Lindemann described Baldwin’s action as ‘the most cynical thing that has been done since Caligula appointed his horse as consul’.17 Still fuming at what he regarded as the pathetically inadequate progress on air defence, the Prof decided to try to join Churchill in the Commons, and in the autumn attempted again to become an MP for Oxford University. In what would turn out to be the last time Lindemann stood for public office, he was humiliated once again, finishing bottom of the poll.18
This election campaign took place during the abdication crisis, sparked by King Edward’s relationship with his American lover Mrs Wallis Simpson. Baldwin handled ‘the King’s matter’ with much-admired tact, easing His Majesty into a position where he had to choose between the throne and marriage to the divorcee. Churchill, a friend of the King, regarded this as unnecessary and made his case in an unconvincing speech in the Commons, where he was shouted down. The debacle underlined once again his reputation as unreliable, disloyal to his party colleagues and a man of poor judgement.19 His parliamentary career had hit rock bottom.
*
Churchill’s literary career, however, was flourishing as never before, enabling him to live the life of ease, like a member of the landed gentry. Between 1935 and 1936, his income peaked at about sixteen thousand pounds, more than thirty times his parliamentary salary.20 Many of his most lucrative publishing contracts were struck by his Hungarian literary agent Emery Reves, an international syndication specialist who had settled in Paris after leaving Germany in April 1933, when he had been flung out of his Berlin office by Nazi storm troopers.21 Assisted by researchers and secretaries who struggled to keep up with him, Churchill toiled until late into the night on a stream of popular articles and books, striving to meet the targets he had set for his daily word count. The quality of his prose was good enough to win praise from Rudyard Kipling, who wrote to Churchill ‘craftsman to craftsman’.22
Any hope Churchill may have had of a return to the Cabinet was scotched in May 1937, when Baldwin was succeeded by the drab Neville Chamberlain, who had even less taste for Churchillian fireworks. The disappointment was only a brief distraction for Churchill. That year, in addition to hundreds of thousands of words he wrote on the life of Marlborough, he dashed off sixty-four newspaper articles, about half of them for London’s Evening Standard, owned by his friend Lord Beaverbrook. Another of Churchill’s favourite platforms was the News of the World, a Sunday newspaper that boasted ‘the largest circulation in the world’,23 secured by providing its sixteen million readers with a fruity diet of titillation and scandal. In October 1937, he submitted an article that drew ‘hearty congratulations’ from the newspaper’s principal proprietor, Sir Emsley Carr. The article concluded by focusing on a subject rarely seen in the newspaper’s columns, nuclear physics. Carr believed the piece ‘one of the most interesting so far as our general readers are concerned’,24 apparently not realising – or perhaps not caring – that Churchill had played one of his favourite tricks of reusing old material – the article was almost identical to the first half of ‘Fifty Years Hence’, published six years earlier. Sir Emsley had enabled him to increase the essay’s readership a hundredfold, and paid him four hundred pounds for the privilege of recycling it.
The News of the World published the piece ‘Vision of the Future Through the Eyes of Science’ on 31 October, flagging it prominently on the front page. Taking up most of page twelve of the newspaper, the article was accompanied by a photograph of the author, in a flattering pose, looking thoughtfully downwards, at beatific peace.25 The climactic line, about the possibility of releasing nuclear energy, was set in bold type: ‘The new fire is laid, but the particular kind of match is missing.’ This time Churchill did not go on to say, as he had in 1931, that the result might be an explosion.26
This article was well timed, as it was published a few days after the funeral of Lord Rutherford, who had died following a bungled operation when he was only sixty-six, four years before he intended to retire.27 The government did him proud, making him the first scientist born ‘in the overseas dominions’ to be laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, next to the remains of Newton and Darwin.28 Among the thousands of mourners were Tizard and also Lindemann, who may have given a thought to the implications of the event for his own career – he had lost his most influential detractor, while Tizard had lost his most powerful supporter. The funeral seems to have made the Prof reflect on the future of nuclear science and its possible consequences for warfare – on that day, he drafted another popular article on the subject for Churchill, who did not use it immediately but put it in his files.
