Between Heaven and Hell

by Alan Rimmer

  The use of the atomic bomb to subjugate Japan quickly and with a minimal loss of American lives was therefore a no-brainer for people like Groves. But by this time the tide of war had turned against Germany and many scientists, who had joined the Manhattan Project because of their fear of the Nazis, were uncomfortable about its use on Japan. To avoid huge loss of civilian life, some suggested the bomb should be exploded harmlessly over Tokyo Bay to demonstrate its power and force Japan to the negotiating table. This was dismissed by President Truman who believed Japan would never capitulate unless forced to. He told the hierarchy at Los Alamos to “get on with it.”

  Groves and his security detail decided to isolate what he called the ‘dissidents’ and excluded many of the scientists from involvement in further development. Penney was most definitely on the side of Groves and appears to have been part of what was called the ‘goon squad’, a group of scientists and security staff charged with investigating the backgrounds of those who objected to using the bomb.

  Michael Moore marked down early on as a possible dissident said: “It’s true I wasn’t very happy about using the atom bomb on a city of defenceless people, and I remember signing a petition got up by some of the other scientists. Even though I wasn’t a very important cog in the scheme of things, the goon squad arrived and put the thumb-screws on me to remove my signature. I refused. I argued that my primary objection was on moral grounds because I was horrified with what the bomb would do to people. But I was also very concerned about the long-term effects. The dangers from fall-out were very well known, even then, but that seemed to have no effect on plans for further bomb development which I knew were in the pipeline.”

  Moore was later sent back to Liverpool, where he was told his skills as a metallurgist were urgently required. It was a far less secretive task than his work in Berkerley and Los Alamos, and Moore always felt he had been sidelined. He was effectively barred from all future work on atomic projects.

  It later turned out the ‘goon squads’ missed their targets completely. Neither Rotblat nor Moore was a security risk. That dubious honour fell to Klaus Fuchs one of of Los Alamos’s most trusted scientists, who succeeded in handing Stalin the complete blueprints of the atomic bomb on a plate.

  The plan to bomb Japan went ahead and Penney was set the task of deciding the height at which the bomb should be exploded to ensure maximum damage. Working alongside him was another British scientist and friend, Ernest Titterton. The two had been close ever since their university days and Penney was said to be mortified when Titterton’s wife, who also worked at Los Alamos, gave birth to a child with spina bifida. Radiation exposure was accepted as being the cause, and it had a sobering effect on those enthusiastic about using the bomb. Penney never said what his thoughts were, but even though he was said to ‘love children more than adults’, he never had any more children, even though he remarried soon after returning from Los Alamos.

  Penney as one of the elite of Los Alamos, joined 51 scientists, engineers and weapons experts who one morning was suddenly not there anymore. One by one they had left in the night; they didn’t even bother to pack. Those left behind of course could guess what had happened: they were the ones chosen to complete the final phase of their work at Los Alamos.

  It had taken just 28 months from the inception of the Manhattan Project to reach this point. It was a remarkable achievement. The 51, known simply as the ‘destination team’ later boarded one of several shiny new B-29 bombers, the first aircraft to have pressurized cabins, and set off for Tinian Island in the Marianas which was to be the launch pad for the nuclear attack on Japan.

  Penney, who wore an American air force uniform at Groves’ insistence, was head of the scientific team building a production line of atomic bombs that were being assembled on Tinian. A rare of picture of him at the time shows him smiling broadly as he sits with his team, dressed in their US Army uniforms, near the production shed.

  Of course only two of the bombs were ever used: Little Boy, which had a uranium core and was dropped on Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the plutonium device used on Nagasaki. But at least a dozen bombs were assembled on Tinian, just in case the Japanese didn’t surrender immediately. (These ‘spares’ were later abandoned and the remains of hundreds of tons of discarded ordnance material litter the crystal clear waters surrounding the island to this day.)

