“Super Mac’s” finger on the UK’s nuclear button

I have just read a review of Peter Hennessy’s latest book, Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties. Hennessy is perhaps the most acute historian of modern Britain of our times. During the period in which his book is set the Prime Minister was Harold Macmillan. The title of his book is taken from a phrase used in Macmillan’s speech in South Africa in 1960, in which “Super Mac” acknowledged that Britain would have to allow its colonies in Africa to become independent states.

I worked with Macmillan in 1980. I was a Vice President of a tiny publishing company, Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, Inc, incorporated in Delaware, with its headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Headquarters” is a rather grandiose term: we were four people in a room on the 12^th floor of the National Press Building at 14^th and F streets. Maryse Rhein, a Swiss national, had worked with me since 1977. Rose Ann Nichols joined us later. She had a military background: her husband Bob was a US army colonel, a psychiatrist by trade. Linda Kraynak was our young office assistant, possessed of a charming southern accent which charmed our male customers.

Pinchas Zuckerman

Macmillan came to the USA in November 1980 to launch The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians at a glamorous event in the Starlight Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. Our guests heard Pinchas Zuckerman play and listened to speeches by the composers Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein. And, of course, Super Mac.

Macmillan with JFK at the White House

When he was Prime Minister, Macmillan was responsible for ordering a nuclear attack in the event of war. In 1962, civil servants had to decide how the Prime Minister could issue the order to launch if he were in his official car when the four minute warning was issued. This was, of course, long before mobile phones. It was decided to give Macmillan’s diver the kind of radio used by the Automobile Association to contact its motorbike mechanics. The driver was then to find the closest public phone box:

Perhaps the kind of phone box the Prime Minister would have used

one of the famous red boxes seen in many tourist photos. Super Mac was then to call his office and give instructions. The civil servants spotted a flaw in this plan: what if neither the driver nor the Prime Minister had the correct change to pay for a call? The solution was to instruct Mr Macmillan to reverse the charges. One suspects that the time taken to radio the driver, for the driver to find the phone box and  for the Prime Minister to reverse the charges might have taken more than the allotted four minutes of warning.

An AA motorbike mechanic in action

By the time I met him, Macmillan’s eyesight was failing and eventually he became almost blind. My friend and colleague, Richard Garnett, who was Macmillan’s editor, told a story of visiting Macmillan at his country estate during the shooting season. He found the former Prime Minister alone with his driver pointing his gun skyward. Richard asked the driver how Super Mac knew when to pull the trigger. The driver explained that he had learned to judge the exact moment to pull the trigger. As the driver told Richard, “I shout fire, he shoots and hits the bugger”.

Slightly mad as the story about the phone box and reversing the charges might seem, I recall paying a visit to an expert in civil defence at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. He told me that the first thing that would happen after a nuclear strike on the USA would be that the Mexicans would loot the country. I left our meeting with an image of vast numbers of Mexicans waiting at the border with their running shoes on ready to start looting.