Strand Magazine published ‘Fifty Years Hence’ in its bumper, December edition, with a Christmassy cover advertising its most prominent contributors, including Churchill and P. G. Wodehouse.52 Illustrated with suitably apocalyptic drawings, the article included all of Lindemann’s ideas, and highlighted the importance of nuclear energy, which is ‘incomparably greater’ than the familiar types of energy in use today and by no means a distant prospect:
There is no question among scientists that this gigantic source of energy exists. What is lacking is the match to set the bonfire alight . . .
Scientists were looking for this match, Churchill wrote, and if they found it, the human race would have in its inexperienced hands ‘tremendous and awful powers . . . explosive forces, energy, materials and machinery . . . upon a scale which can annihilate whole nations’. Possession of such powers put human life in jeopardy unless Homo sapiens could develop morally and spiritually, he argued. Now that ‘the busy hands of the scientists are already fumbling with the keys of all the chambers hitherto forbidden to mankind’, he warned that ‘without an equal growth of mercy, pity, peace and love, science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable’. This was not the most cheerful Christmas fare for the hundreds of thousands of readers who pondered ‘Fifty Years Hence’ over their sherries and mince pies. Nor would they have felt much better had they known that a scientist in Britain was, within the next eleven weeks, to discover the particle that would enable the release of the ‘gigantic source of energy’ that Churchill had mentioned, finally making nuclear weapons possible.
During the following summer, Churchill put together Thoughts and Adventures, a collection of some of his best essays, including ‘Shall We All Commit Suicide?’ and ‘Fifty Years Hence’.53 In his preface, he drew attention to the two pieces and underlined his hope that these ‘two nightmares’ would be read as more than ‘the amusing speculations of a dilettante Cassandra’. He had written the essays ‘in deadly earnest as a warning of what may easily come to pass if Civilisation cannot take itself in hand . . .’
By 1932, Lindemann had become one of the most frequent guests at Chartwell. Even his arrival was an event. Emerging from his limousine, attended by his liveried chauffeur and valet, he looked less like a scientist than an investment banker, complete with a velvet-collared Melton overcoat and bowler hat, even during the dog days of summer.54 Churchill’s chef had to make special provision for the Prof, whose vegetarian diet featured an exceptionally narrow range of meals, including dishes made from egg whites (not the yolks), skinned tomatoes, waxy potatoes and only the highest-quality fresh mayonnaise. No one seemed to mind the inconvenience of catering to his tastes. Clementine was extremely fond of him, and the Churchill children treated him like a favourite uncle – he always remembered their birthdays and never left them before pressing a banknote into their grateful hands.
No longer in the limelight and shunned by many colleagues, Churchill put great store by his conversations with Lindemann and a few other acolytes, especially Brendan Bracken, his principal business adviser. Bracken was an Irish-born Tory MP and publisher, unique in his ability to sate even Churchill’s appetite for flattery. Bracken, Lindemann and Churchill believed they were living in dangerous times – all the signs were that the 1930s were going to be turbulent. The unfinished business of the Great War made Europe a breeding ground for aggressive dictatorships and conflict.
