Labour’s postwar history is inescapably linked with the nuclear deterrent.If it weren’t for Labour, Britain wouldn’t have the Bomb. But it is Labour, more than any other party, that has been split and disfigured by battles over the deterrent.
It was Attlee’s government, in 1946, that took the decision to make Britain a nuclear power at all. The cost – coupled with the wounds of war, and a programme of tight fiscal retrenchment – meant that the two economic ministers, Hugh Dalton at the Treasury and Stafford Cripps at the Board of Trade – now BIS – both believed the cost was too high, and that Britain simply couldn’t afford it.
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