Richard Moore - The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons

THE ROYAL NAVY AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Series Editor: Geoffrey Till

ISSN 1366-9478

This series consists primarily of original manuscripts by research scholars in the general area of naval policy and history, without national or chronological limitations. It will from time to time also include collections of important articles as well as reprints of classic works.

Richard Moore

First published in 2001 by
FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS

This edition published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2001 R. Moore

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Moore, Richard
The royal Navy and nuclear weapons. (Cass series. Naval
policy and history)
1. Great Britain. Royal Navy History 2. Nuclear weapons
Great Britain
I. title
359.8251190941

ISBN 0-7146-5195-8 (cloth)
ISBN 13: 978-0-7146-5195-8 (hbk)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore, Richard, 1968
The Royal Navy and nuclear weapons / Richard Moore.
p. cm. (Cass seriesnaval policy and history, ISSN 1366-9478)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7146-5195-8 (cloth)
1. Great Britain. Royal NavyHistory20th century. 2. Nuclear
weaponsGreat Britain. 3. Naval strategyHistory20th century. 4.
Fleet ballistic missile weapons systemsGreat Britain. 5. Deterrence
(Strategy)History20th century. I. Title. II. Series.
UA657 .M66 2001
359.181709410904dc21

2001028371

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

Typeset in 10/12pt Sabon by Cambridge Photosetting Services

Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy from 1956 to 1985, called it the 'atomic shock' the sudden sense in the mid-19405 through to the early 1960s that new technology in the shape of nuclear weapons was undermining the basic purposes of, and even the justification for, conventional navies. The traditional functions of navies, which had so recently been demonstrated in the Second World War, were to secure command of the sea and then to exercise it in order to project military power ashore and to use the sea as a means of transportation of military personnel, matriel and war supplies and of course to prevent the enemy from doing likewise. But around the world, military men and politicians began to wonder whether any of this was either feasible, or even necessary, in conflicts involving the possible use of these terrible new weapons. Indeed, had not the initial employment of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved the point by eliminating the need for a final amphibious operation against the Japanese home islands?

This sudden scepticism was seized upon by politicians anxious to find ways of reducing naval expenditure, by air forces around the world, who saw themselves as the natural deliverers of nuclear power, and by modernisers, who thought that all aspects of warfare needed to be substantially re-thought in the new Cold War era. Some of the modernisers, like Admiral Gorshkov himself, in fact wore dark-blue uniforms and were ready to embrace a world in which 'maritime' power would be re-engineered to become chiefly a function of submarines and maritime aircraft rather than large conventional surface ships, and who were interested in the prospects of nuclear propulsion and even in the delivery of nuclear weapons from naval platforms.

However, the world's navies were reluctant to accept these technological truths. In Britain and in the United States, old barnacle-encrusted admirals stuck to their guns and their capital ships with the same fervour they had apparently used to resist the arrival of steam propulsion in the nineteenth century and submarines and aircraft in the twentieth. This refusal to accept the blindingly obvious was just another example of 'naval conservatism'.

This, at any rate, is the conventional view of the naval response to nuclear weapons and of wider views about the effect that they could have on the role, composition and future importance of navies. And this is the view so interestingly challenged in this book.

Richard Moore shows that there was a good deal more intellectual coherence behind the notion of 'broken-backed war' (in which an initial nuclear exchange would be followed by a period of conventional operations) than is often realised. He shows the emergence of the notion in the Navy as elsewhere that nuclear weapons could become, in Soviet terminology, 'self-negating' such that neither side would use them unless the other side had or was imminently likely to. He demonstrates the sound practical reasons why pragmatic Admirals should wonder whether nuclear weapons, even if they were used, would actually be as militarily decisive as their proponents claimed. He explores the way in which the Navy thought that nuclear weapons could actually help them secure some traditional naval objectives, by offering means to destroy large well-armed Soviet warships and deep-diving submarines that would be difficult to dispose of by other means.

Above all, by examining as thoroughly and effectively as it does the context within which Naval officers made their decisions and framed their policies, Richard Moore makes the fundamental point, so often neglected, that in fact the Navy had far more urgent and pressing concerns to consider than the role and importance of nuclear weapons in maritime warfare. The conclusion is clear: inasmuch as the Navy of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s considered the matter, it was sceptical about the extent to which nuclear weapons really did represent a revolution in maritime affairs and experience has shown this to be a perhaps surprisingly healthy response. He concludes also that in reacting as they did to nuclear weapons, the Navy's leaders were emulating the achievements of their predecessors in responding to technological challenges such as the aircraft and the submarine so much more intelligently than once used to be said. Perhaps this will have implications for their successors too, as they are forced to grapple with the possible consequences of yet another period of apparently revolutionary technological change.