ARMS ACROSS THE SEA
Wennersten, John R.
Arms across the sea Margaret Thatcher's government holds the U.S. military in fond embrace John R. Wennersten Afilm made almost fifteen years ago has been playing of late to large audiences...
...She would have done better to listen to retired U.S...
...The access of the secret service of a foreign power to the private telephones of another nation is almost without parallel in modern times...
...In Parliament, Labor members are particularly outraged at how the Ministry of Defense has kept them in the dark on nuclear decision making...
...Here, deep in bunkers, an elaborate computer system will direct and deploy most of the new cruise missiles after 1983...
...Much of Britain's current military thinking is based on the idea that it can, in partnership with the United States, win a nuclear war and keep most of its population alive...
...This past fall, the CND rally in London drew 70,000 men and women from all over the countrx and the European continent as well...
...Half of those interviewed believed a nuclear war would take place some time during this decade...
...Lastly, in Buckinghamshire at the site of a former high school for American military dependents, a cruise missile control center is being developed...
...The Labor Party's call for unilateral disarmament was one of the causes of a recent bitter split between the right and left wings of the party...
...In 1956, Lakenheath was the scene of a near-catastrophe when a B-47 bomber with no weapons on board crashed into a storage igloo containing several nuclear weapons...
...military bases in Britain...
...Under Margaret Thatcher's Tory government, Britain has initiated a massive buildup of nuclear arms...
...When the cruise missile was tested in California in 1980, eight of the twenty test flights were failures...
...At its special headquarters at Menwith Hill near Harrogate, the NSA, using electronic switching and sophisticated "keyword" recognition computers, taps more than 20,000 transatlantic telephone circuits...
...It consists of a one-piece outer suit, a two-piece inner suit made of charcoal-impregnated cloth, a pair of Wellington boots, two pairs of gloves (one of which is made of chemically resistant natural rubber), a respirator, two spare filter canisters, a mask demisting kit, and a can of decontamination powder...
...He has written for the Baltimore Sun, The Nation, and other publications...
...If all precautions are carried out, noted the Ministry for Civilian Defense in a policy paper last year, "at best only twenty-five million Britons will be killed" in an all-out nuclear missile attack on the island...
...From Alconbury near Huntingdon, RF-4 Phantom aircraft gather intelligence over East Germany, and electronic tracking stations at Menwith Hill monitor intelligence satellites that are spying on the Soviet Union...
...The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's revival of The War Game is not idle sensationalism...
...The American military establishment currently maintains its own separate lines of command and control in England, and as military affairs writer Duncan Campbell observes, it is "ready, willing, and equipped to operate entirely on its own, as U.S...
...Although the Conservative Party dismisses the CND as a morality club for the bored, the well-off, and the well-educated, in fact the CND has strong trade union support...
...Air Force keeps twenty-one air bases in use or in reserve, has nine transportation terminals, seventeen weapons dumps and stores, seven nuclear weapons stores, thirty-eight communications facilities, ten intelligence bases, and three radar and sonar surveillance sites...
...The British can also now buy a kit from the Ministry of Civil Defense for between 130 and 200 pounds...
...Here America has set aside 700,000 square feet for nuclear weapons storage...
...Thatcher and the Tories also offer an economic argument for the nuclear buildup...
...military in fond embrace John R. Wennersten Afilm made almost fifteen years ago has been playing of late to large audiences throughout Great Britain...
...The simulated deaths and disfigurements are horrible enough to frighten and enrage most viewers...
...The cruise missiles are high-accuracy 0.15-megaton weapons capable of long flight below radar cover...
...So long as those fantastic SS-20s in the Soviet Union are targeted on Europeans, so long must I have a deterrent to them," Thatcher said in a public address in February...
...The Thatcher government has pledged to spend six billion pounds (about $13 billion) to replace the aging Polaris submarine missile system with new missiles for Trident submarines...
