It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction.
He had envisaged a runaway release of energy: one neutron would beget two, which would beget four more, which would beget another eight, and so on, releasing more and more energy at each stage. If something like this happened in nature, then it might be possible to capture energy on an industrial scale and build nuclear bombs. Szilárd quickly realised that he had been introduced to such a possibility the year before, when he read H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free, which, as Szilárd later wrote, ‘made a very great impression on me’, although he ‘didn’t regard it as anything but fiction’.12 He now saw that chain reactions had the potential to turn Wells’s Alpine whimsy into a reality that could be catastrophic if Hitler’s scientists were first off the mark with nuclear technology.
Szilárd was now a man possessed, on a mission to save the world, albeit with limited resources.13 During the winter, he was feeling the pinch financially and moved several times to save money on accommodation, once renting a room that used to be a maid’s closet.14 Having concluded that it would be easiest to set up a nuclear chain reaction using the chemical element beryllium, he began his campaign to persuade other scientists to back the idea. Szilárd knew that an ill-prepared charge into the Cavendish could well be disastrous, so he talked first with some of Rutherford’s former colleagues, including Patrick Blackett and G. P. Thomson, now both running their own shows in London.15 Neither was interested, and nor was Sir Hugo Hirst, founder of the General Electric Company, despite Szilárd’s attempt to stimulate his interest by sending him a copy of The World Set Free.
By early spring, Szilárd had worked out his chain-reaction idea in detail and he decided to take the unconventional step of patenting it. He filed his twelve-page application on 12 March, and then went for broke, seeking an audience with Rutherford, who agreed to meet briefly on the first Monday in June.16 By then, Rutherford’s glory days were over – the most exciting nuclear science was being done elsewhere, notably in Paris and Rome, where physicists had demonstrated that perfectly stable nuclei could be forced to become radioactive by bombarding them with other nuclear particles, including neutrons.17 The atomic nucleus was behaving oddly, but this was nothing compared with what was about to be revealed.
Shortly before noon, Szilárd arrived at Rutherford’s office. It was bestrewn with papers, with dormant apparatus scattered and one item of high-tech equipment perched on his desk – a telephone, one of only two in the entire building.18 According to Chadwick’s recollections much later, the idea of the chain reaction was not new to Rutherford.19 Szilárd nevertheless ploughed on, explaining the idea in terms he thought Rutherford would find especially congenial, in the process making errors that the world’s most accomplished nuclear physicist was not slow to point out.20 The last straw was Szilárd’s remark that he had patented his thinking on the subject, flouting the convention that no idea in basic science should ever be anyone’s preserve, still less a source of income.21 Szilárd later recalled how the meeting ended: ‘I was thrown out of Rutherford’s office.’22
Licking his wounds, Szilárd decided that he had no option but to behave out of character and grovel. He sent Rutherford what amounted to a begging letter. When this failed,23 Szilárd tried to mend fences with the great man, asking him to regard the patent as the property of the entire community of physicists, an argument unlikely to move Rutherford. Later, Szilárd signed over the chain-reaction patents to the British Admiralty, but only after the War Office had turned him down, saying they saw ‘no reason to keep the specification secret’.24 Rutherford still offered him nothing more than a cold shoulder.
Szilárd spent the summer and autumn lobbying companies for funds and doing nuclear research at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.25 There, he and his colleague Thomas Chalmers invented a neat way of making chemical elements radioactive and medically useful, by bombarding them with neutrons. Still used today, this work was widely admired by his peers and did much to establish him as a respected nuclear physicist. He was, however, finding it hard to make progress with his ideas on releasing nuclear energy, except with the physicist G. P. Thomson, who told the Academic Assistance Council that the Hungarian gadfly might be on to something:26
The chance of atomic disintegration becoming of commercial importance in the future is very real, and the type of experiment which Dr Szilárd proposes seems as likely to lead to it as any other.
There was, however, no room for Szilárd in Thomson’s laboratory at Imperial College or, for that matter, any of the other university departments he approached. Szilárd seemed to have been blackballed, especially by physicists within Rutherford’s circle.27 So it made sense for him to approach Oxford University’s Clarendon Laboratory, an especially welcoming harbour for refugees, growing in status and now aspiring to compete with the Cavendish. By the end of 1934, Lindemann’s project to rejuvenate his department was beginning to take flight.28
Despite the harsh economic climate, funds were coming in steadily and he was beginning to make plans for new premises that would give his physicists much-needed additional facilities. Using mainly funds he had won from ICI, the Prof had recruited a strong group of refugee scientists specialising in cryogenics, the science of how matter behaves at ultra-low temperatures. Foremost in the group was one of Lindemann’s friends from his Berlin days, Franz Simon, another fugitive from the Third Reich and a world-class scientist, universally popular for his warmth and approachability (he later anglicised his first name to Francis).29 His wife swore she would never return to Germany, even if it meant scrubbing floors in Britain for the rest of her life.30
The Simons’ cottage home, a short walk from the Clarendon, was a welcoming pied-à-terre for refugees when they first arrived in England. The family was always ready to put an extra seat or two at the dinner table and find their guests a bed for the night. So Szilárd was wise, when he arrived in the city in January 1935, to knock on their door and announce that he wanted to work at the university. Franz Simon fixed him up with modest accommodation nearby and an opportunity to meet Lindemann to make his case for a post at the Clarendon. But the Prof was able to offer Szilárd nothing more than a desk.
