The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War

by Peter Hennessy

As Cold War Britain came under the terrifying shadow of nuclear destruction, secret government plans were underway to ensure the survival of a chosen few ... Peter Hennessy's sensational book draws on recently declassified intelligence and war-planning documents, and interviews with key officials, to reveal a chilling behind-the-scenes picture of the corridors of power when the world teetered on the brink of disaster. Who would have gone underground with the Prime Minister in the event of an attack? Where is their secret bunker? Under what circumstances would we retaliate? Where were the Soviets' UK targets thought to be? Whose finger was -- and is -- on the button? And what kind of world would have been left when the dust had settled and 'breakdown' had occurred ...?

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, British Literature, Espionage, War, Military History

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Peter Hennessy is an English historian and academic specialising in the history of government. Since 1992, he has been Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London.

He was born in Edmonton, the youngest child of William G. Hennessy by his marriage to Edith (Wood-Johnson) Hennessy

Hennessy attended the nearby Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School, and on Sundays he went to St Mary Magdalene church, where he was an altar boy. He was educated at St Benedict's School, an independent school in Ealing, West London. When his father's job led the family to move to the Cotswolds, he attended Marling School, a grammar school in Stroud, Gloucestershire. He went on to study at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a BA in 1969 and a PhD in 1990. Hennessy was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard University from 1971 to 1972.

Hennessy went on to work as a journalist during the 1970s and 1980s.
He went on to co-found the Institute of Contemporary British History in 1986.

From 1992 to 2000, Hennessey was professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. From 1994 to 1997, he gave public lectures as Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. From 2001, he has been Attlee professor of contemporary British history at Queen Mary.

Hennessy's analysis of post-war Britain, 'Never Again: Britain 1945–1951', won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1992 and the NCR Book Award in 1993.

Furthermore, his study of Britain in the 1950s and the rise of Harold Macmillan, 'Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s', won the 2007 Orwell Prize for political writing

Hennessy was created a life peer on November 8, 2010.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was considering putting this book into my 'horror' list but it is no fiction, no attempt to assuage real anxieties with fantasy. This is the real thing and if I could give the book six stars, I would.

Peter Hennessy has carved out a niche as the historian who is a 'safe pair of hands' for the quasi-official history of the near-contemporary British State.

However, this is the United Kingdom and not yet a third world dictatorship so 'safe pair of hands' merely means that he will respect continued security concerns. Otherwise he is rigorous, curious, independent-minded and, at the end of the day, humane in his assessments.

The best way forward is to draw some conclusions of our own, bearing in mind that this edition was published a decade ago and much material remained 'under wraps'. You are recommended to go straight to the book for the full and an accurate picture.

The book was published at that key point after the security apparat had begun to wonder what its purpose was now that the Soviet threat had evaporated and before the 'construction' of the part-real and part-invented terrorist threat that now threatens to recreate some of the horrors in this book but in new forms (see below).

Part of the pleasure of the book (if pleasure at its grim story is the right word) lies in the facility of Hennessy's writing and in the element of detective work as he plausibly reconstructs past policy even where documentation remains classified.

Indeed, the reconstruction based on known declassified documentation is so (bluntly) 'scary' that the mind boggles at what was being left behind closed doors (possibly literally in the case of the West Country Command Bunker) and still could not be seen by the people who pay the salaries of these officials, the enemy having long since departed.

There is black humour as well. Many of these highly intelligent officials had no illusions that their constant and expensive war planning was little more than 'pissing in the wind'.

I am left with the image of Her Majesty bobbing away on HMS Britannia in the North Atlantic while her Government sits hours away from extermination, having murdered 8 million Soviet men, women and children in retaliation for the Soviets doing in 12 million of ours.

The idea that 210 (probably less than 150 after traffic hold-ups) officials could command a country of around 30-40million ('surviving'), most of whom would be starving, rootless, irradiated, dying and bitter through regional centres of much the same numbers - let's say 1,500 men and a very few women - is patently ridiculous.

