Shortly before Christmas, Rotblat left The Hill to return to Liverpool. He paused to spend a few days with the Chadwicks, who by then had moved to Washington, where Aileen was much happier – the family’s conveniently located home on Brandywine Street had much more room than their cottage on The Hill and was also close to Chadwick’s office near the White House.24 At Union Station, Chadwick saw Rotblat off on his journey, helping him lug a box of correspondence and research notes on to the train to New York. When Rotblat arrived, the box had disappeared. The security services had, he was convinced, been at work.
Chadwick was still responsible for recruiting to Site Y British scientists who had skills unavailable in the United States. From the spring of 1944, Oppenheimer needed no more nuclear scientists but urgently required mathematical physicists who were experts in the shock-waves that pass through the Bomb as it explodes, and in the blast it creates. Chadwick brought in Britain’s two leading experts in these fields, beginning with G. I. Taylor, from the University of Cambridge. (‘Anything short of kidnapping would be justified’, Chadwick wrote to London.25) A brilliant applied mathematician and unrivalled expert in the motion of fluids, Taylor soon became a popular colleague on The Hill.26 The second expert, from Imperial College, was Bill Penney, who had accrued years of experience of studying the impact of bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe on British cities. A genial man, Penney’s mouth seemed to be fixed in a grin that he maintained even when he was talking in seminars about the number of people who would be killed by the weapons they were working flat-out to build. The American physicist Viki Weisskopf nicknamed him ‘the smiling killer’.
The move to Washington made Chadwick’s work no easier. A few months before, as the government in France was getting back on its feet, French nuclear scientists in Montreal were beginning to assert themselves over what would today be called their ‘intellectual property rights’. The scientists wanted to be free to communicate with their colleagues at home about the progress being made on the nuclear projects – after all, some of it was based on patents that the French had filed years before. Groves was outraged by all this pettifogging talk of patents and was adamant that knowledge of the Bomb and nuclear reactors must, for the time being, remain entirely in North America. Sir John Anderson, however, sympathised with the French, thereby annoying Churchill, who told a colleague that if Frédéric Joliot-Curie had more information than he was entitled to, he should be ‘forcibly but comfortably detained for some months’.27 This was the lowest point of Chadwick’s stay in North America – tossing and turning at night,28 he spent his days wearily triangulating between the indignant scientists and the Anglo-American authorities who showed them little sympathy. The uproar ended only when the scientists were discreetly muzzled.
With the end of the Manhattan Project now in sight, Chadwick and his colleagues began to discuss Britain’s post-war nuclear initiatives – if the planning were done well, then all the troubles of the past three years would soon be forgotten.29 He, Cockcroft, Peierls, Oliphant and others met in Washington in late 1944 to get the discussion started, while General Groves grumbled privately of ‘British rascality’, resenting any nuclear initiative beyond American control.30
The British authorities gave Chadwick, desperately tired and tortured by chronic back-ache, a much-needed fillip in the 1945 New Year’s honours list, when he was knighted. Somehow, he summoned the energy to begin his campaign to press the government to capitalise on the modest investment it had made in the Manhattan Project. In a masterly memo to Sir John Anderson, Chadwick set out his thoughts on future Tube Alloys policy in seven pages of taut but conversational prose.31 The British policy of joining the project as junior partners had been proved right, he argued, adding that relations with their American colleagues were steadily improving: ‘I think we are establishing a sound foundation for a post-war understanding.’ The best way forward was to continue to ‘throw ourselves heart and soul into the US effort’, though ‘We should proceed at once to prepare for the post-war development of Tube Alloys.’ It was now time for Britain politely to set aside Groves’s opposition and to create ‘a Government-controlled Experimental [nuclear] establishment’. By urging that Britain should support the Americans until the project’s conclusion before focusing on developments at home, Chadwick knew he laid himself open to what he described as the ‘superficial and short-sighted view’ that he was ‘neglecting or forgetting the interests of my country’. He was probably thinking here of Mark Oliphant, who was scathing about Chadwick’s stewardship of British interests in the Manhattan Project. In late May, Oliphant told him that Wallace Akers was complaining that the British Tube Alloys office was ‘almost impossible to run’ because of Chadwick’s ‘attitude of distrust.’32 In a letter shortly afterwards to A. V. Hill, Oliphant was even more vitriolic:33
In the [Tube Alloys] field there will be a doleful story to tell of appeasement and of a most undignified servility, dictated by Anderson and [Lindemann] under orders from Churchill, and fostered and carried out by Chadwick and [Ambassador] Halifax in Washington. I believe we have been sold down the river as a nation.
