ABSTRACT
Broken-backed warfare was described fairly consistently in defence documents of the early to mid-1950s: A guiding principle of the rearmament programme should be to ensure survival in the short opening phase. Thus, building on war time work on the control and diversion of shipping and the inland clearance of cargoes, a great deal of work eventually went into schemes to keep imports flowing in a broken-backed war. The possibility of a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, orders of magnitude more powerful still than the atomic bomb, was known during the war to British scientists, and it was mentioned in discussions during 1945 and 1946 on fissile material requirements and the siting of British reactors. The virtual elimination of a global war role would mean that the ability to sustain the country after thermo-nuclear bombardment would be surrendered, or at least made entirely dependent on the willingness of the US Navy to ensure the import of the necessary supplies.
