Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  Bush left the White House believing that the President ‘had no intention of proceeding further on the matter of relations with the British’. Yet, if the experience of the past few months was anything to go by, these were unlikely to be the wayward Roosevelt’s last words on Anglo-American nuclear exchange. Bush could only follow what he believed to be the President’s most recent line. This is what he did two weeks later, when he began a long-planned visit to London to talk with British experts about military technology that the two countries could share. Inevitably, Bush would have to face the music during this visit and explain America’s policy directly to the Prime Minister.

  Late in the afternoon of 15 July 1943, Bush walked into Downing Street for a meeting of the War Cabinet’s anti-U-boat subcommittee, expecting to spend a few hours talking strategy with Blackett, Lindemann and some two dozen others. No sooner had Bush entered the building, however, than he was ushered privately into the Cabinet room for an audience with the subcommittee’s chairman, Winston Churchill.

  Bush expected to exchange a few pleasantries, but moments later he was like a chicken roasting on a spit.19 The Prime Minister, just up from his afternoon nap, was sitting at the huge Cabinet table, livid. He spent almost a quarter of an hour bawling out his guest, spluttering vituperation about the failure of the interchange agreement while fitfully trying to light his cigar, intermittently tossing burnt matches over his left shoulder towards the fireplace. Bush said nothing. But when Churchill brought up the matter of Conant’s January memo spelling out the drastic limitations on the exchange of nuclear information that the Americans were now imposing, Bush spoke up, doubting the document’s existence. When Churchill brought out a copy, Bush claimed he had never seen it, evidently forgetting that he had, a few months before, watched his deputy Conant reading it aloud to Wallace Akers.

  Bush went on the offensive. It was plain, he said, that Britain’s main interest in the project was to lay the foundations of a post-war nuclear-power programme. Churchill butted in, saying that he couldn’t give a damn about that. Later, after another of the Prime Minister’s tirades, Bush reminded him that the US military was now handling the Bomb project so he should take up the matter with Henry Stimson, who happened to be in London. ‘I certainly do not propose to discuss this subject in his absence,’ Bush huffed. He left the room shaken but determined to win the next round.

  During an expedition to Dover two days later, Stimson was taken aside by Churchill. ‘He was most anxious that I should help him by intervening in the [matter of the Bomb],’ Stimson wrote in his diary.20 They arranged to meet in London shortly afterwards. Stimson knew little of the subtleties of nuclear negotiations and understood less, so went to the meeting accompanied by his colleague Harvey Bundy – a cautious lawyer familiar with the Manhattan Project – and by Bush, the real expert. Less than an hour before, over lunch at Claridge’s, Bundy had warned Stimson that if Churchill had his way, the President might inadvertently be persuaded to overreach the constitutional powers he had in wartime by subsidising the post-war British nuclear industry. As they walked into Downing Street, Stimson told Bush: ‘Van, I want you to handle this.’

  Churchill had also left nothing to chance. He was accompanied by his two nuclear confidants, Lindemann and Anderson, who said little during the meeting, as did Stimson and Bundy.21 According to Bush’s later account, the conversation was another tussle between him and Churchill, who again stressed that he was not interested in post-war nuclear energy. In that case, Bush countered, why did the British select as their representative on the project someone who had been an ICI engineer? Churchill looked to Lindemann and Anderson, but they said nothing.

  Churchill eventually ran out of steam and realised he had no choice but to compromise, Bush observed. ‘I will make you a proposition,’ the Prime Minister said, before setting out a four-point plan. First, the Bomb would be built as a joint venture with free interchange of information; second, neither country would use the weapon against the other; third, neither would pass information to other countries without the other’s consent – a move that would remove any chance of Roosevelt sharing the science with Stalin, with whom the President was more sympathetic than Churchill thought wise. Finally, recognising that the Americans would have to bankroll the project, Churchill agreed that the President would have a veto on any post-war venture Britain might develop to use nuclear energy as a source of electrical power.