Most émigré physicists who had recently arrived in Britain shared the same plight. The authorities treated them decently and enabled them to make a living, but made it clear that they were only visitors and should seek permanent sanctuary elsewhere. Of the sixty-seven physicists known to have arrived in the UK before the war, only three secured a permanent academic job, while almost half (thirty-two) re-emigrated, mostly to the US.31 Szilárd was one of those who took that path, sailing to New York in February 1935. He had a brief change of heart, returning in the early summer to London, where he wrote a flattering letter to Lindemann, once again appealing for help.32 This time it did the trick: the Prof secured Szilárd a Fellowship, enabling him to return to the UK on a comfortable salary. With a chutzpah that will have surprised no one who knew him, Szilárd took up the position but then travelled to America whenever it suited him, spending only part of his time in Oxford as a strolling player in the field of nuclear theory. Szilárd had grievously abused Lindemann’s patience and generosity, but showed no remorse.33
With the Prof’s laboratory now flourishing, his task of establishing Oxford as a leading research centre was almost complete, and he turned his attention to a larger canvas – national politics. At the same time as he was trying to secure financial support for Szilárd, Lindemann was beginning his campaign to be the next Conservative MP for Oxford University, though his unpopularity among his colleagues was his undoing, and he lost the election.34 He also wanted to be involved in setting the direction of British military research, which he and Churchill believed was being run so incompetently that it put the country’s security at serious risk.
FEBRUARY 1934 TO OCTOBER 1938
Churchill fears war – and that nuclear energy will soon be harnessed
‘In the fires of science, burning with increasing heat every year, all the most dearly loved conventions are being melted down; and this is a process which is going continually to increase.’
CHURCHILL to the Commons, 21 March 19341
The coming of the aeroplane – ‘this cursed, hellish invention’ – had revolutionised the position of Britain, Churchill believed.2 Only twenty years before, his country knew it was able to defend its islands with its mighty navy, but no longer: ‘That is the thing that is borne in upon me more than anything else.’ His nagging worry was that the Luftwaffe would launch a devastating attack on a scale hundreds of times worse than in the First World War, which had left Britain – especially military experts in Whitehall – fearful of a Wellsian blitz. For Churchill, London was ‘the greatest target in the world’, as he told Parliament in July 1934: the city was like a ‘fat cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey’.3 George Bernard Shaw agreed, but construed the implications differently – he proposed in a radio broadcast that the best response to an aerial bombardment of London would be to surrender, as that is what the enemy would also do when the British retaliated by bombing their capital.4 Aerial bombers were, in Shaw’s dream world, ‘angels of peace’.
In an unusually well-received Commons speech in November 1934, Churchill predicted what would happen if London were subjected to such a bombardment – at least ‘thirty thousand or forty thousand people would be killed or maimed’, with some ‘three million or four million people’ driven out of the city.5 The government should increase its expenditure on Britain’s air force, substantially and without a moment’s delay, he said, adding that it would be a great mistake to neglect the scientific research into preventing attacks by aerial bombers:
Certainly nothing is more necessary, not only to this country but to all peace-loving and peace-interested powers in the world and to world civilisation, than that the good old earth should acquire some means or methods of destroying sky marauders.
Churchill pestered the government to invest in military defence, berating ministers for their complacency and ineptitude. Among leading British politicians at the time, Churchill did more than anyone else to draw attention to the German threat, apart from his more conciliatory friend Austen Chamberlain (now often forgotten, perhaps mainly because he died in 1937, before events proved him right). It was Churchill, however, who spoke most vigorously in support of military science, though many in the Commons thought he was being alarmist and – with his India cause petering out – looking for a new hobby horse to ride back into the spotlight.
In his speeches and writings, he seemed to hold the work of scientists in awe. When he spoke of these ‘high authorities’, he gave his reflex romanticism full vent, regarding them as an alien tribe of super-humans ‘gathering knowledge and power with ever increasing and measureless speed’, as he had written in ‘Fifty Years Hence’. He spoke in the same vein in the Commons three years later: ‘Science and invention are sweeping all before them,’ and it was vital to support them so that their results could be applied in every branch of the military. Pure science, pursued for the sake of curiosity and without heed to practical benefits, was of relatively little interest to him. He had no more time for abstractions, whether in Einstein’s science or in Picasso’s art.6 The greatest achievement of modern science for him was not relativity or quantum theory but the Wright brothers’ aeroplane, even though it had brought humanity not only an ability to fly, but also a vicious new form of warfare.7 Yet he was prepared to bet that scientists were going to find a way of coping with this aerial menace – whenever a military problem had been put before them, they had delivered like fairy godmothers:8
My experience, and it is somewhat considerable, is that in these matters when the need is clearly explained by military and political authorities, science is always able to provide something.
