Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  As morale in Britain soared after the military successes in North Africa, especially after victory at El Alamein had been secured in November, the esprit de corps of the Tube Alloys staff crashed through the floor.25 In Liverpool, James Chadwick was ‘extremely anxious’ about the project’s future; in Birmingham, Rudi Peierls, who had long urged his British colleagues to be more open and less condescending to the Americans, knew the collaboration was on its last legs; G. P. Thomson, a regular at Washington meetings on the Anglo-American project, realised he was being ‘shut out’. The dream of a balanced UK–US nuclear partnership was now all but dead.

  The scientists on the Tube Alloys project were not the only ones struggling to understand what was going on in Whitehall. A. V. Hill was still condemning the government’s failure to use its weapons advisers effectively and had hammered away at this theme in July, after the Tobruk debacle. In a letter to The Times, he suggested that the government should take a leaf out of Roosevelt’s book and set up a committee of the kind Vannevar Bush was running in Washington.26 Why, Hill wondered, was Churchill so weak at taking decisions about deploying science and technology in the war? Although Hill often saw him perform in the Commons, Churchill’s face-to-face dealings with technical experts was a mystery. To some extent it was illuminated by an indiscreet letter from an official at the Ministry of Supply, Campbell Clarke, who painted a picture of the Prime Minister that was less than flattering:27

  [Churchill] has a histrionic instinct for the centre of the stage, whenever and wherever there is an audience – and an audience may consist of not more than two other persons . . . while he would be quite amenable to ideas and counter-arguments put to him privately by any one man, the presence of a third-party distracts him . . . and he at once takes the centre of the stage. Any difference of view then becomes a lack of respect for his office . . .

  According to Clarke, when experts gave Churchill their opinions on a subject outside his expertise, his vanity came to the fore:

  If [the expert] agrees, [or] fails to express disagreement, [the Prime Minister] is pleased. If [the expert] expresses disagreement – and still worse, if he proceeds to give reasons for his contrary opinions – [the Prime Minister] feels personally rebuffed and humiliated in the presence of others. He has not been treated with the respect due to his leading position. It is injured vanity that hampers his judgement.

  All the technical advisers knew they were liable to be second-guessed by Lindemann. He and others had persuaded Churchill to agree to the carpet-bombing of German cities in order to wear down the enemy’s morale and do serious damage to their industrial capability. Lindemann’s bête noire Patrick Blackett was an implacable opponent of this policy, arguing that it was both immoral and futile. The RAF should concentrate on attacking German submarines and their harbours in the crucial battleground of the Atlantic, Blackett believed. He was in the vanguard of this conflict, working closely with naval and air-force colleagues as a virtuoso ‘operational researcher’, helping to improve the design of weapons and increase their effectiveness, using a combination of simple mathematics, scientific reasoning, practical nous and creative thinking.28 These skills, honed at his bench in Rutherford’s laboratory, were now helping to give Britain and its allies the edge in the Battle of the Atlantic.

  Blackett, like Hill, was at heart a problem-solver, one who preferred in wartime to concentrate on a small number of promising technological ideas rather than fritter away resources on long shots. As Hill remarked, the Prime Minister was behaving like a ‘little [boy] of sixty-seven who will play with toys’,29 spending ‘tens of millions [on] chasing wild geese’.30 Blackett suspected that the nuclear bomb was one of these toys, extremely expensive to build but unlikely to help Britain win the war. Akers and many of his colleagues – especially Chadwick, Frisch and Peierls – had good reason to disagree: according to intelligence reports from Germany, it was still possible that the Nazi state might yet be able to acquire the weapon. If that happened, Moscow would surely be obliterated and Hitler’s bargaining power would soar.

