After Lindemann summoned Tizard from the Air Ministry to Downing Street for a discussion about their ‘overlapping responsibilities’, Tizard soon realised that he was being frozen out.37 On 21 June, his humiliation became too much to bear. At a tense meeting in the Cabinet Room, Churchill and several colleagues – including Lindemann and the demoralised Tizard – were discussing R. V. Jones’s well-reasoned belief that Nazi bombers were being directed towards British targets by radio beams the Germans had set up in the sky.38 The idea was wrong, Tizard believed, but the young Jones prevailed, having dazzled the Prime Minister and others with his reasoning.39 At the end of the meeting, Churchill declared (rightly, as it soon turned out) that they should assume the beams existed, angrily banging the table and denouncing Tizard’s department: ‘All I get from the Air Ministry is files, files, files!’ Later, having found that Lindemann had replaced him as chairman of a meeting at the Air Ministry, Tizard resigned.40 Britain had lost ‘the greatest genius at applying science to [military] tactics this country has ever known’, in the judgement of G. P. Thomson, one of the few leading academic scientists friendly with both Tizard and Lindemann.41
Churchill probably gave the consequences of this no thought at all. He was living through some of the most harrowing weeks of his life, watching the Nazis sweep British forces from the continent and snuff out all opposition. Although Britain’s leading academic scientists supported Churchill as leader, many of them were angry about his studied indifference to their advice and his treatment of Tizard. The difficult relationship between the Prime Minister and his scientists would normally be a matter of no consequence, but this was an unusual time. Several of the physicists were coming to believe that an explosive of unprecedented power, and possibly huge strategic significance, might soon be available.
In one respect, Churchill and his colleagues running British science had reason to be relieved when work on nuclear weapons began to take off in 1940. In a private letter ten years later, Lindemann’s colleague R. V. Jones revealed why:42
. . . we were very short of physicists, and nearly all our best men were working in radar . . . At the same time the large body of refugee scientists in Britain were an embarrassment to us, because we felt that we could not trust them with matters of immediate defence, and we [could] not see a safe way of making use of their talents. When, however, there appeared a remote hope that a uranium bomb might be made, I think many people saw with relief a chance of clearing up two awkward situations at the same time by putting the refugee scientists on to working for the uranium bomb; it gave them something worthwhile to do, and it enabled the country as a whole to do something worthwhile [about the] uranium bomb.
At the beginning of what threatened to be the most destructive war ever seen, human beings were on the verge of creating their most devastating weapon. Scientists were no longer ‘fumbling with the keys’ of the nuclear chamber ‘hitherto forbidden to mankind’, as Churchill had written nine years before in ‘Fifty Years Hence’. His own scientists now believed they had the key in their hands, and would soon be clamouring to bring this to his attention. Would Churchill the politician have the foresight of Churchill the writer?
JUNE TO SEPTEMBER 1940
Thomson and his MAUD committee debate policy on the Bomb
‘It was agreed that Dr Frisch should be informed of the importance of avoiding any possible leakage of news in view of the interest shown by the Germans.’
G. P. THOMSON, minutes of first meeting of the MAUD committee, 10 April 19401
In the past two years, nuclear physicists had been forced to change their priorities. They had previously been like any other curiosity-driven scientists, discussing new results openly and paying little attention to the possible consequences of their findings. But now they were obliged to practise their still-young discipline underground and work secretly on what was expected to be a new weapon of mass destruction.
The U-bomb subcommittee’s proceedings had put its members – including most of the leading lights of the British nuclear community, all of them political ingénues – under severe pressure. It was their task to advise Churchill’s government, at what was probably the beginning of a long war against a brutal fanatic, about whether to invest huge resources in a bomb that might not be feasible or that might already be in the enemy’s hands.
The professor charged with collating the advice, G. P. Thomson, was in some ways an unlikely choice as the committee’s chairman. He was not a nuclear scientist of international standing and, as his colleague John Cockcroft observed, was not in the class of the two finest experimental physicists of their generation, Patrick Blackett and James Chadwick.2 Nor was Thomson a talented manager of people: after clearing up a personnel mess he left at the Cavendish a few months later, Cockcroft griped: ‘G.P. is very tactless.’3 Thomson showed bounteous tact, however, in his dealings with Lindemann, who will have approved of his politics and known that he posed no threat. If Lindemann mistrusted Thomson, there was little chance that the committee’s conclusions would be taken seriously by Churchill.
