Word: skybolt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last November Secretary of Defense McNamara decided to cancel the development of the Skybolt air-to-ground missile. After making the announcement to the press in early December, McNamara flew to England to explain his decision to British Defense Minister Thorneycroft, who flatly informed McNamara that 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...
Several questions emerge from this sequence of events--questions which the Administration has not even tried to answer. Why, for example, did the Administration not negotiate an agreement with Britain before the announcement to cancel the Skybolt program was made? And then why was the Polaris deal not announced in the same statement which dropped Skybolt, thereby reducing the inevitable insult to Britain and avoiding the period of international recrimination? Why, above all, was de Gaulle given graphic evidence of the fickleness of American commitments, thus further enfeebling NATO? What, in short, possessed the Administration to conduct for three weeks...
...answer, which has been very popular in Britain, maintains that Kennedy deliberately cancelled Skybolt to eliminate Britain from the nuclear club. The period of humiliation was designed, so the theory goes, to forceably impress upon the English, as well as DeGaulle, that the U.S. was running the nuclear armaments show and did not welcome competition. This explanation concurs with statements by both Kennedy and McNamara on the necessity for a "unified NATO command," which is today U.S. command. Enticing as this theory may sound, it does not quite square with the final outcome of the Skybolt affair. For the Polaris...
...second theory seeks to explain the clumsiness and apparent indirection of the U.S. policy from the time McNamara first announced his decision until the Nassau meeting. It maintains that McNamara acted independently of the rest of the Administration. After deciding to cut Skybolt for budgetary and technical reasons, McNamara made the cancellation announcement without having allowed anyone else time to fit his decision into a coherent foreign policy. The Administration's behavior seemed so muddled because it was essentially a reaction to McNamara's fait accompli. The fact that Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy figured nowhere...
...multinational" Polaris force promised by 1968 in place of the Skybolt does not fool many people. Like all other "multinational" NATO programs, it will be under the effective control of the United States...