The book shook up the nuclear debate on both sides of the Atlantic, and made Blackett several influential enemies. One of them was George Orwell, who included him among thirty-eight pro-Communist writers and intellectuals on a list he sent a few months later to a friend at the Foreign Office, to help with its clandestine anti-Soviet propaganda initiative.53 Blackett was in good company on this list, which also included J. B. Priestley and Charlie Chaplin.
Most commentators were more level-headed about Blackett’s intentions. Many of his scientist colleagues – even those who were not Socialists – were warm in their praise of his presentation. The steadfastly moderate Rudi Peierls found himself ‘mostly in the position of taking your side’.54 The Conservative G. P. Thomson regretted Blackett’s suggestion that the Americans had ‘Machiavellian motives’ when they dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. Thomson, however, accepted Blackett’s criticisms of the Baruch Plan and praised him for being ‘almost certainly right in deprecating the extremer claims for the effectiveness of atomic bombs’. The root of the arms-control problem, Thomson agreed, was the ‘Russian fear of being in a permanent minority position on any control body’.55
Some of Blackett’s American colleagues were less complimentary. In The Atlantic Monthly, the eminent atomic physicist Isidor Rabi dismissed the British scientist’s ‘ostentatious display of scientific objectivity’ as merely ‘a thin veneer which covers an extraordinary piece of special pleading’.56 Blackett was hopelessly confused and in denial that nuclear weapons had revolutionised modern warfare, Rabi wrote: ‘On international affairs, [Blackett] writes like the amateur which he is . . .’
Sir John Anderson and Frederick Lindemann agreed. In an uncharacteristically forthright BBC radio talk, Anderson attacked Blackett’s ‘warped’ judgement, dubbing him ‘a conscience-smitten atomic scientist’ who had entered ‘quixotically into the unfamiliar field of politics’. A few weeks later, in a Sunday Dispatch article entitled ‘Britain’s Red Scientists’, Lindemann was equally disobliging, complaining about the disproportionate public prominence of a few lefties among Britain’s scientific elite. What pests they are, with ‘their unlimited time, unbounded energy . . . [as well as] insatiable itch and unerring nose for publicity’. He was almost certainly thinking of Blackett. The two men could scarcely bring themselves to give each other the time of day, each believing in his own ability to bring rationality to other people’s confusions about political and military matters.57
Although Lindemann was the better mathematician and writer, Blackett was much the finer scientist. In Oxford, Lindemann’s interfering stewardship of its nuclear research had proved to be expensive and unproductive.58 In Manchester, however, Blackett had shown himself to be the best research leader to have graduated from Rutherford’s school. Among his achievements, he helped to set up the Jodrell Bank Telescope and formed the group of cosmic-ray physicists that discovered elementary particles whose bizarre behaviour indicated the need for a new property of sub-atomic matter, later called ‘strangeness’.59
Blackett’s Nobel Prize and the publicity given to his views appear to have inflamed Lindemann’s jealousy. The Prof sent his denunciations of Blackett to several of his friends, and supplied Churchill with a copy of ‘Britain’s Red Scientists’.60 Over the past four years, Lindemann had remained a close adviser to his hero, who had developed firm opinions on nuclear weapons – views that Blackett abominated.
AUGUST 1945 TO AUGUST 1949
Churchill the Cold Warrior
‘Mr Churchill honestly desires peace; but he is convinced that Stalin is waiting for a favourable opportunity to launch an aggressive war . . . and that he thinks of nothing else by day or night. Therefore, says Mr Churchill, the Western Powers must arm to the teeth.’
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, 19501
Churchill believed that, after the war, it was vital for the United States to make the most of its nuclear monopoly while it lasted. Horrified to see millions of Europeans living under Stalin’s thumb, he believed it crucial to keep the Soviets in check to stop the cancer of Communism from spreading any further.