Whitehall was, as usual, slow to respond to Chadwick’s suggestions. A probable reason for this was that the most influential of Churchill’s nuclear advisers doubted whether the Bomb would work: ‘There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip,’ Lindemann told R. V. Jones. ‘What fools the Americans will look after spending so much money.’34 This observation would have neither surprised nor perturbed Oppenheimer – he had commented to Peierls during the Prof’s brief visit to The Hill: ‘That guy will never understand a thing.’35
Late in the afternoon of Thursday 12 April 1945, when Chadwick was working at home, he heard the news that stunned America – Roosevelt was dead. After months of ill-health, the President died suddenly, following an acute cerebral haemorrhage, at his personal retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. Chadwick and his wife sat in their living room, leaning towards their radio, hanging on every word, shushing away their daughters who couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
The word spread like a panic in the capital. Cab drivers turned their radios up full blast and shouted out the news to incredulous passers-by, some people seeking confirmation of it from complete strangers.36 It hardly seemed possible that the little-known Truman, who had been Vice-President for eighty-two days, was about to run the country. Chadwick may well have wondered that night what the implications would be for the Anglo-American nuclear partnership, secretly agreed sixteen months before in Quebec by Roosevelt and Churchill. If Truman wanted nothing to do with the policy, the British would soon be in deep trouble.
A common refrain that spring evening was ‘What a pity he couldn’t have seen Victory in Europe Day,’ which came a little over three weeks later, on 8 May. The arrival of the long-expected news on The Hill triggered a noisy party, where Frisch, Peierls and Bethe cast off their European inhibitions, formed an impromptu chorus and belted out some of their favourite German student songs.37 Their American colleagues were astonished: for them, the focus of the war had long before shifted from Europe to the Far East, as they had been reminded a few days earlier in a circulated message from the Under-Secretary of War: ‘Every man-hour of work will help smash Japan and bring our fighting boys home.’38
Plans for a test of the first nuclear bomb, built from plutonium, were by then well under way, and a small minority of Manhattan Project scientists were worrying about how the American government might use the ‘gadget’. The epicentre of concern was the Metallurgical Lab in Chicago, where work on the project had finished early. A committee chaired by its director of chemistry, the German refugee James Franck, produced in early June a sober but prolix report calling for the government to refrain from making an unannounced nuclear attack on Japan and suggesting a demonstration of the weapon on an uninhabited area.39 One of the committee members was the irrepressible Leó Szilárd. Already appalled by the carpet-bombing of Tokyo, he was determined to voice his objections to the u
se of the weapon and his support for international control of nuclear bombs, assuming he was not swatted first by his nemesis General Groves.
