Behind the scenes, Anderson lobbied hard for Bohr to be given a chance to make his case in Downing Street, eliciting a testimonial from Churchill’s friend Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa, who likened Bohr to ‘Shakespeare or Napoleon – someone who is changing the history of the world’.46 Normally, this was just the kind of man Churchill liked to get to know.
Anderson’s persistence paid off in early May, when the Prime Minister finally agreed to the meeting. Apparently, everyone involved except Bohr believed it was a disaster waiting to happen, Anderson and Lindemann doing their best to lower the risk of failure. R. V. Jones sat down with Bohr to agree a précis of his argument, which Bohr undertook to learn by heart.47 The President of the Royal Society, Sir Henry Dale, was conscripted to write to Churchill to commend the importance of what his guest was likely to say: ‘It is my serious belief that it may be in your power, even in the next six months, to take decisions which will determine the future course of human history.’48 Dale produced two pages of verbose pleading that made the serious error of drawing attention to Bohr’s attempts to win the ear of Roosevelt in Washington – this kind of ultra-high-level political dabbling was certain to put Churchill’s nose out of joint. Dale’s letter was ‘not a happy effort’, Anderson sighed, but Lindemann agreed to pass it to the Prime Minister, with a crisp reminder of the meeting’s purpose.49
Churchill’s secretary finally scheduled the meeting for Tuesday 16 May. The auguries could hardly have been worse. A few days before, Sir Henry Dale was bracing himself for the Prime Minister’s encounter with Bohr’s ‘inarticulate whisper’ and ‘mild, philosophical vagueness’.50 Impervious to the others’ pessimism, Bohr showed no signs of wavering. An admirer of Churchill’s vision and courage, he had been heartened by the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Stewart Menzies, who told him how fortunate Britain was to have a Prime Minister with the imagination to grasp the long-term implications of possessing nuclear weapons.51
APRIL TO SEPTEMBER 1944
The Bulldog meets the Great Dane
‘It is said that the Prime Minister has a great regard for scientists and employs [them]. I am very glad to hear it because there could be no greater antithesis than between the brilliant mind of the Prime Minister and the scientific mind.’
LORD STRABOLGI, House of Lords debate, 29 July 19421
‘I’m through,’ Churchill sighed to Lord Beaverbrook in the spring of 1944.2 Almost half a decade of hyperactivity and relentless pressure had taken their toll on the Prime Minister, now looking every one of his sixty-nine years. A serious illness in late 1943 had left him tired, yawning in meetings, bereft of his usual drive, feuding acrimoniously with his ministers and Chiefs of Staff, some of them teetering on the edge of resignation.3 His decline was painful to behold in some fumbling Commons performances and lacklustre radio broadcasts.4 In late April, at the end of unpleasant meetings, one of his most senior civil servants thought the Prime Minister was breaking down and doubted if he could continue.5
Though victory over Hitler was now all but assured, Churchill was worried about the war’s endgame. ‘If Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe’, he had written in October 1942, ‘it would be a measureless disaster.’6 Yet Roosevelt, less fearful of Soviet intentions, was striving to overcome their insularity and suspiciousness, and to draw them into a stable post-war community. The first meeting of the three leaders, at the Teheran Conference late in 1943, had been a turning point for the Alliance – Churchill was shocked that the President treated him on much the same terms as Stalin.7 The Soviet leader had played his new status for all it was worth, as the American General Marshall observed: ‘[Stalin] was turning his hose on Churchill all the time . . . [Roosevelt] used to take a little delight in embarrassing Churchill.’ One consolation for the Prime Minister, however, was that the President had never shown any interest in sharing with their Soviet ally the secret of the nuclear bomb.
