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I would like to thank three anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
By the late 1960s, the British government were concerned about the future of Polaris, Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. The Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, agreed with President Kennedy in 1962 that Britain would buy the submarine-launched ballistic missile, Polaris, from the Americans. 1From 1967 anticipated developments in Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defence led the British to question whether Polaris would be able to reach its targets in the Soviet Union.2To deal with ABM defence, the Americans began to develop what became known as the Poseidon missile, which would have a Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) capability, and also investigated a programme, called Antelope, of improving the front-ends of the existing missiles. 3ABM defence posed particular problems for the small British force. In October 1973, the Conservative government under Edward Heath resolved to improve Polaris not by buying Poseidon, either MIRVed or with its MIRV capability removed, from the Americans, but by concentrating on a programme code-named Super Antelope. Super Antelope had taken concepts from Antelope and tailored them to British requirements. The programme involved hardening the re-entry bodies and adding decoys, and from 1974 it was known as Chevaline. 4
The aim of this article is to examine two broadly political questions: why Heath wanted to upgrade Polaris at all, and why he eventually chose to do so by way of Super Antelope. On the first question, Heath and his predecessor Harold Wilson, Prime Minister 1964-70, could both have decided not to upgrade. Had they chosen not to upgrade, Britain would still have nuclear deterrent, but with a role primarily as part of NATO. The critical issue determining the need to upgrade was the understanding that Britain should have a nuclear deterrent which was seen to be independent. Strategists believed that the credibility of a deterrent with an independent capability rested on its ability to destroy Moscow. As Baylis and others have argued, the 'Moscow criterion' was core to British nuclear thinking in this period. 5There are still limitations to considering this question, as the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) conducted the analyses of...