The Joint Intelligence Bureau

: Economic, Topographic, and Scientific Intelligence for Britain’s Cold War, 1946-1964

Abstract

This thesis examines the British Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB), which, between its creation in 1946 and its end in 1964, gathered, collated and processed topographic, economic, scientific, and atomic intelligence. It did so on an inter-service, national level. The thesis examines the creation of the organisation, in the aftermath of the Second World War, exploring what factors and which people supported the creation of the new agency. It then moves on to examine the work of the JIB in several of its key fields of work, namely topography, economics and monitoring the threat from Soviet nuclear forces, before examining some of the JIB’s international connections and how these contributed to its work. It concludes with an examination of how the JIB begat the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS). It argues that the creation of the JIB was an appropriate response to the need to centralise and retrench in the intelligence machinery after the War, but that the organisation, in essence, represented a compromise between those who wanted to fully centralise military (and military-relevant) intelligence and those who wished to preserve service independence. Over the course of its existence it made important contributions to several key areas of policy – including mapping the Soviet Union for nuclear strike planning, the economic containment of the USSR, as well as China and North Korea during the Korean War, and in monitoring the production of Soviet bombers and missiles – before becoming a central component of the new DIS.

Date of Award	14 Dec 2010
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aberystwyth University
Supervisor	Len Scott (Supervisor) & John Paul Maddrell (Supervisor)