In 1967 the issue of renewal of the five-year agreement with the US had to be addressed. Interestingly, by now RAF scepticism had again resurfaced. The American cancellation of the Skybolt missile had set in motion a chain of events leading to the shift of the UK nuclear deterrent force from RAF bombers to Polaris submarines operated by the Royal Navy.90
The acquisition of Polaris missiles from the US meant that the UK would soon have a nuclear deterrent based at sea, virtually invulnerable to a first strike. The V bombers were to be withdrawn from the Quick Reaction Alert role in 1969, and thus the main argument for early warning would no longer exist: ‘it can reasonably be deduced that the value to the UK of the information provided by BMEWS will be less vital once the role of the strategic deterrent passes from the V bombers to Polaris.’91 For this reason it was argued that ‘it is hard to see why the Air Votes should continue to bear Fylingdales costs for anything like five years after the present agreement expires. Whoever may derive benefit from BMEWS after 1969, it looks as though it will not be the Royal Air Force.’92
The question that puzzles me is “What are we going to do with the four minutes warning?” Presumably the main justification for BMEWS in the V bomber era is that the warning period will enable us to take steps to avoid the aircraft being destroyed on the ground. This sort of argument does not seem to apply to Polaris. … I am not au fait myself with all the subtleties of nuclear deterrent theory, but if the missiles are on their way (which means deterrence has failed) it is not very clear what advantage we get from knowing this four minutes in advance of the actual strike. We shall know when we are hit anyway and the speed at which we retaliate would not seem to be very important within the margin of a few minutes.93
Others argued that Fylingdales would continue to benefit the UK because it would enable retaliation commands to be sent to Polaris submarines before communication links were destroyed (and indeed political authority wiped out), but again there was scepticism over this argument: ‘There seems to me to be a considerable difference between a decision to retaliate based on a warning that missiles are on the way (which must involve an agonising judgement on the parts of the Heads of Government concerned) and one made after the missiles have arrived. We don’t need a warning system to tell us that we have been hit! What we do need is some fairly secure arrangement to ensure that someone can give the order to retaliate.’94
Nevertheless, it was also argued that the advent of Polaris and the removal of the V-bombers from the QRA role did not obviate the need for need for these aircraft and others to scramble should there be warning of nuclear attack. In addition, it remained the formal obligation of the RAF that ‘within the radar coverage available to you to provide the earliest possible warning of the approach to the United Kingdom of any air threat’. Whether or not BMEWS was important for Polaris ‘does not detract from its importance to the RAF. It is also an integral part of the air defence of Great Britain, just as much as the rest of the C & R system, and I have not so far heard that this is to become the responsibility of another service or agency.’95
Also at issue, as with the original agreement, was the question of allocation of costs. An early estimate had put the capital cost of Fylingdales at £43M with the UK share £8M.96 Although the US capital cost remained about £35M, the UK capital cost ended up being slightly over £9.5M, and UK running costs in the mid 1960s were between £2m and £2 1/4 M per year.97 Of this the annual contract with RCA(GB) cost about £1.3M.98
With the early warning function perhaps less important to the UK because of Polaris, there was a readiness to argue that the US benefited more from Fylingdales and thus should pay more to its running costs. A further argument adduced was that BMEWS might also benefit the US in its ambitions to develop an ABM system: ‘Incidentally, I notice that in an article in the Financial Times on 19th September about the American decision to go ahead with an ABM system it is stated that the system will get information from BMEWS. Is this not another reason for arguing that the American interest in the Fylingdales installation will increase as compared with that of the UK?’99
Others, however, noted that Fylingdales was only a ‘gap-filler’ for the US. An assessment made by USAF in February 1967 showed that 89% of Soviet ICBM trajectories would pass through the radar cover of BMEWS Site 1 (Greenland), 72% through Site 2 (Alaska), and only 27% through Site 3 (Fylingdales).100
Finally, in November 1968 agreement was reached with the decision to renew the arrangement ‘for a further period of five years from 15th January on the same terms as before.’101 As it turned out, Fylingdales continued in operation, with the original radars in use until they were replaced in the early 1990s by a Raytheon phased array system capable of scanning through 360º, the three distinctive golf balls being replaced with a single pyramid-like structure.
Discussion
As with current American plans for missile defence two questions above all lay at the heart of the decision to build BMEWS in the UK. The first question concerned the efficacy of BMEWS: that is to say, would it work? The second, more substantial, doubt was would it be worthwhile?
The question of efficacy is complex, at least in theory, though in practice it does not appear to have caused significant concern. At the heart of this issue was the fundamental problem that realistic testing of BMEWS could not be carried out. A mass attack of ICBMs from the Soviet Union or IRBMs from Eastern Europe could not be arranged as a test; if it happened, it would be the real thing. Instead two kinds of partial testing provided confidence that BMEWS would perform as required. First, the components of the overall BMEWS could be tested to ascertain to what degree they met their specifications. Second, the overall system could be used to observe other objects, such as satellites, which had some similarity with ballistic missiles.
