Britain’s nuclear response depended on Macmillan’s driver finding a phone box

Britain’s nuclear retaliation in the 1960s was dependent upon the ability of the prime minister’s driver to find four pennies for a phone call or else reverse the charges, it has been revealed.

National Archive documents show that just before the Cuban missile crisis and amid evidence that the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles could reach Britain in four minutes Whitehall was anxious about its ability to respond. It introduced a system it thought would ensure that Harold Macmillan could sanction a retaliatory nuclear strike by the country’s V bombers if he was travelling outside London in his Rolls-Royce and RAF bases, as well as Whitehall, were targeted by the Soviet Union from East Germany.

The documents were discovered by the historian Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, who writes as Peter Hennessy in research for his new book, Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties. They outline how Macmillan’s cars were equipped with a phone tapped into the Automobile Association’s nationwide network so that he could be reached anywhere at any time. His driver would then have to find a public phone box so that Macmillan could contact the Whitehall operations centre to sanction a retaliatory strike. However, an exchange of letters between civil servants highlights fears that the driver might not have had the change necessary to make the call. Macmillan’s private secretary provided reassurance. Even if by “some misfortune or miscalculation [the pennies] have been expended and one is penniless”, Tim Bligh wrote, there would always be the option of “dialling 100 and requesting reversal of the charge”.

Hennessy said that the system, in place until 1970, was “so English and so bizarre that had it appeared in an Ealing comedy it would not have been believed” and it was hard not to think of them as a spoof.

The emergency plans arose in the early 1960s, Hennessy said, when the joint intelligence committee discovered that nuclear missiles fired from East Germany could reach Britain in four minutes. “The real worry in the face of this increased Soviet menace was that the prime minister might be out of [London] in his Rolls-Royce,” he told The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. “He would have to authorise the retaliation [within four minutes] but the Treasury didn’t want to spend any money, Macmillan didn’t want to have any fuss.”

The solution, he said, was to use the AA’s radio system, which would be linked up with the prime minister’s car, and the driver would then be told to find a phone box so that Macmillan could contact Whitehall and unleash the RAF’s V bombers. Bryan Saunders, the private secretary to the minister of works, wrote to a Downing Street colleague suggesting that the drivers could be “provided with four pennies [the sum needed in a GPO phone box before you could press button A and get through]. I should hate to think of you trying to get change for a sixpence from a bus conductor while those four minutes were ticking by.”

In his book Hennessy writes: “Where US presidents and Soviet general secretaries (and, later, French presidents) had (and have) serving officers with them at all times carrying the nuclear retaliation codes and the equipment to transmit them, British prime ministers in the Sixties had the AA and small change.”

In a recorded interview shown at the literature festival Hennessy said that no other nuclear power had such penny-pinching last lines of defence; a system that was in place from 1962 until 1970. “Just think of the cost of being a nuclear power,” he said. “Just one H bomb would cost £1.5 million, a fortune in those days. And to save money they would put Macmillan into a phone box and reverse charges. If it [the plan] had been relayed to the KGB chief he would have regarded it as a complete plant and a spoof.”

His book also outlines what he describes as a “dash of private comédie noire into the whole grim business” of planning for a nuclear war.

In the event of a “bolt from the blue nuclear attack” from the Soviet Union that “wiped out” Macmillan, a senior minister needed to be available to authorise the RAF’s V bombers. Macmillan “with a macabre Shakespearean flourish” wrote to the Cabinet Office of the succession plans: “First Gravedigger Mr [Rab] Butler, Second Gravedigger Mr [Selwyn] Lloyd.”

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