...Although some Conservatives are irate at the government's plans to cut traditional Navy expenditures on personnel and ships and rely instead on the Trident system, many hope that Trident submarines and cruise missiles will enable England to become again the third-ranking military power it was in the late 1940s...
...The United States Government maintains 105 military bases and installations in England with 27,000 armed forces personnel and 31,000 dependents...
...Yet in a BBC poll conducted after a radio program entitled "Who's Afraid of the Bomb...
...All of this is a far cry from the summer of 1948, when the United States asked Britain for permission to allow a thirty-day visit of several B-29 squadrons...
...Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque, a former strategic planner for the Pentagon, who once said, "We fought World War I in Europe, we fought World War II in Europe, and if you dummies will let us, we'll fight World War III in Europe...
...Since 1977, U.S...
...Such a failure is hardly reassuring to the citizens of Cambridge, Newmarket, and Ely in East Anglia, where cruise missiles will be kept in readiness...
...Although the incident was scary enough to prompt British authorities to evacuate the village of Lakenheath, it was not reported in the national press...
...In the past year, paid membership in the organization has jumped from 2,000 to almost 7,000...
...For Tories, thinking dispassionately about nuclear weapons is no easy matter...
...By what process, Labor asks, are the British Isles being turned into a nuclear arsenal and primary target in the event of war...
...Many in England have come to realize, says Frida Knight, head of the Cambridge-based Campaign Against Missile Bases, that "in a country as small as Britain, in the event of war, there is no hiding place...
...Large military expenditures will place an outrageous burden on Britain's already sick economy and, Owen notes, may intensify inflation and divide England into two extreme groups—"the nuclear technology crowd" and the "ap-peasers...
...they are intended to give the United States and Britain the "nuclear punch" to counteract possible Warsaw Pact belligerency...
...Unlike the left, the right wing of Labor, in its current guise as the Social Democratic Party, approves of Polaris submarines, NATO, and the Common Market...
...the things simply crashed into the California scrub land...
...Almost unknowingly, the British people have found themselves in a position where they would be forced to suffer the most horrible consequences of any clash between the Soviet Union and the West...
...By far the most striking American military presence in England is the main nuclear depot at Wellford...
...Secret SR-71 spy planes, which fly three times the speed of sound for penetration of the Warsaw Pact countries, are also located at Mildenhall...
...The British Labor Party has taken a firm stand in favor of nuclear disarmament...
...It is essential, says Leon Brittan, minister of state for the Home Office, that "civil preparedness should be adequate if the credibility of military deterrent strategy is to be maintained...
...The United States Air Force is, in effect, using Britain as its unsinkable aircraft carrier...
...According to Eran Bauer, the ministry's marketing director, the kit has been selling well...
...And Thatcher has readily aligned herself with the Reagan policy of armed readiness...
...The architect of this policy was former NATO Commander Alexander Haig, now U.S...
...The notorious Section 2 of Britain's Official Secrets Act against unauthorized communication or receipt of any official government information of any description depresses enthusiasm for investigative reporting on British military policy...
...The decision to house American-controlled nuclear weapons on British soil and fly them through British air space was apparently made with the agreement of successive cabinets at Whitehall but without the knowledge of Parliament or the public...
...At a time when almost 7,000 British jobs vanish every week, the arms expansion will create employment in such depressed areas as the Vickers shipyards at Barrows, where unemployment has doubled in twelve months...
...In doing so, she has placed England square in the path of nuclear crossfire between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...military involvement in England makes it a prime target for any future atomic war...
...Of particular interest to the British Ministry of Defense is the Swiss procedure for placing all men between twenty and sixty years of age who are not serving in the reserve army in compulsory civil defense training...
...As late as 1979, the main CND rally of the year attracted only 600 at Trafalgar Square in London...
...The government has begun to discuss nuclear war casualties in terms of their being both manageable and tolerable...