A week after the ‘Vision’ article appeared, the News of the World featured the second half of ‘Fifty Years Hence’.29 This time, Churchill’s tone was ominous as he fretted about the monsters that scientists might unleash, knowingly or otherwise, particularly by tinkering with atomic nuclei. Could a few nuclear scientists be the successors to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? The article’s baleful headline ‘Life in a World Controlled by the Scientists’ reflected a deeper worry about how the country might change if, as H. G. Wells had hoped, scientists and engineers were soon playing an active role in government. Churchill believed that unelected scientists had no more right to a say in government than, say, bankers or dentists. Again, he highlighted the impact that nuclear science might one day make on everyday life. In the second paragraph, printed in bold, he reiterated a point he had first made six years before, that nuclear energy could be released not only by splitting atomic nuclei but also by combining them:
. . . if one could induce the atoms of hydrogen in the Serpentine to combine to form helium they would produce enough heat to change the whole climate of England for a year.
He was alluding to nuclear fusion, whose power would nevertheless amaze him fifteen years later, when a hydrogen bomb was first detonated.
In his article in the following week’s News of the World, he focused on how science was about to change the practice of war, a subject he may well have discussed with H. G. Wells, who in mid-August had been a weekend guest at Chartwell, much to Clemmie’s delight.30 In public, the two men still scrapped like kittens, but a bond of affection remained, and Wells had ‘a perfect time’, having basked ‘in the glow of Winston’s approval’.31 A few months before, on a whim, Wells had dedicated his new novel Star Begotten to Churchill, who responded with a special grace: ‘It gives me real pleasure to feel that my early admiration of thirty-five years ago for [your] wonderful books should have come to rest in our later times in a harbour of personal friendship.’32 In his newspaper article, Churchill foresaw ‘the obliteration of the personal factor in war’; the outcome of the conflict depended less on the charismatic generals and their heroic soldiers than the faceless puppet masters drinking coffee at their desks. He imagined a future battle in which ‘some spectacled “brass hat” . . . extinguished some London or Paris, some Tokyo or San Francisco, by pressing a button’.33 There was an encouraging consequence, he wrote: ‘The idea of war will become loathsome to humanity. The military leader will cease to be a figure of romance and fame . . . It may well be that the chemists will carry off what credit can be found.’ This was pure Wells, though shorn of his political agenda.
On 11 March 1938, Nazi troops marched into Austria and occupied it without firing a shot. Churchill was on his feet in a subdued House of Commons three days later, warning that Europe was ‘confronted with a programme of aggression . . . unfolding stage by stage’. It was a great speech, all the more powerful for the absence of self-congratulation.34
In his public utterances, by turns fiery and cautious, Churchill repeatedly drew attention to the threat posed by Hitler, but argued that Britain should keep its distance from the Fascist rebellion in Spain and Japanese aggression in China. He was, however, consistent in courting the friendship of the United States. In radio broadcasts and articles published in the US, he praised ‘the majestic edifice’ of Anglo-American friendship, and usually avoided commenting on its in
ternal quarrels.35 At home in the UK, his message was clear and far-sighted: ‘We must not ask too much of the United States . . . we may find them with us at the end of the road.’36
Apart from his far-receded hairline and his bulging belly, Churchill did not look like a man in his mid-sixties. He was still as lively as ever, the disappointments of the past decade having etched surprisingly few lines into his face.37 The upper half of his body somehow spoke of his determination: the fat cigar jutting from his mouth, his heavy shoulders carried a little forward and the dome of his forehead – they all gave him the air of a bull about to charge.
He was on the rampage again in June 1938, condemning what he believed to be the feeble progress of air-defence research and pressing harder than ever for Lindemann to be given a seat on Tizard’s Air Defence Research Committee.38 Officials compiled a rebuttal, refuting each of his accusations and alleging – with a hint of menace – that his own record of implementing new technological ideas before the First World War was far from perfect. According to Tizard, Churchill had failed adequately to prepare for the threat of the U-boat and displayed ‘his total lack of real scientific imagination and foresight’.39 Churchill responded with more sadness than aggression, perhaps partly because he did not want such allegations aired. During the summer, there was an unsatisfactory standoff, but in the end resistance to Churchill’s onslaughts was futile. By November, Tizard reluctantly allowed Lindemann to join the Committee, on the condition that A. V. Hill also became a member.
This clash of wills between Tizard and Lindemann had damaged them both. Even sympathetic colleagues muttered that Tizard treated Lindemann with too little respect and too much scepticism,40 while in Whitehall, Lindemann was now widely regarded as an impossible colleague. As the distinguished government scientist Frederick Brundrett later commented on this ugly rivalry: ‘For two extremely intelligent grown-up people, their attitude to each other was singularly childish.’41
As Hitler prepared to invade Czechoslovakia at the end of September 1938, it seemed that war with Germany was all but certain. Churchill wanted the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to warn Hitler that Britain would go to war if his soldiers so much as set foot in Czechoslovakia.42 This was an unpopular view. Was the freedom of the people in a small, distant foreign country worth a repeat of the carnage of the First World War, this time likely to begin with a Luftwaffe attack that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in British cities?43 The sense of dread was later well caught by Harold Macmillan: ‘We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today.’44
Chamberlain was cheered when he returned in late September from his negotiations in Munich with Hitler and other leaders, waving the ‘peace for our time’ agreement. In Lindemann’s favourite science journal, Nature, a gushing editorial praised the ‘beautiful solution’ the Prime Minister had helped to negotiate and urged that he be awarded the Nobel Prize for peace (the Prof’s snort would have been worth hearing).45 After Churchill opposed the agreement in the Commons,46 Tories in his constituency threatened to dislodge him as their MP, though he soon saw off the challenge.
Unlike the public, and most of his colleagues in Parliament, Churchill knew that Britain was developing radar defences and, crucially, that they were not yet fully operational. He was also more aware than most of his colleagues of other technologies that might soon be unleashed in wartime. In late October 1938, he returned to this theme in another article for the News of the World, based on the piece written by Lindemann a year before, on the day of Rutherford’s funeral.47
This article, ‘What Other Secrets Does the Inventor Hold?’, published on 23 October,48 pays less attention to physics than to biology: ‘It is in this field that the impact of invention and discovery is likely to be most formidable,’ Churchill wrote. In a section on eugenics, he bewails the invention of contraceptives, which he complains have jeopardised the chances of survival of ‘more civilised peoples’ in a world where ‘the barbarian is breeding against them’. He predicts a forthcoming age of genetic engineering, wondering what will happen if ‘the very make-up of mankind becomes the plaything of the bureaucrat’. Churchill had changed scarcely a word of Lindemann’s draft. In the only striking departure from the original, Churchill took a passage midway through Lindemann’s text and placed it at the top, making it the article’s hook. The passage he chose was about nuclear science.
‘Almost every day, the scientists tell us,’ Churchill begins, ‘discoveries are being made about the artificial building-up or breaking-down of the nuclei of the atoms.’ After six short paragraphs about nuclei and the energy locked up inside them, he concluded:
With these immense resources of power available, it seems likely that means will ultimately be found to tap them. If this were achieved, man’s control over nature would take a step forward greater than any since in Palaeolithic times when he discovered how to make fire.
Again, this does not go so far as to suggest that the release of nuclear energy might lead to a new type of weapon, perhaps to avoid more accusations of alarmism. As usual with his articles about the military applications of future science, this one is pessimistic. He doubts whether the human race would be able to handle the scientists’ latest inventions, adding that it was impossible to say ‘whether they will lead to a Utopia or to the extinction of the human race’. The conclusion is one of unmitigated gloom – the new devices ‘may spell not only the ruin of the civilization we know, but the end of human dominance of this planet’. The article may have had a special resonance with the hundreds of thousands who had read or heard about J. B. Priestley’s light-hearted novel The Doomsday Men,49 an unlikely summer hit that ended with physicists detonating a nuclear bomb in a South Californian desert. The yarn was also popular in the US, where the New York Times reviewer concluded: ‘we might do well to keep an eye on those atomic physicists. If they go crazy, something might happen.’50
Eight weeks after millions in Britain read Churchill’s thoughts about a possible nuclear future, a single experiment made it more plausible to believe that nuclear energy might soon be released on a large scale, perhaps to make weapons. This experiment took virtually all scientists by surprise, including even the world’s most accomplished nuclear theoretician, later to be regarded by Churchill as probably the most annoying physicist he ever met.
