pointing to east and west interventions as old imperial or neo-colonial acts of retrenchment. The principal
observerbeing courted was of course the United States: Churchill’s Fulton speech
outlining the responsibilities of the ‘special relationship’ in the era of the Iron
Curtain had made this perfectly explicit from the outset. But propaganda and
policy were also levelled at the Soviet and later the Chinese communist regimes,
ensuring a hard and fast stance against their global ambitions. This gaze east and
west was not always a mere poodle’s pawing at the feet of a superpower. Historians
have come to agree in recent years that it was primarily the British in the early
post-war years who succeeded in convincing the Americans to assume responsibility
for the Cold War, first in Europe (by outlining the threat to Berlin and by forcing
the Americans’ hand by withdrawing from Greece and Turkey), and then in Asia
and Africa (through propaganda drives against Sino-Soviet expansion in favour of
US/UK decolonization and informal empire). And it was British intelligence and
lobbying that first outfaced the Soviet Union’s global propaganda machine in the
form of the Foreign Office’s formidable Information Research Department.
The illusion of influence was not to last, however, as the US spurned British
requests for a sharing of nuclear knowledge, as British post-war bankruptcy forced
the government to assume the posture of Marshall Plan beggar, as the rapid series of
crises in Europe culminating in the Berlin airlift led the UK government to welcome
US bombers and then missiles on to sovereign soil. The propaganda battle against
the Soviets, too, was less lost so much as ceded to the Americans, especially with the
advent of the CIA and its new intelligence-gathering machine—US condescension
towards the British can be dated to its assumption of control over Operations Silver
and Gold, the intercept tunnels under Vienna and Berlin.
Starved of funds and unable to interest the US in a proper exchange of nuclear
technology after the spy crises of the 1940s and 1950s, the UK rocket programme,
Blue Streak, was eventually run down to nothing. The limit of humiliation was
reached with Suez, with Eden standing down his forces as the US and USSR
issued threats and embargoes on the old colonial powers. Face was saved with the
startlingsuccessofBritishcounter-insurgencyinMalayaandKenya,successes which
contrasted with the US’s costly stalemate in Korea and later its bungled attempt to
imitate British and French counter-insurgency in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the die was
cast. Despite the independent nuclear deterrent, despite the ‘third force’ potential
of the Commonwealth, and despite the continuation of the special relationship
in all its forms, the UK had to learn to abandon the high table of atomic and
thermonuclear diplomacy.
Peter Hennessy has shown, inThe Secret State, how successive Prime Ministers
attempted to twist the special relationship their way—that is, to protect British
interests (the UK, after all, was in the front line of Soviet missile attack) and
to limit the potential for US ‘Dr Strangelove’ mistakes and ‘forestalling’ nuclear
warfare: in Macmillan’s words, to have ‘enough nuclear power to prevent some