Le rôle de la dissuasion nucléaire dans les relations internationales durant la Guerre Froide : l’impact des rencontres entre John F. Kennedy et Harold Macmillan de 1961 à 1963 sur la coopération entre les États-Unis et le Royaume-Uni et le projet de force atomique multilatérale de moyenne portée de l’OTAN

This dissertation inserts itself in the context of the study of the history of relations between the United Kingdom and the United States, particularly in the nuclear field. During the Second World War, the Quebec Agreement signed on August 19, 1943 by Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt formally created the joint Manhattan Project from the British Tube Alloys program, initiated in 1939, thus marking the beginning of nuclear cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom. American and British scientists achieved their final goal by developing the first atomic bomb, tested on July 16, 1945 during the Trinity test in Alamogordo (New Mexico), giving the United States the status of the first nuclear power in the world. In their wake, at the end of the Second World War, the United Kingdom considered itself to be the “second atomic power”, a nuclear power status which would allow it to retain a certain influence on the international scene. In this era sometimes referred to as the first nuclear age, having a weapon as destructive as the atomic bomb at the heart of a national deterrent force was the sine qua non condition for creating a stable international system and preserving peace, with the ultimate goal of avoiding a new world war in Europe. On October 3, 1952, during the first independent British nuclear test, Operation “Hurricane”, carried out in Australia in the Monte Bello Islands, the United States was already a step ahead of the United Kingdom in having succeeded in creating a nuclear weapon. quite different, the hydrogen bomb (the H bomb, nuclear fusion weapon). It was also during this period that the doctrines for the use of nuclear forces evolved profoundly. It therefore appears obvious that nuclear cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom had to be built around different events and changes in conceptual paradigms between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. This work will cover the years 1960 to 1963, in order to highlight two of the critical events of the Cold War, namely the Berlin Crisis (1961) and the Cuban Crisis (1962), whose impact on the development of ties in the nuclear field between the United States and the United Kingdom will be examined in detail. This work will focus on the immediate repercussions of the Nassau Accords in December 1962. This research work is based around different archival funds bringing together government documents dated between 1959 and 1964. The documents on which this research is based come for the majority from the digitized collection and now available online from the British National Archives, more particularly from the archives of the Macmillan Cabinet Papers 1957-1963. This collection contains exchanges of correspondence between Harold Macmillan and John F. Kennedy as well as with their respective ambassadors, ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs, but also letters addressed to Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer and Nikita Khrushchev. Also included are reports of bilateral negotiations, minutes of British cabinet meetings and their conclusions, as well as reports and white papers on the Defense of the United Kingdom. Also included in this work are extracts of documents from the NATO online archives as well as the Diplomatic Archives Centre of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in La Courneuve. Finally, given that this work focuses on the Anglo-American relationship, it was necessary to have access to American sources. Therefore, I consulted the American National Archives, the national security archives, more particularly the collection of the documentation project “The Nuclear Vault” available online, and finally the John F. Kennedy Library, mainly for iconographic purposes. For all these reasons, it is important to ask how the UK and US arrived at the Nassau Accords of December 1962.

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