Nassau Agreement

The Nassau Agreement, concluded on 22 December 1962, was a treaty negotiated between President John F. Kennedy for the United States and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan for the United Kingdom. The agreement enabled the UK Polaris programme.

It was the result of a series of meetings by the two leaders over three days in the Bahamas following the US's cancellation of the AGM-48 Skybolt, the planned basis for the UK's entire nuclear deterrent in the 1960s. Under the agreement the US was to provide the UK with a supply of nuclear-capable Polaris missiles (under the terms of the Polaris Sales Agreement), in return for which the UK was to lease the Americans a nuclear submarine base in the Holy Loch, near Glasgow. The agreement was clear that the UK's Polaris missiles were part of a 'multilateral force' within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and could be used independently only when 'supreme national interests' intervened.

Through the 1950s the manned bomber remained the primary method of delivering a nuclear bomb. The UK had maintained a nuclear development program throughout the Post War period, as well as the V bomber force to deliver them. However, the introduction of effective surface-to-air missiles by the Soviet Union in the late 1950s seriously degraded the ability of a bomber force to penetrate Soviet airspace.

The UK initially attempted to address this problem with the Blue Steel stand-off missile and Blue Streak IRBM. Neither weapon was ideal; the Blue Steel was too short-ranged to be truly effective and was difficult to maintain, while the Blue Streak was subject to attack from Soviet bombers as there was little room to hide their silos on the British isles.

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