The President and the Prime Minister discussed in the White House whether to plan a landing in France later in the year, or whether the Allies should focus on fighting the Germans in North Africa. After the meeting, the two leaders spent thirty-six hours together at the President’s family home of Hyde Park in New York State, a fine property with furnishings that smelt of old money, set in grounds with glorious views across the Hudson Valley. Hyde Park was the President’s Chartwell, a place of repose, a country home well away from the hurly-burly of the capital.
Here, they discussed nuclear weapons for the first time. They both knew that the Allies’ work in this field was not running smoothly, and that American scientists were now surging ahead, though Churchill appears not to have appreciated the extent of their lead. The two men began their discussion after lunch on Saturday 20 June, with Harry Hopkins at the President’s side, but Churchill was alone, presumably because he felt he had no need of an adviser.24 The meeting took place on the ground floor of the main house, in the President’s study, a small dark room dominated by his desk, where he sat untroubled by the intense heat. Churchill was wilting.25 They seem to have come to an amicable agreement – Roosevelt told Vannevar Bush three weeks later that he and Churchill were in ‘complete accord’ – but it was not clear what they had agreed.26 Several years later, Churchill wrote in his war memoir of how he had urged at this meeting that Britain and America ‘work together on equal terms’ and had reached ‘a basis of agreement’ with the President. However, this account included no details, as nothing had been written down.27 Most likely, Churchill had been told what he wanted to hear by Roosevelt and had then been a victim of the President’s ‘almost invariable unwillingness to dictate any memoranda of his conversations with foreign statesmen’, as Under-Secretary Sumner Welles later noted.28
In the Oval Office the next morning, Churchill was hit by one of his most humiliating blows of the war: the President passed him a pink piece of paper bearing the unexpected news that the town of Tobruk in Libya had ‘surrendered, with twenty-five thousand [of our] men taken prisoner’.29 Only a few days before, Churchill had impressed on the garrison’s commander the vital importance of holding the port, commenting that ‘Defeat would be fatal.’30 Roosevelt’s response was just what the wounded Churchill wanted to hear: ‘What can we do to help?’31
Churchill returned to face a Commons vote ‘of no confidence in the central direction of the war’, put down by a cross-party group of MPs in early July. He won it handsomely, but rebellion was in the air. In the days before the debate, Hankey was doing his best to inflict the greatest possible damage on the Prime Minister, while protesting unconvincingly that he had welcomed his own dismissal. At a meeting in the Dorchester Hotel, he went through the familiar litany of charges against Churchill’s leadership: ‘too self-confident and so too prepared to gamble; no team work in government; tried to put too much glamour into the war, which is really a tough business proposition’. After concluding ‘Churchill Must Go’, he warned. ‘If you keep him, we shall not win the war, but shall lose it.’32
Tube Alloys was among the least of Churchill’s worries for most of that grim July, until he received a ‘very urgent’ memo from Sir John Anderson informing him that the agreement he thought he had made with Roosevelt appeared to be all but worthless.33 Anderson had been told the bad news by the head of Tube Alloys, Wallace Akers, who was now struggling to keep the project alive.
JANUARY 1942 TO JANUARY 1943
Akers attempts a merger
‘We have got to make up our minds whether this project is to go on as a minor and spare-time occupation [of the government’s science ministry] or if we are to try to make some sort of show in comparison with the Americans.’
WALLACE AKERS, 21 December 19421
When Wallace Akers took over the MAUD project and named it Tube Alloys – words he coined to deflect unwelcome curiosity – he had good reason to believe he would soon be running one of Britain’s biggest wartime science projects.2 In the coming year, however, his vision would crumble into a handful of dust.
