Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  The Prime Minister’s morale had been ebbing since early February, when he met Stalin and the desperately sick Roosevelt at Yalta in the Crimea. By then, the Soviets were already in control of much of Eastern Europe, and it was plain that they could not be driven out by anything short of an Alliance-destroying military operation that would have no appeal to Truman and would have unleashed a new and terrible war. Stalin looked every inch the victorious military leader, dressed in the uniform of a marshal, calm and jovial, disdaining to take notes in meetings or even to carry around his papers – there was no need, as all the premises were bugged.10 As the leaders discussed the war against Japan and the post-war organisation of Europe, he was shown much more sympathy than Churchill would have preferred. It was obvious to the Prime Minister that the Soviet leader wanted hegemony over Eastern Europe and that, helped by Roosevelt’s incapacity and apparent indifference, he was going to get it – after the war, Poland would pass from one tyranny to another.

  Churchill, as far as we know, had no reproachful words for Roosevelt, who had patently disappointed him. Yet the Prime Minister may have been more hurt than he let on. When the President died two months later, Churchill declined to attend the funeral, even though Truman had suggested they might spend ‘two or three days’ talking afterwards – a priceless entrée.11 It would have been unimaginable for the energetic Churchill of 1941 to have passed up this opportunity, especially as he was aware that the new President was a foreign-affairs greenhorn and ready to listen to his advice.12 Six years later, Churchill commented that this was his biggest mistake of the war – saying at the end of the conflict, ‘Tremendous decisions were made . . . by a man I did not know.’13

  One of the Prime Minister’s distractions in the weeks before the Potsdam Conference was the crumbling of his coalition government. The trouble had started in late January, when his deputy Clement Attlee sat down at his portable typewriter and bashed out a two-thousand-word letter to Churchill, damning his recent performance as Prime Minister – not reading his papers, maundering in meetings, giving more credence to his cronies’ opinions than to his War Cabinet’s.14 Churchill’s close friends Brendan Bracken and Lord Beaverbrook nodded their consent, and even Clemmie weighed in to support the ‘very brave’ Attlee.15 By the end of May, the Labour ranks had lost patience and Churchill had no choice but to call a General Election.

  While he campaigned, he redoubled his efforts to thwart Stalin’s intention to pull down an ‘iron curtain’ across Europe, as he termed it in a top-secret telegram to Truman (H. G. Wells had first coined the phrase in his 1904 novel, The Food of the Gods).16 In an initiative that was not made public for almost fifty years, Churchill instructed his planning staff to consider launching an offensive on the Soviet army in Europe, ‘to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire’, in Operation UNTHINKABLE.17 His horrified Chiefs of Staff – who felt ‘the less that was put on paper on this subject the better’ – quickly convinced him that (in his words) ‘the Russian bear sprawled over Europe’ was too big and too well entrenched to be evicted. Churchill backed off, described his idea as ‘a purely hypothetical contingency’ and allowed the plan to peter out.

  Elsewhere, a Whitehall spat turned nasty when Churchill disappointed eight of Britain’s leading scientists – including Patrick Blackett – by vetoing their long-planned visit to the Soviet Union hours before they were due to leave. Embarrassed officials informed the scientists that their request had been turned down because their services might still be needed in the war against Japan – a patent falsehood, as everyone knew. The real reason was that the Prime Minister felt bound (‘in conformity with the United States policy’) to prevent any scientist who had been within a whiff of the Tube Alloys project to visit the Soviet Union and risk spilling the nuclear beans.18 On the last day of the coalition Parliament, A. V. Hill and other members of the Commons heard Churchill argue his case: the visits had been banned not because of ‘any question of security’, but because the scientists were needed ‘for the purpose of the Japanese war’.19 Government officials expected trouble and got it, though only in the form of mildly embarrassing press reports and a brief rumpus among a few Fellows of the Royal Society.20 Churchill could safely ignore them all, and did.

  The Prime Minister decided to forbid the scientists’ visit during a difficult week in the election campaign. In a radio address, he undermined his reputation as a consensual leader by slighting his former Labour colleagues, and made the preposterous suggestion that a Labour government ‘would have to fall back on some sort of Gestapo’.21 This was a gift to Attlee, a speaker so dull he could bore for Britain, but who blossomed into a suburban Cicero to give the radio broadcast of his life, praising the Prime Minister’s wartime leadership but arguing persuasively that it was now time for new blood.

  Britain went to the polls on 6 July, with virtually all the political pundits predicting that the country would not throw out its wartime hero. Many voters were serving overseas in the armed forces, so the parties agreed to a pause of three weeks before the results were announced, midway through the Potsdam Conference. Taking advantage of the gap in his diary, Churchill went on a painting vacation in south-west France, near Biarritz, relaxing in the sun while the prospect of defeat gnawed at his confidence – he would ‘be only half a man until the result of the poll’, he confided in his doctor.