Thomson had many other virtues, too. He was open-minded, well respected by his peers, good at persuading them to talk through their disagreements, and quick to size up complicated arguments by summarising the salient points crisply and fairly. By turns flippantly humorous and penetratingly subtle, he sometimes surprised his colleagues with his pugnacity, though he rarely crossed the boundary into bad manners. He was more interested in things than in people, preferring to tinker with his model ships than to read poetry or listen to music, which he regarded for the most part as ordered vibrations of air molecules.4 For him, the only music worth listening to was the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Able to spare only a day or two a week from running the physics department at Imperial College, Thomson was always pressed for time on the committee. His chairmanship came with no executive authority, so he had to rely on goodwill, and his largely untested powers of persuasion in Whitehall. His challenge was to coordinate the nuclear work at several laboratories – most importantly Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Liverpool and Oxford – and work constructively with nuclear physicists who had only meagre technical support and diaries crammed full of lectures and university meetings.5 Most inconvenient of all for Thomson, several of the best physicists in the field were (or had been) ‘enemy aliens’ and so were objects of suspicion to the authorities, often making it difficult for them to travel. Thomson made light of the official warnings and discreetly shared top-secret material with Frisch and with Peierls,6 who was working full-tilt on his chain-reaction calculations, having borrowed the services of a secretary and secured permission from his university to jettison his teaching duties. Peierls stepped down from faculty meetings after hearing mutterings that it was not quite right that former ‘enemy aliens’ were attending them.7
During the life of Thomson’s committee, discontent with the government’s handling of science rumbled like distant thunder in the nuclear community. In the Athenaeum Club and Blackett’s apartment in Westminster, scientists, civil servants and service chiefs moaned over their brandies about the government’s mishandling of their scientists.8 Lindemann was the grumblers’ Aunt Sally. Their vehemence probably stoked by jealousy, they blamed him for Tizard’s ejection and for joining with Churchill in the hare-brained pursuit of wheezes and gadgets rather than concentrating on strategic initiatives.
Foremost among the critics was A. V. Hill, still bearing the scars of his battles with Lindemann on the Tizard Committee. A sprightly fifty-four-year-old, he was a handsome figure with his wavy silver hair and matching moustache, both always trimmed neatly. He was one of the most powerful and popular figures in British science, a straight-dealer who was by nature an activist, by conviction a sceptic. Always ready to prick the egos of the pompous, he intensely disliked and mistrusted Lindemann, whom he regarded as a gifted explicator but a second-rate scientist and a malign influence on Churchill. A few months before, Hill had been elected a
s one of the Members of Parliament representing Cambridge University, describing himself as an Independent Conservative (he was the only Nobel Prize-winning scientist ever to be elected to the Commons, a record that still stands).9
Like his late acquaintance Rutherford, Hill wanted British scientists to collaborate with their American colleagues and to share their military work unstintingly. In January 1940, he had begun planning a personal mission to America with this agenda – in the same spirit as Rutherford’s in 1917 – and spent two months touring the eastern US and Canada, privately making his case.10 During his stay, Hill had talked with nuclear physicists at Columbia University – apparently including Fermi but not Szilárd – about their chain-reaction experiments. Hill sent a memo, ‘Uranium – “235”’, to Tizard, declaring it a waste of time to do this research in Britain:11
If anything likely to be of war value emerges they will certainly give us a hint of it in good time. [The American physicists I’ve met] feel that it is much better that they should be pressing on with this than that our people should be wasting their time on what is scientifically very interesting, but for present practical needs probably a wild goose chase.
This advice was out of date. Although Fermi and his colleagues were making swift progress in setting up nuclear chain reactions, they had no idea that Frisch and Peierls had hit on a way of making a nuclear weapon.12
One of the problems Thomson’s committee had to tackle was whether to share its knowledge with the Americans or try to go it alone. This would certainly be a great challenge for Britain, which was hard pressed for resources and not a sensible place to test the weapon. Although Lindemann urged the committee to be scrupulously apolitical – that is, to stay off his territory – it was going to be difficult to make a clean separation of science and politics.
As the threat of invasion grew starker by the week, Thomson worried about the safety of his family and, with expected increases in rationing, his children’s diet. He and his wife Kathleen were alarmed by a chance conversation at the Carlton Club with the MP Rab Butler, who warned that their home in Surrey was likely to be on the inland path of the Nazi army.13 After weeks of agonising, the Thomsons decided that the three children should go to America accompanied by Kathleen, who would return after they had settled into their new homes and schools. On a sunny summer morning in late June, they set off, Thomson driving them across the North Downs to Guildford railway station. An hour later, he was sitting at his desk in silence. After years of living with the noise and pandemonium of family life, he was probably reflecting on the melancholy thought that for the foreseeable future he would be living alone. The Thomsons were just one of tens of thousands of families in Britain to be broken up by the war.
Only a few weeks later, he heard that his elderly father – one of the greatest British physicists of the past century – had died. There was, however, plenty of work that summer to distract him from his grief and loneliness. As he and his colleagues became increasingly confident that a nuclear weapon could be built, so the secrecy of their work intensified. It was time to give their committee a name that would be unlikely to catch the interest of prying eyes. Thomson agreed to name it MAUD, after an incomprehensible word in a garbled telegram Lise Meitner had sent to reassure one of Cockcroft’s colleagues that Niels Bohr and his wife were safe.14 Meitner had asked for the news to be passed on to ‘MAUD RAY KENT’, which Cavendish physicists fretted might be a botched anagram disguising an urgent message for the Allies to separate 235U at the earliest opportunity (MAKE UR DAY NT) as the Germans already had it.15 The truth was rather more banal: the words referred simply to a former governess of the Bohrs’ children, Maud Ray, who lived in Kent.
Thomson’s job was made no easier by the authorities’ refusal to allow him to recruit any scientist who was an ‘enemy alien’, or who had ever been classified as such. Frisch and Peierls were increasingly frustrated by the way they were being treated – they had been refining their idea but had heard nothing from Thomson or an Air Ministry official to acknowledge their work. At the end of July, Peierls’s patience ran out and he accosted Thomson in London.16 Soon afterwards, Frisch and Peierls sent him a ten-page summary of the ‘uranium problem’, showing again that they still knew more about the prospects of nuclear weapons than anyone else in Britain.17 A few weeks later, Thomson, realising that it was ridiculous to exclude the two pioneers from his deliberations, arranged a compromise by setting up a ‘Technical subcommittee’, deemed to be so harmless that it was safe for even former ‘aliens’ to join it.
At the Cavendish Laboratory, the French refugees Hans Halban and Lew Kowarski were even unhappier than Frisch and Peierls about their exclusion from MAUD’s inner circle.18 The two Frenchmen were trying to set up a chain reaction using slow neutrons, with a view to generating nuclear power rather than producing a weapon – a priority that made their experiments less important, from the British point of view. Based on the work they had done in France, they had brought with them a sheaf of patent applications filed in Paris shortly before the Nazi invasion. They then filed corresponding claims in London. Thomson and his colleagues thought these patents on priority were a trifling, time-wasting distraction from the business of building the Bomb – he later described them as ‘the most unmitigated nuisance’.19 But to the Frenchmen’s eyes, the claims were perfectly reasonable ways of preserving their commercial rights in the post-war future of nuclear energy.
The mood of Halban, Kowarski and the other foreign physicists working on the MAUD project darkened when the government stepped up its internment campaign. In late July 1940, every ‘alien’ in Britain – even those who had been British citizens for many years – received a curt letter with an instruction to report to a police station.20 The Royal Society pressed the government to exempt some of the scientists from internment and, in the case of Otto Frisch, was successful.21 While Thomson was discretion itself in arguing the case for foreign nationals to be allowed to work on the project, A. V. Hill was contemptuous of the government’s high-handed policy, which he believed denied many refugees the opportunity to fight the Nazi regime they hated.22 This protest was part of his barrage of attacks on the government’s handling of science, culminating in late June in a long, damning memorandum, ‘On the Making of Technical Decisions by HM Government’.23
Hill began by pointing at the main culprit: ‘It is unfortunate that Professor Lindemann . . . is completely out of touch with his scientific colleagues . . . his judgement is too often unsound.’ Most serious of all was ‘the fact that he is unable to take criticism or to discuss matters frankly and easily with those who are intellectually and technically at least his equal’. Hill deplored the Prof’s ‘ill-advised adventures which slowed down the production of tried weapons’, almost certainly an allusion to Lindemann’s support for MD1, often referred to disparagingly by outsiders as ‘Churchill’s Toyshop’.24 Hill attached two appendices, the first a list of Lindemann’s wackiest ideas, each followed by a crisp refutation, the second a denunciation by Tizard, complete with examples of the Prof’s past bad behaviour. Yet Hill accepted that the government’s scientific incompetence was not exclusive to Lindemann: ‘A system has grown up of taking sudden technical decisions of high importance without, or against, technical advice.’ It was striking that Hill did not question Churchill’s authority, ‘now so important to the nation’, and accepted that Lindemann’s presence may be ‘indispensable’ to him. Yet he was adamant that unless the system used by the Prime Minister changed, ‘The situation will become highly dangerous.’
At the time Hill wrote this philippic, a group of twenty-five scientists led by the anatomy professor Solly Zuckerman was working on the Penguin Special Science in War, urging ‘the effective utilisation of scientific thought, scientific advice, scientific personnel’ in the war. The book, conceived, written and published in only a month, sold modestly, but successfully drew attention in Whitehall to ‘the impression of vast potential forces insufficiently coordinated or inad
equately marshalled’, as a Nature editorial noted approvingly.25
None of the complaining scientists heard a word from Churchill, whose attention was focused on fighting the Battle of Britain, which had begun on 10 July. Using their newly acquired airfields in northern France, the Germans began raids on the west of England and South Wales, the Luftwaffe’s fighters and bombers engaging in brief but brutal encounters with the Royal Air Force’s Spitfires and Hurricanes. This was the beginning of the first major battle to be fought entirely in the sky, with 258 civilians killed that month in Britain.26 Much worse was to come.
In the final week of July, a dextrous move by the Prime Minister blunted the impact of Hill’s protest.27 Churchill invited Tizard, then packing up his files in the Air Ministry, to lead the mission to give the Americans all the British technical secrets that might be useful to its military, as Hill and others had long urged. Tizard paid several visits to 10 Downing Street, where he found the Prime Minister still in two minds about the mission’s wisdom, and uneasy about the idea of giving the Americans secrets in the naive hope that they would reciprocate this generosity.28 Exasperated, Tizard agreed to lead the mission provided that he was allowed to run it with a free hand, which Churchill refused twice before finally succumbing.29
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