...Lately the British government has shown interest in Switzerland's plans for protection against nuclear attack— "sheltered spaces" for 6.3 million—90 per cent—of its citizens...
...Towards this end, the British government has produced a pamphlet called Protect and Survive, a do-it-yourself guide to survival in a nuclear war...
...Fortunately, the bombs did not burn or detonate...
...The prime minister has pointed out that 70 per cent of the revenues used for purchasing the Trident missile system will be spent inside the country...
...And starting in 1983, the British government has agreed to let the United States station 160 Tomahawk cruise missiles at U.S...
...The U.S...
...Yet by far the most telling example of Britain's fond embrace of the American military has been its special relationship with the United States National Security Agency (NSA...
...and British forces have worked hand in glove in NATO military exercises, and Britain subscribes to the American tactic of a first nuclear strike "to convey a decisive escalation of sufficient shock to convincingly persuade the enemy to withdraw...
...Recently, Clive Jenkins gave it the enthusiastic endorsement of his 470,000-member Association of Scientific and Managerial Workers...
...Increases in American military personnel, missile warning radars, and nuclear arms stores are taking place at a rapid rate...
...A major submarine detection system for Britain's western approaches, along with flying war rooms, known oddly enough as "Operation Silk Purse," gives the American military a Strangelovian presence in England...
...Deeper still lies their fear of American abandonment if Britain does not uphold its nuclear defense commitments...
...Other Labour leaders such as Michael Foot and Tony Benn are worried by the fact that the cruise missiles can be fired in time of war without consulting the British government...
...Indeed, at Whitehall as at the White House, it is conventional wisdom that the 1980s and the 1990s will be dangerous decades in which low growth rates and high inflation and unemployment in Western economies will intensify international rivalries...
...The rally was an event of considerable political significance because it represented the.revival of a movement whose activities had an important impact on British public affairs in the early 1960s...
...But even Social Democrat David Owen, former Labor Foreign Secretary, argues that Thatcher's decision to upgrade Britain's Polaris missile system with a new Trident system is foolhardy and dangerous...
...Although NATO members Norway, Turkey, and Denmark have refused categorically to accept John R. Wennersten is an American university professor on leave at Cambridge, England...
...these American-controlled weapons on their soil, the current British government welcomes them...
...The New Statesman has noted that "apartfrom Soviet forces in Eastern Europe and the U.S...
...An additional 2,000 military technicians will be coming to England to run this computer control center...
...in Germany and Japan, no 'other country has such a large foreign military presence...
...Thus the NSA, in the name of American military security, has the power to listen in on virtually any telephone call coming into England...
...Once suppressed by the BBC, The War Game shows what would happen to the English region of Kent in the event of an atomic attack, following the resort to tactical nuclear weapons by U.S./NATO forces fighting in Berlin...
...In the past year, there has been an astonishing rise in attendance at CND rallies...
...The scale of U.S...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that Margaret Thatcher's military policies and linkage with the United States have breathed new life into the nuclear disarmament debate in England...
...There are also similar weapons facilities at Upper Heyford, Bentwaters, Greenham Common, Mildenhall, and Lakenheath...
...Similar support has come from the equally large transport and electrical unions...
...According to Bruce George, Labor Member of Parliament for Walsail South, Thatcher's nuclear weapons policy "appeared to be very much the prerogative of a small group of people...
...Last Valentine's Day, the CND presented to the prime minister a petition bearing half a million quickly gathered signatures and asking for the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Europe...
...Successive cabinets and prime ministers have been subjected to considerable pressure to subscribe to the view that what is good for the United States is good for the United Kingdom...
...interests require...
...The government's nuclear policies have awakened the long dormant Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND...
...At present, the British are spending twenty-two million pounds a year on civil defense, and large increases in this area of the national budget are anticipated...
...seven out of ten Britons said they were more anxious about "the proliferation of nuclear weapons than the state of our industrial relations...
...Secretary of State and one of Thatcher's warmest admirers in Washington...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
