Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  Wells and von Arnim wrote in the mornings and then went on long mountain walks in the afternoons, often pausing to make love alfresco on beds of ‘sun-flecked heaps of pine needles’.27 He also read parts of the book to her on the slopes above her chalet, on one occasion offending her delicate sensibilities: punching him with her fur-gloved hands, she complained that he actually ‘liked smashing up the world’.28

  In his story, Wells as usual let loose hostages to posterity by making absurdly precise predictions, this time about the future of nuclear physics. He imagined scientists in 1933 discovering how to make some chemical elements radioactive and, as a result, releasing large amounts of energy.29 Twenty years later, a special engine brings ‘induced radioactivity into the sphere of industrial production’, making energy available at negligible cost and rendering fossil fuels such as oil and gas too expensive to bother with. Out of the economic chaos, incompetent governments wage war with the new ‘atomic bombs’. Although quite small – three of them would fit into a coffin30 – they are powerful enough to reduce a city the size of Chicago to a pile of radioactive rubble. This wipes the Earth’s slate clean, enabling Wells to spell out his latest vision of Utopia: people finally realise that war is pointless, nations and races become obsolete, conventional politics ends while a new age of leisure begins, and the entire world becomes a single state that speaks only English. One measure the government takes is to keep radioactive matter under strict control so that no bomb-makers can get their hands on it.

  Although not one of his best stories, it sold well and did nothing to harm his literary standing. Many critics admired his still-soaring imagination, though not his balsa-wood characters or the rickety plot. In one of the most complimentary reviews, the New York Times saw beyond the limitations of The World Set Free and glimpsed why historians, if not literary scholars, would study this ‘magnificent’ book a century later: ‘It is the development of the control and employment of radioactivity that lies at the root of the changes prophesied . . .’31 Wells did not fully deserve this praise. In the next three decades, he did next to nothing to promote his notion that atomic energy could be important in war and peace. When he wrote a new introduction to the story in 1921, he scarcely mentioned the nuclear science underpinning it.32

  In the year after The World Set Free first appeared, Wells was praised not so much for his scientific vision as for his prediction of the outbreak of what would become the First World War. A few days after the conflict began, his American publisher took out an advertisement boasting that ‘the European conflict now in progress’ had been ‘foreseen and described’ by ‘the world’s greatest imaginator’.33 During the early stages of the conflict, Wells watched Churchill burnishing his own reputation as an orator of singular power and wit, running the Admiralty and eager – too eager for some – to learn the art of war.

  Churchill was well qualified to play a leading role during the conflict. At the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, he had been trained in fortification and other military tactics, though he was never taught anything about bombs, he later wrote, as ‘these weapons were known to be long obsolete’.34 He had then served in the army, killed in battle and demonstrated a strong grasp of both geopolitics and military strategy. In Asquith’s government, he had played a role in the founding of the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6 and repeatedly stressed the importance of equipping the country’s fighters with the latest technology.35 He had encouraged officials to get in touch with the Wright brothers in February 1909 to explore the military potential of their invention, the aeroplane – this was four months after Wells published The War in the Air, which Churchill read with ‘astonishment and delight’.36

  According to Prime Minister Lloyd George, Churchill did more than anyone else in the Cabinet to promote Wells’s idea of ‘land ironclads’, subsequently known as tanks.37 Churchill invited Wells to see prototypes in action and helped to ensure that the vehicles became standard equipment for the army. Wells gave him great credit for this and Churchill later repaid it, testifying in court that the tank was solely his friend’s idea.38 Although the jury accepted the case, the truth was that several other inventors had independently hatched the concept.

  Churchill’s judgement at the top table in wartime proved to be erratic. Within nine months of the start of hostilities, after the disastrous campaign in the Dardanelles, he was obliged to resign his post in the Admiralty. He became so deflated and depressed that his wife thought he might die of grief, but he picked himself up, reported for duty in the army on the Western Front and developed his new hobby of painting, later his favourite pastime. Back in the government, as Minister of Munitions, in less than two years, he supplied the army with increasing quantities of guns, shells and tanks. His return to office in mid-1917 coincided with the first bombing raids on London by Gotha aeroplanes, when Wells stood defiantly on a balcony to witness the beginning of the aerial bombardment of cities that he and others had foreseen.39 He had long been critical of the government’s wartime deployment of scientists and new inventions, especially the aircraft.40

  It was their views on the Soviet Union that first led Wells and Churchill to fall out, publicly and spectacularly. Wells had welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and supported Lenin’s vision of an organised, godless society that embraced science and technology. Always fiercely anti-Communist, Churchill was the British government’s most outspoken critic of the Bolshevik regime. It was a ‘cancer’, he said – a ‘monstrous growth swelling and thriving upon the emaciated body of its victim’ – and must be eradicated.41 After he was appointed Secretary of State for War in January 1919, Churchill was fixated on the Soviet threat, hoping that the Allies would ‘declare war on the Bolsheviks’ and ‘send huge forces there’.42 His words, and the limited British Expeditionary Force sent to Russia, would return to haunt him some two decades later, when he had to work with Soviet leaders who remembered his vilification and his attempts to smother their regime before it could mature into an international force.

