Blue Streak (missile) - Cancellation As A Military Project

Cancellation As A Military Project

Doubts arose as the cost escalated from the first tentative figure of £50m submitted to the Treasury in early 1955, to £300m in late 1959. Its detractors in the civil service claimed that the programme was crawling along when compared with the speed of development in the US and the Soviet Union.

Estimates within the Civil Service for completion of the project ranged from a total spend of £550 million to £1.3 billion, as different ministers were set on either abandoning or continuing the project.

Whitehall opposition to the project grew, and it was eventually cancelled in 1960 on the ostensible grounds that it would be too vulnerable to a first-strike attack. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten had spent considerable effort arguing that the project should be cancelled at once in favour of his Navy being armed with nuclear weapons, capable of pre-emptive strike.

Some considered the cancellation of Blue Streak to be not only a blow to British military-industrial efforts, but also to Commonwealth ally Australia, which had its own vested interest in the project.

The British military transferred its hopes for a strategic nuclear delivery system to the Anglo-American Skybolt missile, before the project's cancellation by the USA as its ICBM program reached maturity. The British instead purchased the Polaris system from the Americans, carried in British-built submarines.