  As the meeting drew to a close, Stimson agreed to put the four points to the President. Bush and his colleagues had achieved much of what they wanted, most importantly a commitment to scientific interchange so vague that it would be easy to block. Bush left Downing Street with the impression that Churchill was not best pleased with the outcome of the meeting and would not be in a hurry to do him any favours.

  A few days later, when Bush was still in London, his relief curdled into anxiety. He read a garbled cable from the President, written before the second meeting in Downing Street, instructing him ‘to review’ full interchange of information with the British. In Washington the following week, Bush learned that the President’s cable had been wrongly transcribed – Roosevelt had actually dictated an order ‘to renew’ the agreement. But it was too late: the result of the Bush–Churchill meeting stood, and exchange of information was not renewed. If H. G. Wells had come up with this storyline in one of his political satires, it would have been condemned as laughably improbable.

  It was now time to seal an agreement on collaboration. Bush, Anderson and a few colleagues were tasked with drafting a text for their leaders to consider at their forthcoming meeting in Quebec. Although Bush was optimistic, he still could not be sure what his President really believed the American policy on nuclear collaboration should be, and how Roosevelt would react when the bulldog began snapping at his heels again. ‘Van’ did not have long to wait to find out, however – Churchill and Roosevelt were scheduled to meet only a few weeks later.

  JANUARY TO SEPTEMBER 1943

  Churchill’s nuclear deal with FDR

  ‘But what a cultivated animal FDR is . . . and a cute, cunning old bird – if ever there was one. But I still know who gets my vote . . .’

  Churchill’s daughter MARY, 3 September 19431

  Churchill had first fully appreciated the significance of the British nuclear-weapons project at the beginning of April 1943, almost two years after his scientists on the MAUD committee had assured him that the Bomb was viable. He had realised that Britain was in serious danger of being shut out of the Manhattan Project, and had at last tackled the problem head-on, commissioning reports, calling meetings and talking with his advisers. Britain’s negotiating position on this question was by that time dire.

  Lindemann had drawn Churchill’s attention to the seriousness of the problem in an angry note written after the Prof heard, almost certainly in January 1943, that Britain had been all but shut out of the American nuclear project.2 There was a risk, he wrote, that ‘we might lose [the War] if Germany completes the work first’. Assuming that the Allies prevailed, then there was still a danger that Britain would emerge from the conflict grossly handicapped, without access to the Bomb, which promised to be the world’s most powerful weapon:

  The principles and possibilities are known to scientists throughout the world. In five years undoubtedly the leading powers will possess these weapons unless forcibly prevented. Can England afford to neglect so potent an arm while Russia develops it?

  That mention of Russia in this context must have unsettled Churchill. Lindemann’s note prompted the series of memos the Prime Minister sent to Hopkins, whose repeated evasions galvanised Churchill into a concerted attempt to pin down the Americans on the matter of nuclear collaboration.3 In early April, he commissioned a report from Lindemann, who summarised the project and its underlying physics in five pages of opaline prose, noting that ‘the specialists are prepared to lay 100 to 1 on success’, though he believed their odds were too optimistic by a factor of ten.4 Churchill
, saying that he now understood ‘the broad outline of the story’, ordered his intelligence staff to investigate whether there was ‘the slightest chance’ that the Germans were building the plant needed to make a nuclear bomb. Eight days later, he asked Anderson to investigate the cost of developing a nuclear-weapons project ‘at full speed ourselves’.5 The results made sobering reading: it made no sense to lavish so many precious resources on building the weapon on British soil – it would be far more efficient to work closely with the Americans and, if they refused to share the weapon, use the experience of working on the project to build a bomb in the UK after the war.6

