Existing analyses of early defence reviews are dominated by the impact that economics has had on decision making. John Baylis (1986b, p 443) cited the titles of several books and journal articles on the subject to reinforce what he believed was a commonly held, or conventional, view that a continuous process of contraction and decline was the most apt description of the trajectory of post-Second World War UK defence policy. This historiographic orthodoxy that economic constraints on defence expenditure precipitated the UK’s post-1945 relative decline remains the dominant paradigm. In the academic examinations that followed all the Cold War defence reviews, cutbacks in capability were regularly attributed to the deterioration of the economy, which forced the government of the day into reducing defence expenditure (see Chichester and Wilkinson,1982, pp x– xvi; and Rees, 1989, p 218). For some, even the first consideration of nuclear weapons in the 1957 defence review was influenced by economic factors (see Dorman, 2001c, pp 188– 92). Specifically, Martin Navias (1989, p 408) asserted that ‘[in 1957] nuclear strategic thinking was very much a secondary consideration in a larger formula that sought major financial savings’. Evidence that this thinking endured throughout the Cold War period can be found via both commentators (Healey and Cross, 1969, p 15) and practitioners (Jackson, 1990, pp 3– 22). Revealingly, in 1975, defence secretary Roy Mason (1975, p 218) observed that ‘the imperatives of economics, no matter how illogical this may be, do in fact exercise a commanding influence over the level of the resources which we can devote to defence’.

There are alternative points of view. Recalling the consequence of the UK’s tardy rearmament decision in the 1930s (Dunbabin, 1975), John Slessor recognized the significance of the prevailing economic situation in the 1950s, but sounded the following words of caution: