webofevil | Impenetrable civil service blather saves world

Soviets befuddled by British civil service

A British civil servant who was a master of government jargon scuppered an audacious Cold War plan by the Soviet Union to remove the US’s nuclear deterrent. Confidential documents from the 1970s, declassified yesterday, reveal how Thomas Brimelow was given the top-secret mission of fudging a devious nuclear treaty that Moscow put before president Richard Nixon's US administration.

Details of Sir Thomas's assignment, codenamed Operation Hullabaloo, show how he used his expert redrafting skills to transform the Soviets' treaty. What started as a bold text designed to persuade the US to sign away the right to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union was reworked into Whitehall jargon.

Moscow's first draft said: “The Soviet Union and the United States undertake the obligation not to use nuclear weapons against each other.” Sir Thomas's redrafted version, which was eventually adopted in the text of the treaty signed by presidents Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in June 1973, says: “They [the US and Soviet Union] will act in such a manner as to prevent the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations, as to avoid military confrontations and as to exclude the outbreak of nuclear war between themselves and between either party and third countries.”

Moscow had sent Washington the draft text in 1972. When the British found out about the proposed treaty, alarm bells began to ring. The fear was that a treaty of this simplicity would remove the US nuclear umbrella over NATO and make it more difficult for Britain to develop its own nuclear weapons.

Henry Kissinger, then the US national security adviser, seemed reluctant to use his own officials and turned instead to the British to draw up Washington’s draft response to Moscow. Sir Thomas, deputy under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office, was the man for the job. He effectively became Dr Kissinger's “desk officer”, according to the documents released by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and wrote a draft that removed all the hidden dangers of the original wording.

Dr Kissinger is quoted at a meeting in March 1973 at the British embassy in Washington as saying that he liked Sir Thomas’s draft. “It was longer, more comprehensive, more vague, gave the impression of conveying more but in fact meant a great deal less ... He thought it unlikely the Americans could have achieved anything so good,” a recorded minute said.