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MLF - Kennedy Administration

In 1960, UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was forced to cancel work on two missile systems. Needing something to take their place, he reached an agreement with Eisenhower to buy the American Skybolt. By 1962 the question was whether the switch of horses from Skybolt to Polaris would upset the principal allies. Britain had a powerful bomber force which was important strategically, particularly because of its location in England.

There was a danger that some would think that cutting off the Skybolt was an effort to cut off the British national deterrent. On 07 November 1962 McNamara abandoned Skybolt. Many individuals around Kennedy wanted to use the cancellation of Skybolt to force the British to give up their independent nuclear deterrent. George W. Ball, undersecretary of state, believed the decision to continue to help the British maintain a nuclear deterrent was unwise and contrary to the best interests of American policy.

At the Nassau summit on December 19, 1962, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that Skybolt would be safe to carry and would be an effective deterrent, but would have low reliability — something on the order of twenty to thirty percent operational reliability. McNamara stated that this was the most complex system the US had yet attempted. He pointed out that an error of one foot per second meant an error of one thousand feet at target.

The US sought work out a solution in regard to Polaris which would move Europe away from national deterrents. But the other European states did not want the multilateral force — the British and French were opposed, the Italians uninterested, and the Germans, even if presently favorably inclined, would probably change their opinion once they studied the proposal and realized how little it offered them.

At his press conference on 14 January 1963, de Gaulle rejected British entry into the Common Market and French participation in the multilateral force.

After the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, leaders of both states hoped that other, more comprehensive agreements on arms control would be forthcoming. Given the excessive costs involved in the development and deployment of new and more technologically advanced nuclear weapons, both powers had an interest in negotiating agreements that would help to slow the pace of the arms race and limit competition in strategic weapons development.

US negotiators worked to strike a delicate balance between the interest in preventing further transfer of the technology that it shared with the Soviet Union and the desire to strengthen its NATO allies by giving several Western European nations some measure of control over nuclear weapons.