  Partly to soothe his senior scientists, the Prime Minister appointed a few full-time scientific advisers to the Ministry of Production. If Hill and his colleagues thought they were making progress, they were soon disabused – a few weeks later, Churchill gave Lindemann a seat in the Cabinet with the role of Paymaster General. In Whitehall, the promotion was marked with this verse, written in the style of William Gilbert’s pattering libretto for The Pirates of Penzance:31

  My secretariat scrutinises memoranda topical,

  Elucidating fallacies in detail microscopical;

  I plumb the depths of strategy, I analyse ballistics,

  Reform the whole of industry, or fabricate statistics;

  My acumen’s infallible, my logic irrefutable,

  My slightest proposition axiomatic, indisputable;

  And so in matters vegetable, animal and mineral,

  I am the very model of a good Paymaster General.

  Akers knew that it was essential to keep Lindemann sweet. It was the only way to preserve the confidence of the Prime Minister, who most of the time was no more than a bystander on the Tube Alloys project.

  On New Year’s Day 1943, Akers walked to his Washington office – without wearing an overcoat, as was his habit – to put the finishing touches to a five-page letter to General Groves, setting out the case for merging Tube Alloys with the Manhattan Project.32 As Akers knew, he was playing a weak hand against a cardsharp who held all the trumps, and the end of the game was near. The subtext of the Americans’ diplomatic manoeuvres, Akers believed, was their ‘desire to build up a monopoly in this field’, but he could not help liking Groves, who ‘is honest, if very misguided’. Some of Groves’s plans were as odd as they were unwise – he even proposed to lock up his nuclear theorists in isolation, perhaps allowing one final discussion with Chadwick and Peierls before the jail gate shut.

  Almost two weeks later – on the freezing, windy morning of 13 January – Akers heard the Americans’ decision. James Conant had already written to the chief executive of the Anglo-Canadian nuclear-reactor project – without copying his letter to Akers – laying down the law on the terms of their collaboration, much to the Canadians’ disadvantage.33 The auguries for the Anglo-American nuclear project were poor.34 Later that day, the coup de grâce was delivered: with Bush in the room as a witness, Conant read Akers a single-page note setting out the principles of American cooperation on the project, and then handed it to him.35 The news was even worse than he had expected.

  The memo covered seven aspects of the project, including the production of heavy water, its use in chain reactions and methods of separating 235U from 238U. The first two lines of the memo, about the so-called electromagnetic method of separation, set the tone, declaring peremptorily: ‘No further information to be given to the British or Canadians.’ It continued in this vein, spelling out with brutal clarity the arrangements the Americans were now imposing. The message could not have been clearer: the British researchers were being shut out, except in a few areas where their knowledge might be useful to the Americans. In case anyone doubted that they had the authority to impose the new arrangements, Bush and Conant pointed out that they were following ‘orders from the top’.36

  Akers had spent months labouring in vain. The Americans’ nuclear project had been jump-started by the MAUD report and they had benefited from the open exchange of nuclear expertise, but now they were unilaterally abandoning the policy of cooperation that Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed. Akers had the grim task of making the best of things with his colleagues in Whitehall, of explaining the Americans’ volte-face to his disgruntled Tube Alloys colleagues,37 and of trying to do business with the scientist who had done most to betray his trust, Vannevar Bush.

  OCTOBER 1942 TO JULY 1943

  Bush aims for an American monopoly

  ‘[Churchill] had an ego that has never been matched anywhere . . . he did not hesitate to consider
himself an expert on the application of science to weapons.’

  VANNEVAR BUSH, 19721

  Vannevar Bush and his deputy James Conant had been stringing the British along for months. The two men, almost always of one mind about American nuclear policy, had reassured Akers that they wanted to work closely with the British, while working sedulously behind the scenes to reverse the policy of collaboration that Roosevelt had apparently supported. In a series of long, courteous and factually accurate letters to an increasingly anxious Sir John Anderson, Bush skilfully played for time, as the American project overtook the British one. After an especially adroit letter to Anderson that contained no untruths but neatly avoided addressing any of his concerns, Conant congratulated Bush on a ‘masterly evasive reply’.2 It was not long before Bush and Conant had persuaded their President to abandon the collaboration policy, enabling them to pass the buck and assure poor Akers that the new arrangements came ‘from the top’.3