  This was why Churchill had been so determined to persuade Vannevar Bush and Henry Stimson of the need to resume the Anglo-American collaboration, when they met him in the early summer of 1943. Although those talks had been difficult, Churchill believed they had been successful from the British point of view. But Anderson warned him that there was still a risk that the American generals might cause trouble. Anderson asked Churchill soon after their meetings: ‘Is there not a danger that General Groves, at any rate, will simply tell Stimson and Bush that, like all Americans who come to our misty island, they have been taken in by our hypocritical cunning and carried away by our brilliant Prime Minister?’7 Within hours of receiving this note, Churchill read a friendly but vague cable from Roosevelt, who wrote that he had ‘arranged satisfactorily for Tube Alloys’ and suggested that he send over his ‘top man’ to sort out the details.8

  It had been many months since the Prime Minister had received such an encouraging note from the President about the nuclear project. Anderson, wanting to strike while the iron was hot, packed his bags and prepared to visit Washington to draft an agreement with American officials, so that Churchill could close the deal at the leaders’ next conference in Quebec.9 Lindemann and Anderson were still, in effect, Churchill’s only nuclear counsellors, neither especially adept at dealing with American officials. Anderson excelled at negotiating compromises, so he could be trusted to come up with wordings acceptable to both parties, though the experience and diplomatic skills of Tizard – exceptionally popular with the Americans – would surely be missed. Sir Henry would play no part in such sensitive matters, however, as Churchill ensured by sending him on a three-month mission to Australia.10

  When Anderson arrived in Washington on 5 August, a telegram was awaiting him – ‘Best of luck – Winston.’11 Sir John, dressed like an Edwardian butler, cut an anachronistic figure on Capitol Hill, though his steady manner made him agreeable company.12 He spent five days tweaking his draft agreement with Bush, Conant and other officials, with Akers on hand to advise on the practicalities from the British scientists’ point of view. Conant was convinced that the American project was going swimmingly – the Bomb was ‘in the bag’, he thought – while his boss Vannevar Bush was more cautious. Although the Americans were ‘spending money like water’, he doubted whether the weapon would be ready in time to be used in the war.13

  The negotiations went more smoothly than Anderson had expected. Neither Groves nor his army colleagues made any trouble, and the American negotiators requested only slight changes to his draft agreement, though Conant baulked at the arrangements Anderson suggested for the interchange of technical information. Rather than risk a contretemps, it was agreed that a new Combined Policy Committee – chaired by Stimson and consisting of British, Canadian and American officials – would oversee the policy’s implementation. Anderson trusted the Americans to turn over a new leaf and collaborate in a friendly spirit, knowing that Churchill would be happy to back him up. The arrangement was, however, a classic bureaucratic fudge.

  Churchill and Roosevelt’s agenda in Quebec was sure to be dominated by debates about the opening of the second front in northern France. There would be time to consider the nuclear project briefly and the draft text agreed in Washington promised to make it easy for the leaders to reach a final agreement. If everything went to plan, Churchill would win the prize he had sought for months: to open up an uninhibited exchange of information on the Bomb project with the Americans.

  When Churchill set off for his next meeting with the President, shortly after midnight on 5 August, he was in a jaunty mood. Marching up and down the platform of Addison Road railway station in West London, he sang a William Gilbert ballad he had known since he was a boy:14

  I go away this blessed day

  To sail across the sea, Matilda!

  The next day, he arrived at the Clyde in Scotland and boarded the Queen Mary, together with some two hundred staff, his wife and their daughter Mary. The visit promised to be both a productive business trip and an agreeable family vacation.