After winning the confidence of Oliphant over the time it took to eat lunch, it was only going to be a matter of time before Akers had the respect of all the other scientists on the project. So it proved. It was hard to take exception to this thoughtful, donnish man. He was a good listener, slow to pass judgement, and was an engaging conversationalist, quick to share his enthusiasms, perhaps for a Velázquez portrait he had recently seen at the National Gallery or an especially fine new recording of the Emperor Concerto.3 His long, open face radiated approachability and he was quick to take the initiative in cultivating friendships among his new acquaintances, often treating them to dinner in the restaurant overlooking the Serpentine at the Royal Thames Yacht Club, where he lived in bachelor rooms. After a glass or two of Château Lafite Rothschild on the restaurant terrace, with swans fluttering nearby on the riverbank, even the harshest of professional disagreements would abate, if only temporarily.
It was easy to see why Anderson and Lindemann had chosen him to run the Tube Alloys project – after he graduated from Christ Church three decades earlier, he had carved out a successful career as an industrial chemist at ICI. In one tussle between the company and the government, Akers’s integrity and organisational talent had impressed Anderson, who regarded him as a kindred spirit. Akers had the knowledge, energy and experience to realise the potential of the MAUD report and oversee the huge industrial project that would be needed to build the Bomb in Britain. The plan had been based on wishful thinking, as Blackett had foreseen, so Akers had to make the best of a misconceived policy and try to merge Tube Alloys with the American project on the best possible terms. By all accounts he did a creditable job of this, energising his small team in the project’s headquarters in a multi-storey, seventeenth-century house on Old Queen Street, a dark lane in Westminster, about ten minutes’ walk from both the House of Commons and Downing Street. From his office, he had a fine view across St James’s Park, the vista spoiled only by the sandbags and rolls of barbed wire in the foreground.
The year 1942 began well for Akers. Invited to the United States to liaise with leaders of the American project, he arrived in New York in January with Francis Simon and was welcomed warmly. The French researcher Hans von Halban joined them soon afterwards, followed by Rudi Peierls, who combined business with pleasure by visiting his children in Toronto. The British team members spent several weeks touring the main centres of research and policy-making – including Berkeley, Chicago, Washington and Virginia – and were impressed by the resources now being invested in the project and the friendliness of their American colleagues. Nothing, it seemed, was too secret to discuss. Within a few days of his arrival, Akers knew that it was time for the British to reassess their project’s relationship with the American effort: ‘One thing is clear,’ he reported to London, ‘an enormous number of people are now on this work so their resources for working out schemes quickly are vastly greater than ours.’4
The British project had a series of research and development problems, besides suffering from a lack of decisive leadership. Officials could not decide whether to get the Tube Alloys programme moving by setting their theorists to work and by commissioning a chemical plant to produce 235U. Meanwhile, the Americans were planning to leave nothing to chance by investing in several ways of separating out 235U – they had substantial plans to build no fewer than four plants, two of which would use methods that the British had scarcely contemplated.5
One surprise for Akers and his colleagues was that the Americans were concentrating on the newly discovered element plutonium as a suitable material with which to make a bomb. Its most accessible form, 239Pu, was fissile like 235U, and in some ways was better, as less of it would be needed to set up a nuclear chain reaction.6 Although Chadwick had understood this some months before, the Americans were making all the running: by March 1941, a team led by the chemist Glenn Seaborg at the University of Berkeley had m
ade 239Pu and had confirmed that it was fissile. Although the British still had a modest lead on the theory of nuclear weapons, the Americans were now way ahead on the experimental side, propelled by an unyielding determination to beat Hitler to the Bomb.7 The intrepid spirit that had once energised the MAUD project had migrated to the other side of the Atlantic.
Although Akers was a polished and hard-working ambassador, his presence could not make up for the absence of two leading figures in the Tube Alloys group, Sir John Anderson and James Chadwick, who did not set foot in the US that year. Anderson’s authority as a member of the War Cabinet, and Chadwick’s as a world-class nuclear physicist, could have made a significant difference to the case for a greater involvement in the American venture. By the time Akers returned to Britain in March, he was convinced that there was no alternative but to fuse Tube Alloys with the American machine and transfer Halban’s nuclear-power project to North America.