  In the always-measured words of John Cockcroft, Bush was now ‘the king of US scientists’.4 Since the President had given him the go-ahead to set up the National Defense Research Committee, he had built a formidably well-resourced and effective system, linking some two hundred thousand scientists, from the humblest lab technician to Albert Einstein, to the needs of the American military. Away from the public eye, he directed the organisation from his wood-panelled office in the Carnegie Institution on P Street in north-west Washington. Some of the military chiefs were uneasy about working alongside civilians and did not trust them to keep secrets, but ‘Van’ waved these reservations away, dealing majestically with objectors. He took them to dinner, patiently spelled out his case to them between puffs of his pipe and sips from a glass of milk, and dropped heavy hints about his close links with the President. Most dissenters quickly shuffled into line; those who did not risked being skunk-sprayed with profanities.

  During the week, Bush worked long hours to push his agenda, but he also knew how to relax. Some weekends, he left the local hotel where he lived and headed out to his New Hampshire farm, where he took it easy for a day or two, feeding his turkeys, playing the flute and sailing along the coast.5 He retained an agrarian earthiness even while bestriding Capitol Hill, looking every inch the Washington insider, wiry in frame, wry in demeanour. A eulogy in Collier’s magazine, written a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, captured his personality well and invited readers to ‘meet the man who may win or lose the war’.6 Bush probably grimaced when he read that the author had quizzed his office staff about progress on one of their most secret topics: using 235U to build a nuclear bomb that ‘would make Berlin one vast crater’. The staff handled the question well, telling the author that they ‘cringe when they hear such stories’ – their fundamental interest was in ‘235U as a source of power’, they insisted, the opposite of the truth.

  Within a year or so of mocking early press reports that linked the discovery of nuclear fission with the threat of imminent Wellsian cataclysm, Bush had begun to take seriously the possibility of nuclear weapons. He quickly became convinced that the United States should take the initiative to build such a bomb on its own, and was soon disenchanted with the British negotiators, their wearisome pushing for equal participation, their feeble resources, and their blithe indifference to the interests of American taxpayers. Nor could Bush understand how the British system, with its committees entangled like a heap of spaghetti, ever got anything done.7 Frisch and Peierls’s seminal memorandum, Chadwick’s masterly MAUD report, Anderson’s gentlemanly pleadings for fair play – none of them cut any ice with Bush. All that counted for him was the long-term future and interests of America.

  All the leading players agreed with the Bush–Conant line. Among their leading supporters was the Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had been an advocate of Britain’s interests since the beginning of the war but firmly believed that it was America’s destiny to lead the world.8 The problem was that by far the most important person in the loop, Roosevelt, was also the most unreliable, inclined to change policy in a trice and able to hold several opinions at the same time. In late October, he remarked that he and Churchill had discussed the Bomb project only ‘in a very general’ way – quite a change from the ‘complete accord’ he had described three months before.9 Roosevelt soon became sympathetic to Bush and Conant’s view that America no longer needed British help on the nuclear project, and that it was time to exchange only purely scientific knowledge and to share only a very limited amount of engineering and manufacturing information. That way, America could keep for itself a weapon that, in Bush’s phrase, may be ‘capable of maintaining the peace of the world’.10

  At a meeting in late October 1942, Stimson told the President that the US was doing ‘ninety per cent of the work’ on the Bomb and suggested that they should not share ‘anything more than we could help’. Roosevelt concurred, but proposed they confer with Churchill. Bush wanted to take a tougher line – to restrict the exchange with British scientists only to information they could use during the war. Furthermore, he believed there should be ‘no interchange on research or development . . . on bomb design’. In mid-December, all this was approved without demur by the influential Military Policy Committee, whose members included Stimson and Vice-President Henry Wallace. In all significant details, they agreed to shut Britain out of the development of the Bomb, even though they knew that putting an end to the collaboration would delay the project and might conceivably mean that Hitler got hold of the weapon first. For Bush, Groves and their associates, the challenge was to persuade their unpredictable President to rescind the cooperation agreement he had made with Churchill and then to stick to his decision. Roosevelt’s colleagues had no difficulty, however, in persuading him to authorise the multi-billion-dollar investment needed to deliver to his military a nuclear weapon as soon as humanly possible.11