Churchill, with Lindemann at his side like a stony-faced bodyguard, made advancing the science of air defence his cause célèbre. In early 1935, Churchill was invited to join the government’s Air Defence Research Committee, a useful platform from which he could harass the government over its indolence, though he was sworn to keep its proceedings secret.
As everyone in Parliament knew, the Prof regarded Churchill as the man who should be leading the country, while Churchill regarded the Prof as the only source of advice on military science worth listening to. For several years, the two men were one side of a venomous political battle against some senior government officials and several leading academics, including one of Britain’s finest nuclear scientists. Four years later, when many of the combatants first started to think about developing nuclear bombs, the pool of poison was still bubbling.
After evidence of the Luftwaffe’s rapid expansion became undeniable, Ramsay MacDonald’s government finally responded. In one initiative, taken in the closing weeks of 1934, the British Air Ministry set up a committee to consider new technologies that might help defend the islands against aerial attacks. The members of the committee were all from the heights of the science establishment, and all highly regarded by Rutherford: the physicist Patrick Blackett, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist and expert on anti-aircraft gunnery A. V. Hill, and the Ministry’s director of scientific research Harry Wimperis. The chairman was Henry Tizard, rector of Imperial College and generally considered to be the country’s leading research administrator. After Lindemann heard he had been excluded, he fired off a note to Churchill, complaining that although Tizard was ‘a good man’, neither Hill nor Blackett ‘have ever had anything to do with aeroplanes’. Besides, Blackett held ‘himself out as a Communist’.9 Angry and disappointed, Churchill was not going to stand aside and do nothing.10
A clash between Lindemann and Tizard had been a long time coming – both wanted to be top dog among the academic scientists advising the military. Besides, the two men had form. Thirty years before, as young researchers in Berlin, they had been close colleagues, but their friendship had cooled, apparently after they fought a friendly boxing match that left Lindemann decidedly worse off. Later, though Lindemann proved himself to be the better academic scientist, Tizard’s administrative career took off, leaving the Prof envious and resentful. After he was passed over for an appointment to a committee, Lindemann believed Tizard was responsible and marked his card. When applying science to challenges posed by the military, Lindemann had no time for Tizard’s communitarian approach, which involved painstakingly fostering collaboration between scientists and the combat troops who would use the weapons. Lindemann’s top-down style was all of a piece with his self-belief, which contrasted sharply with the anxiety that always seemed to shadow Tizard’s face.11
The Tizard Committee first met at the end of January and got off to a strong start. By happenstance, only a few days earlier the Air Ministry had received Robert Watson-Watt’s proposal for the technology that would later be called ‘radar’.12 Soon, however, the Committee was under intense pressure from Churchill, who agreed with Lindemann that its terms of reference were ‘totally inadequate’, lacking status, power and resources. By June, there was bad blood among the committee members after Lindemann had been foisted on them, following a back-room campaign by Churchill. In an eight-page memorandum, Lindemann enumerated the ideas he wanted government scientists to develop immediately. Lukewarm about radar, by far his top priority was the development of aerial mines, explosive devices attached to wir
es that could be dropped in the paths of enemy bombers. He argued sensibly that it would be unwise to neglect ideas apart from radar, which the enemy might be able to foil and which would not be useful at night.13
When his fellow Committee members dismissed his ideas as impracticable or old hat, he was furious. He complained of their foot-dragging and lack of imagination to Churchill, who backed the Prof’s judgement to the hilt, but struggled to understand the underlying science. After he asked the Committee secretary Albert Rowe to explain the difference between radio and sound, Rowe wrote a ‘tiny-tot note on the subject’ – as he later recalled – but Churchill said ‘it was beyond him’.14
Less than a month after the Prof joined the Committee, its atmosphere was septicaemic. After one tempestuous meeting, Blackett and Hill despaired of working constructively with Lindemann and submitted their resignations.15 Ministry officials wound up the Committee but reconstituted it a few months later with the same members, apart from Lindemann, whose place was taken by the more collegiate Edward Appleton, another accomplished physicist. Churchill complained to the Secretary of State for Air that the Tizard Committee’s progress over the past year had been like watching a film in slow motion.16 He was, however, ignored. For now, his campaign to have the Prof at the top table of air-defence research was over.
Until Friday 13 March 1936, Churchill kept his powder dry, moderating his public criticisms of the Conservative government in the hope of securing a Cabinet post. But in vain. On that day, the new Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin created the post of Minister for the Coordination of Defence and gave it not to Churchill but to the conciliatory Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip. Churchill now knew for sure that there was no place for him in any government run by his Conservative peers, who regarded him as too self-obsessed, too wayward, too much of a blow-hard and insufficiently committed to their party.
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