Just as depressing for him was the sight of Britain emerging from the war exhausted, impoverished and – for the first time in centuries – playing a secondary role in the world. The only sensible way forward for Britain, in his view, was to line up behind the Americans and maintain his country’s role in the ‘special relationship’ by acquiring nuclear bombs. This is why he was disturbed that his country appeared to be making such slow progress in developing them. In the meantime, he wanted America to capitalise on its nuclear advantage, and even suggested – at the height of his frustration with Stalin’s bullying – that the US make a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union.
Churchill’s views were already in place on the day after Hiroshima, when he visited his old friend Lord Camrose, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, at an off-the-record meeting in the newspaper’s Fleet Street headquarters.2 Afterwards, Camrose wrote in his notes:
Churchill is of the opinion that, with the manufacture of this bomb in their hands, America can dominate the world for the next five years. If he had continued in office he is of the opinion that he could have persuaded the American Government to use this power to restrain the Russians. He would have had a show-down with Stalin and told him he had got to behave reasonably and decently in Europe, and would have gone so far as to be brusque and angry with him if needs be.
After the war, freed of the burdens of high office, Churchill had plenty of time to write a multi-volume account of the conflict that enshrined his version of the epic story. Camrose pressed him to get on with the job and strike while the iron was hot – if the books were not written by Christmas 1947, their commercial value would be diminished.3
The new government’s parliamentary majority was so large that, barring disasters, it would be in office for at least one complete term (five years) and probably two – a disheartening prospect for an elderly opposition leader. In his spasmodic appearances in the Commons, he fulminated against the government’s social-democratic legislative programme and its bureaucratic controls. But his opposition was weak and ineffectual. Most upsetting of all for Churchill was the government’s decision to give India independence, destroying the Empire ‘by a hideous act of self-mutilation’.4
Churchill was now approaching his seventy-first birthday. On the day after he met Camrose in the Telegraph offices, he was miserable, confiding to his doctor:5
It’s no use, Charles, pretending I’m not hard hit. I can’t school myself to do nothing for the rest of my life . . . After I left Potsdam, Joe did what he liked. The Russians’ western frontier was allowed to advance, displacing another eight million poor devils . . . I get fits of depression.
The autumn of his life promised to be one long, gloomy November afternoon, made bearable only by the company of friends and family, the challenge of writing his memoir, and plenty of vacations in the sun. With luck, he would live long enough to have another crack at the premiership.
Although Churchill had excluded Attlee from years of discussions about the Bomb, the new British Prime Minister showed no resentment. He often consulted his former boss on nuclear policy, though he did not always accept his advice.
Churchill was angry when he heard that the government’s new Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy included Blackett but not Lindemann.6 Blackett’s views and activities had long attracted the suspicion of Churchill, who had ordered MI5 four years before to ‘see if they had anything against’ him, but had been told that he was ‘entirely harmless’.7 That did not put Churchill’s mind at rest, however. Soon after he heard of Blackett’s appointment, he lobbied Sir John Anderson, putting in writing for the first time what many had suspected – after Tube Alloys, Blackett had been excluded from the British nuclear project:8
As you know, [Blackett] had been kept carefully away from all this business, and I think it very likely that the inclusion of his name will have the effect of drying up . . . contacts
in the United States.
Anderson’s reply was masterly. He pointed out that Lindemann’s name had not even been mentioned during a discussion with Attlee of possible advisers.9 It was important, Anderson added – perhaps with his tongue in his cheek – that Churchill was advised by someone not involved with the committee so that he was not inhibited when he was criticising the government’s proposals. ‘As regards Blackett,’ Anderson concluded crisply, ‘I think he is probably safer on the committee than off it.’ When Churchill replied a week later, he was beginning a painting vacation on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy. A few days later, he told Attlee that it was ‘not so much what [Blackett] would do as what the Americans will do . . . I apprehend that they will be increasingly shy of imparting the further developments’. Churchill backed down, but he had marked Blackett’s card.10 A few months later, when Blackett was nominated for an honorary degree at the University of Bristol, Churchill used his power as its Chancellor to veto the nomination.11
Churchill’s intervention on Lindemann’s behalf was, however, not in vain: Attlee gave the Prof a place on a technical committee that put him in the stalls of the nuclear debate, but not close to the main actors.12 This kept both Lindemann and Churchill well informed but far enough from the decision-making to prevent them mounting guerrilla attacks like the ones they had waged on the Tizard Committee a decade before.
