Word: macmillan
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...strength has been sapped by internal bickering and by the loss of many of its ablest men (Gaitskell, Sir Stafford Cripps, Ernest Bevin, Aneurin Bevan). The feuding has faded, and Labor finds itself in the best shape in years to topple the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. A Gallup poll last week indicated that Labor had a 15½% lead over the Conservatives, the lowest the Tories have been in eleven years in power...
...such a move was wholly unacceptable. During the following week the British press blasted the Kennedy Administration for its tactlessness and infidelity. Stunned government officials, including a large number of M.P.'s, began talking of reprisals and an "agonizing reappraisal" of Anglo-American relations. At Nassau, a hand-wringing Macmillan accepted the U.S.'s viewpoint and received a guarantee for Polaris missiles in lieu of the promised Skybolts...
...quite square with the final outcome of the Skybolt affair. For the Polaris agreement provides the British with a better weapons system than the Skybolt-Vulcan bomber arrangement would have given her. If Kennedy had been determined to deprive England of its nuclear capability he could have refused Macmillan's demands completely...
...wait and formally negotiate a long range agreement with Britain might have forced Kennedy and McNamara to go through the same embarrassing and time-consuming performance that they had undergone the year before. The quickest course was to confront the British government with an unchangeable situation, let Macmillan work himself into a desperate frame of mind, and then present him with Polaris missiles, a gift he accepted with practically no delay...
...Nassau, however, Britian showed that she was not European in this sense at all. Despite the abrupt abandonment of the Skybolt Program, which meant the end of at least semi-independence for the British, Macmillan once again leased the destiny of his country to the United States...