Conclusion

This chapter demonstrates that the British Army possessed the intellectual capacity for organizational innovation after 1945. It argues that the officer corps understood the significance of the nuclear revolution and arrived at logical conclusions as to how tactical nuclear weapons might affect land warfare. Its ability to think critically about the challenges posed by nuclear weapons calls into question the traditional narrative of the post-war British Army as an anti-intellectual organization, tied to out-of-date methods and a stagnant military doctrine. The chapter concludes that although the Army played an important role in NATO strategy, it displayed a cognitive dissonance about the logical inconsistencies of nuclear deterrence.

British Thinking about Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Chapter 1 examines how British policy-makers viewed the arrival of tactical nuclear weapons, employing as a vehicle in the 1950s debate on the relative merits of the opposing strategic theories of ‘graduated deterrence’ and ‘massive retaliation’. It shows how the British government rejected any suggestion to draw distinctions in peacetime between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons because of a strong belief that such an announcement would undermine the overall deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. Gripped by a ‘deterrence habit of mind’, civilian leaders viewed tactical nuclear weapons not as meaningful military tools, but as weapons of escalation whose use would trigger a strategic nuclear exchange between the superpowers. The rejection of any kind of graduated deterrence through the use of tactical nuclear weapons set a precedent in how British policy-makers conceived the utility of tactical nuclear weapons, which would have important consequences in the following debates about NATO strategy.

Nuclear Instruction at the Staff College

Chapter 4 examines how the design and implementation of the curriculum at the Army Staff College, Camberley exposed organizational views about nuclear warfare. The chapter critically evaluates how the Army institutionalized learning on a subject about which very little was known, that was politically sensitive, and that relied ultimately on abstract concepts untested in the crucible of war. It argues that the Staff College proved remarkably absorbent to new ideas and habitually incorporated the most fashionable thinking and latest doctrinal constructs into its syllabus. In this context, the development of the Staff College curriculum reflected the ebb and flow of NATO’s changing strategic concepts, the maturation of BAOR’s nuclear doctrine, and the Army’s perceptions of its own place within national defence policy.

Conventional Forces and Tactical Nuclear Weapons in NATO Strategy

Chapter 2 analyses how the British deterrence habit of mind manifested in a preference for a ‘pure-deterrence’ strategy for NATO. NATO’s forums were a market for strategic ideas, and competing visions of nuclear warfare reflected the often incompatible preferences of its member states. Bargaining and compromise resulted in significant changes to defensive concepts throughout the Cold War and saw the emergence of two distinct strategies, massive retaliation and flexible response, which provided the conceptual framework for the Army’s thinking about nuclear war. The chapter explores the most important assumptions made about the character of nuclear warfare, the political and military utility of tactical nuclear weapons, and the perceived role of ground forces within NATO’s deterrent posture. It argues that the British reluctance to accept that military organizations could perform a useful function during or after a nuclear exchange set an ominous tone for the Army’s own theorizing about future war.

Operational Research and the Nuclear Battlefield

Chapter 5 examines how concepts for nuclear land combat were tested through tangible training regimes and war-games to indoctrinate troops for fighting in a nuclear environment. It argues that Army research groups and training institutions made some headway into the practical challenges of preparing for nuclear ground combat, but the results highlighted the dilemmas inherent in planning for warfare using an untested weapon of unprecedented power. Objective analysis threatened to expose some of the Army’s more fanciful ideas about future war and challenged its faith in its ability to successfully prosecute the surreal mission to which it had been assigned. While the Army claimed the conclusions drawn from its research supported well-established beliefs about the modern operating environment, its critics saw only wishful thinking and the erroneous use of scientific data. The uncomfortable realities exposed by these synthetic representations of nuclear war served only to entrench the Army’s cognitive dissonance.

Introduction

This chapter examines the historiography of the post-war British Army. It demonstrates that the Army’s nuclear mission in Germany is underrepresented in the mainstream literature, in spite of this being its most important commitment after 1945. The chapter explains how the Army became a potential agent of nuclear warfare and its role in national and alliance strategy. It argues that the Army was largely successful in overcoming the conceptual difficulties of planning for future war, but that it displayed a cognitive dissonance when faced with uncomfortable realities about the nature of nuclear warfare.

The Evolution of Nuclear War-Fighting Doctrine

Chapter 6 assesses the evolution of the British Army’s doctrine for tactical nuclear war. It challenges the orthodox narrative of an intellectually stagnant post-war British Army by demonstrating that the service was continually engaged with the development of new doctrine throughout the Cold War. In particular, the chapter draws attention to how formal written doctrine was influenced by two of the Rhine Army’s most coveted, and controversial, commanders: Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery and Field Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall. It argues that the post-war military thought of Montgomery was much more progressive than has hitherto been described by historians, and that the doctrinal reforms instigated by Bagnall in the 1980s were merely a logical progression of concepts articulated in the 1950s, calling into question the revolutionary nature of the reforms.

Military Publicists and Theories of Tactical Nuclear War

Chapter 3 considers some of the first attempts by the Army to imagine nuclear warfare. It provides a survey of the types of articles that appeared in the seven most popular service journals during the 1950s to determine how speculation about the nuclear battlefield shaped organizational thinking about the nuclear battlefield. This body of work, which constituted the emerging theory of tactical nuclear warfare, defined the parameters of the debate about the use of nuclear weapons in the land battle for the remainder of the Cold War. Critical analysis of this text, in addition to that of other published work and unpublished typescripts, suggests an officer corps that possessed the intellectual capacity for organizational innovation. The chapter maintains that the intellectual reference points for thinking about future warfare reflected the culture of an officer corps bloodied in two world wars and struggling to find a role in a changing world.