Desperately trying to direct their armed forces into public order control as a de facto military dictatorship with draconian rights to the death penalty (the safeguards would have collapsed on the first regional revolt), the question arises how these people ever contemplated this scenario as a rational possibility.

The only good news today (and probably the reason our Government is so in favour of 'nudge') is that we simply no longer have enough soldiers to hold down the population.

Our police are also unlikely to accept orders to do the sorts of bad things necessity might seem to require - but then we are no longer under the threat of a wave of nuclear bombs that could physically wipe out our industrial capacity within minutes.

And that brings us to another absurdity. The only reason that those bombs were targeted on us was because of our unique role as the Western Alliance's island supply base for the protection of the Continent from the Red hordes.

In other words, think about this, we were targeted because we were the premier supply base and yet the first few minutes of a nuclear exchange would ensure that we could never ever be used as such an asset. Our island would be an irradiated ashen ruin, the symbolic hub of an empire (before we lost it) which would merely remember us on 'Irradiation Day' each year.

Our nuclear capability was created in a series of steps of logic from false assumptions (which we will return to later) as a 'deterrent' but a deterrent related to what? - because the answer is not as simple as it first appears.

Let is pause here to say at once that this monstrous war never took place (self-evidently) so deterrence 'worked' But this deterrence was explicit not only against the Red Hordes (effectively, "attack us tactically and we'll take out 8 million of your people") but against another fact of the Cold War - American lunacy.

That is not too strong a phrase for the really serious worry of the British authorities in the immediate wake of the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire. There was once a critical gap in nuclear capability between the US and the Soviet Union and a genuine fear (attested from multiple evidence) that 'hawks' in America would engage in a pre-emptive war against Moscow.

This was a fear that never went away because American assesments and psychology were always different from British, its interests were global in a more fundamental way and the fear was of brinkmanship by either side in which the first victim would be the United Kingdom as forward supply base.

Naturally, this oversimplifies a situation which changed from year to year (read the book for the detail) but fear of American behaviour at the beginning, when the United Kingdom was still under some great power illusions (held by Ernie Bevin as much as by any Tory), led the country into a deep entanglement with its ally.

That entanglement required our own expensive weaponry with its own consequences - for example, while small European countries built at least some degree of protection for their citizenry, the British population was left wholly exposed because all the money had to go on a massive programme of bomb and delivery development. Contingency planning for anything beyond the survival of the State as military dictatorship was simply not possible.

The situation moves inexorably into nightmare - the determination to try to control the US within a Western alliance which made the UK little more than a target, the need to buy a place at the table with an independent nuclear deterrent that was merely a provocation to destruction in a crisis and which was beyond the country's means, and the fact that a weakening economy and scientific-industrial base meant that this self-destructive white elephant was mostly dependent for its functioning on the US in any case.

At a certain point, the ridiculous position is reached where four nuclear submarines are made available to commit mass murder because the United Kingdom no longer exists.

But there is a second aspect to the story that emerges. This is about the relationship between the Crown and its People which is a story of degradation that has not ended with the end of the Cold War.

This is not to say that the high officials and politicians of the Cold War were not men of the highest intelligence, integrity and goodwill who genuinely placed what they saw as the interests of the nation at the centre of their thinking. If the outcome was absurd, it followed logically from first assumptions and it is the lack of questioning of those assumptions that now looks so tragically startling.

There might be an analogy drawn with the logic of the German war machine in which so many men of 'intelligence, integrity and good will' were engaged to the point of the worst sort of mass murder. There really is, in the end, only the moral difference (admittedly an important one) that the German war machine committed mass murder as part of a war of aggression whereas the British would have committed mass murder only in retaliation for a similar assault - or an accident.

Oh dear! Because an accident of information was always possible and our external security apparat was built up mostly on the need to avoid accidental failures of interpretation and to get good warning - if only to manage the cowboy responses of their main ally.

But the British and German States had this in common - whether for Crown or Kaiser, both had a reified concept of the nation that could contemplate rationally that its population could be thrown on to the poker table as part of the gamble.

