THE SERIES, THINKING BACK, SAY "WELL, OF COURSE, THESE WERE VERY NEW IDEAS, AND IT TOOK THE EUROPEANS SOME TIME TO GET USED TO THEM, BUT EVENTUALLY I THINK WE MANAGED TO GET THROUGH TO THEM." I MEAN, WHAT'S YOUR REACTION TO THAT?
Hunt: Well, there's a certain amount in that, in the sense that flexible response was eventually agreed.
Hunt: But it wasn't quite the flexible response they came over with.
Hunt: Their flexible response was really conventional defense by another means with the nuclear weapons merely in reserve in case.
Hunt: What was eventually adopted was, we will be conventionally stronger, and, the role of the nuclear weapons will be watered down a little, but still, it was a strategy with a nuclear kernel to it.
Hunt: It was nuclear at heart, and that wasn't what they came over for.
Interviewer: SO THEY CERTAINLY—YOU WOULDN'T ACCEPT THAT THEY HAD THOUGHT ABOUT THESE THINGS AND KNEW A GREAT DEAL MORE ABOUT THESE THINGS THAN YOU DID.
Hunt: I think they may...have thought about them more, because, after all, they had...originated the doctrine.
Hunt: Nuclear weapons were...more easily discussable there.
Hunt: I guess what they hadn't thought about at all, was the reaction to Europeans who lived on the ground with their own particular positions and the evidence of that, of course, is that...m...was what made the French leave the integrated part of the alliance.
Hunt: They simply wanted no part of flexible response as enunciated at that time.
Interviewer: THE GERMANS WEREN'T ABLE TO DISAGREE, OF COURSE, SO OPENLY WHAT DO YOU THINK THEIR ATTITUDE WAS?
Hunt: The Germans, I think, were a bit mixed.
Hunt: There were some Germans who wanted nuclear mines, for example.
Hunt: If any Russian crosses the frontier, the mine goes up.
Hunt: That never seemed to be likely to recommend itself to a German public, but, nonetheless, there were Germans who wanted that.
Hunt: There was a strand among the German military that wouldn't have minded German nuclear weapons...
Hunt: either.
Hunt: They were rather goalist in their...in their thinking.
Hunt: They wanted a certain independence.
Hunt: But, in most cases, the Germans, above all, wanted to keep the Americans involved in their defense, and wanted therefore, in a sense, to agree with the Americans, but not too much.
Hunt: They wanted the doctrine of conventional insufficiency.
Interviewer: I THINK A LOT OF EUROPEANS, LAYMEN IN EUROPE BELIEVE THAT NUCLEAR WEAPONS OF ALL KINDS, REALLY, ARE IN EUROPE BECAUSE AMERICANS WANT THEM TO BE AND THAT IF IT WEREN'T FOR THE AMERICANS, THERE WOULDN'T BE ANY HERE.
Interviewer: WHICH, MAY, IN SOME SENSE, HAVE BEEN TRUE FOR THE VERY FIRST FEW YEARS IN THE 1950s, BUT IT'S PROBABLY THE REVERSE OF THE TRUTH SINCE.
Interviewer: WHAT'S YOUR REACTION TO THAT BELIEVE?
Hunt: That is right.
Hunt: It is a reverse...of the truth, really—
Interviewer: COULD YOU SPELL IT OUT FOR US?
Hunt: Or put it another way...When the nuclear weapons first came, yes, they seemed the answer to everybody's prayer, because the other side didn't have them.
Hunt: That's a wonderful form of deterrence.
Hunt: After that once the Soviet Union was able t...to fire back, that concentrated American minds wonderfully.
Hunt: And when it became apparent that not only could they fire back, but also fire back at the American, then the whole business of a strategy, which locked you into nuclear escalation, became very unattractive to the Americans.
Hunt: And from that point on, and this is where the flexible response debate started, it was the Americans who did not want to get involved in the use of nuclear weapons.
Hunt: And it's the Europeans who wanted to, because they reckoned that nothing but a threat to the oi...Soviet homeland would deter the Soviet Union.
Hunt: They were not liable to be deterred just by the cost of fighting a conventional war in West Germany.
Hunt: So, it was the Europeans that wanted the nuclear weapons.
Hunt: And ever since then, the position has been the same.
Hunt: The Americans have really tried to get off the hook of a strategy, which involved an early use.
Hunt: They wanted therefore, stronger conventional forces.
Hunt: They wanted us to have larger ammunition stocks; all of the things which put off and the Europeans didn't actually want it.
Interviewer: SO IRONICALLY, DESPITE MR.
Interviewer: WEINBERGER'S PUBLIC ALARM, THE POLICY THAT THE...AT THE MOMENT IS PUTTING FORWARD OF NOT HAVING NUCLEAR WEAPONS BASED IN BRITAIN, BUT INCREASING CONVENTIONAL FORCES, IS EXACTLY WHAT THE AMERICANS HAVE BEEN ASKING FOR TWENTY YEARS.
Hunt: No, not quite.
Hunt: Because, what the Americans have wanted is always to have the nuclear weapons there in reserve.
Hunt: They hold firmly to the belief that nuclear weapons deter nuclear weapons.
Hunt: And if you're going to deter Soviet nuclear weapons, you've got to have some of your own.
Hunt: And that is what the Labour party misses, totally.
Hunt: They would, in effect, have us there, with Soviet nuclear weapons on the other side, but with none on our end.
Hunt: And that's a very vulnerable, very dangerous position.
Hunt: The Americans wouldn't agree on that at all.
