Despite a number of the participants unduly striving to impress the Secretary of State, this second war game, set in highly plausible scenarios which were very professionally briefed, went well and led to the very difficult and daunting decision by the participants to use Trident in a sub-strategic mode. As Conley emerged afterwards into the fresh air of a pleasant sunny spring afternoon with people enjoying their lunch in nearby gardens, the proceedings of the previous three hours seemed chillingly possible, but very surreal.
Meanwhile, Conley had become involved in the arrangements for phasing out Polaris. The latter had been updated in the 1980s under the secretive ‘Chevaline’ programme, where the warhead package incorporated a range of decoys to enable penetration of the Moscow anti-ballistic missile defences. This was an ingenious system which involved a team of talented people who had unique knowledge and expertise in the physics and engineering of ballistic flight. Because of Trident’s much greater capability, there was no future requirement for the decoy package and the team was being disbanded. In the process of attending meetings to wrap up the programme, Conley came across some members of this very dedicated and committed group of mathematicians and engineers. ‘Most were destined for early retirement, looking forward to golf or tending their roses — such a sad waste of talent and skill.’
In June 1996, in the absence of apparent interest from anyone else in the MoD, Conley sent a message to the prime minister’s office, informing him that as the last Polaris patrol had been completed, and as two Trident submarines were fully operational, the scrapping of the Polaris weapon system would commence. It seemed to him that times had markedly changed from the heady days of 1967 when he arrived at the Clyde Submarine Base in its final phases of construction to be able to support and base HMS Resolution, in an era when the nuclear deterrent was very much at the forefront of the nation’s attention and interest.
Since the 1950s the United Kingdom has enjoyed very close links with the United States in all aspect of nuclear weapons technology. As part of this relationship, the British Nuclear Policy Directorate and its Pentagon equivalent met twice yearly to discuss a wide range of issues, the venue alternating in each country. These talks were always frank and forthcoming with few, if any, security classification constraints. However, Conley got the impression that the Americans did not always put their best and most talented people into the field of nuclear policy, despite the fact that the United States’ team was led by a very impressive senior civil servant named Frank Miller, who clearly had a wealth of experience, coupled with an excellent intellect and the ability to think laterally. Moreover, he was a great friend of the British and a supporter of its nuclear weapons programme. The United States continued to possess a ‘triad’ of nuclear weaponry, submarine-launched missiles, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombs delivered by aircraft. However, the START I nuclear weapons treaty limitations, which constrained the number of warheads and delivery platforms on each side, were beginning to bite. Although the United States Navy’s SSBNs were considered to be the ultimate deterrent, under the provisions of the treaty their numbers were being reduced by four to fourteen. For the ambitious and talented American naval officer, the nuclear programme, in long-term contraction, was not seen as a desirable posting.
These talks, normally spread over two or three days, included visits to each country’s nuclear weapons facilities or bases and involved a social gathering aimed at providing a unique cultural experience to the visiting delegation: a visit to Wimbledon greyhound racing and a junior league baseball match featured as events during Conley’s time with the directorate. Whilst the British range of facilities of interest was very limited, in America there was plenty to see in their bases or nuclear weapons laboratories.
One of the series of talks Conley took part in incorporated tours of the Los Alamos and the Sandia laboratories, both facilities in New Mexico, the first of which had seen the development of the first atomic bombs. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (finally adopted by the United Nations in 1996), which prohibited the detonation of nuclear weapons either in the atmosphere or underground, was engendering the twin challenges of ensuring that existing stocks of warheads remained reliable, and that the capability of developing new warhead designs was retained. Accordingly, the Americans had started putting resources into these areas. At Los Alamos the British delegation were shown round a very ambitious and costly facility which enabled the sequence of the conventional trigger explosion in a nuclear device to be recorded to very fine degrees of accuracy. This was complemented by a presentation by a physicist explaining the concept of the National Ignition Facility which, by using high energy lasers, would enable experiments to be achieved examining the complexity of nuclear fusion — turning an atomic detonation into a much more powerful nuclear explosion. This controversial facility in terms of value was to become operational in 2009 at a cost of several billion dollars, but it would ensure the maintenance of a baseline of expertise in nuclear weapon design. Such facilities put into context the relatively small scale of the British nuclear weapons maintenance programme.
The lecturing physicist also presented a large number of viewgraphs, the content of which was mostly incomprehensible to the British visitors. This contrasted with the clarity of a talk the following day about nuclear warhead design delivered by a Chinese-American scientist, Wen Ho Lee. Remarkably, a few years later he was arrested by the FBI on allegations of providing nuclear weapons design information to China; in the event these charges were never proven and he was released.
On completion of their visit to Los Alamos, the British party travelled by road through the New Mexico desert to Sandia Laboratory, which was of specific interest in that it provided support to testing and ensuring the reliability of the Trident warhead fusing and detonation components supplied to the Royal Navy. However, perhaps of most interest at Sandia was an insight into the ongoing American programme aimed at improving the safety and security of former Soviet nuclear weapons and materials, thus reducing the risk of unguarded proliferation. This programme included helping former Soviet republics destroy their nuclear weapons delivery vehicles. In a related effort, the United States and Russia had agreed to co-operate in converting highly enriched uranium from former Soviet weapons into reactor fuel for possible sale to the United States. It was a surprise for the visitors to learn that the United Kingdom had provided financial support to the security element of the programme, but even more remarkable for them was viewing real-time images of nuclear warheads in a Russian storage facility, where the Americans had set up surveillance cameras as part of the nuclear weapons security enhancement initiative.
All this was a very different scenario to the confrontation and abrasive relationships of the Cold War. Indeed, in an illustration of changed times, whilst being given a tour of the facilities in the Trident Base, in Kings Bay, Georgia, Conley observed his hosts to be concerned over something. Once the tour was over, it was explained by an American officer that a Russian START inspection delegation was about thirty minutes ahead on a similar tour route, and there was concern that the two sets of visitors would get mixed up. Asked about any problems with the Russian delegations, the response was that they tended to quickly empty the minibars in their US paid-for hotels and accordingly because of the horrendous hotel bills incurred, use of this facility had been banned.