The continuity of the State, the safety of the Queen, the preservation of what remained of the Empire, all these were vastly more important than the particular lives, properties and aspirations of the 'subjects' (mark that word) of the Crown. It drove the concept of the State/Empire as something to be preserved by alliance against an offensive ideology but, above all, it drove the construction of the secret state which was secret not only against the enemy but against its own population because of the Communist 'enemy within'.

Again, we should not be too hysterical about this. What Hennessy's researches make clear is that (sometimes for practical reasons) the genuinely civilised high officials of the State alwaysd started by trying to minimise intrusions into private life (only, of course, to see bureaucratic logic extend the machine further by degrees).

The American approach to Communism - a brutal unjust purge of citizens who simply thought differently - was pure politics and such methods were vigorously resisted at the highest political level in the UK. It was understood that real espionage against the British would remain undiscovered except through break-throughs in counter-espionage that no vetting procedure or bugging of King Street would contribute towards.

The discovery of the Cambridge Communist spies came in just that way and I offer the unfashionable view that, given the fact that not knowing what the other side is up to represents the greatest risk of error and accident of interpretation, Philby's supply of 20,000 pages of security material to the Soviets may actually have helped avoid apocalypse, with the only regret that we did not have our own Philbys in Washington and Moscow.

However, as in the logic of the acquisition of armament through to Trident (via the V-Bombers and Polaris) and the huge gamble involved in deterrence for an unprotected population, so the British wartime state that was first constructed by the 'war socialisms' of Lloyd George and then, after a gap, by the Churchill-Attlee Government found itself increasingly paranoid about an 'enemy within'.

The most interesting moment is not the decision to engage in 'positive vetting' which strikes me as reasonable, if appallingly handled in individual cases such as that of Turing (not mentioned in this book), nor the cat-and-mouse with the Communist Party which would have been rounded up and interned long before the bombs started landing.

[Personally, I would have driven straight to the internment camp zone since there is an above-average chance that the Russians might decide not to plant a bomb in the vicinity].

The most interesting moment is when a non-communist part of the population starts to get wind of the scale of the threat to its own existence and to the arrangements made by the elite to hunker down and sit out the bombings. This is the foundation of CND and the distribution of leaflets that pinpointed the 'safe bunkers' making them suddenly useless. The leaflets would have resulted in the Soviet targeting being adjusted accordingly - poetic justice, I say.

There was a rather desperate attempt to keep a lid on public awareness of what was going on and to some extent this was successful, if only because the Soviet threat was, even for socialists, possibly for them more than anyone, a very real concern and fear.

Peter Watkins' disturbing TV film of the aftermath of an attack on Sheffield was kept off the BBC for some years until it could be held back no longer. A strain of doubt set in about the good will of the Government from the mid-1960s though it never attracted a majority.

The handling of student revolts of the 1960s and 1970s and labour action have to be seen in this Cold War context because the difference between the 1950s and the 1980s was the State's belief that it might not, in fact, be able to hold the country in the run-up to a war, let alone in the aftermath.

In short, the Cold War strategy of defiance, secrecy and deterrence was being quietly undermined by the arrival of a different sort of 'enemy within' - not foreign-backed and partially-directed Communists but imperfectly educated (and whose fault was that?) and angry indigenous people.

Fortunately for the Government, the histrionics of the Left and of direct action and genuine fears of Sovietism on the centre-right kept the majority solid if wary but (and we move well beyond the book now) precedents had been set for investigation into the secret state (which are still under way) and for popular resistance to authority.

The book is, therefore, vital reading not only as contemporary history and as an insight into what happens when a delusion of power affects a whole institutional elite but also in helping us to critique what is happening to the State mechanism today and why we should continue to be wary of its claims and its internal logic.

We noted above an important difference between the German and British war machine which may be summarised as a desire for empire compared with a determination to preserve what was left of empire but this no longer applied under the most dangerous man ever to be given control over the State machine - Tony Blair.

The Cold War over by a few years by the time of his arrival in office, adventurism could now be an option. Blair synthesised the German and British models by replacing the desire for empire with a determination to spread 'values', simply replacing the US as collaborative ally for the preservation of empire with a model of inveigling a sympathetic American political class into a forward policy of extending those values and (yet again) 'ensuring Britain's place in the world'.

