... Many parties were involved and Charles was unable to get the project stopped although in due course it was abandoned. His letter to The Times of 7 April 1951 not only sums up the story but reveals his sense of humour as well:
'Sir—Readers of The Times of 29 March vlll have been amused by Lord Mountbatten's story of Pykrete, but they may not know that this story, like many comedies, had a serious side. The stimulus of the war brought out the inventive genius of our race with full force. Not unnaturally, some of the ideas put forward lacked the elements of soundness desirable before our scarce man-power should have been dlverted to thcir development. One such idea was to build an aircraft-carrier out of ice, big enough to take a large part of the Royal Air Force down to an unprotected part of the French coast to cover a first landing on the Continent. Its size was to be five to ten million tons and of a draught of about 125 ft. It was to be externally insulated and fitted with a refrigerating plant equal in power to the Battersea power station, and also would be self-propelled.
'This idea, the code name of which was HABAKKUK, would have gone the way of most of its type, if for no other reason than the fact that ice was about one hundred times weaker than that required simply to prevent the break-up of such a structure in the Atlantic swell. Unfortunately, it was found that the strength could be increased twenty times by incorporating in the water, before it was frozen, a high concentration of the wood pulp that is used for making newsprint. This material became known as Pykrete and in addition to its strength had the amusing and spectacular properties described by Lord Mountbatten. The tragedy is that these demonstrations sold what was patently an absurd scheme at a very high level and resulted in the diversion of some millions of man-hours of allied effort before the scheme was quietly allowed to die by our American friends. Serious though this loss was, our language became the richer. For the remainder of the war the "micro-habakkuk" became the measure of unsoundness of certain inventions, the "micro-" being introduced to avoid decimals.