These forms of testing could not provide complete assurance of the efficacy of BMEWS. In some cases, such as the use of simulated missile attack data that was fed into the computers, the testing had an element of circularity. Some assurance that BMEWS would work could also be derived from the experience gained from the first two BMEWS sites, although this was not entirely reassuring as the false alarm caused by the moon showed the potential for failure. Ultimately, however, efficacy was not a significant concern because the consequences of failure were unlikely to be disastrous. The limitations of BMEWS were appreciated at the time, and it was clear that no automatic retaliation was likely to be initiated simply due to BMEWS warning (something which would probably be necessary for a Ballistic Missile Defence). In the UK, the QRA V-bombers took at least three minutes to take off from a high alert state, and this time could be used to check with Fylingdales over the credibility of their warning.102
Concerns about the inability to test BMEWS fully were summed up by Dr Herbert York, Director of Defence Research at the US Department of Defence, who noted in 1960 that: ‘I personally doubt you ever will be sure enough so that you would be willing to launch your missiles on warning from BMEWS. But you will be sure enough to be able to take action such as to make use of the ground alert posture and to get aircraft off and do all other things which are of a recallable nature. …. My input to the problem is to tell people that, in my judgement, this is an electronic device and there is not any way of really making it foolproof, and the operational planning for the use of this data should take into account that it cannot be made absolutely foolproof. There is no way to check the system out. There is no way to practise with the system.’103
If doubts over whether BMEWS would work were quickly overcome, the question of whether it would be of significant value to the UK took a little longer. This cannot be seen simply as a matter of rational analysis of the benefit to the UK as a whole. At the heart of this question was opinion within the RAF which had responsibility for air defence and so was the service concerned with BMEWS. Initially there was scepticism within the RAF, particularly as regards the short warnings times that BMEWS could provide for IRBMs launched from Eastern Europe. Although there was an Air Staff Requirement for ballistic missile early warning, BMEWS fell short of this, particularly because it did not provide an upgrade path to an anti-ballistic missile defence.
RAF doubts over whether Fylingdales was of significant benefit were only overcome when it was seen that the credibility of the airborne deterrent – the V-bombers – could be enhanced by sufficient early warning to enable them to ‘scramble’ before enemy missiles destroyed their airfields. To be credible, nuclear-armed aircraft could not be seen as being vulnerable to attack before they took off, and early warning was thus essential. Opposing such early warning, which BMEWS would provide, was thus tantamount to opposing the airborne deterrent. In the early 1960s this could only mean one thing: critics of BMEWS belonged to, or were at least giving comfort to, ‘the Polaris lobby’.
RAF support for BMEWS thus hinged on its value in the ‘bureaucratic politics’ surrounding the debate over the future form of the UK nuclear deterrent.104 Moreover, the ‘four-minute warning’ – still rather short for most V-bombers to scramble in practice – could be increased by thoughtful strategic analysis. Not only was a ‘bolt from the blue’ considered highly unlikely, and so there would be time to raise the alert status of the V-bombers, but also an attack on the UK was thought only to be plausible if accompanied by a simultaneous assault on the US. If it was assumed that this meant the missiles would arrive at their targets simultaneously, then this conveniently meant that the UK would get the same thirty minutes warning of attack afforded the US:
This is because we must assume that the Russians, if they attacked us at all, would deliver a concerted attack on the United Kingdom and the United States. They would have to time their missiles to arrive in the United States and the United Kingdom simultaneously. This means that missiles aimed at the United Kingdom would be launched later than those aimed at the United States. We should, therefore, be able to order the bomber force to take off, like SAC, when BMEWS detected the missiles aimed at the United States.105
However, this rationale for BMEWS disappeared once Polaris was chosen as the principal UK nuclear deterrent – thanks to the US cancellation of the air-launched Skybolt ballistic missile, rather than the efforts of the Polaris lobby. Scepticism about the value of Fylingdales then resurfaced within the RAF. However, by then the RAF has already staked a claim in a new role for Fylingdales, as a centre for satellite tracking.
Moreover, the shifting arguments for supporting Fylingdales within the RAF operated with one constant interest, that of engendering better cooperation with its American counterparts. Both within the RAF and in the government the overall benefits of UK-US cooperation seem to have been at least as important as the specific benefits of any particular development. Defence technology like BMEWS was assessed in terms of its political significance as an embodiment of the ‘special relationship’ rather than purely on its own military merits.
The decision by the British government to allow the upgrading of Fylingdales for use in American missile defence, mirrors almost exactly the debate over the original BMEWS decisions. The questions that most critically need to be answered are: will it work? and will it be worthwhile? Again, as in the original BMEWS decision, these specific issues will inevitably also be subsumed into a broader issue, that of relations between the UK and US.
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