This aspiration to be a global player is like a drug that affects the British Left more than it does the old British Right which is generally less interested in the world and more interested in simple profit (a much more healthy attitude). The Tory Party has since been 'Blairified'-lite under Cameron and Hague.

Macmillan expressed this well - as referenced by Hennessy - when he mused on whether it might be best just to flog off the family assets (so to speak) and retire on one's wealth but, like all the others, he was trapped into the same path of redirecting massive resources to weapons that could only be used genocidally.

Blair reintroduced an ideology of Great Power status far beyond the capability of the British economy and so reinvigorated the famous 'poodle status' with the US.

This is not electorally daft. A good proportion of the British population are highly delusory about our ability to sustain a global presence and are still locked into militarist imperial imagery from the past. There are also a fair number of jobs involved in various aspects of the so-called military-industrial complex.

Perhaps one might say - "why not, if you can get away with it". But, apart from moral considerations and the sheer absurdity of the cant involved, there are two more fundamental issues that take us back to Hennessy's book.

The first is that the British economy is desperately in need of sustainable investment according to a national plan that takes account of its true destiny - as a solid trading power in the second rank globally but first rank at what it does well. It has a huge population of nearly 80 million for a small island but one that is under-educated, expectant of welfare standards that are not sustainable and increasingly non-competitive.

The 'Great Power' fiction and the excessively close relationship with the US has benefits but it also has costs and the costs of policy are a recurrent theme in Hennessy's book. Back in the day, strategic choices were made solely for cost - a massive wasteful intelligence system and deterrent with no lasting value, say, in preference to a massive house-building programme with full civil defence capability and the sort of industrial investment seen in Germany and Japan.

As we write, the Cameron Government is trying to hang on to Trident despite a desperate lack of funds for investment in innovation. What funds are available are being poured into an electorally important welfare system for an increasingly old and unskilled population.

The other legacy is the 'secret state' itself which has not merely been reinvented for the age of 'terrorism' but has the sinister aspect that it is almost entirely directed (barring 'Al-Qaeda' in collaboration with the Americans) at an 'enemy within' who is not easily identifiable.

The original positive vetting procedures of the 1940s extended themselves into significant MI5 investigations and surveillance of individuals who simply made it known that they did not agree with national policy and were prepared to say so. Within a relatively short period, threats, none of which are foreign-financed, came to include a whole range of direct action activism as well as terrorism arising out of Northern Irish and Islamic issues.

Some of this interest is justified where breaches of the law are involved and certainly where the breaches offer public danger, but we should be aware of the risk of mission creep involving not merely increasingly widespread surveillance and file-keeping but other more sinister developments, all of which have Cold War precedents.

There is also the 'co-operation' with allies where the survival of the collaborating network of regulatory states is placed ahead of the real interests of the inhabitants of those states. The argument that these are democracies stand up less well when, after reading Hennessy, one realises the degree to which the political and bureaucratic elites are in close cahoots on the need to preserve the state and impose order on the population.

As we noted, the Cold War model successively involved internment camps and ultimately military dictatorship (albeit under Cabinet Control which must make the other 79.99m of us feel immensely better) with death penalties.

What Hennessy reveals and which is easily missed is that part of the war plans involved a pre-drafted Emergency Power (Defence) Bill which would have been whipped through the House of Commons and which would effectively have ended all civil rights.

The planning was reminiscent of Hitler's move after the Reichstag Fire. The Bill was recognised not to be passable in peace time so the plan was to deliver it to parliament only when the threat of war was imminent - requiring some fine timing. The document remained secret until it appeared in an MOD file at the PRO in the late 1990s. One wonders what other 'emergency measures' are being readied for a crisis.

We should not be too paranoid. State officials are generally decent men and women and the growing 'whistleblower phenomenon', the reduced number of military and police in the hands of the State, the changing international situation, the emergence of the internet (which clearly worries the Cabinet Office) and a slight increase in political education and awareness all militate against action.