Over dozens of meals at Chartwell, Churchill and his colleagues reflected on the parlous state of the British economy, on the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, on Germany’s rearmament and, very probably, on Stanley Baldwin’s belief that it was impossible to resist an attack by enemy aircraft: ‘The bomber will always get through.’55 Yet politics was by no means Churchill’s only interest. He spent much of his time writing and was still widening his horizons, reading novels such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though he was ‘not much attracted by these thin-skinned, self-disturbing Russian boobs’.56
The gatherings at Chartwell were grand affairs.57 The Churchill family – lively, affectionate and sometimes boisterous – would assemble round the vast oak table in the dining room, the head of the household almost always arriving late. The huge windows flooded the room with light and offered a splendid view far out across the Weald, the kind of vista that could lift the most jaded spirits. Churchill – wide-shouldered and, at 210 pounds, considerably overweight – sat at the head of the table like a feudal lord, able to dominate the dining room even when he was not speaking. After one of his occasional monologues, he would relight his cigar in the flame of a candle standing in the silver Georgian holder on the table. The main course, perhaps beef with Yorkshire pudding, was incomplete without a glass or two of wine, only a small part of Churchill’s daily consumption of alcohol. He had a well-developed ability to hold his drink and – despite many reports to the contrary – was apparently never drunk, a state he had been brought up to abhor.58
Later, Churchill’s daughter Sarah remembered one particular lunch in early 1932, soon after Lindemann had published his book The Physical Significance of the Quantum Theory.59 The servants were pouring the coffees and the after-dinner drinks. Lindemann may well have had a brandy, having long before been persuaded by Churchill occasionally to abandon strict teetotalism.60 Having decided that it was time to display Lindemann’s talent for synopsis and simplification, Churchill placed his gold watch on the table and asked Lindemann to summarise quantum theory in no more than five minutes, using words of one syllable. Sarah recalled: ‘Without any hesitation, like quicksilver, he explained the principle and held us all spellbound. When he had finished we all spontaneously burst into applause.’
Performances like this impressed Churchill. He appeared to be unaware that his science adviser had a reputation among experts for misunderstanding new and fundamental ideas in theoretical physics, and was increasingly becoming alienated from his peers, among them the undisputed doyen of the nuclear community.
1932
Rutherford: nuclear sceptic
‘In a recent book, H. G. Wells has discussed in an interesting way some of the future possibilities if this great reservoir of [nuclear energy] were made available for the use of man . . . The possibility . . . does not at present seem at all promising.’
SIR ERNEST RUTHERFORD, Washington DC, 21 April 19141
Rutherford, Lindemann’s opposite number in Cambridge, was the Christopher Columbus of the atomic nucleus. He had discovered it, explored it, helped to clarify its strange behaviour and shown that it stores comparatively huge amounts of energy. Quite apart from his pre-eminence as a scientist, he was an accomplished operator in Whitehall, a leading adviser to the British government on the application of science to military problems. By the time it became possible to use nuclear energy to make explosives, he was dead, and it was Lindemann who, through his closeness to Churchill, became by far the most influential British scientist on the early development of the new weapons. Many of Lindemann’s peers saw this as a tragedy – Rutherford believed him to be ‘a scientist manqué’, a physicist who had failed to live up to expectations, while many of his colleagues damned the Prof as a scientific amateur.2
The most graphic proof of Lindemann’s weak grasp of modern fundamental physics arrived in 1932. Early in the year, Lindemann published The Physical Significance of the Quantum Theory, his unconventional perspective on the most revolutionary theory physicists had produced for centuries, about the behaviour of matter on the smallest scale. In effect, he tried to explain why the world’s leading quantum physicists were wrong about the new theory and why he was right. The book arrived on Rutherford’s desk in the Cavendish Laboratory in early January along with a brief note: ‘I trust you will not be displeased by the endeavour to base our concepts upon observation rather than adopt the mystical outlook . . . so fashionable of late.’3 The Prof was appealing to Rutherford’s distaste for abstract theory and to his insistence that by far the best way of uncovering na
ture’s secrets was to come up with well-chosen experiments.4
Rutherford does not appear to have replied to the note, but it is all but certain that he discussed the book with the quantum theorists in Cambridge. One was his son-in-law Ralph Fowler, who was offended that Lindemann had even considered writing on a subject he knew so little about: ‘It is an impertinence of Lindemann to write a book on quantum theory,’ he snorted.5 In agreement with Fowler was his former student Paul Dirac, a co-discoverer of the new theory, whose belief in the power of mathematics in fundamental physics some regarded as mystical.6 After one of the Prof’s lectures, when one audience member despaired of its wrong-headedness and utter lack of originality, Dirac disagreed, making one of his rare interjections: ‘No. Only Lindemann could have made those mistakes.’7
In the coming months, the Prof’s book – in particular, his confused thinking about space and time in quantum theory and the role of mathematics in fundamental physics – lost him the respect of many of the ablest theoreticians.8 The experience will have been painful for him as it coincided with an especially glorious period for Rutherford and his young researchers.