At the Teheran Conference, Churchill had finally agreed, in sufferance, to the opening of a second front in northern France. He had no choice, as Roosevelt and Stalin had run out of patience with his duplicitous attempts to string them along with reasons to postpone the operation.8 At the conference table, it was painfully clear that Britain was no longer an equal partner with the Soviets, with their huge army and Stalin’s willingness to suffer casualties, and the Americans, with their colossal firepower. It was probably the anguish of seeing the power of Britain and its Empire diminishing by the month that led him soon afterwards to contract pneumonia and to have two minor heart attacks. His doctor had even feared for his life.9
Two weeks before the scheduled date of the landings, 6 June, Churchill was under huge pressure, with a workload as heavy as it had ever been during the war, and jumpy at even the thought that the operation might be a bloodbath on the scale of Gallipoli.10 Most worrisome for Churchill was Roosevelt’s apparent indifference to the possibility that the Soviets would dominate much of Europe after the war – ‘I don’t care two hoots about Poland,’ the President had commented. ‘Wake me up when we talk about Germany.’11
It was at this tense juncture that Churchill was due to meet Bohr, the first time the Prime Minister had met one of the Tube Alloys nuclear scientists. The meeting was scheduled for the day after the final conference in London on the planning for D-Day.
Churchill apparently had no recollection of his first acquaintance with Bohr’s science at Chartwell eighteen years before, when his excitement over the planetary model of the atom distracted him from his forthcoming Budget. Apart from Lindemann, Churchill resented the presence in government circles of scientists who had elbowed their way into Whitehall and claimed to offer politicians wisdom more profound than common sense could supply. Bohr stood a chance of getting his message across only if the Prime Minister had the patience to listen to his ramblings for long enough to sift the gems from the clay. The timing of the meeting, due to take place in Downing Street, was not propitious: it was to begin at three in the afternoon, when the Prime Minister normally liked to begin his daily nap.
The encounter got off to a bad start and then went rapidly downhill.12 Bohr and Lindemann arrived early and were sitting together when Churchill walked in, having just read Sir Henry Dale’s windy appeal ‘on behalf of the scientific community’ for him to meet the guest now in front of him. The Prime Minister appears to have sensed an ambush by the scientific elite and was probably indignant to read that the Dane had been meddling in Anglo-American politics. Ignoring Bohr, Churchill laid into Lindemann, accusing him of arranging the meeting only to ‘reproach me for the Quebec Agreement’.
The Prime Minister’s resentment over opposition to the agreement burst like a boil and infected the entire meeting, which degenerated into a long, private altercation between Churchill and the Prof. Bohr would have struggled to make himself understood even if the other two men were silent, so he was fighting a losing battle. Having found nothing of value in the tortured words that Bohr managed to utter, Churchill lost patience. ‘I cannot see what you are worrying about,’ he said – all they were talking about was a new and bigger bomb that ‘made no difference to the principles of war’. The prospect of post-war nuclear proliferation that so frightened Bohr obviously meant nothing to the Prime Minister, who assured his visitor that there were no long-term problems with the weapons that could not be ‘amicably settled between myself and my friend President Roosevelt’. For Churchill, policy on nuclear weapons was a private matter; nuclear scientists should mind their own business.
As he left, Bohr offered to set out his views in a letter, drawing a sharp reply from Churchill: ‘It will be an honour for me to receive a letter from you, but not about politics!’13 A week later, the Prime Minister received via Lindemann a long-winded, fawning letter from his unwelcome visitor. In it, Bohr said nothing new but underlined his regret if he had caused any offence.14 Churchill appears not to have replied. Unimpressed with Bohr’s argument
s, he had no time for him personally – four months later, he wrote to Lindemann:15 ‘I did not like the man when you showed him to me, with his hair all over his head . . .’