But we should never forget that the State defines the terms of a crisis and that it is now proven to place its own existence ahead of the lives of its subjects for whatever carefully thought out and logical reasons. There is potential for harm.

The Government has a command centre, much more effective than the old West Country bunker, has access to internment camps, and can rely on a relatively uneducated, atomised and easily led majority in the population and on a supine and self-selecting political party of third rate minds where a consensus can be constructed over the heads of the population through Privy Council. You have been warned!

[Bjarke Knudsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

'at the present time it will probably be found that the measures which could be taken in an emergency would be quite inadequate' - JIC assessment of Civil Defence preparations, July 1948.

This one took some time. In more than one sense. Also, it seems that the edition listed on this website is a later one, because the edition I got hold of was just under 200 pages for the "main text", with the rest being appendices etc.

It is an intriguing read, if a bit dense at times. This, however, is hard to avoid given the subject matter. Though it probably helps to have at least some active interest in the history of politics and the machinations of Whitehall if you want to get the most out of this book. At times, I was reminded of the first episode of Yes, Prime Minister and all of its talk of Polaris and "When the Russians come" and so on.

He does a good job of shedding light upon the convoluted processes and the thankless tasks imposed upon the Whitehall political machine by international politics and developments in nuclear armaments - while at the same time giving fair coverage to the history and origins of the CND.

Hennessy has evidently "done his homework", the reference list is exhaustive and comprehensive, but the later chapters seem a bit "spindly" in this edition compared to the early ones. It hasn't scared me off the subject, but I think I need to read something a bit lighter after this to "clear my synapses" a bit.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book shows the acute trade-offs of a democratic state trying to preserve security. A chapter about what the secret services did to prevent communism infiltration in the early days is quite boring. The part about nuclear détente is absolutely fascinating and chilling, showing what the UK government was planning in case of a nuclear attack, in which case most of the country would be devastated and the remaining population trying to escape the radioactive fallout. The author tries to learn the lessons from the Cold War to modern times and the risks of domestic terrorism. A very cool information is that the royal yacht Britannia was not only a pleasure ship for the royal family, but actually the contingent plan for the Queen in case of nuclear Armageddon. It seems now logical that it was decommissioned only after the end of the Cold War.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really interesting topic, and the author clearly knows what's he's writing about, but it's a bit of a slog. The writing style is often challenging to the point of obfuscating the point.
I think a lot of this is due to the subject matter; for example when a new politician comes up in a story, there might be a small paragraph giving full name, job title, history and relationship to the previously mentioned politician. It's probably necessary, but having so much information introduced mid-story makes it difficult to follow what's being described. As a result, I don't think I'd recommend this to anyone looking for a light or easy read.

[Gramarye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hennessy's book is a wealth of analysis of recently declassified documents that centre on the British government's plans for what would happen if World War III actually had come to pass during the Cold War. This topic is always a tricky one for historians to tackle, because too many viewings of Dr Strangelove tend to burn a misleading image in the mind, the image of balding men in suits and cigar-chomping generals sitting round a table in the War Room, looking at the Big Board and listening to some scientist with a German accent talk about mineshaft gaps and having ten women to every man. The Secret State manages to present a story that keeps Strangelove in mind, but also manages to keep the pathetically human element in mind. One's stomach wrenches at the mental image of some unfortunate soul who had joined the Civil Service during WWII -- who might very well have read Classics at Oxford -- trying to come to terms with the very real possibility of leaving his family behind to face nuclear destruction in while he followed the Prime Minister into the Cabinet bunker in the Cotswolds.

The Secret State touches upon a number of fascinating subjects in its 250-odd pages. The Cabinet reaction to the growing atomic rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union is engrossing, particularly the famous statement by Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in 1946 that Britain could not fall behind in the acquisition and development of nuclear weapons -- 'We've got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.' ('A Bloody Union Jack on Top of It' was later the title of a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the subject of Britain's nuclear arsenal.) Hennessy also includes several copies of actual Civil Service documents about planning for nuclear attack, and a series of photographs of his visit to the real Cold War bunker in the Cotswolds -- including a picture of himself going through the turnstile leading down to the shelters. (The plan to evacuate the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet to the bunker was at one point codenamed 'TURNSTILE'.) The anecdote that got a bitter laugh out of me was the proposed plan to save the Queen from the nuclear devastation by putting her on Britannia, the royal yacht, and having it set out to sea until it was safe for her to return...presumably to what was left of her shattered country.

