ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1956 the United Kingdom still seemed not simply a European power or the hub of the Commonwealth but a world power in a more general sense. The next Defence White Paper in February 1969 explicitly stated that political and economic realities reinforced the defence arguments for concentrating Britain's military role on Europe. For de Gaulle, the Nassau agreement was evidence that Britain was not European. Over the years before this agreement, Britain had not co-operated with the other European powers on questions of nuclear strategy and had not shared information. There was disquiet in Federal Germany about proposed reductions in the British Army of the Rhine and haggling, which threatened to become annual, over the German contribution to British military costs. Even so, British governments were not so frightened by 1956 that they refrained from any military action overseas.