Henry Stimson regarded the Bomb as ‘a royal straight flush’ for the United States in its dealings with the Soviet Union, though he wanted America to play its hand carefully.40 He had set up and chaired a secret committee of civilians, whose brief was to advise the President on matters relating to the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.41 Stimson passed the Franck report to a subcommittee of eminent scientists, including Oppenheimer and Fermi, whose views would be respected by the protestors but would be unlikely to rock the boat. The subcommittee dismissed the central recommendation of the report, pointing out that supplies of fissile material were too short to enable the luxury of such a demonstration and – despite knowing almost nothing about the military situation in the Far East – saying that they saw ‘no acceptable alternative to direct military use’. In another forum, Vannevar Bush and James Conant agreed.42 No senior government official in Washington or London showed any interest in consulting Chadwick – or any of his colleagues – about the use of the Bomb. The indifference of the Churchill government to the views of its nuclear scientists was deeply resented by the President of the Royal Society, Sir Henry Dale, who was still ruing the abject failure of Bohr’s meeting with Churchill.43
At no time had the American government been in any serious doubt that if the nuclear bomb were produced, it would become a legitimate weapon of war. The attacks on Tokyo had strong public support, so it was unlikely that there would be an outcry if the Bomb was dropped – the number of deaths would probably be less than a hundred thousand, the toll of the American raid on Tokyo on 9 March. The nuclear weapon would have an element of surprise, too, and might lead the Japanese to surrender before the planned invasion, certain to cost tens of thousands of lives. Szilárd had no truck with these arguments: he lobbied widely and petitioned the President to think again, but in vain. The political stage was now set for the test of the first nuclear bomb – the Trinity project – described later by Chadwick as ‘the boldest and certainly the most expensive experiment in scientific history’.44
Chadwick was one of the few hundred civilians allowed by the American army to witness the test, on a hill about twenty miles from the planned explosion. Women had been banned. Shortly before dawn on 16 July 1945, he was sitting in the cold, pre-dawn darkness of Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, listening to the countdown for what was to be, in effect, the first artificial sunrise, half an hour before nature’s. This desert, a byword in America for a landscape of almost unimaginable quietness, would for a few moments be the noisiest place in the world. He was on Compañia Hill with a few dozen of the Manhattan Project’s leading scientists, including Hans Bethe, Ernest Lawrence, Otto Frisch and Rudi Peierls. Every one of them knew that much could go wrong. The weather, stormy the night before, had already forced a postponement of the ignition to 5.30 a.m. Aware that the radiation blast was expected within the next few minutes, several of the scientists passed the time by applying sun lotion to their skin.
In the control centre, some miles from Chadwick and his colleagues, the nervous Groves – flanked by Bush, Conant and Oppenheimer – was pondering what he would do if the Bomb were a flop. Oppenheimer had not slept a wink and, in the final seconds, his Herculean self-confidence seemed suddenly to drain away: he held on to a post to steady himself and stared straight ahead.
Years of expectation had not prepared Chadwick for what he saw.45 Suddenly, noiselessly, an intensely bright pinpoint of light appeared and grew quickly into a huge ball of swirling debris, bathing the surrounding hills and desert in dazzlingly bright light, as if someone had flicked a switch and turned on the sun. Chadwick watched it through a piece of welder’s glass, sometimes peeping round the edges. As the light faded slightly, the cloud began to resemble a mushroom, the orange-red ball of fire connected to the ground by a short grey stem. Another mushroom cloud grew out of it shortly afterwards, like a mutant offspring. Almost two minutes after the spectacle began the first blast of sound arrived – ‘sudden and sharp as if the skies had cracked’, as Chadwick later wrote, ‘followed by a long rumbling noise’, like the sound of a convoy of wagons trundling across the hills.
The crowd on Compañia Hill was ecstatic. According to one report, the buttoned-down Chadwick could not contain his joy: when Lawrence slapped him on the back, he gave one of his trademark grunts before leaping into the air. Several others could not resist mimicking him, before stomping on the ground triumphantly. ‘It worked, my God, the damned thing worked!’46
More than any of his fellow witnesses, Chadwick appreciated the scientific significance of the spectacle. As a shy undergraduate in Manchester thirty-four years before, he had sat at the back of a lecture theatre and watched Rutherford first present the idea of the atomic nucleus. Chadwick had later proved the existence of the neutron in a bench-top experiment a stone’s throw from the centre of Cambridge. But this latest nuclear experiment had to be done in a desert miles from the nearest town and resulted in the destruction of its apparatus, leaving behind a crater 1,200 feet wide and up to six feet deep. Some of the desert sand was fused into glass – Chadwick was later given several samples as souvenirs, which he donated to the Natural History Museum in London.47 A single one of Chadwick’s neutrons had triggered the biggest explosion ever engineered on Earth. Chadwick knew that he and his fellow scientists had been able to do this by working hand in glove with the military and with a government determined to be first to achieve this goal, regardless of the cost, which turned out to be about two billion dollars, a vast sum, though it was easily afforded by the United States, whose Gross Domestic Product had almost doubled in the previous four years.48 The cost of the Manhattan Project had been about half that of the B-29 bombing campaign against Japan.49 Many of the world’s leading scientists had shown that they could master nature’s best-hidden form of energy, and their very first use of this new knowledge was to give politicians an explosive of unprecedented power to kill.
