6 - Poseidon

Summary

Most of us saw the role of Poseidon as not different from the role of its predecessors, namely providing an absolutely dependable, reliable deterrent, and most of us were sceptical about the need to dig out hard targets as an essential element of deterrence. We went along with it to the degree necessary in order to keep the program. The nature of democracy … is that you're constantly making compromises with conflicting constituencies, and we had to serve the reigning constituency even if we, sometimes we felt they were a little nutty.

Admiral Wertheim.

Polaris A3 was generally seen as a logical extension of the FBM role established by the A1 and A2 missiles – deterrence by the threat of devastating counter-city retaliation. Although some people had favoured more emphasis on enhancing counterforce capabilities, the A3 payload was clearly ‘disoptimized’ for such a purpose, except against soft, spreadout military targets. SPO had taken care to exploit the success of the Polaris programme and to emphasize continuity and a moderate approach by retaining the Polaris name for the A3, which was almost entirely a new missile. As thoughts turned to the next generation, again this was initially thought of as another Polaris, be it A4, A3A or, as it was later known, B3.

Lockheed, keen to maintain their workload after A3, were first to suggest another generation of Polaris.