Cold War at 30,000 feet: Anglo-American technology controls, aircraft sales, and trading with the enemy at the dawn of the jet age

Aircraft were the most technologically advanced product available for purchase on the world market during the first decades of the Cold War, and more than 80 percent of the world's aircraft were produced in either the United Kingdom or the United States during these years. Aviation exports therefore provided a source of commercial tension within the Anglo-American Special Relationship, as policymakers from both nations struggled to see their own manufacturers capture global markets, in a zero-sum game of export competition. Such sales simultaneously blurred the line separating military and commercial distribution, as even civil airliners (especially the first jets) relied upon technologies desperately sought by communist states. British and American policymakers therefore struggled throughout these years to coordinate a mutually beneficial export regiment, but their divergent financial and military world-views thwarted their bilateral efforts. For the British, imperiled by their post-war financial difficulties but with aspirations of great power status, a liberal export policy ensued, one bent more upon capitalizing on technological leads in the field than in securing strategic technologies. For Washington, ever more zealous in its Cold War fight, security concerns trumped sales made purely for profit. The Anglo-American aviation rivalry therefore illuminated a fundamental divergence within their unique alliance over the best means of countering the communist threat and over the efficacy of trading with totalitarian states. By the 1960s advances in Soviet engineering capabilities prompted Anglo-American policymakers to turn their attention to Communist China. British aircraft sales to Beijing, and Washington's efforts to stop them, reveal each nation's fundamental beliefs concerning the utility technology diffusion in the industrialization of their geopolitical adversaries. By the mid-1960s, nascent detente coupled with domestic commercial need prompted American policymakers to liberalize their own export control policies for civil aircraft, making Washington's export rhetoric and regulations akin to London's of a generation before.