Polaris: Submarines, Missiles, the US Navy and the Royal Navy

366 pages

Capt Jeremy Stocker

John Boyes has previously written about the Blue Streak and Thor missiles, so Polaris is a natural choice for his latest work. To cover the full 40-year story of Polaris from both US and UK perspectives in just 300 pages of text is ambitious, especially as the book gets to page 70 before going beyond early background material. The US Navy’s early experiments with the German V-2 and, later, with cruise missiles are competently covered though Boyes relies almost entirely on secondary sources and has done little original research in the US.

He then moves on to the early history of Polaris’s development. There’s plenty of interest here but without citing much by way of original sources, it’s hard to know how accurate Boyes’s statements are. For the general reader, this may not matter but this reviewer would like to see fewer anecdotes and more hard evidence.

It’s the UK angle that will be of most interest to NR members who will, I’m afraid, be disappointed. A chapter on the Holy Loch agreement which saw the stationing of US SSBNs on the Clyde contains observations about Edwina Mountbatten’s political sympathies and John F Kennedy’s sartorial style. Of no more relevance is a brief account of a 1981 collision between the USS George Washington and a Japanese freighter in the Pacific. There’s plenty of detail about the USN’s presence in the Holy Loch, but only a superficial coverage of the bigger political and strategic issues involved.

Boyes then turns back to the US to consider the development of Polaris’s successor, Poseidon. Some of this is of UK interest as the chapter includes the early development work on a penetration aids project called Antelope. This eventually led to the UK’s Chevaline system.

We’re over halfway through the book before we get to the RN’s acquisition of Polaris. This story has already been well told by Richard Moore’s The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons (2001), Peter Hennessey and James Jinks’ The Silent Deep (2015) and Volume II of Matthew Jones’s Official History (2017). All of these are better researched and, consequently, more authoritative. There’s a wealth of material available in the National Archives at Kew which Boyes has made comparatively little use of. The RN’s (and especially Mountbatten’s) interest in Polaris dated back to as early as 1957 and the possibility that it might be the right answer for the UK was exposed to Ministers in 1958. Boyes has not really got to grips with this early history, nor the ‘back-channel’ correspondence between Mountbatten and his USN opposite number Arleigh Burke.

Boyes’s technical interest means he’s on better ground in discussing the Resolution-class submarines, though there’s nothing new here that others haven’t already covered. He continues to make sparing use of primary sources and entirely overlooks Ministry of Defence papers, which is where a lot of the most important material is to be found. To be fair, he is aware of issues like the cancellation of the fifth boat and subsequent proposals to station Polaris East of Suez but could say more about these rather than (sometimes inaccurate) asides. For example, there was never any question of the fifth SSBN being called Churchill as the boat was cancelled prior to the great man’s death.

A later chapter on Chevaline (the Polaris Improvement Programme) is most interesting for its detailed drawings of the system, though Boyd doesn’t say where he got them from. Again, his account, though fine as far as it goes, is limited by the paucity of his sources. A better place to go, apart from the works already cited, is the Royal Aeronautical Society’s conference proceedings on the topic from 2004.

This is an unbalanced and poorly researched book which makes more use of press cuttings than it does official sources or the established secondary works – despite most of the latter appearing in the Bibliography. To do justice to the subject from both American and British standpoints would require a much more substantial work. It’s probably fine for the general reader – though I’m not sure who that would be – but for anyone with either a professional or historical interest there’s already much better available.