Groves was elated. He had achieved the goal the government had set him – to deliver a usable nuclear weapon – in just over a thousand days after taking on the running of the Manhattan Project. In the nick of time, he had enabled President Truman to attend the conference with Stalin and Churchill as the first world leader to go to the table with nuclear weapons in his arsenal. The conference began in Potsdam, Germany, a few hours later.
1 JULY TO 5 AUGUST 1945
Churchill says yes to dropping the Bomb
‘If the Russians had got [the Bomb first], it would have been the end of civilisation . . . [The Bomb] has come just in time to save the world.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL, 23 July 19451
The Potsdam Conference was the first gathering of the Allies’ leaders at which the Bomb was mentioned, if only briefly and in the wings. Churchill was poorly prepared for the imminent arrival of the nuclear age, having taken little interest in his Tube Alloys briefings, or in the development of the Manhattan Project and its consequences.2 As Sir John Anderson had told Niels Bohr in March 1945, the problem with Churchill was that his ‘mind was so far from being of a scientific nature that he had difficulties in viewing the project in its proper perspective’.3 Churchill’s main concern – the opposite of Bohr’s – was to keep the Bomb a secret from the Soviets to maximise the diplomatic advantage over them after the war. He believed that the 1943 Quebec Agreement guaranteed that Britain would share in the Americans’ triumph, though it remained to be seen if Truman would endorse Roosevelt’s view.
Unlike Stalin, neither Truman nor Churchill was looking forward to the Potsdam Conference. Churchill, wearied by political worries at home and pessimism about the future of Central Europe, predicted to his doctor Lord Moran that the gathering would be of no consequence. Truman was in a more positive frame of mind, but was apprehensive about his debut on the international stage and his first trip to Europe for twenty-seven years. He was also anx
iously awaiting news of the outcome of the Trinity test.4 Churchill and Truman had not yet met, but they had exchanged cables and talked on the phone, confident that the Soviet leader knew nothing about the Manhattan Project.
Truman had begun his presidency ill-briefed. In the eight months since he had won the Vice-Presidential nomination, Roosevelt had told him almost nothing about military, diplomatic or even administrative matters, apart from a vague mention over lunch in August 1944 of the special new weapon the military was developing.5 The Manhattan Project had been probably Truman’s biggest surprise when officials told him about it soon after the Presidency was thrust upon him.6
Decent and dedicated, Harry Truman kept Roosevelt’s team of advisers and officials almost intact, and strove to continue virtually all of his policies, domestic and foreign, including the use of the nuclear bomb and the fostering of the United Nations. On the train to Norfolk, Virginia, en route to the Potsdam Conference, the journalist Merriman Smith asked him about his enthusiasm for this international forum.7 Truman bashfully reminded Smith that the organisation was not his idea but was an old one. He took out of his wallet a neatly folded piece of paper on which he had written out Tennyson’s prophetic poem ‘Locksley Hall’.8 The President then read the couplets that Churchill had quoted in his 1931 essay ‘Fifty Years Hence’, the same dark visions of civil and military aviation, and this stirring climax:
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
Truman had been carrying this poem – a personal favourite – since he was a high-school student at the turn of the century, and then into the following decade, when the magazines he read often featured stories illustrating the power of American technological genius to change the course of history.9 Now, almost half a century later, the small-town Missouri kid had taken his place among the new Big Three, and was about to shape the political future of Europe. Still full of enthusiasm for the grave responsibilities of his new job, he had – unlike the exhausted Churchill – prepared himself thoroughly for the Potsdam Conference.
Churchill's Bomb Page 27