Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  In spite of Hitler’s preoccupation with crushing Poland, he quickly showed Chamberlain that he meant business, sinking the British ship SS Athenia a few hours later. Yet no bombs fell on London, and there was no Wellsian cataclysm,8 only the beginning of ‘the Sinister Trance’, as Churchill put it, as Britain braced itself for aerial attack and, perhaps, invasion.9 Although the opening months of the war were an anticlimax, the British navy went on the offensive.

  Britain was well placed to fight.10 It had a strong army, by far the largest economy in Europe, the continent’s most powerful navy, and was about to retake from Germany the world record for annual aircraft manufacture. Britain also had the crucial support of its dominions and colonies, along with a global trading network second only to that of the United States. Hitler, however, had a much greater momentum and self-belief, with a well-drilled military machine backed by an industrial base working as if its destiny depended on breaking every productivity record. No one was quite sure of the contents of Hitler’s arsenal: perhaps he had bacterial weapons, gliding bombs, pilotless aircraft or even new self-guiding torpedoes. Any one of these might leave his enemies dangerously exposed. The nervous British press jumped on a cryptic phrase in the speech he made in Danzig (now Gdańsk) on 19 September, several newspapers mistranslating the words as ‘a secret weapon against which there was no defence’.11 Whitehall officials wondered whether this ‘secret weapon’ might be nuclear – not crop-eating locusts or death rays as others suggested – and sought advice from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.12 When Churchill heard the story, he may well have surmised that Hitler was bluffing, as Lindemann had predicted a few weeks before.

  For several months, the Prof had been keeping a sardonic eye on press reports of the imminent advent of nuclear weapons. After Bohr and Fermi’s announcement of the discovery of fission in January, he may have seen that a gossip columnist in the Observer was quick off the mark with a warning: ‘Unless we learn the lesson, it is, in all probability, only a matter of time before atomic energy becomes a form of warfare.’13 Those words were easily missed. Not so the article ‘Scientists Make an Amazing Discovery’ splashed across almost an entire page of the Sunday Express several weeks later, on 30 April.14 The article’s apparently pseudonymous author, C. A. Lyon, writing from ‘somewhere in England’, gave millions of readers a well-informed if slightly hysterical account of fission research, concluding that ‘a nation at war might be able to wipe another nation right off the face of the earth in a second’. The story ‘reads like H. G. Wells, but it is strictly authentic’, Lyon insisted.

  Overblown stories like this in the newspapers, which Lindemann read in bed over breakfast, were enough to make him choke on his truffled scrambled egg whites.15 He knew that several government officials were carefully weighing up the options for research into nuclear weapons. Tizard had received the support of his Air Defence Committee after he hurriedly dictated them a note estimating that the chance of the release of energy having military applications was 100,000 to 1.16 This was a spuriously precise number, though he was careful to add that even this low probability should not be ignored.

  Lindemann was worried that press articles about the atomic bomb could lead the public to believe that the Nazis had the weapon and might use it to intimidate the British government. In early August, he decided to make his concerns public, by drafting a letter to the Daily Telegraph. Beginning with an oblique reference to the Sunday Express article, Lindemann homed in on the latest reports of the possibility of producing nuclear chain reactions (he wrote inaccurately that scientists had already observed them).17 The essential point, in his view, was to realise that ‘there is no danger that this discovery, however great its scientific interest, and perhaps ultimately its practical importance, will lead to results capable of being put into operation on a large scale for several years’.

  Lindemann predicted that the press would be as gullible as ever: ‘Attempts will no doubt be made by the Fifth Column’, he wrote, ‘to induce us by means of this threat to accept another surrender.’18 There was no substance to the fears that the Nazis had such a weapon, he insisted, concluding with the sneer he reserved for his intellectual opponents: ‘Dark hints will no doubt be dropped and terrifying whispers will be assiduously circulated, but it is to be hoped that nobody will be taken in by them.’ Churchill read the draft during a mid-August weekend at Chartwell and forwarded it privately to the Air Ministry, asking if there was any objection to Lindemann’s sending the letter to the Daily Telegraph.19 Although officials raised no objections to the letter – one of them commenting that Lindemann’s views were ‘consonant with the best scientific opinion in this country’ – the letter was never published.20 With the country about to go to war, someone apparently decided that it would not be good for national morale to raise even the thought that a single one of the bombs expected to rain down on Britain might be nuclear.