The Secret State made me shiver because looking back on this time period, there's something sad and horrible and terribly futile about the whole era of the high Cold War, something that in my opinion is all too often overshadowed by the image of Peter Sellers attempting to prevent his right arm from giving the Nazi salute.

[Georgia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely interesting subject, especially given the breadth of subjects covered rather than just the policy directly concerned with nuclear weapons. However, rather dense writing style and suffered slightly from an overabundance of large quotations.

[Vasil Kolev · Rating 3 out of 5]

The topic is very interesting, but the book could've done a lot better.

[Steven Batty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary book. A look at the State and Government during the Nuclear Cold War Years. A must read.

[Newfad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep - in many ways - look into the dark abyss and government machinations that might have followed a cold war nuclear confrontation. frightening yet fascinating.

[Ben Dixon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned ch2, unreadable style full of negatives, even after deciphering I was struggling to see what his argument is

[Harry Balden]

needed less lists

[Antony Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Push through the endless lists of Communist Sympathiser organisations in chapter 3, the rest of the book is a great read of Britain's war planning and disaster continuity

[Riley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating and thought-provoking book but one that needed more focus and structure. Chapters 2-8 were absolutely gripping, outlining how the British Government protected itself and planned for nuclear Armageddon, but the introduction and the chapters on modern-day security planning were disappointing. I studied international relations and am familiar with many of the concepts mentioned; yet I could scarcely decipher the point Hennessey was trying to make as he rambled on with quotes from experts, his own comments and historical background. This was also evident in a few of the chapters that lurched from chalk to cheese in parts. A fascinating read and one I would recommend to all interested in mechanics of government and security planning, but it could have been more readable.

[Timothy Olson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Secret State details the UK's nuclear deterrent from the end of WWII, through the Cold War, with a brief excursus on how procedures stood at the time of Tony Blair. An often chilling look at the historical realities (and unrealities) under which cabinet government operated in regard to the Cold War. The UK's justification for acquiring and retaining the bomb, the procedures used to activate the defenses at various points of the UK's history, and details of declassified materials indicating the human toll that nuclear war would take on the UK and also the damage that the UK would be prepared to inflict.

[John Bleasdale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chilling

A great read. Lots of detail. Some of it perhaps a little too wonkish. Still Hennessy is a clear eyed critic as well as historian. The stuff on the nuclear threat was particularly fascinating.

[Peter Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those who wondered just how close the Cold War world really got to a nuclear meltdown, this is fascinating reading. Hennessy weaves his work around the recently declassified papers from 1950s and 1960s Britain, and shows the reader a secret underworld of defence strategists and civil servants uncomfortably aware of what a nuclear war would entail but still conscious that contingency plans had to be made, even for the end of civilisation itself. Frightening, but strangely compelling stuff.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating insight into UK Cold War plans for the continuance of the state following a strategic nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. A chilling peek into a future that never happened. At least, not yet.

[Nandan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about the British plans during cold war should a nuclear war start. Quite a detailed book, but pales in comparison when read immediately after the passionate and one might say path-breaking approach taken by 'A People's History of the United States' by Howard Zinn.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating read, for all the things you know wish you didn't know.

[Graeme Eyre · Rating 1 out of 5]

Have tried to read this book a couple of times but really struggled to get in to it. Gave up eventually.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little dry. But equal parts terrifying and fascinating.

[Adam Selby-Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent second edition, if slightly repetitive at times

[Paul Cooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outstanding. Do read it.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well researched description of the decision-making, policy and implications of the UK's independent nuclear capability 1946-2010. How different could it be today? A sobering thought.

For my liking rather light on the practicalities with a concentration on policy and thinking of the era based on released PRO records. Less detail on the later decades.

Glad I read it. Bought on Amazon second hand. ex library stock.