The same author's comments on Sandys, incidentally, are just as misleading. It's far too easy to peddle the age-old claim that Sandys was hell-bent on destroying everything because of some bizarre obsession with missiles. It's simply not true.
Sandys simply did what he had been tasked to do - cut the ridiculously oversized defence expenditure that was crippling the country. He embraced the (then) current thinking that future defence policy relied upon MAD and the prevention of war through the ability to strike the USSR with nuclear bombs. He concluded that devoting huge resources to fighter assets was therefore pointless. In his view there was nothing much to defend other than Thor and (eventually) Blue Streak.
It's lazy to claim that Sandys simply didn't understand the need for new fighters. He did understand but he simply believed (and with good reason) that fighters were unnecessary. But once again, in Empire, the same old line about Sandys was churned-out...
Last edited by WH904; 13th May 2013 at 19:16.