In June, Anderson’s policy committee gave Akers’s proposal a frosty reception, Lindemann maintaining that Simon’s separation plant should indeed be built on the British mainland. The committee fudged the decision, concluding that it could not reach a verdict until an agreement had been reached with the Americans about the handling of nuclear patents. Churchill’s two nuclear advisers were still in denial about American industrial and organisational capacity. A few days after they dismissed the palpably strong case for a merger, more ammunition arrived on Akers’s desk. His assistant Michael Perrin had just arrived in the US, and wrote to say that he had already come to believe ‘very strongly’ that there was ‘probably less than a month’ left to draw up plans for coordinating the American and British projects.8 The progress the Americans were now making was startling.
By midsummer, Akers had won over Anderson and Lindemann, telling them that to refuse a merger would risk giving the Germans the chance to make the Bomb first.9 Lindemann still declined to allow Halban’s reactor project to be transferred to Canada, though he conceded that his opposition was principally ‘sentimental’ – not a quality he usually admitted to – an opening that Akers quickly exploited. He took the Prof aside and persuaded him to back down, clearing the way for Anderson reluctantly to recommend a merger with the American project, in a ‘very urgent’ memo to the Prime Minister on 30 July 1942. Sir John could not have expressed the British predicament more bluntly:10
We must . . . face the fact that the pioneer work done in this country is a dwindling asset and that, unless we capitalise it quickly, we shall be outstripped. We now have a real contribution to make to a ‘merger’. Soon we shall have little or none.
Churchill agreed immediately, without comment.11 Unfortunately, he gave his approval too late to enable his chief negotiator to have much leverage with the Americans. As Akers later told Perrin, the lifeblood of collaboration was haemorrhaging, with American officials making no secret of their suspicion that ‘the wily British’ would exploit ‘the secrets and “know-how” of the innocent American inventors’.12 From September, the Americans began their crash programme to build nuclear weapons, handing over its management to the military. Akers was now looking on helplessly as the Americans’ ocean liner of a project surged forward – his only option was to do his best to tether to it the British dinghy.
This was forcefully brought home to Akers on the first day in December, when he visited Enrico Fermi’s nuclear-reactor experiment in Chicago, then hunkering down for another Great Lakes winter.13 Nuclear physics had never before been advanced in such an unlikely place, an unheated makeshift laboratory under the west stands of the University’s Stagg Field stadium, on the floor of a disused squash court. Having shown his credentials to the armed security guards, Akers made his way to the site of the experiment, a dark and ill-lit space, the air thick with graphite dust – ‘We breathed it, slipped on it and it oozed out of our pores,’ one of the physicists later remembered. Fermi’s team was building the reactor, brick by brick, a wooden framework supporting a roughly spherical structure assembled from some three quarters of a million pounds of ultra-pure graphite, about eighty thousand pounds of uranium oxide and roughly twelve thousand pounds of uranium. The only moving parts were a few control rods.
Akers had a good view of the experiment. Standing on what had once been a spectators’ balcony, he introduced himself to some of the physicists who were measuring the reactor’s output with their chart recorders and meters. Fermi was directing the operation with the authority of a five-star general and a sureness of judgement that had earned him the nickname ‘the Pope’. He was not one for small talk during experiments, so Akers probably got most of his information from others. He saw the scientists put some of the final graphite block into place and saw that the assembly was already breeding neutrons – the physicists appeared to be only hours away from setting up the self-sustaining, controlled nuclear reaction that Szilárd had envisaged nine years before. If Fermi and his colleagues were successful, plutonium would be produced in such reactors as a by-product and the Americans could use it to make a weapon.
Akers was not present to witness the project’s climax. The day after his visit, shortly before four in the afternoon, the pen on the chart recorder traced an exponential increase in the flow of neutrons that ended only when Fermi ordered one of the control rods to be released into the core, immediately slowing the flux of neutrons. There would be no meltdown. Fermi pulled out his slide rule and did a quick calculation that left him smiling broadly, before he announced, ‘The reaction is self-sustaining.’ After a gentle round of applause, Eugene Wigner shook his hand and presented him with a bottle of Chianti, soon shared in paper cups with the rest of the team, who sipped in silence, their eyes fixed on their pontiff. They knew that he, officially an enemy alien, had done as much as anyone to allow the Americans to build the Bomb in what they could only hope was enough time for the Allies to beat Hitler to the punch. After the team had dispersed, Szilárd remained alone with Fermi, shook his hand and told him: ‘This will go down as a black day in the history of mankind.’
A little over three weeks later, Roosevelt secretly agreed to fund the Manhattan Project, named after the location of its first headquarters. He had already appointed the soldier and engineer Leslie Groves to direct it, after its first leader Colonel James Marshall had shown himself lacking in the required urgency.14 Groves was a graduate of West Point and MIT and a butt-kicking project director, who already had several huge ventures under his belt, including the building of the Pentagon in Washington, the world’s largest office complex. A brusque forty-six-year-old, still with the uncompromising ambition of someone half his age, he brushed aside or crushed anything or anyone that stood between him and the achievement of the task in hand. In many ways, he was the perfect person for the job – smart, efficient and resolute. At his first meeting with scientists at the project’s Chicago laboratory – including Szilárd and three Nobel laureates – he put them firmly in their place and made clear his indifference to their fancy qualifications, telling them that his studies had given him ‘the equivalent of about two PhDs’.15 His audience sat in silence.
Within six weeks of formally taking charge of the project, he appointed Robert Oppenheimer as its director of science.16 This was a stroke of brilliance. It was not obvious that ‘Oppy’ was the right person for the job: something of an intellectual popinjay, he was a theoretical physicist of international standing but had no experience of management, industry or the military. Although he was a physicist of a high calibre, Oppenheimer was well aware of the sustained brilliance it took to join the elite of fundamental physics and, at the age of thirty-eight, he knew he was never going to reach such heights. So, when Groves offered him the chance to make his mark in another way, he grabbed it, leaving behind promising work on the theory of sub-atomic particles and on the astronomical objects later called ‘black holes’.
Groves was impressively decisive, though not all his decisions appeared to be grounded in logic and rationality. Among his prejudices wa
s a marked Anglophobia that he had acquired twenty years before during a stay in London. This did not take long to surface. Soon after his appointment, Bush and Conant agreed with his view that ‘the British effort would probably be limited to the work of a very small number of scientists without any significant support from either the British government or industry’.17 Convinced that the cunning British were trying to freeload on a venture funded entirely by American money, he trampled all over Akers and his finely honed arguments, playing on concerns about lax security on the MAUD project and the time-wasting disputes with the French over their nuclear patents.18 Groves was angered, too, by the Churchill government’s appointment of two ICI officials to run the British project. He suspected that Akers and his deputy Michael Perrin wanted to exploit new American technology to create a profitable nuclear-power industry for their company – ‘very nearly a monopoly’, Conant pointed out – after the war.19 Akers’s use of the ICI office in New York and reports in the press of anti-trust cases involving the company did nothing to quell the General’s suspicions of the British corporation.20 After he in effect halted the exchange of information in early 1943, the British authorities retaliated by forbidding their scientists from attending meetings in the US, leading Groves to enforce even more draconian restrictions.21 By the spring of 1943, the pious ideal of unrestricted scientific ‘interchange’ was in tatters.
Having no idea of why the flow of information from their American colleagues had dried up, the Tube Alloys scientists in Britain and Canada were puzzled and frustrated.22 They knew that Roosevelt had offered to set up a ‘jointly conducted’ project twelve months previously,23 and they had worked with their American colleagues like brothers only a few months earlier – so why had the collaboration suddenly stopped? Akers could offer no explanation. The British government was still funding its nuclear project to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds a year, and money was still pouring into the laboratories. But the project desperately lacked focus and leadership.24
Churchill's Bomb Page 20