Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  I was received on my [pre-election] tour with public rapture. They then went to the polling booths and voted against me. But the rapture was not insincere. They were not ungrateful. They thanked me for such services as I have rendered in the war. But they did not want me for peace. They may have been right.

  On the day Churchill heard of his defeat in the polls, the authorities in Potsdam released the declaration that he, Stalin and Truman had signed, calling on Japan to surrender immediately or face the destruction of its armed forces and ‘the utter devastation’ of its homeland.57 The Japanese government’s response was mokatsu – an icy, dismissive silence that left Truman in no doubt that he should now play his highest card.58 Churchill had, as British Prime Minister, formally agreed to the use of nuclear weapons on Japan, fifteen days before the Trinity test.59

  With Chartwell mothballed, the Churchills had nowhere to live. Granted the use of Chequers the following weekend, they threw a party there for their family, wartime colleagues and friends, including Lindemann, Jock Colville, Brendan Bracken and the American Ambassador Gil Winant.60 This was the kind of party Churchill loved, but even a jeroboam of champagne, abundant good food and a gramophone recording of the mindlessly jolly ‘Run Rabbit Run’ could not lift his spirits. One of Churchill’s few political tasks in these last two days of his wartime premiership was to finalise his message to Britain and its Empire for when the news broke that the Bomb had been dropped.61 He worked with Colville, Anderson and Lindemann, who liaised with American officials on the texts of the announcements that were to be made after the event. Churchill wanted his to mention the Quebec Agreement and the aide-mémoire he had signed with Roosevelt, but the Prof believed this ‘very undesirable – this would only lead to demand for publication, which would be very embarrassing to the Americans and perhaps even to us.’62 Churchill accepted the advice and backed down.

  Most of Churchill’s eight-page draft was an outline of the Bomb’s history highlighting the early British foundations of the Manhattan Project, naming all the leading British scientists involved except, unaccountably, Otto Frisch.63 At the end, however, the tone changed suddenly: the author was no longer the project’s dutiful chronicler but the romantic who had looked forward sceptically to the nuclear age in ‘Fifty Years Hence’, albeit with reservations: ‘This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn recollections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension.’ His final words echo the hope H. G. Wells had expressed in his 1914 novel The World Set Free that nuclear weapons will be a force for good:

  We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce to peace among the nations, and that, instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe, they may become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.

  While Churchill and his wife were looking for a more permanent residence in London, they moved into the penthouse suite of Claridge’s Hotel, where he contemplated his future and waited for news from Hiroshima.

  3

  CHURCHILL AS LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

  July 1945 to October 1951

  AUGUST 1945 TO JANUARY 1949

  Blackett: nuclear heretic

  ‘. . . the dropping of the [nuclear] bombs was not so much the last military act of the Second World War, as the first act of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.’

  PATRICK BLACKETT, October 19481

  The war that had by then killed over fifty million people had one last shock in store. At 9 p.m. on 6 August 1945, a quiet Bank Holiday Monday, millions of radio listeners in Britain heard that nuclear bombs were not – as physicists had repeatedly assured them before the war – merely the pipe dreams of journalists and novelists. The announcer, suffusing his clipped tones with an unusual excitement, began the bulletin with three short sentences, so dense with information that it was difficult for most listeners to take them in:2 ‘Scientists, British and American, have made the atomic bomb at last. The first one was dropped on a Japanese city this morning. It was designed for a detonation of twenty thousand tons of high explosives.’

  Patrick Blackett will have read about the news from Hiroshima in the Manchester Guardian over his breakfast the next day.3 He had been bracing himself for the announcement, but years of forewarning had done little to prepare him for the trauma of hearing about what he believed was a disaster, among the most heinous acts of the war.

  Blackett was then head of the physics department at the University of Manchester, and he lived with his wife in their apartment in the suburb of Fallowfield.4 Their two children had recently left home. He had arrived in Manchester eight years earlier, after leaving Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory and spending four years as a professor at Birkbeck College in London. Although not a national figure, his peers knew him to be a fine nuclear physicist and an outspoken Socialist who was unwilling to kowtow to anyone. Over six feet tall, he had an impressive presence, with the looks of a matinée idol, a tack-sharp mind and the gravitas of an archbishop.