Attlee also sought Churchill’s comments on a draft note to President Truman, which proposed that the United States make a Bohr-like ‘Act of Faith’ by sharing its knowledge of nuclear weapons through the United Nations.13 Churchill’s response was like a controlled explosion on the shores of Lake Como: such talk would ‘raise immediate suspicion in American breasts’, he said. He then argued – convincingly, in Attlee’s view – that Britain and America should try to achieve security based on ‘a solemn covenant, backed by . . . the force of the atomic bomb’. Churchill concluded with impassioned comments on the 1943 Quebec Agreement, which he said ‘almost amounts to a military understanding between us and the mightiest power in the world’. The operative word was ‘almost’.
*
In the early spring of 1946, Churchill spoke out on what he believed to be the growing threat of Soviet power. To make maximum impact, he chose to make a big speech not in Britain, where he was a controversial figure and apparently on the wane politically, but in the United States, at the invitation of President Truman. ‘The Iron Curtain speech’, as it is now remembered, was certain to receive the blanket press coverage no longer given routinely to his pronouncements in the UK.
Churchill gave the speech in Missouri, the President’s home state, in the tiny college town of Fulton. He rose to the occasion, talking with all the eloquence and aphoristic brilliance his audience hoped for. The speech, titled at the last minute ‘The Sinews of Peace’, focused on a grand theme, redolent of his 1930s campaign on the dangers of growing militarism in Europe, with the Nazis now replaced by the Soviets. No one knew the limits to the ‘expansive and proselytising tendencies’ of the Soviets and their international Communist organisation, he warned.14 Condemning any thoughts of appeasement, he urged that the only hope of countering the Soviet threat was through ‘a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States’. God was on their side, he believed, as He had willed that only America had nuclear weapons for the time being, providing a crucial means of containing the Soviets. It would be ‘criminal madness’ to give away the secret of the Bomb in the current climate, though Churchill knew that the Soviet Union would have the Bomb within the next few years – by that time, he hoped nuclear weapons would be overseen by the United Nations. His message was not, as is often depicted, a call to begin a Cold War but an argument that the UK and the US must stand together and negotiate with the Soviet Union from a position of strength, to avoid another global conflict. This was to become his clarion call.
The speech was coolly received by the British press and went down badly in America. The Nation objected that Churchill had poisoned ‘the already deteriorating relations between Russia and the Western powers’, while the Chicago Sun complained that he was seeking ‘world domination’ by America and the British Empire, though the United States wanted no such alliance.15 Truman and Attlee quickly distanced themselves from the speech, though Churchill had been careful to consult them both when he was drafting it.16
Churchill had gone out of his way to express his ‘strong admiration and regard [for] the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin’. But this cut no ice with the Soviet leader, who made the most of the controversy by giving an interview to Pravda (soon reprinted in the New York Times) in which he pointed out that Churchill’s call for English-speaking peoples to control the fate of the world was ‘strikingly reminiscent of [the rhetoric] of Hitler and his friends’.17 Not only did Churchill brush off these and other criticisms, he also did little to correct the misinterpretations of his text, commenting to an admirer that he had made the most important speech of his career.18
In Fulton, he had proved beyond doubt that he was still a figure to be reckoned with on the global stage. Six months later, he reinforced this impression in another powerful speech at the University of Zurich, where he spoke on ‘The Tragedy of Europe’.19 He urged that a ‘United States of Europe’ should be formed as another bulwark against tyranny and once more stressed that the West should use its narrow nuclear lead over the Soviet Union: ‘We dwell strangely and precariously under the shield and protection of the atomic bomb.’