  When Churchill returned to the Cabinet, he was three months short of sixty-five and eligible for a pension. After almost eleven years in the wilderness, he was thrilled to be back in government. Based in Admiralty House, an eighteenth-century redbrick building in Whitehall, he worked hyperactively, as if to make up for lost time.21 Arriving at his desk by seven in the morning, he began a day of cross-examining his admirals, badgering civil servants, dictating memoranda (known as ‘minutes’) to a fleet of stenographers, telephoning colleagues and poring over the colourful charts and maps often covered with black cloths to hide them from unauthorised personnel.22

  To stay fresh, he usually took a long nap in the late afternoon, bringing to his harassed department a welcome calm that ended abruptly after he awoke. Later, he relaxed again for a couple of hours over a good dinner, washed down with champagne, wine and brandy. The working day ended for him only in the small hours of the morning, when he would retire to the suite of rooms he and his wife shared on the top two floors of Admiralty House.

  Six days after he returned to office, the Admiralty notice-board displayed an announcement that surprised no one:23

  Professor F. A. Lindemann FRS to be personal adviser to the First Lord on scientific development. The appointment will be temporary and unpaid. It will take place from September 9th.

  Lindemann had left Oxford for London as soon as he heard that Britain was at war, having only just moved into his office in the new Clarendon Laboratory building.24 He now had an office next to the war room, with another for his valet Harvey, who was always on hand to launder his clothes, prepare his meals and chauffeur him between meetings.25

  Two days after Lindemann officially took up his post, he received an amiable note from Tizard, scientific adviser to the Chief of Air Staff.26 Relations between the Prof and Tizard were still tetchy, if not as poisonous as they had been a few years before. Lindemann believed that not nearly enough had been done to develop his ideas and that even the top-priority radar programme had been handled poorly. In a party of officials who witnessed a demonstration of the new radar technology two months before, he alone had been unimpressed and filed a critical report.27 On the day after the official announcement of Lindemann’s appointment as science adviser in the Admiralty, Tizard wrote to him: ‘I am sure that you will agree with me that any remnant of a private hatchet should be buried . . . we should remember old friendship and cooperate as much as we can.’28 Lindemann replied immediately from London’s Carlton Hotel, where he lived during the working week: ‘Hatchets are made to be buried, above all when so many trenches are available,’ adding that all he wanted was ‘to cooperate as much as we can in the common cause’ and concluding with a warm invitation to lunch.29 Tizard then heard nothing more from him.

  Lindemann’s appointment put several noses out of joint. Churchill was signalling that he did not wholly trust the opinions of the scientists already employed by the Admiralty and that he wanted the Prof to subject every statistic, every opinion, every recommendation to his unforgiving scrutiny. This undermined the confidence of Chur
chill’s colleagues, who knew their advice would always be less important than the assessment given by a disdainful outsider. Contrary to the image of Olympian detachment Lindemann cultivated, he had a rich palette of prejudices, especially against government officials, whom he regarded as feckless buck-passers – a view summarised in a mock prayer that he kept in his files:30

  O Lord grant that this day we may come to no decisions, neither run into any kind of responsibility, but that all our doings may be so ordered to establish new and unwarranted departments for ever and ever. Amen.

  In many ways, Lindemann’s skills complemented Churchill’s, but they shared a weakness for any wheeze and gadget that might give even the slightest advantage over the enemy. Churchill promoted new ideas he had hatched with Lindemann, including the trench-cutting tank, but it seems that none of them proved especially useful. The admirals, many of them exhausted by Churchill, resented these time-wasting suggestions and came to despise Lindemann for his arrogance, his interferences and his second-guessing of the ideas they put in front of their leader. Yet they knew that Lindemann had a unique ability to calm their boss down. Most evenings, he would arrive in Churchill’s private office around midnight, after the Admiralty evening conference and another round of dictations (‘Are you ready?’ Churchill once said to a typist, ‘I’m feeling very fertile tonight’).31 The two men would then settle down on the sofa by the fire and talk, Churchill thoughtfully sipping his whisky.

