The Falklands secret
SIR – However important the supply of Israeli weapons may have been to the Galtieri junta in the Falklands War (report, August 24), it was nothing to the boost Argentine capabilities would have been given had another vendor – Britain – succeeded in a massive arms sale just over a decade earlier.
The deal that Denis Healey as defence secretary pushed so hard to achieve (beyond the limits of legality), would have rendered victory for the Falklands Task Force impossible.
The package, put together in the mid-Sixties, would have supplied two Sea Dart frigates, nine Canberra bombers, two Oberon-class attack submarines, a nuclear reactor and, most significantly, given subsequent events, a dozen Harrier GR1 V/STOL fighter-bombers.
Had the Argentine navy possessed the latter aircraft, neither the Royal Navy nor the RAF could have closed Stanley airport to fast jet operations. Confronted with air strikes from two directions, the Task Force’s position would have been tactically untenable.
The deal was thwarted by pure chance. In 1967 a foot-and-mouth epidemic was triggered by a batch of Argentine lamb that infected livestock near Oswestry. Buenos Aires retaliated against the Ministry of Agriculture’s ban on Argentine meat imports by cancelling the arms contract.
Despite Healey’s efforts to strongarm the Cabinet into breaking British and international health legislation, Harold Wilson was persuaded (by Fred Peart, the agriculture minister, and Sir Solly Zuckerman, the Cabinet scientific adviser) to uphold the ban.
As a result, although the sale of the Canberras went through and two Type 42 destroyers were eventually substituted for the frigates, the Task Force did not have to face aircraft as capable as its own, operating at close range rather than from the mainland.
An Argentine pilot, shot down by a Sea Harrier, later lamented that things would have been different had his own air force had an aircraft like that, little realising that the big secret of the Falklands War was that they very nearly did. Hadrian Jeffs Norwich