The British government trusted that the United States would continue to share nuclear technology, which it regarded as a joint discovery, but the United States Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) ended technical cooperation. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943, the prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the Quebec Agreement, which merged Tube Alloys with the American Manhattan Project to create a combined British, American and Canadian project. Polaris patrols continued until May 1996, by which time the phased handover to the replacement Trident system had been completed.ĭuring the early part of the Second World War, the UK had a nuclear weapons project, codenamed Tube Alloys. There was controversy when this project became public knowledge in 1980, as it had been kept secret by four successive governments while incurring huge expenditure. To ensure that a credible and independent nuclear deterrent was maintained, the UK developed an improved front end named Chevaline. In the 1970s it was considered that the re-entry vehicles were vulnerable to the Soviet anti-ballistic missile screen concentrated around Moscow. At least one submarine was always on patrol to provide a continuous at-sea deterrent.
They were operated by the Royal Navy, and based at Clyde Naval Base on Scotland's west coast, a few miles from Glasgow. All four boats were operational in December 1969. Construction of the submarines began in 1964, and the first patrol took place in June 1968. The Polaris Sales Agreement provided the formal framework for cooperation. The British Polaris programme was announced in December 1962 following the Nassau Agreement between the US and the UK.
This configuration was later upgraded to carry two warheads hardened against the effects of radiation and nuclear electromagnetic pulse, along with a range of decoys.
Each missile was able to deliver three ET.317 thermonuclear warheads. Polaris itself was an operational system of four Resolution-class ballistic missile submarines, each armed with 16 Polaris A-3 ballistic missiles. Polaris was in service from 1968 to 1996. The United Kingdom's Polaris programme, officially named the British Naval Ballistic Missile System, provided its first submarine-based nuclear weapons system.
A Polaris missile is fired from the submerged ballistic missile submarine HMS Revengeĭeployment of Polaris ballistic missile submarines
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