  One of the good ideas Churchill came up with, within a month of taking office, was the need for a continuous stream of high-quality statistical advice and for the staff to research and collate it. The information from the various departments in the Admiralty was unreliable and incoherent; besides, as Minister for the Navy, he needed to be kept well informed about all other matters relevant to his brief, in other words almost everything to do with domestic economics and the other armed forces. Using this empire-builder’s logic, and in the teeth of opposition from his senior Admiralty staff, he issued a minute to announce the formation of ‘The First Lord’s Statistical Branch’, to be run by Lindemann and with a modest number of staff. When a colleague recommended to the Prof that he employ more people, he replied disbelievingly, ‘Who would join me?’, and did not raise the matter again.32 Like Churchill, he placed a high premium on personal fealty. He recruited a handful of bright assistants – all of them from Oxford University – distinguished by their ironclad loyalty, and also by their willingness to ask awkward questions. Two of the first recruits were the economist Roy Harrod, who had worked closely with Maynard Keynes, and the resourceful physicist James Tuck, who later made crucial contributions to the design of the first nuclear weapons.

  At the War Cabinet table, Churchill was a bold, imaginative risk-taker, just as he had been at the opening of the First World War, and he was confident that the war was going well for Britain. Even in those hectic days, he found time to relax, to meet with friends and to continue working on his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Soon, the pressure of work forced him to shelve the project until after the war, but he did not give up the pleasure of dining with his friends, particularly the members of the Other Club.33 Eight days after Britain entered the war, he sent a telegram to H. G. Wells inviting him to one of the Club’s meetings, probably at its usual venue of the Savoy Hotel.34

  The war seemed to have given the ailing Wells a new lease on life. He proffered advice and comment to the government in a fusillade of public letters to newspapers and magazines, impressing the poet T. S. Eliot so much that he wrote an article on Wells’s sudden return to prominence, comparing it to Churchill’s, both men having apparently been ‘slowly and unwillingly retiring from public life’.35 Eliot particularly welcomed their bluntness, ‘all too rare among the loudspeaker voices of our time’. Wells and Churchill stayed in contact during the war by letter and telegram, but no record remains of their conversations at the Other Club, where they will have had their most candid exchanges. Wells had long since lost interest in making technological predictions and had not publicly mentioned ‘atomic bombs’ for almost two decades.

  Churchill took some time off over Christmas, celebrating at Admiralty House with his wife and a few ‘padlock’ friends, including Lindemann and other Chartwell regulars.36 Impatient for action, he had begun to develop plans to mine Norwegian waters in order to choke off the supplies of iron ore Germany needed to sustain its war machine. Most of the War Cabinet dithered, not wanting to provoke Germany or the neutral countries, but Churchill championed the Norwegian offensive, taking care to stay on the right side of the Prime Minister. Chamberlain was looking increasingly sick, disillusioned and out of his depth, while Churchill appeared ever more assured.

  Among the hundreds of files, reports and minutes that Churchill and his colleagues waded through in those early months of the war, a few mused on the possibility of nuclear weapons. As one of dozens of long-shot threats that the politicians had to contend with, it did not command much attention. Gradually, however, a handful of nuclear physicists, working outside the huge government-run science laboratories, began to take the idea seriously. Among the experts assessing the danger was the recent winner of the first Nobel Prize for nuclear physics, awarded for discovering the match that could light a nuclear bonfire.

  SEPTEMBER 1939 TO FEBRUARY 1940

  Chadwick doubts that the Bomb is viable

  ‘[James Chadwick] put his duty, whether to his country, university or college, before everything, so he never did what he really wanted to do with his neutron. That is, apply it to the medical aspect for the cure of cancer.’