  Any misgivings Roosevelt may have had about curtailing cooperation with the British vanished after Stimson showed him a secret Anglo-Russian agreement on the exchange of new and future weapons, implying that Britain might share American information with Stalin. This was odd – anyone who had even a passing acquaintance with Churchill knew that he would have dropped the agreement immediately if he thought it stood the least chance of jeopardising Anglo-American relations. In his cables to Churchill soon afterwards, the President made no mention of the policy reversal, probably because he was confident that he could talk his way out of his volte-face when they met in the sunshine and warmth of Casablanca a few months later. The difficulties with the nuclear project scarcely figured in their discussions, Roosevelt palming off Churchill with an assurance that Harry Hopkins would sort out any problems after the meeting. Hopkins then remained silent for months, provoking a series of cables from the increasingly anxious Prime Minister: ‘That we should each work separately would be a sombre decision,’ Churchill wrote in April 1943.12 Hopkins was stonewalling, as Bush had recommended.

  Now that Tube Alloys had lost most of its momentum, Britain’s bargaining power was rapidly dwindling. The strategy of virtually excluding Britain from the American project was paying off well for Bush, yet he seemed to be out of favour in the White House – he scarcely heard from Roosevelt. It seems that the President was allowing his chief scientist not only to freeze out the British but also to take the flak for it. If and when matters came to a head, Roosevelt could then claim he was not privy to the details and could renegotiate from the position of great strength guaranteed by his officials’ temporising. At the same time, Bush was twisting in the wind, worrying whether the President had grasped the strategic significance of nuclear weapons.13 It still rankled with Bush and Conant that they were discussing Britain’s nuclear policy with employees of ICI rather than with academic scientists with no axe to grind. In March 1943, Conant told Bush that the controversy over the UK–US collaboration on the production of nuclear weapons ‘would never have arisen if the negotiations had been in the hands of British scientists comparable to yourself and if [the
y] had had the same voice in determining policy in Great Britain as you have had here in the United States’.14

  Bush feared that Roosevelt would make another of his policy somersaults during his next meeting with Churchill. From 12 May, when the talks began, ‘Van’ was standing by in his office at the Carnegie Institution, ready to be summoned to the White House, but he heard nothing for almost two weeks. Then, on the last day of the talks, Harry Hopkins called him in the early afternoon: would he come over and see if a meeting of minds could be reached between him and Lindemann? The three men got together an hour or so later in Hopkins’s office, in his second-floor White House suite overlooking the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial.15 Lindemann was not the softly spoken Prime Ministerial counsellor familiar to Bush, but a rasping accuser, demanding to know why on earth the Americans had unilaterally ended their collaboration. With Hopkins looking on, puzzled, Bush put the Americans’ case.

  Lindemann firmly rejected it. The reason why the British wanted to be involved in building the Bomb was, he said, that it wanted the weapon after the war.16 Commercial considerations about nuclear power were unimportant. If the technical information on how to build nuclear weapons was not forthcoming from the Americans then – in his view – Britain might have to divert some of its war effort in order to get it, though the decision was ultimately Churchill’s. As the meeting wound up, Hopkins said that he now understood for the first time the point of the disagreement. For the time being, Bush thought it best to ‘sit tight’, he told Hopkins.17

  No one in the American administration bothered to tell Bush that, on the day he defended the Americans’ case against Lindemann’s attack, the President decided to accede to Churchill’s pleas to resume full exchange of nuclear information with the British. Roosevelt did not mention it even when he met Bush over lunch a month later, on 24 June. Bush informed the President that Britain’s number-one priority was – according to Lindemann – to have the Bomb after the war. Roosevelt was ‘astounded’, murmuring that Lindemann was ‘rather a queer-minded chap’.18