  Wells took a very different view of the Bolsheviks. Although more critical than many British Socialists of the new Soviet government, he was prepared to excuse some of its failings as unfortunate consequences of a development that was for the best in the long term. Wells defended Lenin’s administration as the only possible Russian government, and even defended the murderous Red Terror that accompanied the civil war.43 In the autumn of 1920, he toured a number of Russian cities and described his experiences in a series of articles that called on other powers to help the Soviets create ‘a new social order’.44 Churchill snapped, attacking him for his naivety and for giving solace to evil fanatics. Wells’s reply was weak, but he made one astute point:45

  [Churchill] believes quite naively that he belongs to a peculiarly gifted and privileged class of beings to whom the lives and affairs of common men are given over, the raw material for brilliant careers . . .

  Churchill was a menace to world peace, Wells harrumphed – he should retire from public life and concentrate on his painting.46 The two men, professional writers with skins of titanium, quickly put this spat behind them, neither bearing a grudge. Afterwards their relationship was friendly, intermittently hostile but never poisonous – even after January 1923, when Wells published his political satire Men Like Gods, which featured a thinly disguised version of Churchill in the character Rupert Catskill, an Empire-obsessed warmonger, though ‘fundamentally a civilised man’.47

  In November 1922, Churchill lost his seat in the Commons. During his time away from Parliament, he edged back towards the Conservative Party and developed his parallel career as a writer, by far his main source of income. He had already published the first volume of his insider’s account of the First World War, The World Crisis, described by former Prime Minister Lord Balfour as ‘a brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe’.48

  At the same time, Churchill wrote dozens of articles and regarded most of them as potboilers. He was, how
ever, especially proud of one, which focused on the future of warfare.49 This was his first attempt at Wellsian prognostication and it was here that he first alluded to his sometime friend’s ‘atomic bombs’.

  1924–1932

  Churchill glimpses a nuclear future

  ‘It would be much better to call a halt in material progress and [scientific] discovery rather than to be mastered by our own apparatus and the forces which it directs.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, November 19311

  When Churchill wrote his first predictions for the long-term future of warfare, he was assisted by Professor Frederick Lindemann, who by then had become the main influence on his thinking about science. The men had first met privately in August 1921 at a special dinner arranged by the Duke of Westminster, a mutual acquaintance.2 Lindemann was keen to befriend Churchill, but their relationship was slow to gel, perhaps in part because the two men, though both aristocrats, were quite different.

  Lindemann was a man of complex lineage. His father Adolf was a German and had emigrated to Britain around 1870, later becoming a wealthy business executive. In an observatory and laboratory built in the garden of the family’s palatial home in Devon, Adolf spent most of his leisure hours pursuing his hobby of astronomy, the young Frederick often at his side, learning fast.3 Lindemann’s mother Olga was, like Churchill’s, American. The Prof always resented that she had given birth to him in Germany, during a visit – he regarded himself as English to the core and strongly denied that, despite his surname, he had any Jewish blood.4

  Lindemann was a bachelor, teetotal and a vegetarian, much more Conservative in his political outlook than Churchill and with none of his generosity of spirit. Twelve years younger than Churchill, the Prof was untiring in his enmities, notably of Socialists, Jews and colleagues who – in his view – overvalued the arts compared with the sciences. Nor did he much like the company of those with a skin colour different from his own, or even people he judged to be ugly.

  Nine months after the two men met, the Prof wrote his father a newsy letter, tinged with excitement and mentioning that he had just received a cable from Clementine Churchill, inviting him to lunch. In the letter, he also commented that he had recently met H. G. Wells (‘of all people’) at Blenheim Palace, commenting that the writer was ‘very second rate as regards brains’ and had been put in his place by someone who was ‘not considered clever at all’.5 Besides, the Prof noted, Wells was a comically bad dancer. This note is classic Lindemann – written in his neat hand, it was crammed with obsessive high-society gossip and references to lords, ladies, dukes and duchesses, whose company he adored and whose approval he craved. In his description of Wells – a Socialist and self-evidently not to be trusted – he vents his feelings about someone he plainly regarded as an interloper in his circle. Lindemann may also have been concerned that he had a rival for the ear of Churchill in matters of science.

  It took Lindemann almost five years to win Churchill’s friendship, but then he never lost it. The Prof proved himself to be as loyal as a lapdog, a charming companion at the dinner table and good company for Clemmie on the tennis court – he was a player of international quality, once progressing to the second round in the men’s doubles at Wimbledon.6 Most important, Churchill was dazzled by the Prof’s ability to analyse and solve technical problems, by his skill as a writer of jargon-free summaries on difficult topics, and by his gift for précis.

  No one could deny Lindemann’s scientific credentials: Oxford University appointed him as a professor of physics in 1919 and he was soon afterwards elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of science. In the world of physics, he seemed to know everyone worth knowing, including Einstein, who had recently become a global celebrity almost overnight.