  No British representative was allowed on the first historic flight. On August 6, 1945, at 08.15 am local time, a B-29 Superfortress called the Enola Gay with Colonel Paul Tibbets at the controls dropped the Little Boy uranium bomb on Hiroshima. 100,000 people died. A triumphal announcement was made by President Truman on board the cruiser USS Augusta a short time later.

  Penney’s big moment came on August 9 when he climbed aboard a superfortress called Big Stink, which was the observer aircraft for this mission. The lead B29 was Bock’s Car and carried the Fat Man plutonium bomb destined for Nagasaki. At 11.02 am, the bomb was released and although it exploded a mile off course, 80,000 people perished.

  Penney witnessed the annihilation of the beautiful Japanese port city (known as the Venice of the Orient) with the only other British observer, Group Captain Geoffrey Cheshire VC. Cheshire was horrified by what he witnessed. Later he became a pacifist and a life-long campaigner against nuclear weapons. Penney found the experience less appalling.

  He was not surprised by what he saw, through welder’s goggles in the rear-gunner’s position. He had spent months calculating its probable performance and had given lectures to air crew about what to expect. He knew only too well what would happen to the people of Nagasaki: first there would be the blinding flash with the ‘brightness of a thousand suns.’ Then there would be the huge, roaring sound like an approaching express train accompanied by an immense pressure wave, a howling wind and unbearable heat. He also had a very good idea of what would happen next: the hellish haze of rapidly darkening smoke that would rain lingering death down upon the luckless inhabitants.

  Among those who died that momentous day was a young RAF engineer called Ronald Shaw who was on a “slave labour” detail at the Mitsubishi shipyard a couple of hundred yards from ground zero. He is the only known British victim of the Nagasaki bombing. He had been captured in Indonesia and sent by sea to Japan on the troop transports known as “hell ships”. An allied torpedo sunk the ship, but Shaw survived and he was eventually sent to work in Nagasaki. The few known details of Corporal Shaw’s life show he was an engine fitter at the RAF base at Kalidjati on the island of Java and was captured in Batavia, present day Jakarta, in 1942. After the torpedo attack he was rescued and taken to Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese islands and eventually found himself working in the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki. The force of the atomic bomb caused the entire building to collapse killing Corporal Shaw in the crush of falling masonry.

  Penney doubtless would have been horrified, but by that time he had embraced the “total war” policy now favoured by the allies to bring the carnage to a swift end. He was a patriot with a deep and abiding love of his country. Later as he examined the smouldering ruins of the once great city he vowed to do everything in his power to avoid a British city suffering a similar fate. As he stared into the ashes of Nagasaki, he hoped it would not only end World War II, but perhaps end war itself. After all, what industrial country, knowing the destructive capacity of the atomic bomb, would deliberately embark upon another war in the face of such utter destruction?

  When the Japanese surrendered, Penney was sent to rummage among the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to collect materials which would help to calculate the immense power that had been unleashed. He visited the makeshift hospitals and, with echoes of his grim task during the London blitz, examined the scorched bodies of the dead and barely living. With his task completed Penney returned home to write a detailed report on the blast effects of atomic bombs.

  In summing up the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, General Groves singled out Penney for special praise; h
e was lukewarm about the rest of the British scientific contingent. No doubt his views were coloured by the exposure of Klaus Fuchs as a Russian mole. German-born Fuchs was a Jewish scientist who fled to England when the Nazis rose to power. Groves was furious when only later did he learn that the British had been informed by the Germans prior to the war that Fuchs was a communist. He felt let down by his British allies for not carrying out proper security checks on the scientists chosen to work on the Manhattan Project. Groves vented his spleen in his memoirs: “Since the disclosure of Fuchs’ record, I have never believed that the British made any investigation at all. Certainly, if they had, and had given me the slightest inkling of his background, which they did not, Fuchs would not have been permitted any access to the project.”