  As Churchill and Truman saw when they arrived in Berlin, the city had been flattened. It was now a black and smouldering ruin, reeking of death and open sewers, with empty-eyed women and men roaming the city in search of food and somewhere to sleep.22

  The subject of nuclear weapons did not crop up when Churchill and Truman met for the first time, although the matter was on the President’s mind – their meeting took place on 16 July, when Groves was in the New Mexico desert, in the final few hours of preparations for the Trinity test. Churchill arrived at Truman’s yellow-stucco villa on the Potsdam Ringstrasse at precisely the President’s specified time of 11 a.m., having been rebuffed the previous evening, when Truman’s staff said the President was ‘fully engaged’.23 They talked for two hours, mosquitoes buzzing around them in the heat. During the conversation, Churchill tried to persuade the President to modify the Allies’ demand that Japan surrender unconditionally, but was unsuccessful.24

  After the meeting, Churchill was relieved. He told his daughter Mary as they walked back to their lakeside residence nearby that he liked the President ‘immensely’ and was sure he could work with him.25 Truman was also impressed, writing in his diary that Churchill was charming and very clever, if a little unctuous: ‘He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how much he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me etc. etc.’ The President was sure that he and the Prime Minister could get along ‘if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap’.

  That night, shortly before eight o’clock, Truman first learned of the success of the Trinity test in a coded cable informing him that a child had been born, larger than expected.26 The news was delivered to him by Henry Stimson, no longer in office and not even an official participant in the conference. Stimson had in effect invited himself, to conclude matters he had been overseeing for years, including the strategic use of the Bomb, which he had called America’s ‘master card’.27 The next day, he went to the Prime Minister’s villa for lunch, where one of the guests was Clement Attlee, invited by Churchill to Potsdam as an observer. Attlee had only a vague awareness of Tube Alloys, having been excluded from Churchill’s inner circle of nuclear confidants for five years.28

  During the meal, presumably while others were talking, Stimson placed in front of the Prime Minister the cable announcing that a larger-than-expected baby had been born at the Trinity site. This must have been an awkward moment as Churchill had no idea what the note meant; if, as is likely, Stimson told him, Churchill will have quickly snuffed out the subject. At four-thirty, the lunch over, Churchill walked with Stimson to the garden gate and
heard the news of Trinity in plain words, although without much detail. Stimson wrote in his diary: ‘He was intensely interested and greatly cheered up,’ immediately urging that the news should be kept from the Soviets. Within half an hour, Churchill had been driven to the first plenary session of the conference, to join Stalin and Truman, who had met for the first time over a lively lunch.29

  The conference took place at the mock-Tudor country palace Schloss Cecilienhof, a brick-and-timber-frame building constructed mainly during the First World War, with dark interiors softened by glorious views of the lake. The grassy island in the middle of the central courtyard featured a huge five-point star of bright-red geraniums, planted by the occupying Soviet soldiers who were glumly patrolling the grounds.30 Churchill’s opening oration at the first session was embarrassing, according to his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who made no secret of his views, even to American colleagues: ‘He had read no brief and was confused and woolly and verbose.’ Eden complained openly that his leader was ‘under Stalin’s spell, and kept repeating “I like that man”’.31 Truman, too, was taken with the Soviet leader, who surprised him by looking not so much like a thug and a mass murderer as a softly spoken gnome with a penchant for Chopin.32

  Stalin was an effective negotiator, subtle and determined. Having lost far more troops and civilians in the war than both his allies combined, he regarded himself as the principal victor of the conflict and was determined to reap a handsome territorial reward. One of his other worries was that Japan would seek a separate peace with the United States, forestalling Soviet entry into that theatre of war and denying him political gains in the Far East.33 Away from the conference table he suppressed these worries and was a charming host, entertaining his guests while waiters poured champagne and spooned caviar with unstinting generosity. Yet the lavishness of the hospitality could not disguise the horrors of Stalin’s regime, at least for Churchill, who was ‘rampant’ in his private denunciations of Soviet repression, Stimson observed.34

  President Truman, appointed chair of the meeting, was at first subdued, but four days later he ‘was a changed man’, telling ‘the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting’, as Churchill later described the President’s behaviour.35 The reason for this was that, shortly before that conference session, Truman had read General Groves’s first extensive report on the Trinity test, declaring it to have been ‘successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone’. Mid-morning the next day, Stimson took the clutch of typewritten pages to Churchill’s villa, where the Prime Minister was meeting with Lindemann. Groves’s verbose and repetitive report was the kind of document Churchill normally abhorred, but he was soon won over, as the sheer scale of the event became clear: ‘One of [the eyewitnesses] was a blind woman who saw the light . . . an awesome roar [warned] of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty . . .’ After Churchill had read the report, he turned to his American colleague: ‘Stimson, what was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath.’36 Perhaps unknowingly, the Prime Minister was echoing phrases he had used in ‘Fifty Years Hence’ and other articles about nuclear weapons, including one he had published two years before the war began: ‘If and when these sources of power become available our whole outlook will be changed.’37

  The excitement of Groves’s report was too much for Churchill – the following morning, he broke his iron rule that the Bomb must be kept ‘absolutely secret’.38 His resistance broke when he was in bed finishing his breakfast. When Lord Moran entered the room, he found his patient desperate to talk, hindered only by his fussing valet. After impatiently dismissing the servant, the Prime Minister turned to Moran and announced, ‘I am going to tell you something you must not tell any human being,’ adding solemnly: ‘We have split the atom.’