Interviewer: JUST GOING BACK TO THE '50s WHEN...JUST STOP FOR A MINUTE, CAN WE?
Hunt: ...he's just one of us.
Hunt: I mean, he's a...was sitting in the office with me...in the army.
Interviewer: THIS WAS THE PERIOD, OF COURSE, THE EARLY '60s OF THE HEIGHT OF THE CAMPAIGN FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT.
Interviewer: AT LEAST UNTIL THE LATE '70s.
Interviewer: WAS THERE ANY COMMUNICATION AT ALL BETWEEN THOSE OF YOU WHO WERE PROFESSIONALLY CONCERNED WITH DEFENSE, NUCLEAR MATTERS, AND WITH THE DEMONSTRATORS OUTSIDE THE GATES, AS IT WERE?
Hunt: I don't think so, really.
Hunt: It was a very general...
Hunt: movement.
Hunt: One was very aware, of course, of strong political figures in it, who later on became members of the Labour government.
Hunt: And, not forgetting, there were quite a number of people in the services—senior people who were inclined to...Labour anyway at that time.
Hunt: But no, there was absolutely no communication with CND as such.
Hunt: And then, of course, the various members of CND joined the Labour government.
Hunt: And, in a way, that put an end to the movement...but also helped because in the period from about '66, notably 1968 up to about '72, there were quite big arms control measures...
Hunt: were taken.
Hunt: The non-proliferation treaty, and SALT I for example.
Hunt: So, they did see some arms control going on.
Hunt: And the whole thing be...became quiescent.
Hunt: But it really dispersed into the Labour government except for the ...who went off and did something else.
Interviewer: WE WERE TALKING TO LORD SOPER, AND HE SAID THAT HE SAT DOWN ON ONE OCCASION QUITE EARLY ON, THIS WOULD BE '58, '59, OUTSIDE THE GATES OF...
Interviewer: AND AS HE PUT IT, "I BECAME AWARE OF THIS HUGE GULF THAT EXISTED BETWEEN THE REAL WORLD, WHERE I WAS, AND THOSE PEOPLE IN THERE." NOW, YOU PRESUMABLY WOULD HAVE SEEN IT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
Hunt: I would have seen it the other way around...
Hunt: with one...
Hunt: qualification in a second.
Hunt: Because, after all, nuclear weapons were there.
Hunt: There was no way one was ever going to get rid of them.
Hunt: The Soviet Union had acquired nuclear weapons and merely to talk about disbanding them like that was Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Hunt: That wasn't the real world at all.
Hunt: Now, I do share...did share.., his views that nuclear weapons were horrible things, and one should have to do something about them, but one's own personal feeling was, as you couldn't get rid of them, you have to learn to manage them.
Hunt: And not merely walk around praying that they will go away.
Interviewer: ONE LAST QUESTION.
Interviewer: WE HAVEN'T TALKED AT ALL, BECAUSE YOU WERE IN THE ARMY AND LATER ABOUT THE BRITISH NUCLEAR DETERRENTS LIKE THE B-BOMBERS, POLARIS AND SO ON.
Interviewer: BUT TO WHAT EXTENT DO YOU THINK THAT FOR THE DEFENSE OF EUROPE FROM A NATO POINT OF VIEW, THE BRITISH DETERRENT WAS NECESSARY?
Hunt: I think from a military point of view, it will be hard to argue that the British independent deterrent was important to NATO, simply because the percentages of warheads that it represented were so very small.
Hunt: There were more than enough American warheads to look after us all together.
Hunt: And that applied all the way down the line, and of course, at the bottom of the pile, we actually relied on American warheads in the battlefield of nuclear weapons.
Hunt: No, I think the purpose of the independent deterrent was always seen.
Hunt: The bottom line was, it was to deter an attack on this country.
Hunt: It wasn't really for NATO purposes, though, that excuse was often given.
Hunt: It was simply for the defense of a deterrent some attack on this country.
Hunt: And that, of course, was the logic behind the French one as well.
Interviewer: DO YOU THINK THAT THERE WAS A GROWING DOUBT AND A REASONABLE GROWING DOUBT THROUGHOUT THIS WHOLE PERIOD, THAT WHEN IT CAME TO THE CRUNCH, WASHINGTON WOULD NOT BE SWAPPED FOR BONN, NOR FOR PARIS OR FOR LONDON?
Hunt: I think inevitably that doubt is always there.
Hunt: It's there today.
Hunt: If the Soviet Union and the United States can each destroy the other one, and regardless of which fires first, they can each destroy the other one, then they've surely got a compelling reason not to go to war and an even more compelling reason not to go to war on behalf of somebody else.
Hunt: So, the doubt was always there.
Hunt: Now, I should have added much earlier on, that when the British nuclear weapon was first contemplated right at the end of the war, then I don't think there were any doubts at all that any medium sized or major power would have to have nuclear weapons.
Hunt: One simply felt that nuclear weapons are going to decide future wars.
Hunt: But that was rather...
Hunt: you know, preliminary thinking.
Hunt: And later one got out of that.
Interviewer: OF COURSE, H-BOMBS MADE IT MUCH LESS LIKELY THAT WARS WOULD BE FOUGHT IN THAT SENSE, THAT ALL...
Hunt: That is right.
Hunt: But the fact that a major power should not have a nuclear weapon seemed in those early days unthinkable.
Hunt: These were the weapons of the future.
Hunt: I remember thinking, that you'd never mount a Normandy invasion again, or something of that type, because one little nuclear weapon put in the middle would totally destroy it.
Hunt: But, as I say, that was very undeveloped thinking.