Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  The British objective in 1957 was an amendment of the McMahon Act, which had been passed in 1946 and which forbade the United States government from sharing nuclear information and technology with other countries. The Eisenhower administration was prepared to propose amendments to this legislation to make possible renewed American collaboration with its original nuclear partner— Great Britain. The thirty-year cover-up of the Windscale disaster was designed, in the words of the newly released minutes, to avoid providing “ammunition to those in the United States who would in any case oppose the amendments of the McMahon Act.”

  The preceding year, at a United States Air Force base at Lakenheath in Suffolk, a B-47 Stratojet had crashed on one of the main runways and exploded among the “storage igloos” which housed nuclear warheads. Inside the igloos were three B-6 atom bombs, modeled on the “Fat Man” plutonium weapon. Although the bombs were burned and damaged, it is extremely unlikely that they could have been detonated. But their high-explosive detonators could have detonated, with the force of about 10,000 tons of TNT, and this could have spread the deadly plutonium over a huge area. A senior USAF officer later testified that there could have been a “desert” in East Anglia as a result.

  The British public did not find out about this near-calamity (which, interestingly, had resulted in the rapid evacuation of the base personnel and their families but not of the neighboring villages) until 1979. A series of articles in the Omaha World-Herald, rather than any disclosure by government, brought the episode to light. It would not be the first or only time that British citizens were to find the American press more forthcoming than their own authorities when it came to the “special relationship.”

  There is a direct connection between the two accidents, and also between the two cover-ups. The emplacement of American nuclear bases in Britain, without a vote or a debate in Parliament, was the British quid pro quo for a renewal of nuclear collaboration with the United States. The two decisions, and the evasion and secrecy which surround them, are in effect the same policy and the same raison d’état.

  Provost Hodson of Ditchley was right to describe the nuclear balance of terror as “the supreme governor of the Cold War.” He would have been equally correct in describing it as the supreme governor of the “special relationship.” The United Kingdom is the only country in the world with which the United States formally shares nuclear secrets, nuclear weapons, and nuclear technology. In return, the map of Britain is dotted with over one hundred American “military facilities” of varying size and capacity. In a particularly striking instance of the “Greece to their Rome” conceit, it was British research and technology which, employed as a bargaining counter in the Second World War, first empowered the United States with nuclear knowledge and capability. In a no less striking instance of the role reversal involved in the conceit, the British found themselves almost immediately excluded from the nuclear world to which they had introduced their senior partner, and had to fight hard to regain even subordinate status. But it is its continued standing as a nuclear power which, more than any single thing, gives the British government the feeling, that it belongs, still, at the “top table” of nations. The fact that this “independence” is predicated upon dependence is, like certain facts about Orwell’s wartime Britain, too obvious and too awkward to receive much attention in polite circles. A month before he popularized the phrase at Fulton, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons: “We should not abandon our special relationship with the United States about the atomic bomb.”

  The ironic and contradictory story begins in 1940, with Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, two refugees from Nazism, demonstrating the explosive possibilities of uranium 235 at Birmingham University. At about the same time, in Cambridge, two French refugee scientists arrived with the world’s only known stock of “heavy water.” Heavy water was the most efficient “moderator” for a nuclear reactor of the sort envisaged by Peierls and Frisch, whose findings led to the Maud Committee report. In this report, which is overshadowed in later accounts by the immense prestige of the Manhattan Project, the feasibility of nuclear weaponry was adumbrated for the first time. (As a footnote, let it be remembered that the British did not requite their debt to French nuclear science after the war, preferring to concentrate all their effort on the “special relationship” with America. This had political consequences of a high order, as will appear.)

  The Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence contains a number of letters about “Tube Alloys,” the British code name for research on fission weapons, and these letters are full, in 1941, of warm expressions of esteem and of willingness to share and cooperate. Frederick L. Hovde, who headed the London bureau of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, was brought in touch with Sir John Anderson, a former governor of Bengal, who as Lord President of the Council was one of the few ministers “in” on Churchill’s most closely held military secret.

  Churchill’s exploitation of this asset was not very judicious. He both overplayed and underplayed his hand, in one of the few areas where Britain enjoyed an advantage over the United States. At the end of 1941, Roosevelt proposed a joint project which would have involved pooling all nuclear material and expertise. This the British declined in what Professor Margaret Gowing, official historian of the British Atomic Energy Authority, describes as “a most superior tone.” Conscious of their lead, they preferred mutual exchange of information but not full-blown collaboration. The offer was not to be repeated. Huge American resources were thereupon deployed on nuclear research, and by 1943 the United States was so far in front that it could and did disdain even the sharing of information. Acting particularly on the advice of Vannevar Bush, head of the American Office of Scientific Research and Development, Roosevelt decided to keep nuclear data from the British in order to prevent them from exploiting atomic power commercially after the war. At the Washington summit in May 1943, Churchill protested loudly at this treatment, as he had already done to Harry Hopkins. There are, suggestively, no written minutes of this discussion, but it seems that Roosevelt must have decided pro tem to overrule Bush and his supporters. The decision cannot have been quick or easy, however, since on July 9, 1943, Churchill cabled Roosevelt:

  Since Harry’s telegram of 17th June I have been anxiously awaiting further news about TUBE ALLOYS. My experts are standing by and I find it increasingly difficult to explain delay. If difficulties have arisen, I beg you to let me know at once what they are in case we may be able to help in solving them.