  AILEEN CHADWICK, 19741

  James Chadwick did more than any other British scientist to give Churchill the Bomb, though the two men never met. In the course of the war, as nuclear weapons became a reality, Chadwick was transformed from an introvert experimentalist into the first and most influential of the new breed of nuclear physicist-diplomats, and was tested almost to breaking point. He knew better than anyone that he would be judged by how well he filled the outsize shoes of the scientist who would almost certainly have done the job, had he lived – his former mentor, Lord Rutherford.

  Chadwick had left the Cavendish to take up a professorship at the University of Liverpool in 1936, a few weeks short of his forty-fifth birthday. Within a few months, he had demonstrated that he was not only a brilliant experimenter but that he could also lead his own department effectively, winning new resources, chopping down the dead wood and cultivating new young talent. He had left Cambridge to avoid an altercation with Lord Rutherford, who had spent years resisting his younger colleagues’ pleas to invest in some of the new and extremely compact particle accelerators that could probe deep inside nuclei2 – ‘I won’t have a cyclotron in my laboratory,’3 he told his boys, brooking no further discussion.4 When Chadwick was offered the Liverpool professorship, he jumped at the chance to run his own show, mix more freely with industrialists and live in the gritty native city of his wife Aileen, daughter of a prosperous local family. The Chadwicks and their eight-year-old twin daughters moved to the affluent suburb of Aigburth Vale, where they had a grand home with a tennis court in its grounds. Aileen was content with domestic life, while her husband worked in his department on Brownlow Hill, flanked on a road leading up from Lime Street railway station by some of the worst slums in Britain.

  Soon after he arrived, Chadwick won the first Nobel Prize to be awarded for nuclear physics. The prize must have been all the sweeter for being unshared, though it was not enough to win him the job of Rutherford’s successor as director of the Cavendish Laboratory. To his well-hidden disappointment, Cambridge University authorities gave the post to the less distinguished Lawrence Bragg – rumour had it that Chadwick’s gauche manners ruled him out of contention.5 Soon, the Cavendish broadened its interests, but it was no longer a world centre of nuclear physics.

  Chadwick soon realised the task he faced in revitalising a department that had been running down for thirty years.
6 Its annual budget was ‘less than some men spend on tobacco’, he later recalled, and some of the laboratories did not even have alternating current.7 None of this deterred him: during the First World War, he had managed to do research even as an internee at the liberally run German prisoner-of-war camp at Ruhleben. There, he gave fellow inmates lectures on nuclear physics and even set up a basic laboratory in his barracks, where he did worthwhile experiments using radioactive material in toothpaste.8 He walked out of the camp in November 1918, his digestive system ruined, and soon returned to Manchester, where Rutherford gave him his first big break by securing him a scholarship.9 Chadwick’s career quietly flourished until his discovery of the neutron enabled him to step out of his boss’s shadow.

  At first it seemed that he was going to have a quiet war. Six days after Britain entered it, Nature declared uncontroversially that ‘the interests of pure science as an intellectual pursuit and discipline must remain in abeyance’10 – nuclear physics and other curiosity-driven research would be put on the back burner so that scientific talent could be redirected to projects most likely to help win the war. In 1939, Chadwick had begun the new term in early October with the usual complement of students but only half its roster of lecturers – the rest had left to work on radar, a technology that never seemed to interest him. It was going to be an uphill struggle to maintain the growth of his department.

  Chadwick had not expected war to be declared. When proved wrong, he kept his head down and made the best of things, privately grousing that his younger colleagues had lost their grip, ‘dithering about and feeding on their imaginations, instead of getting on with the job’.11 It was when his department was in this febrile state that a letter arrived in his office indicating for the first time that his nuclear expertise might be useful to the government. The note was from his former Cavendish colleague Edward Appleton, then running the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which was being inundated with queries about a possibile uranium bomb. Chadwick was the ideal scientist to assess the worth of what appeared to be nuclear scare stories, as he was famous for the sobriety of his judgement.