Lindemann’s disappointment with the Quebec Agreement was still festering. Nine days after the unfortunate meeting with Bohr, Churchill sent the Prof a note in a sealed envelope, defending the decision to sign the agreement, with arguments based on a defensive pragmatism that sometimes drifted close to sentimentality:16
I am absolutely sure we cannot get any better terms by ourselves than are set forth in my secret Agreement with the President. It may be that in [later] years this may be judged to have been too confiding on our part. Only those who know the circumstances and moods prevailing beneath the Presidential level will be able to understand why I have made this Agreement. There is nothing more to do now but to carry on with it, and give the utmost possible aid. Our associations with the United States must be permanent and I have no fear that they will maltreat us or cheat us . . . The great thing is to get on with the job and keep it absolutely as secret as we can.
Churchill resented what he saw as the tendency of some scientists to regard a secret as information that could be disclosed to only one person at a time. Later, when he dismissed Tizard’s appeal to be formally allowed to know about the Manhattan Project, Churchill told his Chief of Staff: ‘For every one of those scientists who is informed, there is a little group around him who also hear the news.’17
When Churchill wrote his defence of the Quebec Agreement, British and American officials were discussing the supplies of uranium ore they would need after the war in order to produce nuclear weapons. The Americans were pressing hard for British cooperation, as the amounts of these minerals in the US were small, and the British had ready access to huge amounts of them in territories of its Commonwealth and Empire. Vannevar Bush, James Conant and General Groves knew the strategic importance to America of making a deal and worked for months to secure it, talking over the details with Sir John Anderson, who kept Churchill well briefed.18 Here was an opportunity for the strong negotiator to play hardball.
But these talks were a sideshow compared with the colossal enterprise of planning the D-Day landings. On the night of 5 June, Churchill remarked to his wife before they went to their beds, ‘Do you realise that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand men may have been killed?’19 The operation went far better than he dared hope, and as well as Roosevelt expected: under the command of the American General Eisenhower, a hundred thousand British, American and Canadian troops landed on the fire-swept shores of Normandy. Three thousand were killed on the day, but this was not another Gallipoli. By 10 June, four hundred thousand men were ashore, smashing Hitler’s Atlantic fortress.
After a short visit to the Normandy bridgehead, Churchill returned to Downing Street just in time to see Hitler’s reply to the landings – the first German V1 flying bombs roared across the sky and fell on London (V stood for Vergeltungswaffen – ‘weapons of revenge’).20 Intelligence reports had given the Allied governments months of warnings of these attacks and Churchill had expected them to begin in early 1944.21 The bombardment came as a shock to civilians, however, thumping their already low morale and wounding their trust in the government. Three months later, another weapon sped into the skies over London, the supersonic V2 rocket, again terrifying people below. Yet, from a strategic point of view, these imprecise weapons were only a distraction – each one was extremely expensive, costing far more to manufacture than an aeroplane, but killed on average only a single person.22
Churchill was, for once, disappointed with the advice that Lindemann had given him about these German weapons.23 The Prof had been right to insist that the experts were exaggerating when they predicted that V2s would each carry a ten-ton warhead. But he had been wrong to advise that reports of the Nazis’ development of long-range rockets were a hoax to distract attention from their manufacture of flying bombs.24 Almost a year before, when War Office scientists tried to warn ministers of what seemed to be afoot, Lindemann had dismissed their interpretation of what appeared to be (and were) launch sites for the rockets on the Belgian and French coasts.25
The attacks rattled and infuriated Churchill. Encouraged by ‘most secret’ briefings from Lindemann, he considered retaliating with biological (anthrax) weapons, which – as scientists at Britain’s Porton Down research centre pointed out – were ‘infinitely easier to make’ than nuclear weapons.26 Britain ordered anthrax bombs from the United States, and a small batch of them had arrived in May 1944. Two months later, Churchill asked his Chiefs of Staff to think ‘very seriously’ about using poison gas, telling them that he wanted ‘the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by . . . psalm-singing uniformed defeatists’.27 He made his own views clear:
It is absurd to consider morality on this topic . . . in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts of women.
