- LONDON - British intelligence
warned in 1951 that the Americans were planning to wage a "preventative"
atomic war on the Russians the following year with or without the support
of their NATO allies.
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- The director of naval intelligence said the United States
military was convinced that "all-out war against the Soviet Union
was not only inevitable but imminent".
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- Vice-Admiral Eric Longley-Cook went on to say that the
Americans had, accordingly, "gone ahead to prepare for an inevitable
clash of arms with the Soviet Union, 'fixed' for mid or late 1952".
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- Details of the report, and the British concerns that
their ally was about to provoke a third world war, are contained in a new
book by Richard J. Aldrich, professor of politics at Nottingham University.
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- The Hidden Hand says Longley-Cook's report, so secret
that only six copies were produced, was the culmination of two years' tension
in which the Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb, four years
before the earliest NATO intelligence prediction.
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- During that period, a succession of senior British officers
had returned from visits to America expressing alarm over the apparent
conviction among their United States counterparts that they should attack
Russia.
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