  ‘Man is now well on the way to mastery of the means of destroying himself utterly,’ he read in the Manchester Guardian’s leader. The newspaper’s reports featured no photographs of the damage caused by the Bomb, but had plenty of comments on its significance from Churchill, Truman and others. Henry Stimson, until recently the American Secretary of War, declared the Bomb to be ‘the greatest achievement of the combined efforts of science, industry, and the military in all history’. Blackett saw on the back page of the newspaper an entire article on the contribution to ‘one of the most remarkable events in history’ by his own physics department, beginning with the work of Rutherford. Chadwick’s name was mentioned, too, but Blackett’s was absent, as he would have wished. Since he joined the MAUD committee in 1940, he had been a law unto himself and had sometimes been wiser than the consensus. His judgement that it would be impossible to build the Bomb in Britain during the war had proved right – the early predictions of Chadwick and Lindemann now looked absurdly optimistic to anyone who could remember them. After Tube Alloys had been folded into the Manhattan Project, Blackett had nothing to do with it beyond opposing Britain’s participation.5

  In the days following the first reports from Japan, journalists struggled to find out how much damage the Bomb had done. At first, all they knew was that Hiroshima – 425 miles from Tokyo, on the coast of the Seto Inland Sea – was under a vast cloud of smoke and impossible to see from the air. Within two days, however, British newspapers reported that the city had been almost wiped out, with a death toll of about a hundred thousand, and that soon afterwards another Bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, about 185 miles south-west of Hiroshima. In London, George Orwell noticed that Japan’s prompt surrender altered people’s perception of the Bomb – after first recoiling from the horror of Hiroshima’s annihilation, Londoners were beginning ‘to feel that there’s something to be said for a weapon that could end the war in two days’.6 Blackett was less sanguine and doubted that the new weapon would make as much difference to the future of warfare as most people seemed to assume.

  Harold Nicolson’s phone was ringing off the hook, with journalists asking if he had known about the Bomb when he wrote Public Faces thirteen years earlier.7 He contributed little to the debate and nor did H. G. Wells, who appears to have been too ill to comment. The most prominent public intellectual to set out his views was George Bernard Shaw, now eighty-nine years old. In his Sunday Express article ‘The Atom Bomb’, soon reprinted across America and Europe, he wrote: ‘H. G. Wells said all there is to be said, and more, thirty years ago,’ before contradicting himself by adding a few ideas of his own.8 The new weapons might one day be cheap and plentiful, he pointed out, so that wars might easily be waged not only by wealthy countries but also by special-interest groups, such as ‘neo-Darwinians and Creative Evolutionists, Fundamentalists and Atheists, Moslems and Hindus’. But he concluded that the Bomb may prove too deadly to deploy with any disc
rimination – ‘It may burn down the house to roast the pig’ – not mentioning the possibility that its users might be irrational or even mad.

  Blackett would soon become one of the leading public commentators on the Bomb. But in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he kept his own counsel. He was preparing to take a position as a prominent adviser to the British government on nuclear policy, a role Churchill would never have allowed him to play. Prime Minister Attlee probably knew that he had made a risky appointment – if Blackett did not approve of the policy agreed within government, he would certainly make his dissatisfaction public.

  In the United States, by mid-August 1945 the Stars and Stripes had well and truly been wrapped around the Bomb in a report researched and written by the Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth. Government officials distributed mimeographed copies to the American media after the Nagasaki bombing, making the basic principles of the Bomb’s operation available to all-comers. In Washington, a few hours before it was released, Chadwick nervously addressed a press conference, doing his best to promote the British role in the Manhattan Project. But he was on a hiding to nothing.9 Smyth’s presentation set the international agenda for discussions of the project and was a runaway bestseller in the US and elsewhere, going on to nine editions and eventually being translated into forty languages.10 Attlee’s officials, caught on the hop by the report’s publication, gave Michael Perrin in the Tube Alloys office twenty-four hours to write the British side of the story. He worked through the night drafting the worthy but dull ‘Statements Relating to the Atomic Bomb’, rushed into print by the government’s stationery office.11 But it was too little, too late. After the Americans’ public-relations coup the British response looked tardy, ineffectual and slightly mean-spirited.