  Postwar developments saw the US and the UK locked in discussions on cooperation over nuclear collaboration. The Americans were now reluctant to share their nuclear technology, but the British were insisting their ally adhere to promises made that nuclear know-how would be shared after the war. The Brits were suspicious about American insistence that it could not find the document on which the agreement was drawn. This document, referred to as the Hyde Park aide-memoire, supposedly summarized a conversation between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Hyde Park on September 18, 1944. The Americans said they had no record of the document and was not therefore obliged to share its nuclear secrets with Britain. This intransigence persisted even when Churchill sent a Photostat copy of the agreement to the Americans.

  General Groves, who was in the thick of the negotiations, commented: “While the mutual confidence which had prevailed throughout the war continued, we were completely mystified by the British references to this document. I am sure that on their part the British must have been annoyed by our insistence that we could find no copy of what they considered to be a valid and binding agreement. Where was it? Why had President Roosevelt never told any of us about this highly important document? This still remains a mystery.”

  It was of course convenient for Groves and the rest that Roosevelt wasn’t around anymore to verify the agreement. The confusion was used to renege on the agreement, thus achieving a monopoly on nuclear weapons for the Americans. The Hyde Park aide-memoire eventually turned up in a file of papers pertaining to naval matters. According to Groves: “The misfiling was due, I suppose, to the fact that the paper referred to Tube Alloys, the British code name for the atomic project, and the file clerk must have thought it had something to do with ship boiler tubes.”

  While all this was going on, Penney slipped quietly away to resume his career in academia. But like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Goethe’s poem, he found it impossible to escape the elemental forces he had helped to unleash.

  By this time it was now obvious to the British that America was determined to retain its monopoly over nuclear weapons for as long as possible. And of course the Soviets, who were perceived as the new threat to world peace, were by now throwing everything they had into acquiring its own atomic bomb. Way ahead of the game, American flexed its muscles and carried out a series of atomic tests in the Pacific in the summer of 1946. The British were excluded from this program, except for Penney. Groves thought so highly of him, he invited him to join the scientific team gathered in the Rongelap islands, Polynesia. Penney’s political masters impressed upon him the vital necessity for him to attend; it could an invaluable experience if Britain was to have its own bomb.

  Penney was welcomed back by Groves who allowed him a free rein to examine the arrangements. They were in the command bunker together when the huge atomic bomb was exploded 40-feet below the surface in a lagoon on Bikini atoll. A derelict flotilla of captured World War II Japanese warships was moored nearby to test the effects of the blast. Penney once again deeply impressed the Americans with the novel simplicity of measuring the blast wave using 300 old petrol cans and toothpaste tubes filled with varying amounts of water, strung around the atoll. Groves wasn’t surprised when Penney’s calculations proved to be more accurate than the immensely expensive electronic measuring devices used by the Americans (most of which, in any event, were destroyed by the blast).

  On his return to Britain, Penney stock had now risen so high that he was seconded to take part in the first ever East-West discussions at the United Nations on the control of atomic energy. He was appointed scientific adviser to the British delegation. In a speech he announced that control over atomic energy was only possible provided nations allowed free access to observers. The Soviet Union, in the process of drawing an Iron Curtain across Europe, refused to cooperate.

  In response, the USA decided to draw a curtain across its own scientific discoveries, especially those concerning atomic research. And in a surprise move the McMahon Act was introduced which specifically forbade Britain from a share in atomic secrets, despite the vital part played by British scientists in building the first A-bomb. It was a devastating blow for Britain which now had no choice but to go it alone if it wasn’t to be shut out completely from the world stage. In 1947 Penney reluctantly accepted the post of Chief of Armament Research at the Ministry of Supply (forerunner of today’s Ministry of Defense.) His job description was deliberately ambiguous to give the impression he was involved in conventional weapon research. In truth he had just one brief: “build an atom bomb.”

  BATTLEGROUND BRITAIN

  Britain was in a perilous position in the 1950s. Both America and the Soviet Union were stockpiling atomic bombs at an alarming rate and the only thing preventing mutual destruction was that neither had aircraft with a long enough range to reach the other. But America had an ace in the hole: its heavily fortified air base at Lakenheath in Suffolk, which Britain had allowed them to build, despite the bad blood over the McMahon Act. The US had strike aircraft based at Lakenheath that could deliver A-bombs to Russian soil. The Soviets had no bases close enough for retaliatory action on mainland America. The only place they could effectively strike back at was America’s closest ally, thus making Britain the likely starting point for World War 3.

  The harsh reality galvanized the politicians into action. But building the atomic bomb was an enormous task and a huge drain on the resources of a country virtually bled dry by the ravages of five years of war. Nevertheless two reactors, both capable of producing plutonium, were constructed at enormous cost at Capenhurst near Windscale on the north west coast of Britain. In those days, the Cumbrian coastline between Barrow and Whitehaven was almost as remote as Los Alamos. Just to get there from London took all day and with construction workers arriving from all over the country, the area soon resembled the Klondyke.

  But while Windscale was being built to make the plutonium for the bombs, it was decided to base Britain’s ‘Los Alamos’, the bomb-making facility, at Aldermaston, near Reading in Berkshire. This was a former Ministry of Supply wartime armaments research facility which was not as remote as Cumbria and therefore more accessible for Penney and his staff. Harwell, an old RAF airfield, 60 miles from London was also requisitioned as a base for the scientists who devised the plans for the new super weapon.

  Living accommodation at both centres was basic with many of the newly arrived staying in caravans or converted wartime hangars. The roads were rutted and unpaved, and there was a shortage of everything. Scientists were so short of equipment that some used milk bottles as beakers; the only ‘luxury’ items afforded them were extra milk rations because it was believed this could ward off the harmful effects of radiation.

  Klaus Fuchs was taken on as a section head at Harwell, where all the theoretical work was done. Penney, who was based at Aldermaston, often met with him and the pair collaborated on every aspect of atomic research. It was a huge shock to Penney and his co-workers when in 1949, and against all expectations, the Soviet Union successfully exploded its first atomic bomb.

  Penney was summoned to London for urgent talks as the politicians desperately tried to work out how the Soviets had so comprehensively beaten Britain to the punch. It had be
en thought it would be 1954 and probably later that Russia would have the expertise to build ‘the bomb’, so Penney had some awkward moments explaining the situation to his political masters.

  Meanwhile panic swept America where this sudden development was regarded as a national humiliation. This quickly turned to outrage when Klaus Fuchs, who was critical to the development of Britain’s bomb, was arrested in 1950 for espionage and confessed to being a communist spy. He admitted that while at Los Alamos he had provided the Soviets with the blueprints for the bomb.

  The Americans were furious. Even Penney, the only British scientist with any access to United States nuclear technology was shunned by his erstwhile admirers in America. He was reduced, along with another Los Alamos scientist, the German-born theoretical physicist Rudolf Peierls, to visiting Fuchs regularly in Brixton prison to try to find out what secrets he might still have. It was a frustrating time for Penney.

  Despite the setbacks, the development of Britain’s bomb continued and in early 1951 prime minister Clement Atlee wrote to his Australian counterpart Robert Menzies with a request for Australia to be used as the site for Britain’s first A-bomb. The anglophile Menzies agreed at once and the Monte Bello Islands, a small uninhabited archipelago off Western Australia, was earmarked as the site for the test.

  By 1952, enough plutonium had been produced and the immensely precious and dangerous cargo was conveyed by saloon car to Aldermaston where Penney’s first bomb was being assembled. But amid scenes that could have come straight out of an Ealing Studios comedy, the car broke down on the way and the ingot of plutonium (in a container about the size of a large can of beans) had to be left on the back seat while the driver looked for a telephone. Penney and his high-powered team sweated it out for hours while a local garage carried out repairs before the ingot was delivered into their safe keeping.