In response to my request at a meeting on 18 July, I received on 22 September 1977 a paper by Foreign Office officials on the Future of the British Strategic Nuclear Deterrent. The minutes of a meeting on 17 October describe my personal views as Foreign Secretary very frankly on the Moscow Criterion, the Chevaline programme, Polaris successor systems, cruise missiles and theatre nuclear weapons.

At a meeting called by the Prime Minister on 28 October 1977, with three ministers, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for Defence and myself, we agreed to continue to fund Chevaline despite its considerable cost overrun. I deployed arguments similar to those I had outlined within the Foreign Office on 17 October when I had said that the time to cancel Chevaline was when Labour initially came back into government, saying that it ‘was conceptually misguided and ought to have been abandoned in 1974’. Other arguments were that any decision to cancel would become public and it would be damaging for the Soviet Union to know. We would save a relatively small part of the overall cost. But as part of my prior understanding with the Secretary of State for Defence, Fred Mulley, it was agreed that our going ahead with Chevaline was not a decision to endorse the Moscow Criterion and to underline this a study was commissioned on the continuing validity of the Moscow Criterion. The aim was to submit that study to the Ministers by May 1978.