Tactical Nuclear Weapons, Operational Employment, and Conventional Defence, 1974–1976

Abstract

While UK policy on non-strategic nuclear use during the last two Wilson premierships became increasingly focused on developing and sustaining a NATO policy in this area of deterrence, rather than war fighting, the equipment policy to buttress it largely revolved around procurement decisions taken during his first two administrations. Since many of these decisions concerned new delivery systems which were, in theory at least, dual use, they generated much less UK domestic debate than the UK’s strategic systems. They also revolved around how to deploy the new UK multi-purpose lay-down bomb, the WE-177, and the blast yields it should be designed to produce. The new aircraft and helicopters purchased or developed to carry this weapon had started to replace existing types at the start of the 1970s. This final chapter will question to what extent the strategic debates at the ‘high policy’ level detailed in the last chapter were being implemented at the ‘operational level’ and how, or whether, strategies which enabled creating a more flexible policy on how to respond to an act of Warsaw Pact aggression were being arrived at. This would not be accomplished overnight, and, indeed, some of the issues this generated, such as the utility of tactical nuclear weapons against the Warsaw Pact or attempts at technology-based solutions to the security dilemma, would be felt in NATO throughout the 1980s. As one commentator writing in the late 1980s put it, ‘war between East and West, even if conducted solely with non-nuclear weapons, could result in a scale of casualties not seen since the Black Death or the Thirty Years War’.1