ABSTRACT

For the most part, the British policy-making community shared the American political economic analysis of the cold war.5 Like their American counterparts, many British policy-makers perceived western rearmament and the productivity drive as intrinsically linked. For example, Graham Hutton argued in his summing-up of the British productivity mission reports that higher productivity levels would allow Britain to shoulder "... an even larger defence burden" as well as improve its economic position and the living standards of the population.6 After the outbreak of the Korean war, British economic policy-makers initially assumed that continued rapid productivity growth would ease the burden of rearmament on the economy.7 This policy statement acknowledged that renewed rearmament presented a particular challenge to the British government. Since 1945, the British economy had experienced severe labour and skill shortages particularly in the engineering industry. In the absence of unemployment, an expansion of defence production could only be achieved by diverting resources from peace to military production or through improvements in productivity. As a consequence, the Attlee government redoubled its efforts to emphasise the necessity of further productivity growth in order to meet the challenges presented by the intensification of the cold war.