  The scene a few days before in the New Mexico desert was ‘as if seven suns had lit the Earth’, Churchill said, before describing the epic scale of the project that made the explosion possible. ‘It is H. G. Wells stuff,’ Moran commented. ‘Exactly,’ responded Churchill, perhaps remembering the huge bouquet of flowers he had recently sent to his frail antagonist, who had explained a few months before in a prominent article why ‘Churchill Must Go’.39 The Prime Minister seemed to be desperate to get off his chest the secrets he had been keeping for so many years. Moving up through the gears of indiscretion, he shocked Moran by telling him: ‘It is to be used in Japan, on cities, not on armies. We thought it would be indecent to use it in Japan without telling the Russians, so they are to be told today.’ Moran was stunned and incredulous, writing in his diary later that day: ‘I once slept in a house where there had been a murder. I felt like that here.’

  Churchill had still not calmed down when he lunched with his Chiefs of Staff. Their chairman, Lord Alanbrooke, wrote in his diary that he was ‘shattered’ by the comments of the Prime Minister, who was ‘completely carried away’:40

  The secret of this explosive, and the power to use it, would [Churchill said] completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium . . . Now we had a new value which redressed our position (pushing his chin out and scowling), now we could say that if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, Sebastopol etc. etc.

  Churchill was greeting the advent of nuclear weapons less like a supremely gifted international statesman than a boy playing with his toy armies.

  Truman waited until the following day to tell Stalin about the Trinity test. As the delegates were dispersing after meeting, Truman ran after him – without the American interpreter – watched closely by Churchill. The President ensured his disclosure was low-key, informing Stalin via his interpreter Pavlov that America had developed an unusually destructive new weapon.41 Stalin said nothing, before turning on his heels and departing. Lost for words, Truman stood gazing at the Soviet leader as he hurried out of the room.42

  Stalin’s reaction convinced Churchill and Truman that their Soviet ally had known nothing of the Manhattan Project.43 Both had been fooled.44 For years, a network of spies in Britain and the United States had been keeping the Soviet leader and his colleagues well briefed on the Anglo-American plans to build nuclear weapons. The Kremlin had received a copy of the MAUD report in October 1941, when Roosevelt offered Churchill a nuclear collaboration, from the spy John Cairncross, then Lord Hankey’s Private Secretary.45 Five months later, Lavrenti Beria – Stalin’s security and espionage supremo – had presented intelligence material to the State Defence Committee.46 Stalin and his associates had been slow to appreciate the significance of the information, and provided only modest resources to Igor Kurchatov, responsible for the Soviet nuclear venture, who knew that he and his hundred or so colleagues had no hope of competing with the Manhattan Project.47

  The Quebec Agreement signed in 1943 by Churchill and Roosevelt, enabling British scientists to resume work on the Manhattan Project, was also no secret to Stalin, who had been briefed on its contents.48 In the year preceding the Potsdam Conference, thousands of pages of top-secret material had been sent to the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, keeping the Soviet high command up to date with developments on the American project. Soviet intelligence chiefs expected the Americans to test their nuclear weapon for the first time a week before the Potsdam conference began.49 It seems likely that, shortly before the Trinity test, Stalin knew roughly as much about it as Churchill.

  Stalin also knew that Churchill had contemplated taking on the Soviet army in Europe in Operation UNTHINKABLE. Planning officials in the Kremlin discussed the operation a few days after Churchill floated the idea to his military chiefs, who quickly persuaded him that it was impracticable.50 The Soviet leader may have been thinking of these deceptions when he told the Polish Deputy Prime Minister: ‘Churchill did not trust us so we could not fully trust him either.’51 The night the Soviet leader heard about th
e Bomb, he laughed as he chatted with his colleagues, and arranged to speak with Kurchatov to accelerate their own nuclear-bomb project.52 Stalin complained to colleagues about their supposed American allies: ‘They slay the Japanese, and bully us. Once more everything is done in secret’53 – a little rich, considering he had shared virtually no technical secrets with the British and Americans. They were about to use the new weapon as a bargaining chip, he suspected – ‘They want to force us to accept their plans on . . . Europe and the world,’ he said, adding, ‘Well, that’s not going to happen!’ He concluded with one of his ripest curses.54

  The conference was suspended that evening so that the British delegation could return home to hear the results of the election on 26 July. Churchill was only cautiously optimistic, unlike his doctor, who was so confident that he left his luggage in Potsdam. Around ten in the morning in the Map Room at 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister climbed into his blue siren suit, lit a cigar, and slumped into a chair to monitor the results as they rolled in.55 By one o’clock, BBC news reported that the Conservative government had been routed. The British electorate had kicked out the leader they had cheered on the streets three months before – he had, it seems, shown too little interest in rebuilding his country after the war. Churchill stayed in his chair for the rest of the day, watching the disaster unfold and feeling the robes of power slip from his shoulders. In public he was magnanimity itself about the result; in private he was hurt and stunned but impressively candid. He told his son Randolph:56