By 1932, the science establishment had run out of garlands to lay over Rutherford’s shoulders. Then sixty, and recently ennobled, he was President of the Royal Society, had a Nobel Prize, and was internationally recognised as ‘the generalissimo of the atom-smashing artillery’, as the New York Times later described him.9 It was difficult to tell his status from his demeanour and appearance. Tall and thickset, with a bay window of a belly, he had a large drooping moustache and more often than not had a cigarette or cigar hanging from his bottom lip.10 His tongue was not refined – he was given to swearing like a trooper at apparatus that failed to behave itself – and he had no taste for either fine art or great literature or demanding classical music, much preferring military bands to string quartets. If conversation in the Trinity Common Room after dinner became too highfalutin, he was known to shout in his shrill yet booming voice – still with clear traces of the accent of his native New Zealand, ‘Anyone for the Marx Brothers?’, before heading off to the movies.11
He had largely given up working at the laboratory bench, having proved himself a great experimenter with an unrivalled nose for productive lines of research. It was at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in his late twenties and early thirties, that he had done much of his pioneering work on radioactivity, mainly in collaboration with Frederick Soddy. They demonstrated that the process – initially a complete mystery – usually involved one chemical element transmuting into another. By 1904, Rutherford had understood from these experiments that ‘an enormous amount of energy could be obtained from a small quantity of matter’,12 foreshadowing the energy–mass equation Einstein set out a year later, E=mc2, c denoting the speed of light in a vacuum. This simple relationship implied that even the mass of a penny was equivalent to a huge amount of energy – enough, in principle, to run a small city for hours and wipe it out in seconds.
After he moved to the University of Manchester, where he discovered the atomic nucleus, the First World War slammed the brakes on his career as a nuclear physicist. He switched his focus from nuclei to submarines and devoted most of his phenomenal energy to finding new ways of using sound waves to locate enemy vessels underwater. Although he had no reservations about working on military projects such as submarine detection, he drew the line when it came to developing gruesome weapons. Max Born suggested to him in 1933 that he meet the chemist Fritz Haber, who played a prominent role in developing and deploying chemical weapons during the war, but, as Born later remembered, Rutherford ‘declined violently’.13
Rutherford was a prominent Whitehall adviser during the global conflict and served on several government committees, including the new Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, set up to encourage private and public investment in university work. Soon after America entered the war in April 1917, he was a joint leader of the Anglo-French Mission to the United States, sent to brief the Americans on everything the Allies had learned about the application of science to war. It was all ‘somewhat one-sided’, he and a military colleague reported soon after they returned, though they believed that the advice they had given would soon produce results ‘of great value, not only to America, but to the Allied cause in general’.14 Sharing British secrets had been entirely acceptable to him – it brought to the Alliance, after all, the internationalism he practised in science – as it would be to his researchers and associates in the next global conflict, especially when they came to develop the Bomb.
Within a year of the end of the First World War, Rutherford moved to Cambridge to run the Cavendish Laboratory, and brought with him a list of contacts in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which would later become one of his most munificent funders. As he had done at Manchester, Rutherford regenerated his laboratory, running it like a benevolent dictator, focusing the teaching and research mainly on ‘fundamental physics’, rather than other physics, such as crystallography, which he dismissed as ‘stamp collecting’.15 Much of Rutherford’s greatness lay in his skills as a leader. Soon after he arrived, he recruited several young researchers, many of them foreign, wanting to put the war behind them, and trained as engineers rather than physicists.16 To most of his ‘boys’, as he called them, he became a role model – although sometimes domineering and unreasonable, he supervised his researchers with a light touch provided they appeared to be on a productive track, and he would encourage scientists who wanted to take risks on what seemed impossibly long shots.