  One of Attlee’s most pressing challenges was to forge a nuclear-energy policy for Britain, ideally capitalising on the knowledge and experience his scientists had gained in developing the Bomb. A few days after the end of the war, he set up a select Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy, whose most notable appointment was Blackett.12 He was the only scientist on the committee to have been trained in military strategy and to have been in the thick of a bloody conflict – in May 1916, he was a cadet in one of the turrets of HMS Barham in the Battle of Jutland, the most violent naval conflict of the First World War. Now, thirty years later, he was in by far the most influential post he had held in Whitehall. Chadwick resented the intrusion of the Tube Alloys outsider, remarking later that Blackett’s appointment ‘was as much political as scientific’.13 Chadwick believed that Blackett bore a grudge against the Americans after they declined a request he had made in late 1943 to visit their military operations in the Pacific. Blackett would have strongly denied this – he always saw himself as an agent of logic, not someone swayed by mere emotion.

  Other core scientific members of the Advisory Committee were G. P. Thomson, Edward Appleton and the Royal Society President Sir Henry Dale, though not ICI’s Wallace Akers, who was discreetly sidelined. In a surprising move, Attlee appointed as the committee chairman one of the previous government’s most prominent experts on nuclear policy: Sir John Anderson. He was certain to bring experience and fair-mindedness to the role, as well as his fabled caution and some of Bohr’s thinking about the new weapons. Churchill’s main nuclear adviser, Frederick Lindemann, did not fare so well – after rubbing Attlee up the wrong way for years, the Prof was pointedly excluded.

  Among the other committees Attlee set up to deal with nuclear matters, the most powerful was known as GEN 75, staffed entirely by members of the Cabinet. Nineteen days after the Nagasaki bombing, Attlee wrote to his colleagues to set out the stakes. Normally terse and bloodless, the Prime Minister wrote this with a passion and sense of history almost worthy of Churchill: ‘We should declare that this invention has made it essential to end wars. The new World Order must start now . . . The Governments of the UK and the USA are responsible as never before for the future of the human race.’ He concluded: ‘Time is short . . . I believe that only a bold course can save civilisation.’14 After taking a few weeks to consult his colleagues – and Churchill – Attlee wrote to President Truman, urging that Britain and America work together to deal with the ‘entirely new conditions’ facing the world.15

  Blackett’s new role in government was the culmination of almost twenty years of political activity. In the first General Election after the First World War, he had voted Conservative, but then turned to the political left and stayed there. During the Wall Street Crash and the slump of the 1930s, he came to believe that planned Socialism was the best basis for running the economy. Although Blackett was impressed by the Soviet Union’s apparent economic achievements in the 1930s, he was not a Communist but a principled Socialist, his beliefs underpinned by Marxism and, specifically, the idea that economies should be planned scientifically.

  During the war, Blackett had minimal political influence and was mainly deployed as a stellar operational researcher, the boffin’s boffin. He had done more than any other British scientist to smarten up the tactics of the air force and navy. One of his most effective contributions had been to the anti-U-boat war of 1943, which he ensured was waged with an unprecedented degree of scientific control. Although publicly loyal to his bosses in Whitehall, he sometimes despaired that the good that he and his colleagues were doing was undermined by incompetent decision-making at the top. ‘If I had published the truth of what I have known of parts of our war effort,’ he told one of his colleagues in late 1941, ‘I would certainly be locked up.’16

  When Blackett read his first confidential briefings on the British nuclear project during the war, he was scornful of the Churchill government’s handling of it. Blackett spelled out his criticisms to Mark Oliphant, who – with a breathtaking lack of discretion – passed them on to the sick and exhausted Chadwick, with comments on the Churchill–Roosevelt Quebec Agreement:17

  [Blackett is] appalled by the incompetence and sheer stupidity . . . of the political and administrative history of the British [Tube Alloys] effort and he regards the Quebec Agreement as a degrading document. He is very critical of your views and says that you do not serve as a representative of your country . . . but that you ‘side with Groves against [it]’.