The Chiefs of Staff opposed the use of poison gas, fearing that the Germans might retaliate in kind.28 ‘Not at all convinced’ by this response, Churchill persisted. The military prepared to attack German cities with anthrax bombs, but nothing came of these plans because sufficient numbers of the weapons – ordered from the United States – were not ready in time.29
The new weapons of most interest to Churchill in the final stages of the war were nuclear. On 13 June 1944, he and the recently re-elected Roosevelt signed a ‘Declaration of Trust’ to gain ‘combined control of ores and supplies’ needed to produce fissile material.30 Anderson, carrying out what he believed to be Churchill’s wishes, had not attempted to take advantage of the strong British position by, for example, monopolising ore in the Congo. Rather, the declaration permitted the United States to take the lion’s share of the ores after the war – the British took a small amount, and even that was resented by the American negotiators. On the day Churchill signed the declaration, he asked Anderson to explain how it differed from the agreement struck with Roosevelt eight months before in Quebec.31 The Prime Minister had not understood the document he had signed.
By the summer of 1944, Churchill knew that the world would emerge from the war with only two superpowers – the Soviet Union and the United States. Great Britain now had no choice but to play second fiddle to the Americans. His main aim in the closing months of the war was to maximise the strategic advantage for his exhausted country and its dominions, and to rein in Stalin’s ambitions to dominate Eastern Europe, including Poland. For him, it was a grim and depressing end to the war. Determined to maximise the dwindling asset of his reputation and charisma, he repeatedly requested meetings – preferably in Britain – with Roosevelt and Stalin, but both were unwilling to indulge him.
With no appetite for the business of rebuilding Britain after the war and other matters he regarded as small fry, Churchill packed his diary with international travel, most trips leaving him refreshed and celebrating rather more than their outcomes warranted. After a long visit to Italy, he set off for his sixth wartime meeting with Roosevelt, to be held in September, once again in Quebec, this time in the afterglow of the Allies’ liberation of France and Belgium. Since they had last met in Canada, both leaders had aged, especially Roosevelt, who looked gaunt and frail – ‘You could put your fist between his neck and his collar,’ Churchill’s doctor noted.32 The meeting was a disappointment and led to few agreements of lasting consequence.
A few weeks before he set off for Quebec, Churchill – unusually in his dealings with Tube Alloys – took the initiative, requesting a brief on progress from Lindemann. ‘The extraordinary American ideas on security’ made it impossible to give a valid judgement, the Prof replied, doubting whether the Bomb would be ready in time to be used in the war.33 On the second day of the meeting, Lindemann wrote to ask Churchill, rather pathetically, if he could discover ‘where we stand’ on post-w
ar collaboration with the Americans, as no one in the London Tube Alloys office had any idea.34
The Bomb was not on the leaders’ agenda in Quebec, but they discussed it afterwards in Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home, where they talked privately with only the sickly Harry Hopkins – now out of favour with the public and the White House – hovering in the background. The conclusions of the Prime Minister and the President emerged in a brief aide-mémoire, edited by Churchill.35 It looks forward to the end of the war and notes that nuclear weapons ‘might perhaps, after mature consideration [the hesitant wording was Churchill’s], be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will continue until they surrender’. After Japan had been defeated, ‘full collaboration’ for military and commercial purposes would continue between Britain and America unless they agree otherwise. There was no mention of the veto Churchill had given Roosevelt in Quebec on any nuclear-power industry Britain might want to develop after the war.
The remainder of the document concerned Niels Bohr and his thinking about nuclear weapons. A month earlier he had secured a private meeting in the White House with the President, who had been his usual affable self. Roosevelt listened attentively for almost an hour and gave the impression that he was sympathetic to ideas about international control of nuclear weapons and, in particular, bringing Russia in on the secret. These sentiments flatly contradicted the view Roosevelt had held all along – that the ‘secret’ of the bomb should be kept from the Soviets. He and Churchill maintained this line in the aide-mémoire:
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