Word: skybolt
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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...
...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...
...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...
...flanked the U.S. on the "right," just as the British have flanked us on the "left." From the French viewpoint there was grave concern when Khrushchev, during the Cube missiles crisis, opened a private pipeline which bypassed the Western allies and went straight to Kennedy. Now Kennedy, after dropping Skybolt without informing the British, is putting through the same pipeline a test ban treaty which the French don't like and on which they are not being consulted. Under these circumstances, de Gaulle may well want to conduct an independent foreign policy. But his differences with the U.S. take...