Whitehall's take on Armageddon

It is appropriate that this book is dedicated to Sir Frank Cooper, who died a few weeks ago. He was of a generation of civil servants that Peter Hennessy admires and whose largely anonymous exploits he chronicles here. This generation returned from the war to build the welfare state, imbued with an ethos of public service and a belief in the possibilities for good government. As a postwar baby, Hennessy benefited from their efforts. It is not for nothing that he is the Attlee Professor at Queen Mary's College.

Hennessy's enthusiasm for the welfare state does not follow through completely to the warfare state that developed in parallel. In retrospect, Britain's cold-war policy can be judged a success, but that was as much the result of judgments made in Washington and Moscow as in London. Policy-makers were often caught between their sense of the limits to British power and a determination to make the most in terms of international influence of whatever power could be mustered. The decision to build Britain's nuclear force, and the accompanying rationale, came about with an almost casual ease, reflecting the country's early association with the technology, its belief that the Soviet Union needed deterring, and a determination not be dependent upon the United States. The presumption of an ideologically-driven, belligerent opponent with a talent for recruiting well-bred spies, reinforced the tendency to keep policy deliberations and operational responsibilities confined to a secure few. The inescapable possibility of a deterrence failure and a consequential nuclear war led to a need for some serious, if in the end unconvincing, preparations for civil defence.

These strategic imperatives were internalised by Whitehall, and Labour as well as Tory governments followed their logic. Hennessy shows that those responsible were not in the grip of the paranoid fantasies often assumed to be the hallmark of the cold warrior.

The reports that came back from the security service about the activities of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, investigated in case it was succumbing to communist influence, were not caricatures but fair representations of the movement. The civil servants were confident that by employing dispassionate reasoning they would find ways to maintain some control over pressures that might lead to the ultimate in destructive irrationality. It was only as they imagined how they might cope in the event of nuclear war that their analytical powers began to fail. In the early Sixties, complex but barely credible schemes were designed to sustain the governmental machine in such circumstances. Hennessy describes one attempt at a method to keep in touch with a prime minister on the road in the event of Armageddon that relied on the AA network.

Quoting liberally from recently declassified documents, Hennessy brings these tortured deliberations to life. He may be filling in the details of a story that is well known, and describes few of the Whitehall battles that led to the policies he describes, but few can match him when it comes to recreating the cast of mind and the thought patterns of the old establishment. He enjoys their detached, terse prose and his enthusiasm is infectious as he brings boring memoranda to life, even when they deal with topics such as the loss of a fifth of the population in the first Soviet salvos or the establishment of regional seats of government. More contemporary documents elude him: it would be fascinating to read Tony Blair's handwritten letter to Trident commanders to be opened only in the event that the country they sought to defend had been turned to rubble.

The enthusiasm can be traced back to Hennessy's journalistic past, when he challenged official secrecy, so that he now delights in finding documents that were never meant for his eyes, even if the document is not revealing much that is new. The book opens with a description of how he stumbled across a 1965 minute which indicated that, up to this point, nobody had thought to provide Buckingham Palace with the War Book that provided the information on the procedures to be followed during the transition to war.

Although the War Book is still classified, he found in a longhand draft the key details to be transmitted to the Queen, which in turn describes the measures that would need to be taken as the situation deteriorated. If her prime minister still has to write a contingency note for submarine commanders, presumably Her Majesty still has at hand a jubilee version of the War Book.

? Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies at King's College, London.