A few weeks later, Churchill wrote to Attlee, who had yet to be persuaded that the Soviets were bent on global domination:20 ‘It is clear to me that only two reasons prevent the westward movement of the Russian armies to the North Sea and the Atlantic,’ Churchill wrote. ‘The first is their virtue and self-restraint; the second, America’s possession of the atomic bomb.’ If the United States was not prepared to use the Bomb, then Europe could soon be overrun by Stalin’s troops, he believed.21
In private, Churchill was as robust about using the Bomb as he was in public, as Augustus John heard over lunch at Chartwell.22 The painter said little during the meal, but a mention of Hiroshima made him explode: the dropping of the Bomb was ‘the most monstrous crime in all history’. Churchill disagreed: ‘I have many things worse than that on my conscience.’ The conversation then moved on. Churchill was rather more forthcoming at another lunch, this time with Lord Mountbatten, soon to oversee Britain’s withdrawal from India, and Sir John Anderson. When Mountbatten suggested that the use of the Bomb had allowed the Japanese to save face after spending years as aggressors, Churchill replied that it was fair to question the decision to use the weapon:23
I may even be asked by my Maker why I used it but I shall defend myself vigorously and shall say – ‘Why did you release this knowledge to us when mankind was raging in furious battles?’
Anderson retorted, ‘You cannot accuse your judges.’
Churchill’s spirits were lifted later that summer by his last correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, in which they discussed nuclear weapons. After Churchill sent greetings to the writer on his ninetieth birthday, Shaw replied with a valedictory testimonial: ‘You have never been a real Tory,’ he wrote. Churchill was ‘a phenomenon that the Blimps and Philistines and Stick-in-the-Muds have never understood and always dreaded’, Shaw wrote.24 Churchill replied, in a warm note. He seemed despondent about the state of the world and, once again, decided that some of the blame ought to be shouldered by God:
Do you think that the atomic bomb means that the architect of the universe has got tired of writing his non-stop scenario? There was a lot to be said for stopping at the Panda. The release of the bomb appears to be his next turning point.
Churchill wrote those words on 18 August 1946, five days after the death of his old frenemy H. G. Wells, whose original predictions thirty-five years before about the post-Bomb world had proved so wide of the mark. In his final creativ
e spurt, Wells had worked on the scenario for a movie, The Way the World Is Going, aiming to show that mankind should ‘face his culminating destiny with dignity and mutual aid and charity, without hysteria, meanness and idiotic misrepresentation of each other’s motives’.25 The work never reached his publishers and appears to have been lost or destroyed.
Churchill’s frustration with what he perceived to be Soviet expansionism apparently drove him often to strike a more hawkish tone, as Lord Moran found when he visited him at Chartwell.26 Over lunch, his tongue perhaps loosened by champagne and claret, Churchill was gloomy:
MORAN: You think there will be another war?
CHURCHILL: Yes.
MORAN: You mean in ten years’ time?
CHURCHILL: Sooner. Seven or eight years. I shan’t be there.
When Moran questioned how a country as small as Britain could take part in a nuclear war, Churchill cut loose: ‘We ought not to wait until Russia is ready.’ His face brightening, he went on:
America knows that fifty-two per cent of Russia’s motor industry is in Moscow and could be wiped out by a single bomb. It might mean wiping out three million people, but they would think nothing of that.
Just over a year later, he repeated the same sentiment, still in private but this time when talking with the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King.27 The West should make it clear that the Soviet Union must not extend its regime any further in Western Europe, Churchill argued. He added that if the Soviets did not accept the ultimatum, a Western leader should tell them straight: ‘We will attack Moscow and your other cities and destroy them with atomic bombs from the air.’ This was the zenith of Churchill’s nuclear bellicosity.
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