Word: macmillan
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...McNamara's cost-performance computers and found wanting: as a weapon, McNamara decided, Skybolt was simply not worth the money and effort. His decision made, McNamara flew off to London to tell British Defense Minister Peter Thorneycroft the bad news. McNamara had not reckoned on the reaction. Harold Macmillan's Tory government was already on shaky political ground; its Labor opposition was always easily stirred on nuclear matters, and Macmillan and Britain had based all their long-range nuclear hopes on Skybolt. McNamara's cancellation of the Skybolt project met with furious British protests...
...unshakable, McNamara returned to the U.S., went vacationing in California's High Sierras ("You don't know the feeling you get when you're on top of a mountain"), hopeful that the storm would soon blow over. Instead, it grew worse. President Kennedy agreed to meet Macmillan at Nassau. Kennedy ordered McNamara back from vacation to attend the sessions, which Secretary of State Dean Rusk...
With his own party united behind him, and Labor's ranks demoralized by Leader Hugh Gaitskell's death, Macmillan trounced a no-confidence vote 337-234. Then, in a supreme gesture of self-confidence, Harold Macmillan fielded an Opposition question about the possibility of "the door being reopened to entry into Europe" with the bland retort: "Does the honorable Member mean in this Parliament, or in the next Administration which I hope to form...
After the Cuban crisis, when it became patently clear that there was a wide-open, undefended path through Canada for Soviet bombers, Canadian defense officials began secret nuclear negotiations with the U.S. Diefenbaker still hedged. Returning from a Nassau meeting with British Prime Minister Macmillan and President Kennedy, during which Britain agreed to scrap Skybolt bomber-carried missiles in return for Polaris-armed submarines, Diefenbaker told Parliament that bombers had been ruled obsolete. Therefore, he said, there was no need for Canadian nuclear de fense against a transpolar Russian strike...
CROSSROADS OF POWER (234 pp.)-Sir Lewis Namier-Macmillan...