Tim McC
I'm still waiting to read what possible reason there could be to suppose that Britain ever considered a first strike capability. I'd love to know what kind of lunatic would fancy taking-on the Soviet Union with a handful of Blue Danubes, most of which probably wouldn't have even worked!
Me too. I can hardly wait.
But in fairness (and it's painful to be scrupulously fair in this instance) there were more than a handful planned to be built. Production stopped at 58 (whether all were serviceable not is debatable) because production switched to Red Beard, of which there were approx 120 built. Some Red Beards used converted Blue Danube nuclear cores. But original RAF plans conceived before the first detonation of a US H-bomb were for up to 800 kiloton bombs. That they were never built on this scale matters little, for it illustrates that the planners believed they had a use for them, and planned more than one sortie per bomber.
In stating that though I don't make the elementary mistake of assuming and alleging that they were intended for a first strike. No one can see into the planner's minds, and there is no published evidence from official sources that suggests a first strike was ever contemplated. Or at least I ain't seen any, and I've looked hard for any hint of it.
It was the sudden arrival of the H-bomb that concentrated the military chiefs minds, and its immense power made them understand that all had changed. That a nuclear war was not something that could be fought, but best avoided. That was the true origin of deterrence.
Some above have suggested that the UK arsenal was too puny to take on Russia, but they miss the point. It wasn't only intended to deter Russia but also to restrain a gung-ho element in the US. There were Ministers even within Winston Churchill's Cabinet in 1954 who advocated a British H-bomb for that very reason. Read the Cabinet minutes. They argued that a British bomb would 'bind' the US into NATO, and make it impossible for the US to stand aside to protect American cities while British cities burned. Mrs Thatcher's later decision to acquire Trident and ensure interchangeability with US Tridents was an extension of that. On the basis that a Trident heading for Moscow was of indeterminate origin. It could be US. Or it could be British. The Russians wouldn't know who fired it and would act accordingly.
The puny size of the UK stockpile hardly mattered if we were suicidal. Assume the unlikely, a British first-strike, the Russians would act to protect themselves from a US follow-on strike to take advantage of Russian weakness. American cities would be turned into ashes. The trick pulled off by deterrence policy was to convince others that we were so irrational, so blindly stupid that we would, just possibly might, on a bad hair day, respond to a threat by pushing the nuclear button, possibly even in a suicidal first strike. But pretending to our enemies (and our friends) that we might just possibly be so irrational is streets away from actually planning cold-bloodedly to do it.
That was in part, the rationale for the independent deterrent. And for fifty years it worked well enough, and I have no regrets for my small part in it whatever revisionist historians say from their ivory towers.