When Rutherford became director of the Cavendish Laboratory, he was an admirer of Lindemann and gave him a reference for the Oxford chair, a contribution the Prof regarded as crucial.17 Lindemann told him: ‘I am most anxious to work in the closest collaboration with Cambridge and schools of physics.’ For several years, the two men exchanged friendly and sympathetic correspondence, though their characters and styles were quite different. Lindemann seemed to be less at home in his laboratory than in stately homes, his head turned by anyone who was rich or who had a sufficiently impressive title, preferably both. One joke doing the rounds went: ‘Why is Lindemann like a coastal steamer?’ ‘Because he runs from peer to peer.’18 Whereas Rutherford focused strongly on fundamental physics and successfully sought funding from industrial partners to support it, Lindemann supported a wide variety of research topics and set up profitable collaborations with industry.
Like Lindemann, Rutherford was a Conservative, though much closer to the middle of the road and more tolerant of colleagues of different political persuasions.19 Several of the Cavendish researchers – especially Patrick Blackett and Peter Kapitza, a committed Soviet citizen who returned to Russia in 1934 – spent evenings and weekends engaged in left-wing political debates, but Rutherford remained unconcerned, provided they left their views at the door when they entered the laboratory.20 Rutherford was a tough-minded advocate for the Cavendish within Cambridge University, but appears to have been a good deal more popular with his colleagues than Lindemann was at Oxford, where his name was a byword for authoritarianism and aggressive empire-building. J. J. Thomson, Rutherford’s friend and predecessor at the Cavendish, fumed when he heard reports of the Prof’s management style: ‘He seems to think he can run his Laboratory by the methods of a Prussian dictator.’21
In Whitehall, Rutherford argued strongly that it was the State’s role to support curiosity-driven research, even if it had no obvious commercial or military applications, a view that often irritated the politicians who wanted State-funded science to bear fruit quickly.22 Nuclear energy, however, was not among the findings of basic research that were likely to prove useful in the foreseeable future, as he noted in a lecture in Washington DC a few weeks after The World Set Free was published. Four months later, during a visit to New Zealand, when a reporter asked him if ‘atomic bombs’ were likely to be made soon, Rutherford’s tone was even more dismissive: ‘The suggestion of Mr Wells must be
considered as a dream of the future,’ as up to the present there was ‘not the slightest evidence’ that radioactive energy could be released quickly enough to make explosives.23
By the beginning of 1932, Rutherford’s career as a productive scientist was showing signs of tapering off. His hands were so unsteady that he could no longer perform experiments, and his laboratory’s results over the previous few years had been thin by his standards.24 His fortunes changed one morning a few days after Lindemann’s book on quantum theory arrived at the Cavendish, during one of the 11 a.m. meetings Rutherford had every day with his deputy, James Chadwick. That morning, ‘Jimmy’ told him that it may be possible to prove the existence of the neutron, a sub-nuclear particle that Rutherford had hypothesised twelve years before, but that had not yet been observed. Hardly anyone else except Chadwick had taken the idea seriously.25
Chadwick raised his already-accomplished game to an even higher level: after scattering helium nuclei by beryllium nuclei on his laboratory bench, and then carefully interpreting the results, he nailed the neutron. It was now becoming clear that a typical atomic nucleus is built not only from protons – each with a positive charge equal and opposite to that of each orbiting electron – but also from Chadwick’s electrically neutral neutrons. The discovery was especially exciting as the new particle promised to be a useful probe: a beam of neutrons would not be deflected by atomic nuclei and so should be able to penetrate deep inside the nucleus, though no one knew what would happen after the disruption. Fundamental science was about to be transformed again.
For most people, it was hard to get excited about this – the new particle was billions of times smaller than anything human beings can see and had no obvious uses. The Manchester Guardian announced the discovery in a scoop on 27 February, its correspondent James Crowther – Rutherford’s press officer in all but name – assuring his readers that the new particle’s practical applications ‘will doubtless be discovered before long’.26 Newspapers all over the world reported the story, genuflecting at what scientists assured them was a great discovery. Only The Times in London introduced a note of caution, commenting that even if the existence of the neutron were confirmed, for ‘humanity in general’ the results of this and other nuclear experiments ‘would make no difference’.27 Within thirteen years, the world would see the mushroom-cloud image that confirmed that the neutron was anything but an irrelevance – it was the particle that would trigger the first nuclear explosions.
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