  At length, at their meeting in Quebec on August 19, 1943, the two men agreed to full collaboration on “Tube Alloys.” This allowed Britain to participate in the Manhattan Project and placed uranium stocks under joint control. Both countries agreed not to use the bomb without the consent of the other, and pledged not to introduce any third member to the nuclear club without mutual agreement. The British scientists removed themselves en bloc to the other side of the Atlantic, though the large number of them based at Los Alamos were not permitted to enter the plutonium plants.

  The relationship had thus quickly become a senior-junior one, and there is reason to suppose that Roosevelt went a little further in indulging Churchill’s amour propre than his scientific advisers would have liked. The evidence here concerns the Hyde Park agreement of September 1944, when the two leaders pledged to continue atomic cooperation after the defeat of Japan. After Roosevelt’s death it was discovered that no United States nuclear agency or official knew of the agreement, and the British embassy was awkwardly asked to furnish a copy. The minister at the embassy feared that a post-Roosevelt America would not honor the agreement but would instead seek a nuclear monopoly. In a distinctive choice of metaphor he observed: “The salad is heaped in a bowl permanently smeared with the garlic of suspicion.”

  The British were perfunctorily consulted about the decision to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and gave their expected consent. But just as the Hyde Park agreement had been superseded, so also was a 1945 agreement bet
ween Truman and Attlee which in essence restated the same commitment. In July 1946, the McMahon Act made the passing of classified atomic information to any other country an offense punishable by death or life imprisonment. This was the Act which Macmillan in 1957 was striving to amend.

  British nuclear policy from then on became a desperate and ceaseless search for ways of binding Britain to the United States. Repeated efforts to resume collaboration were thwarted. In 1948, a partial agreement was struck, known appropriately as a “modus vivendi,” by which it was agreed that technical but not military cooperation would be resumed. In return, the Labor government had to sign away the clause in the 1943 Quebec agreement which required British consent for American use of nuclear weapons. It continued to work away on its own nuclear weapons, deceiving Parliament by concealing the secret expenditures under the heading of (much needed in the late 1940s) “Repairs to Public Buildings.”

  The explosion of a Soviet nuclear device in 1949 (attributed in many American circles to the treachery of the British atom spy Klaus Fuchs, who had worked at Los Alamos) changed the situation somewhat in Britain’s favor. Sooner than they had thought they would, the generals of the U.S. Strategic Air Command needed forward air bases capable of hitting the Soviet Union. The urgency of their concern increased with the onset of the Korean War—the first time that an American President was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in public. Attlee agreed to the stationing of B-29 bombers at bases in the United Kingdom—again without much consultation of Cabinet or Parliament—and in return again extracted a pledge that they would not be used without British consent. This pledge was deleted from all official documents by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who spoke of “unachieving” Attlee’s short-term success.

  However, an uneasy trade-off had been established between American bases in Britain and British access to American nuclear weapons technique. For the next two decades, there was to be a permanent lack of synchronicity and reciprocation. Almost every British Prime Minister was to know the humiliation of accepting an American weapon system and then seeing it canceled for internal American reasons, or reasons of American statecraft with the Soviet Union. Harold Macmillan suffered this with Skybolt, Harold Wilson with Antelope, and Edward Heath with Poseidon. Yet there was no other conceivable access to nuclear technology, and as a result the pretense of an “independent” British nuclear capacity had to be kept up. The reasoning was summarized succinctly by Field Marshal Lord Carver, Chief of the Defense Staff between 1973 and 1976, in an interview in 1988. Why did Britain insist on remaining nuclear?

  The political argument has pretty much remained the same, which is that it makes us appear, or actually be, or be thought by other people, particularly the United States, to be an important nation.

  The military arguments produced in support of that have varied a great deal over the years, and have constantly had to be adjusted. [Italics mine.]

  In the end, this post-imperial dogma has overwhelmed all concerns, whether from Ernest Bevin or Margaret Thatcher, about the subordination of British defense and security to the United States. It is a long time since Lord Cherwell, Winston Churchill’s adviser on these matters, warned: “If we are unable to make the bombs ourselves and have to rely entirely on the United States for this vital weapon we shall sink to the rank of a second-class nation.” Sir Henry Tizard, the government’s chief scientific adviser, was more realistic. He accepted the change in Britain’s circumstances, observing laconically that the idea of concentrating nuclear production in America was greeted “with the kind of horror one would expect if one made a disrespectful remark about the King.”