  Blackett was also scathing about continuing the Tube Alloys project, Oliphant told Chadwick: ‘[He] expresses amazement at the inadequacy of the organisation . . . and he believes that this reflects the inability of Akers to deal with the situation.’ Nor was Blackett any more complimentary about the Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy, which he had joined a couple of weeks earlier: Sir Henry Dale was ‘a particularly poor member’ and Anderson was ‘quite inadequate as chairman’. Oliphant ended by advising poor Chadwick to take a ‘real holiday’, a break he will have needed after reading that letter.

  The 1943 Quebec Agreement did not remain secret for long. It was disclosed in the House of Commons late one evening in October by the nonconformist Raymond Blackburn, a solicitor and former soldier who had recently entered Parliament as a Labour MP. After Hiroshima, Blackburn had become obsessed by the Bomb. Though he was not a scientist, he threw himself into the underlying technicalities, determined to cudgel the government into making its nuclear policy public. In a dramatic statement, he drove a coach and horses through the Official Secrets Act by revealing the agreement’s existence, declaring that it ‘left the development of the peacetime use of atomic energy by this country very much to the discretion of the President of the United States’.18 Party officials were furious, as were many others – it was ‘a monstrous abuse’, Anderson howled.19 Blackburn refused to name his informants, but the authorities quickly identified one of them as Oliphant, who had spent hours giving the errant MP advice, physics tutorials and a history of Tube Alloys.20 MI5 could pin no blame on Blackett, whose record in protecting state secrets was exemplary.

  Government officials prevented the agreement from becoming widespread knowledge outside Parliament, but the ca
t was out of the bag. The substance of Churchill and Roosevelt’s document was known to most insiders in Britain but not to President Truman, who told the press the day after Blackburn’s statement that he doubted the agreement’s existence, a remark that did not bode well for Anglo-American nuclear relations.21 Despite chastisement from Labour Party whips, Blackburn spoke again in the Commons about the agreement, this time in the presence of Churchill, who said that if it were made public he would be only too pleased.

  As this controversy swirled in Whitehall, Blackett was looking to Britain’s nuclear future, impatient with the plodding pace of the government’s Advisory Committee. In early November, he wrote a ten-page paper ‘Atomic Energy – An Immediate Policy for Great Britain’ and sent it to the Chiefs of Staff. Blackett was probably hoping to influence Attlee, who was shortly to have his first meeting with President Truman and with the Canadian leader Mackenzie King. Blackett challenged virtually every aspect of conventional military thinking on the Bomb. With relations between the US and the USSR already tense, and the near-certainty that the Soviets would have nuclear weapons within five years, he believed it made no sense for the UK to build or acquire them. Britain was, unlike the United States, within striking distance of Soviet aircraft, so if it were to acquire nuclear weapons, the country would be the most likely target in the event of an East–West war. The popular idea of international control of nuclear materials was not viable, in his opinion: it would be better for Britain not to make nuclear weapons but to concentrate entirely on making peaceful use of nuclear energy, as a source of electrical power. The paper was classic Blackett – powerfully argued and more than willing to upset the apple cart of conventional Whitehall thinking.

  Attlee, however, was unimpressed. Blackett’s paper was the work of ‘a distinguished scientist speaking on political and military problems on which he is a layman’, he scrawled across his copy.22 His agenda in Washington bore no sign of Blackett’s influence. The most tangible outcome of the meeting was the setting up two months later of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, established ‘to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy’ and charged with making proposals for the ‘elimination of all atomic weapons’.23 At the close of the discussions, Truman and Attlee put their names to a few hurriedly drafted lines expressing their desire, in the field of nuclear energy, for ‘full and effective cooperation’ between the US, the UK and Canada. The spirit of the Quebec Agreement appeared to have endured and Attlee returned home believing that the British and Americans saw eye to eye on nuclear policy. There had been no appetite at the conference for sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviets.