The world was entering what George Orwell had named, within seven weeks of the end of the Second World War, the ‘cold war’.24 Although Blackett was as patriotic as anyone in Westminster, he refused to demonise the Soviets and argued that they had just as much right as the Americans to be concerned about their national security. In thinking about the possibility of nuclear war, he was studiously even-handed – not a popular point of view in Whitehall. Blackett found himself shut out of important meetings and his influence diminished by the week. He sighed to Oliphant: ‘[the] government doesn’t much approve of me’.25
Much more congenial to Attlee’s government was the stream of advice supplied from Washington by James Chadwick. He ensured a seamless continuity with the thinking that had informed the Churchill government, based on the assumption that Britain should acquire nuclear weapons and begin to set up a nuclear-power industry at the earliest opportunity. As Attlee and his officials knew, this was the national consensus: it was received wisdom in all the mainstream press that Britain must acquire the Bomb if it was to remain a global power and deter a nuclear attack. Winston Churchill said in Parliament that he assumed it was agreed on all sides of the Commons that ‘we should make atomic bombs’.26
In January 1947, a special Cabinet committee agreed to authorise ‘research and development work on atomic weapons’.27 Lord Portal of Hungerford agreed to lead the project, though reluctantly – he had spent most of the war in the role of Chief of the Air Staff, and was still recovering from exhaustion. The scientists appointed to report to him were all British-born – ‘the smiling killer’ William Penney was to be head of armaments, the imperturbable John Cockcroft was to lead the research programme, and the hard-driving engineer Christopher Hinton was to be responsible for designing, building and operating the nuclear plants. All these leading players then slid into the shadows – none of their former colleagues and no one outside Attlee’s nuclear coterie had any idea what they were doing, except Stalin’s spies.28
This was a bittersweet time for Blackett. Although disappointed with the minor role he had been given in the new government, he strongly approved of its radical social-democratic agenda. Attlee swiftly began a programme of nationalising industries such as steel and coal, setting up a State-owned railway network, creating the National Health Service and starting to dismantle Britain’s Empire. For a few years, rationing was worse than it had been during the war. This made life crushingly drab for a people who expected victory to have a sweeter taste, though the austerities meant nothing to the Gandhian Blackett. He approved of virtually everything the government did, except in his own specialist field of nuclear strategy.29
In this area, Blackett advanced his ideas with prodigious energy. While building Manchester University’s physics department into one of the best in the country, he became a public figure, Britain’s most original and controversial thinker on nuclear strategy. He was also a prime mover in the new organisations promoting open debate on nuclear matters in the scientific community, especially the influential Atomic Scientists’ Association, led by Rudi Peierls. Most of the former Tube Alloys scientists had joined the organisation, though not Chadwick, who ‘feared they could do something silly and make matters worse . . . I could see no way of controlling them.’30 Blackett had no wish to be controlled, least of all by conservative thinkers like Chadwick, but wanted to speak freely. He told a meeting of chemists in Manchester that ‘the net effect of the discovery of [nuclear] energy up-to-date has been wholly bad’.31
*
In the spring of 1946, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were worsening by the month.32 America was determined to develop its nuclear arsenal and maintain its position as the world’s leading military power, while Stalin was refusing to be intimidated. Scientists warned that it was only a matter of time before the Soviets acquired these weapons, so it was all the more important for America to maintain its nuclear lead. Blackett’s friend Niels Bohr, though politically jejune, had been right to predict that a potentially dangerous nuclear-arms race would begin within months of the end of the war.
The breakdown in trust between the Cold War’s leading protagonists was perhaps even worse than Bohr had foreseen. The United States, convinced of the moral superiority of its political system, was determined to maintain its military pre-eminence so that it would never suffer another Pearl Harbor. The Soviet Union, equally committed to its own social and political structures, was no less determined to avoid another of the terrible invasions that had left its economy and infrastructure in ruins. The US was fearful that Stalin would gain an irreversible hold on war-torn Europe, especially in Germany, whose future had not been properly resolved at Potsdam.
From the point of view of the American and British governments, Stalin was a bully, imposing puppet regimes in Bulgaria, Poland and Romania, as well as an authoritarian mini-State in the USSR’s occupation zone in eastern Germany. Yet in the early post-war period Stalin did allow relatively free elections in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and he agreed to the formation of representative governments in Austria and Finland. Most people in the US and Western Europe, however, soon became alarmed by the increasing repressiveness of administrations now answering to Moscow, fears that were later given voice by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘If you want a picture of the future,’ his hero Winston Smith is told before one of his bouts of torture, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’
Fearful lawmakers on Capitol Hill had no interest in sharing with Britain what most of them regarded as America’s secret of the Bomb. The Quebec Agreement had been news to Truman, whose officials could not find it and had to request a copy from London.33 Precisely the same thing happened in the case of the aide-mémoire signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in September 1944.34 To have lost not just one of the documents, but both, may attest less to sheer carelessness than to the relatively low importance that Roosevelt placed on them.
Truman cast aside the Quebec Agreement and went along with the consensus in Washington that the United States should work alone on nuclear energy. On 1 August 1946, he signed the McMahon Act, which made it illegal for any American to share nuclear information with any other country, signalling that the United States was now supremely dominant in the nuclear field. Britain was left to its own devices. On Capitol Hill, the British diplomat Roger Makins – the civil servant most familiar with Tube Alloys – brandished copies in Washington of the Quebec Agreement and aide-mémoire signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, but the American lawmakers were unimpressed. As Makins later recalled, ‘They were very weak documents, and they had no legislative backing.’35 Attlee complained about the passing of the Act in a letter to Truman, but did not receive a reply and let the matter drop.
The passing of the McMahon Act was a bitter blow to most of the British scientists who had worked on the Bomb, especially for those still working on the laboratory on The Hill, now known by its place name, Los Alamos.36 Groves directed them all to leave, though not before some of them were denied access to reports they had written days before. Chadwick, however, looked on the bright side: ‘Are we so helpless that we can do nothing without the United States?’37 Indignation among British scientists and government officials at the Americans’ decision did not spill over into the British press – Attlee’s government ensured that public discussion of nuclear weapons never caught fire: during the entire five-year life of this Parliament, there was not a single debate on nuclear matters.
It was a different story in the United States, where the media often reported the discussions on the subject between scientists and legislators. At one extreme, the hawkish Secretary of State James Byrnes wanted to make the most of the US’s monopoly and play tough with the Soviet Union; at the other, Robert Oppenheimer and the now-retired Henry Stimson emphasised that the monopoly was not permanent and that the US should take the lead in setting up an international framework to control the spread of the weapons. American policy was hammered ou
t by a high-powered committee, whose members included Oppenheimer, Groves, Vannevar Bush and James Conant. They recommended that fissile material be placed under the aegis of a neutral international agency and that the US should abandon its nuclear monopoly and reveal its Bomb-making secrets to the Soviet Union. In exchange, America should secure an agreement limiting the number of weapons both countries would be allowed to make. Truman, unable to swallow whole such a radical proposal, turned to an unlikely authority to develop the proposal for submission to the United Nations: Churchill’s friend and admirer Bernard Baruch, seventy-six years old, almost deaf, in poor health but as flamboyant as a Hollywood star on the make. At a UN gathering in the Bronx on 14 June 1946, Baruch unveiled his plan at an event with all the hoopla of a movie premiere.38
The Baruch proposal appeared to offer a generous deal to the Soviets, but specifically insisted that ‘condign and swift punishment’ for control violations would be imposed by the UN Security Council and decided by a majority vote of the Great Powers. The Soviets rejected the plan, having smelt a rat: America could always command a majority in the UN by calling on the support of its allies, so it could get away with whatever it liked.
Blackett predictably disagreed with the proposal and in September 1946 set out his reasons in a pamphlet, for the first time publicly declaring his opposition to Anglo-American control initiatives.39 That month, during a visit to the US, he was alarmed by the hysterically anti-Soviet mood – politicians were vying with each other during the mid-term hustings to whip up public anxiety about the Communist threat. American scientists, realising that plans for international controls were likely to fail, appeared to be making matters worse, Blackett believed. He told Peierls that Oppenheimer had admitted that ‘the attempt to solve the atomic bomb problem in isolation led to one logical solution only – preventative war’.40 Oppenheimer’s former Manhattan Project colleague Harold Urey announced that America might be forced to declare war ‘with the frank purpose of conquering the world and ruling it as desired and preventing any other sovereign nation from developing mass weapons of war’.41
Returning to Manchester angry and shaken, Blackett decided to challenge the consensus in favour of international control, which he believed was unfair to the Soviets. In early November 1946, after a private meeting with Attlee in 10 Downing Street, Blackett recommended to the Prime Minister that, in the event of the break-up of the UN Atomic Energy Commission, Britain should renounce nuclear weapons, introduce a purely defensive strategy and declare itself politically neutral, like Switzerland.42 Yet none of Blackett’s arguments ultimately had any purchase in Whitehall, nor was he making much impact among his peers, who thought he was overreacting to American extremism. They lobbied him hard to support – or, at least, not to oppose – the consensus that it was crucial to forge some sort of agreement with the Soviets to control the spread of nuclear weapons, but he would not budge.43 Foreign Office mandarins thought Blackett was spouting ‘dangerous and misleading rubbish’, while some of his colleagues, weary of his self-righteous expostulations, believed he was becoming a crank.44
It is not clear why Attlee agreed to meet Blackett. The Prime Minister had already accepted, in secrecy, almost two weeks before their first meeting, that Britain needed the Bomb, and he appears not to have told Blackett this when they talked. The decision was taken in Downing Street on 25 October 1946, after the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin waddled into a meeting of the secret ‘Atomic Energy Committee’, having fallen asleep after a heavy lunch.45 Attlee and his colleagues were discussing whether to build a costly gaseous diffusion plant that would enrich uranium-reactor fuel and accelerate the production of plutonium. When Attlee summarised the view of his leading economic ministers that it would be best to take the proposal off the table, Bevin piped up, ‘No, Prime Minister, that won’t do at all.’ Having recently been ‘talked at’ by the swaggering American Secretary of State James Byrnes, Bevin said he did not want any future Foreign Secretary of Britain to suffer such a humiliation – ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs . . . We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ The meeting swung his way and the decision was finally confirmed three months later, a verdict known only to Attlee and the four ministers he trusted to be on the committee. No one else in Parliament was aware that Britain was about to develop its first nuclear weapons, although – as Attlee knew – few MPs would have doubted that Britain must have the Bomb, to demonstrate its military muscle and to help sustain some of its prestige on the international stage.
When Blackett discussed the decision with his colleagues on the Advisory Committee, he realised that he had been banging his head against a brick wall. It was time to try another way of getting his message across, by writing a book. He set out to demonstrate the futility of area bombing, to explain why current international control initiatives were unfair to the Soviet Union, and to argue for policies that treated nuclear weapons alongside conventional armaments.46 The American policy on nuclear weapons was misguided, he believed – America’s monopoly would not prevent the huge Soviet army in Eastern Europe from invading the west of the continent.
After reading a proof copy of the book, Tizard advised Blackett to avoid giving the impression that ‘everything that America has done is wrong and stupid, and that everything Russia has done is right’. Blackett accepted that he ‘might have erred slightly in objectivity’, but left the substance of his argument unchanged.47
On 12 May 1948, when Blackett was finalising the book, the government disclosed that Britain was building its own Bomb, making the announcement in the most downbeat way imaginable. During a quiet afternoon in the Commons, new Labour MP George Jeger put a planted question to the Minister of Defence, A. V. Alexander, asking if he was satisfied that ‘adequate progress is being made in the development of the most modern types of weapon’.48 The news that Britain was making nuclear weapons was delivered in passing, so quickly that it seems most of the MPs did not even notice:
MINISTER: Yes, sir. As was made clear in the statement relating to defence, 1948, research and development continue to receive the highest priority in the defence field, and all types of modern weapons, including atomic weapons, are being developed.
JEGER: Can the Minister give any further information on the development of atomic weapons?
MINISTER: No. I do not think it would be in the public interest to do that.
Seconds later, the Commons’ agenda moved on to consider the quality of imported Danish beef. The disclosure was reported in the press so discreetly that only the most diligent of readers would have seen it and appreciated its importance. As a result, the announcement was a non-event, no doubt as Attlee had intended.
Behind the scenes, the government had achieved a measure of success in its negotiations with the Americans over their nuclear policies. Senior members of Congress had been horrified the year before when they heard the details of the Quebec Agreement, especially the British veto on the American use of the Bomb. A few months later, in January 1948, the governments’ leading nuclear scientists – including Vannevar Bush and John Cockcroft – secretly agreed a modus vivendi in which the veto was revoked, along with America’s freedom to halt a nuclear-power industry in Britain, and some other clauses favourable to the US.49 Most importantly, the new agreement enabled the British to share American nuclear information that would help them build a new weapon of their own design. Unknown to the British Parliament, the Quebec Agreement was now dead.
*
Blackett’s short book Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, so dense that much of it is barely readable, went on sale in early October 1948. By then, the temperature of the Cold War had fallen further, making it unlikely that Blackett’s ideas would have much appeal. The Americans, looking to win influence in Europe, had pumped huge amounts of money and resources into the continent to alleviate economic hardship through the Marshall Plan, which the Soviets regarded as part of an attempt to forge an allian
ce hostile to the Kremlin and its friends. The plan would also reduce the chances of Communist regimes taking power in Eastern Europe. On 24 June, Stalin snapped – the Soviets blockaded West Berlin, aiming to take control of it by cutting off its Western supply lines, threatening hundreds of thousands of Berliners with starvation. A tragedy was eventually averted by Allied airlifts, but only after Europe had spent weeks on the brink of another war. Soon afterwards, the Western powers created the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviets established the German Democratic Republic, a split that mirrored the division of Europe into American-led and Soviet-led spheres of influence. The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) a few months later cemented the trans-Atlantic security agreement that sought to deter Soviet expansionism and quell a revival of nationalist militarism in Europe. This new security arrangement was, the Soviet news agency TASS protested, ‘openly aggressive’.50
In normal circumstances, Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy would have been ignored. But Blackett was in luck – only weeks after the book was published, he heard that he had won the Nobel Prize for physics (the literature prize went to T. S. Eliot). The award gave his tract a special credence and made it an improbable bestseller, soon translated into eleven languages.51 Blackett and his wife celebrated the award of the prize by throwing a party, defying departmental protocol by inviting not just his fellow academics but everyone who worked with him, including secretaries, technicians and cleaners.52 His idea of splashing out usually involved nothing more than buying a new pipe, but his Nobel winnings enabled him to buy a second-hand yacht, twenty-five feet long, with rust-red sails. It had been named Red Witch.
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