  Harold Macmillan did get his 1958 agreement, trading further bases in Scotland for access to the Skybolt missile and (when that was abruptly canceled) the Polaris system. But he never regained the power to influence American decision making, let alone to exercise a veto on first use. In Bermuda on December 21, 1961, he found himself saying to President Kennedy:

  Every time you lift the phone, Mr. President, I think you may say that you intend to go, and I wonder what answer I would give.

  When events became critical, as they soon afterward did over Cuba, the British government was to discover that the United States administration had barely time to consult with itself let alone with its allies. And the reaction times have shortened very considerably since Cuba, which by modern standards was actually a slow-motion, aborted naval engagement.

  Stanley Kubrick caught the absurd essence of the situation in his classic Dr. Strangehve, where a fatuous and ingratiating RAF stereotype, Captain Mandrake, forever enacts the pretense of parity and consultation with his less polished USAF counterpart, General Jack D. Ripper. As scene succeeds scene, the luckless Mandrake discovers exactly what it means to be a Greek in Ripper’s Rome. Mandrake moments in the recent past have included British government “surprise” at Richard Nixon’s 1973 nuclear alert, and at Ronald Reagan’s decision to adopt the “Star Wars” policy in 1984. The latter decision, which involved the denunciation of deterrence theory as “immoral and unstable,” was particularly irritating to the Thatcher government, which had endured considerable political risk and difficulty by supporting the “deterrent” deployment of a new generation of American missiles on British soil, thus reawakening the long-torpid controversy over the United States military presence.

  The American occupation of British territory, as it is conducted today, would not surprise Orwell overmuch. In 1943, he had complained of the United States forces being a law unto themselves, and of the shifty reluctance of the British authorities to discuss the matter openly:

  An example is the agreement by which American troops in this country are not liable to British courts for offences against British subjects—practically “extraterritorial rights.” Not one English person in ten knows of the existence of this agreement; the newspapers barely reported on it and refrained from commenting on it.

  Orwell wrote generally in defense of the American wartime presence and deliberately sought to defuse the anti-American potential of such a situation. But decades after the defeat of Hitler and the death of Stalin, it took a Member of Parliament three years to establish how many United States military facilities Britain was actually hosting.

  Robert Cryer, M.P., asked in June 1980 how many such bases there were and on June 18 received a written answer giving the figure of 12 bases and an unspecified number of other “facilities.” When he pressed the minister, he got a second answer on July 7 raising the total to 51. A still further question produced the reply, on August 8, of three additional named installations. The ones cited on the third time of asking were Brawdy, which is the largest underwater monitoring station in the American Ocean Surveillance Information System; Machrihanish, a nuclear base which headquarters the U.S. Navy Special Forces unit in Europe; and Felixstowe, a port used for the shipment of bombs by the U.S. Air Force. This brought the total to 54. But a private investigation by the defense and intelligence expert Duncan Campbell, published in The New Statesman later in the same year, produced a total of 103 military bases and facilities. The Ministry of Defense at length admitted to 75 bases in a statement issued in April 1983. Inquiry revealed that 73 of these had been in existence on the day that Cryer had been told—on his third request—that the total was 54.

  Nations considerably less powerful than Great Britain—such as the Philippines and Turkey—enjoy formal arrangements and signed treaties with the United States where bases on their territory are concerned. When modern Greece negotiates with the American Rome, whether the Prime Minister is Constantine Karamanlis or Andreas Papandreou, there are written leases and protocols to govern the arrangement. Whitehall’s decision to forgo any formal or ratifiable agreement is a testimony to the hypnotic power of “special relationship” priorities, and to the belief that partnership with the United States, however defined, transcends all other questions. As the USAF commander in Britain had remarked in 1949: “Never before in history has one first-class powe
r gone into another first-class power’s country without any agreement.”

  A revealing instance of the degree to which this implicit undertaking has been internalized came during the House of Commons debate on the American bombing of Libya in April 1986. Alone of Western European and NATO governments, the Thatcher administration had agreed to allow its territory to be used in preparations for the raid. (A later investigation by Jane’s Defence Weekly showed clearly that here, too, the imperatives were political rather than military, and that the Reagan administration required an ally and accomplice rather than the few remote airfields which could easily have been duplicated by the carrier decks of the U.S. Sixth Fleet.) Defending her decision to allow F-111 aircraft to fly from bases in Britain to bomb Tripoli, and replying to a storm of criticism from all parties including her own, Mrs. Thatcher said:

  I remind the Hon. Gentleman that the United States has more than 330,000 members of her forces in Europe to defend our liberty. Because they are here, they are subject to terrorist attack. It is inconceivable that they should be refused the right to use the American aircraft and American pilots in the inherent right of self-defence, to defend their own people.