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Documents

October 9, 1992

Ewan Buchanan to Warwick Morris (UK Embassy Seoul), 'U.S.-ROK Security Consultative Meeting'

A telegram from Ewen Buchanan, an arms control specialist with the FCO, to Warrick Morris, the UK Ambassador to Seoul.

May 6, 1992

David Wright (UK Ambassador in Seoul) to FCO, 'Los Angeles Riots: Korean Reaction'

While geopolitical reconfigurations in the region and issues like arms control and defense posture were of key concern to British observers, American domestic events also fed into British analysis. This report describes South Korean responses to the attacks on Korean-Americans during the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1992

January 26, 1968

"Defence And Oversea Policy Committee: Non-Proliferation: Memorandum By The Minister Of State For Foreign Affairs "

Subsequent to De Gaulle's November 1967 veto of Wilson's EEC application, senior British ministers still saw the European question as having considerable importance. Shortly before his departure from the role of Foreign Secretary, George Brown reported to the Defence and Oversea Policy Committee that the ructions over Article 3 of the NPT would be "particularly awkward for us as potential members of EURATOM and the E.E.C." De Gaulle's second "Non!" only served to postpone Britain's membership of the EEC, as Edward Heath's Conservative government successfully campaigned for accession, which took place in 1973.

December 6, 1983

Letter, Yuri Zhukov, President of the Soviet Peace Committee, to Bruce Kent

In this letter, Zhukov sets out how, from the Soviet perspective, the Soviets have been working towards peace but the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe derailed arms control talks in Geneva and has made the international situation markedly worse. He invites the CND to work with the Soviet Union "to further our common struggle for a nuclear-free Europe."

July 15, 1991

Memorandum of Conversation: Meeting with Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany on July 15, 1991

Bush, Kohl, and others discuss relations with France and France's views of NATO, talks between the US and the USSR over the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), safeguarding the Brazilian rainforest, the Uruguay Round of the GATT, support for economic reforms in the Soviet Union, and US-German relations.

February 1987

First Assessment of the Military Content of the 24th International Wehrkunde Conference from 31 January to 1 February 1987 in Munich

The report looks into the 24th Internationale Wehrkundetagung in Munich focusing on "Perspectives of NATO" and emphasizing a continued NATO's reliance on nuclear weapons and the strategy of flexible response. NATO policymakers did not endorse Egon Bahr's scheme for the creation of a nuclear- and chemical-weapons free zone in Europe.

December 3, 1956

Middle East (Situation): Debated in the Commons Chamber, Monday, 3 December 1956

In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) nationalized the Suez Canal Company, surprising the world. The government of France, in whose capital of Paris the company was headquartered, and the British government, the company’s plurality shareholder, sought to reverse nationalization in court, but failed—even though they clad their case in the language not of imperial self-interest but, rather, of international public interest. The time in which such language was somewhat acceptable, even at home, was passing, and the Suez Crisis played a big part in this final act.

At the same time, the two governments early on after the canal nationalization decided to remove Nasser by force, for re-compensation was not their central concern. France believed Nasser was enabling the FLN, which in 1954 had started Algeria’s War for Independence, and Britain wanted some say in the canal, which had for decades been its worldwide empire’s “swing-door,” as a member of parliament, Anthony Eden (1897-1977), called it in 1929. In August 1956 France began discussing a joint operation with Israel, which wanted Nasser gone, too, and the Red Sea opened for Israel-bound ships. In early October the two were joined by Britain. On the 29th, Israel invaded the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. On the 30th, France and Britain gave Israel and Egypt a 12-hour ultimatum to cease hostilities, or they would intervene—and Anglo-French forces bombed Egyptian forces from the 31st and on November 5-6 occupied the canal’s northern tip. Although a power play, “Operation Musketeer,” like the court case, could not be an open imperial move anymore, then, and did not present itself to the world as such. No matter: especially in colonies and postcolonial countries, people were outraged.

More problematically for France and Britain, Washington was incredulous. This Middle Eastern affair triggered the worst crisis of the 1950s between America’s rising international empire and Europe’s descending empires, and indeed clarified and accelerated that descent. President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) fumed that Prime Ministers Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet (1905-1977) had disregarded his administration’s opposition to military action. Worse, they had deceived him about their intentions. And worst, their attack on Egypt undermined the supreme US tenet: Soviet containment. The Americans were by association tainted by their NATO allies’ imperialist move while the Soviets looked good—on November 5 they offered Egypt troops and threatened to nuke London, Paris, and Tel Aviv—and that although they had just repressed an uprising in Hungary.

On the very day of the ultimatum, October 30, Eisenhower washed his hands of that move on live US television, and the US mission at the UN organized a cease-fire resolution vote in the Security Council. France and Britain vetoed it. Although sharing its European allies’ emotions about Nasser, the US administration withheld critical oil and monetary supplies from them to bring them to heel and withdraw from Egypt—after which, it promised, they would be warmly welcomed back. It ceased most bilateral communications and froze almost all everyday social interactions with its two allies, even cancelling a scheduled visit by Eden. And it badgered its allies at the UN, supporting an Afro-Asian resolution that on November 24 called Israel, Britain, and France to withdraw forthwith. On December 3, the British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd took the floor in the House of Commons.

April 23, 1979

Letter from C.L.G. Mallaby (Arms Control and Disarmament Department) to R.J. Alston (Joint Nuclear Unit), 'South Asia: Nuclear Issues'

This document is a memo from Christopher Mallaby at the FCO's Arms Control and Disarmament Department, to Robert Alston at the Joint Nuclear Unit. In it, Mallaby discusses a prior memo from Alston, as well as a meeting they both had with an official from the US State Department, Thomas Pickering, three days prior.

September 22, 2016

Oral History Interview with John Simpson

Co-founder of the Programme for Promoting Nuclear Non-Proliferation (PPNN) and director of the Mountbatten Centre for International Studies (MCIS

1956

Visit to the United Kingdom of Bulganin and Khrushchev, 19-27 April 1956

UK record of discussions with a Soviet delegation including Bulganin and Khrushchev.

Pagination