NOVEMBER 1938 TO SEPTEMBER 1939
Bohr thinks the Bomb is ‘inconceivable’
‘[Niels Bohr] utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who believes himself to be in possession of definite truth.’
ALBERT EINSTEIN1
With Rutherford dead, no one had a surer intuition of how nuclei behave than his only protégé theoretician, Niels Bohr. Yet even he was amazed when experimenters discovered that a uranium nucleus could be split in half when it was struck by a neutron, with a few other high-energy particles emitted at the same time. It was as if a granite monument could be cleaved by throwing a pebble at it. Bohr was in good company – no one had clearly foreseen this discovery, which soon commanded worldwide attention. Few were surprised when Bohr was among the first to shed a bright light on the fission process.
Bohr had first learned about nuclear science from Rutherford, who had almost been ‘a second father’ to him.2 They met shortly before the First World War, when the twenty-six-year-old Dane won a scholarship from the Carlsberg Foundation to spend time in the UK. At Manchester University, using mainly high-school mathematics, Bohr developed the idea that electrons in a typical atom move in quantised orbits around the nucleus, an insight that enabled scientists to understand swathes of experimental data that had previously appeared unconnected. Rutherford considered Bohr’s work as ‘one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind’.3
In 1921, the year before he won the Nobel Prize for physics, Bohr became director of the new Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, accommodating about twenty scientists. Within a few years of opening its doors, it b
ecame the maternity ward of the nascent quantum theory, with Bohr its most attentive obstetrician. On first acquaintance, he did not appear to be greatly distinguished, though he was an imposing presence, with his huge head and hands, bushy eyebrows and a pipe that for him was virtually a prosthesis. He ran the Institute with a uniquely cerebral brand of avuncularity, discoursing in the corridors, running up its stairs two at a time, spending hours in the lunch-room chatting with his young colleagues about the latest paradox to catch his eye. After becoming the Institute’s director, he wrote relatively few original scientific papers, though his colleagues admired him – to the point of idolatry – for his intellectual depth and his generosity of spirit.
No one counted communicative skills among Bohr’s strengths, however. His writing was as opaque and tortuous as his speech, so hushed and garbled that he sometimes left his audience unclear about which language he had been speaking. Yet he loved to talk, not only about physics, but also about the many subjects that fascinated him, including cubism, economics, genetics and cowboy movies.4 Once his interest was captured by what he believed to be an important cause, he would pursue it politely but with the fearlessness of a terrier.
By the early 1930s, the atmosphere at the Institute had darkened. Its glory days were coming to an end and conversations were turning ever more insistently to international politics. The dinnertime banter, for years relaxed and freewheeling, was becoming tense and stilted – German nationalists such as Bohr’s young friend Werner Heisenberg had to respond to tales of Nazi anti-Semitism circulating round the table. More than any other leader, Hitler had made a mockery of the internationalist ideal of science that Bohr and his colleagues cherished. From the mid-nineteenth century, Berlin could have claimed to be the capital of world science but, by late 1938, the city was home to only a few eminent research scientists, most of them fearful, demoralised and feeling cut off from their international community of peers. Over a year earlier, Nature had been banned by the German Education Ministry.5 Hitler boasted that the Third Reich would last a thousand years, but he seemed indifferent to the destruction of German scientific culture, until then one of the most powerful and prolific the world had ever seen.6 Yet out of this husk came the sensational discovery of nuclear fission.
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