A Historical Sensibility

Sir Michael Howard and The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1958–2019

Michael Howard, Benjamin Rhode, Benjamin Rhode

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000075465
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Sicurezza nazionale

With the death of Professor Sir Michael Howard, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) lost not only its president emeritus but the last of its founders and intellectual parents. The foremost military historian of his generation, Sir Michael embodied and epitomised a historical sensibility that informed all his writing. He will forever remain an icon not only for historians, but for all those who acknowledge the indispensability of history and the historical sensibility for any true understanding of present events.

In tribute to Sir Michael and in celebration of his life and work, this Adelphi book collects a selection of his remarks and writings for IISS publications over six decades, as well as previously unprinted material. Through this collection, these works will reach a new generation of readers and be made more accessible to those fortunate enough to have read them already. They illustrate Sir Michael's role in the Institute's creation and his abiding presence in its evolving intellectual life, and serve as a historical document, tracing the development of strategic thought and preoccupations from the 1950s to the recent past. In addition to their historical value, Sir Michael's conclusions retain their immediacy and power. This book is therefore of direct relevance to anyone interested in contemporary events: whether the professional analyst, the student of international relations or the general reader.

CHAPTER ONE

An interview with Sir Michael Howard

This interview was conducted by Dr Dana Allin, IISS Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs and Editor of Survival, at Sir Michael’s home in December 2017. It was organised by Hilary Morris, then the IISS Librarian and archivist. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Dana Allin: The [Institute] came out of the Brighton Conference [of 1957]. [What role did you play in organising it?]

Michael Howard: I was not an immediate organiser [of the conference] but I belonged to one of the groups which organised it. There were three groups who were vaguely conscious of one another’s existence and to some extent overlapped.

There was the group at Chatham House, which consisted primarily of Denis Healey, Richard Goold-Adams, Admiral Sir Anthony Buzzard – they were the major figures, and they had a study group of their own, looking into the problems of nuclear weapons. The leading figure there, in terms of thinking, was Denis Healey.

It overlapped with the second group, which was organised by the Council of Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), of whom the leading figure was the Bishop of Chichester [George] Bell, who was the leading churchman concerned about nuclear weapons, as he had been concerned about bombing during the [Second World War]. The actual bureaucrat connected with that was someone called Sir Kenneth Grubb, who was the chairman of the British end of the CCIA, and Alan Booth was the secretary. They were the people, I think, who got the Brighton Conference together.

There was the third group, which is where I came in to some extent, which was called ‘the Military Commentators Circle’, which was a dining club, got together by Basil Liddell Hart, consisting largely of the military correspondents in London at the time and a number of senior retired officers who were interested in the future of war in general. I was brought into that by Liddell Hart, who had got interested in what I had been writing, which was mainly book reviews about the whole question. The people who did the main organisation [for the conference] were Alan Booth for the CCIA, and Anthony Buzzard from Chatham House.

When we got together [at Brighton] – and this I have described very fully in my own memoirs [Michael Howard, Captain Professor (2006)] – we were divided into groups. I was in the junior group, which was not looking at any of the big subjects but was looking at the interesting questions of ‘Where do we go from here? What do we do?’ I found myself elected to the chair of that group. Modesty forbids as to why I should have been the chair, but the chair’s a very good place to be if you have to be in anything! We did have, in our group, the idea that whatever we decide here about the way the world should be governed, we must have some kind of organisation which will carry things on, and that was then accepted by the conference as a whole.

The conference set up something called, at that time, I think, the Brighton Conference Association, whose main job was to continue to keep this question afloat and circulating and being discussed: a sort of mini-Chatham House, was the way we looked at it.

But the main thing was to get some money! The main person who had their fingers on the money was Denis Healey. Denis Healey was vitally important in getting things moving, because he got together with the Ford Foundation Secretary Shep Stone. [Healey asked for] a couple of thousand dollars just to sort of keep things going, and Shep Stone said ‘well I’m sorry, we can’t do that - we don’t do anything less than twenty thousand dollars, but you’ll have twenty thousand dollars left’. We agreed that we should use the money to get the thing established as a proper organisation, and then see.

First thing then, was to find a director, and the obvious man was Alastair Buchan, who was not only the leading defence correspondent for The Observer, but had also spent the last year in Washington and he knew what was going on there, and he knew all the people who were interested [in these questions] in the States, and they were the people who it was important to get over.

So, phase one was to have a conference which would bring over all the American pundits to tell us what they were doing and why they were doing it, and really to start interesting people in England about it. [The Institute] was, at that time, a truly English affair, and we had the money to run it as an English affair for three years. If at the end of that we hadn’t achieved anything, then no more money. If we had achieved anything, then the Ford Foundation said they’d be interested in giving more money and it would become international after that.

DA: So, it was the Ford Foundation who sort of gave the impulse to the internationalisation [of the Institute]?

MH: That’s right. So, we did two things: we organised conferences, and we set up this little journal called Survival, which was simply getting together all the articles on the whole question of nuclear weapons and publishing them separately, and that was why it was called Survival and continues to be.

Well, we had a couple of conferences. The first one was at Oxford, where all the pundits about nuclear affairs introduced themselves to one another. And a number of those were from the United States who had previously been not on speaking terms with one another – which we discovered was a normal situation with American pundits – but they came over and met one another, and talked to one another, and talked to us, and got ideas floating. That was fascinating, and that produced our first book [Alastair Buchan, NATO in the 1960s (1960)], which Alastair Buchan edited, about basically, extended deterrence: how effectively could American nuclear weapons defend Western Europe, and should Western Europeans have their own nuclear weapons?

The second conference which was about arms control and disarmament, and that led to Hedley Bull’s book [The control of the arms race: Disarmament and arms control in the missile age (1961)], and that had a terrific effect – not so much on statesmen but on academics, because it really changed the whole thinking of academics gradually about international relations and international affairs, and what could and could not be done by normal states. It was an attack on total and complete disarmament.

DA: [And it instead proposed the] idea of arms control.

MH: Yes.

DA: Until that moment – in fact, even going back to the famous 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report – there was a lot of immediate utopian reaction to the atomic weapon …

MH: Yes. In his book, Hedley Bull said: forget about disarmament. Disarmament is irrelevant and counterproductive. Think about arms control. [That book was] the most important, long-term influence which we had during our first few years, because it extended so far beyond the whole rather narrow question of nuclear weapons.

It was three years of pretty hard work. [We had] set up Alastair as the director, and found an excellent secretary, and a couple of wonderful girls, who ran the whole thing between them – there’s always wonderful girls around who run things!

We then said, okay, we need more money and so, okay, we will go international. We knew we were going to have to go international anyhow, so we did, and we set up an international council. Initially we had a [British] President, it then being a purely British institute: Clement Atlee, who represented, as it were, the sane branch of the left as he always had. That was where the interest lay, [not with] the conservatives who disapproved of the whole thing, and the left who thought total abolition [of nuclear weapons] was the only thing. [Atlee] actually was a good, sane and solid figure.

When we went international, we then had to look for an international president, and the obvious person was the Prime Minister of Canada, [Lester B.] ‘Mike’ Pearson. He was the obvious person, because Alastair Buchan was himself the son of John Buchan, who had been the [Governor-General] in Canada, and brought up Alastair as being half-Canadian anyway. This was in the immediate aftermath of the Suez [Crisis of 1956], where Mike Pearson was the person who, more than anybody else, somehow rescued the whole mess of the Suez affair, and was therefore, the flavour of the month. So he was a good international president.

When he died, we then get onto the Europeans. We wanted to have a European President, and so one of the – in fact the most distinguished European we got interested – had been Raymond Aron, and Raymond Aron was dragged kicking and screaming and made President [of the IISS] on the condition that he had absolutely no responsibility for doing anything at all…

DA: It’s interesting that you said the obvious initial president was Clement Atlee. Was this, in a sense, an organisation of the centre-left? Were you serious when you said the conservatives were against the whole idea?

MH: Well, I exaggerate a bit. There were a number (as there always are) of very intelligent conservatives, who were interested in the thing, but the driving force did tend to come from the centre-left. But the major figures were not politicians; they were civil servants and military. Civil servants are, as you know, the people who really run the country, or did until recently. We were able to enlist some Foreign Office people, who were particularly prepared to see these ideas floating about – particularly Michael Palliser. One of the things which I take credit for is getting Michael Palliser in – an old army and schoolfriend, and a rising star in the diplomatic service.

DA: Was he with you in Italy [during the Second World War]?

MH: No, he was in North-West France, but I knew him before. I was with him at school, with him at Oxford, and our paths ran parallel for a long time. He was working in the Foreign Office on our behalf, as it were, making sure that the good young diplomats knew about us and came along to our discussions and were able to introduce the whole question of what is practical and what is not practical, who we should talk to in America, who we should talk to in Germany. They were most significant.

And then among the military, a major figure was Air Chief Marshal Jack Slessor – now an almost forgotten figure, but at the time [he] was our top airman. Although he didn’t invent the concept of deterrence, he was writing about it before anybody in America.

Where do the British stand on the question of nuclear weapons? Up until then, and up until the beginning of the foundation of IISS, the whole question was basically an American one. They were the only people who had these things, and they were the only people who were going to be able to use them. In the 1940s, from 1944 until 1950 or so, the whole matter was a purely American one, because the Americans were the only ones who had the bomb, and so for the British – in so far as we thought about it at all, and not very many people did – it was simply a question of our relationship with the United States.

In the beginning of the 1950s two things happened. One was that we acquired our own nuclear weapons, and the other was the transition from nuclear to thermonuclear weapons. That transition was something of vital significance. With purely [fission] weapons, it was possible to regard a nuclear weapon as just a larger kind of bomb. We had destroyed Hiroshima with just one bomb, but we had inflicted far greater damage on Tokyo, with conventional weapons. So to go from one thing to another was not really a change of category at all. With [the first test of a thermonuclear weapon on] Enewetak Atoll, then you are in a different, nightmarish world. And it is then that people started thinking, in this country and elsewhere, about nuclear weapons as a question affecting us. It is then that we start getting CND [the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament]. This was something in the air that was affecting all of us. 1957, which was when the Brighton Conference began, was at the time when the Americans had, I think, declared [their policy of] massive retaliation. And then what do the British do about that with their little bomb? The simultaneous foundation of CND and IISS, not in conscious competition with one another, but two different social groups reacting to what was seen as the innate global problem.

I think it was then that another quest...