  Churchill had good reason to feel chirpy, as the war was now going well. In May, North Africa had been cleared of enemy armies, the surrender of Italy was expected soon – following the deposition of Mussolini by the Fascist Grand Council in July – and the Russians were inflicting vast casualties on Hitler’s armies, now in retreat. Churchill had met Stalin for the first time in Moscow in August 1942 and was agreeably surprised. Stalin was not an imposing figure – only a few inches above five feet tall, with pock-marked skin, bad teeth and a withered left arm – but he had an impressive directness. After a six-hour man-to-man talk with him over a merry, alcohol-fuelled banquet – a roasted suckling pig crowned their table – Churchill left shortly after three in the morning with an enduring belief that he could do business with the Soviet dictator. Two months later, the Prime Minister dismissed the story doing the rounds in Moscow that he had described Stalin as ‘that monstrosity’ as nothing more than ‘a silly lie’.15

  The Russian army had turned the tide at Stalingrad and by early February 1943 the entire German 6th Army had been defeated or captured. The Russians were now on the brink of fighting the Battle of Kursk, which was to be the biggest tank battle the world had ever seen. Although the Germans would also lose that battle, the Soviets’ losses were now terrible, far greater than those of all the other Allies combined, and Stalin resented what he regarded as the tardiness of the British and Americans in opening another front in Europe, to help reduce pressure on the Russian forces. Roosevelt wanted to placate him and wrote to suggest that just the two of them talk privately.16 After an American official let slip that this overture had been made, a disturbed Churchill raised the matter with the President, who shamelessly denied making any such approach. Stalin eventually declined to meet, but Roosevelt’s mendacity drew attention once again to the great difficulty of doing business with him in a straightforward way. If Churchill was hurt and wounded, he did not show it: he liked nothing more than to be in Roosevelt’s sparkling company, and had arranged to spend a week in Hyde Park before the conference began.

  The conference was hosted in Quebec by the Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King at the seventeenth-century Citadelle, which had fine views over the local fortifications and the St Lawrence River, hundreds of feet below, making its majestic way towards the Atlantic. Within a few minutes of arriving, Churchill was working in his mobile map room, talking with officials in Whitehall and giving directions to his generals.17 Sir John Anderson brought him the draft agreement on nuclear collaboration, but it seems that they did not discuss it for long – Churchill and his daughter soon checked out and made their way to the Roosevelts’ home in New York State, a day’s train ride away. Warmly welcomed by the relaxed and cheerful President, Churchill swam in the outdoor pool, donned a ten-gallon Stetson and picnicked in the late-summer heat with the President and guests on hamburgers, corn on the cob, fish chowder, water melon and hot dogs.18 Daisy Suckley, one of Roosevelt’s cousins, was struck by Churchill’s obeisance – he ‘adores the President, loves him, looks up to him, defers to him, leans on him’.19

  The leaders’ talks in Quebec began on 17 August and lasted a week. Churchill was on his most dynamic form, performing far into the small hours and leaving Roosevelt feeling ‘nearly dead’.20 Among the early fruits of their talks was an agreement
to invite Stalin to meet them both in Alaska21 – Churchill had put a stop to Roosevelt’s desire to meet the Soviet leader alone. The fear of being sidelined by the emerging superpowers was always present in Churchill’s calculations. Although the Alaska conference did not come off, there was enough goodwill between the Big Three for them to meet for the first time a few months later, in Teheran.

  The high point of the Quebec Conference, especially for the Americans, was that Churchill agreed in principle that an Allied landing in France would take place in the following year under US command, though he still left himself wriggle-room. The Americans had long resented what they – and the Soviets – had regarded as Churchill’s obsession with wearing down the Germans by bombing their cities and attacking what he called the ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe, rather than attempting a frontal assault.22 Churchill feared that such an operation would be a bloodbath and a strategic disaster.

  At a private meeting, Roosevelt finally gave Churchill what he wanted – confirmation that the Americans would resume collaboration on the Bomb. During 19 August, on the second day of their meetings, they signed a document, typewritten on four pages of Citadelle notepaper, which closely followed the Anderson–Bush draft, though Churchill added a few rhetorical flourishes to give it a more elevated tone.23 The agreement began with a statement that the speedy completion of the project was ‘vital to our common safety’, referring to the threat that Hitler might have the Bomb first. Yet the leaders knew from intelligence reports that this was unlikely.24 The point of the American Bomb project was beginning to change from beating the Germans to the weapon, to winning global dominance after the war.