  Churchill had been used to a steady flow of technical advice from politically neutral civil servants and scientists working for the government. What he wanted was the private and confidential counsel of a tame scientist, whenever he needed it, partly to give him the edge over other politicians. In the early spring of 1924, when Churchill agreed to write about the future of warfare, he had ‘a good many ideas’ but asked to meet Lindemann to talk about the topic, and apparently did not consult Wells. The Prof responded immediately. He was rightly sceptical of a sensational report of a new ‘death ray’ that Churchill had read about, and sent him a copy of ‘Daedalus’, a spirited essay on the future of biology published a few months before by the Marxist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane.7

  Although the resulting article, ‘Shall We All Commit Suicide?’, lacks Churchill’s usual wit, it is in many ways typical of his prose – easy to read, self-assured and informative but with no pretensions to original scholarship.8 In one passage, he noted how Germany’s sudden surrender in the First World War meant that the world only narrowly avoided an ‘immense accession to the power of destruction’. In particular, he feared an escalation in the use of poison gases ‘of incredible malignity’, not mentioning that, five years before, he had approved their use against the Bolsheviks and, in a note about the strategy in the war against Mesopotamia, had declared himself ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’.9 This would have been easy to arrange – the British government had set up a laboratory facility to develop and produce these weapons in March 1915, at Porton Down in Wiltshire. In the field of chemical warfare, he wrote, ‘Only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book,’ and he looked ahead to biological weapons, including ‘Anthrax to slay horses and cattle [and] Plague to poison not armies only but whole districts’.

  Towards the end of ‘Shall We All Commit Suicide?’, Churchill alluded to the type of weapon that Wells foresaw in The World Set Free – ‘a bomb no bigger than an orange’ possessing ‘a secret power . . . to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke’. He also suggested that conventional explosives could be delivered more effectively, foreseeing vehicles we now know as drones: ‘Could not explosives . . . be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless and other rays, without a human pilot . . .?’

  In what would become a familiar theme in his ruminations on the new weaponry, Churchill worried that politicians would not be able to handle the terrible devices scientists were about to put at their disposal. Also, these weapons might well get into the wrong hands: ‘A base, degenerate, immoral race [could subjugate a more virtuous enemy simply by possessing] some new death-dealing or terror-working process [if they] were ruthless in its employment.’ This purple passage made prescient reading fifteen years later, when it seemed that Hitler’s Germany might well beat its enemies to the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

  Churchill believed that humanity’s best hope of avoiding ‘what may well be a general doom’ was to support the League of Nations. This may have been a nod to international attempts to prohibit the first use of chemical and biological weapons – initiatives that led Britain, the United States, Germany and other countries in June 1925 to sign the Geneva Protocol. The document was registered in the League of Nations Treaty Series four years later.

  Of all the essays Churchill wrote around this time, ‘Shall We All Commit Suicide?’ made the biggest splash.10 The article first appeared in Britain in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine on 24 September 1924 and was equally successful in North America two months later. The well-regarded former president of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, praised the piece warmly: ‘This statement . . . should be placed forthwith in every American household.’ By the time Churchill read this endorsement, shortly after his fiftieth birthday, his political career was again back on track. Having been out of Parliament for almost two years, he won the safe seat of Epping and was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Churchill carried out his duties in rumbustious style, dominating the Commons with his oratory, calming the House to a contemplative hush moments before summoning roars of laughter. In his first Budget, however, he made what he later called the biggest blunder of his lif
e by accepting the advice of his officials to take the British currency back onto the Gold Standard, at a rate that made British exports disastrously uncompetitive. Among his many enemies in Parliament, many of them Tories, this was yet more evidence of his dubious judgement. Never entirely comfortable at the Treasury, Churchill was easily distracted, even – as Lindemann saw in the spring of 1926 – by atomic physics.

  It was a wonder the adult Churchill had any appetite at all for science after the training he had received as a boy. Unlike Lindemann, whose governesses and tutors had given him a first-class education, Churchill had been miserable in his early years at school. He had seen little of his parents, who packed him off as a boy to a disciplinarian school in Ascot, which he hated – he was much happier at home, playing with his collection of some fifteen hundred toy soldiers, most of them from Napoleonic regiments.11 He fared better under the more kindly regime of his next school, in Brighton, although he appears to have been one of the naughtiest boys in his class. He hated rote learning, especially of Latin and other subjects that did not capture his interest. Yet he was already a precocious reader.

  For the young Churchill, mathematics was a trial. Labouring in its ‘Alice in Wonderland world’, he ground his way through exercises on square roots and the propositions of Euclid, unconvinced that such things were of much use in the real world. After he entered Harrow as a thirteen-year-old, he struggled with the subject, although one of his teachers, a Mr Mayo, was able to convince him that it ‘was not a hopeless bog of nonsense, and that there were meanings and rhythms behind the comical hieroglyphics’.12 Churchill was more inclined to the arts, especially literature. He won a school prize for reciting from memory a 1,200-line poem by the nineteenth-century essayist and historian Thomas Macaulay, whose thinking exerted a powerful influence on him. Macaulay, laureate of British imperialism, argued passionately that it was right for his country to colonise less developed ones and impose ‘civilised’ values on ‘savage’ cultures, notably in India.13