He soon softened his line. In the House of Commons, he went no further than the words he used after British relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated again, in January 1948:28 the best chance of avoiding war was ‘to bring matters to a head with the Soviet Government . . . to arrive at a lasting settlement’. His enthusiasm for a prompt showdown diminished during that year. He told his colleague Anthony Eden in September that he wanted to give the Americans time to stockpile more nuclear weapons and to improve their ability to deliver them – then, in a year’s time, a demand for a showdown ‘would certainly have to be made’.29 He dreaded the moment when the Soviets acquired the Bomb, for then ‘nothing can stop the greatest of all world catastrophes’.
When Churchill was writing his war memoirs, he made no bones about his approach: ‘This is not history, this is my case.’30 He had a terrific story to tell and the literary talent to make it sing; all he needed was a crack team of researchers, administrators and several years of hard labour to bring it to fruition. The arrangements for the research, writing and checking were in place by spring 1946, along with lucrative publishing contracts, including the all-important one in the United States, arranged by his friend Emery Reves. If it went well, the venture would enable Churchill’s account to set the agenda for public discussions about the war in the English-speaking world.
He quickly set up an impressive team, often called ‘the Syndicate’. Its de facto chief executive, Churchill’s former research assistant Bill Deakin, was supported by Churchill loyalists Pug Ismay (formerly military Chief of Staff to the Minister of Defence), Henry Pownall (formerly Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff) and the Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, who read and commented on the entire text and even wrote some of it. Among dozens of other specialists, R. V. Jones and Lindemann spent months drafting and checking the sections concerning science and technology.
Churchill persuaded the government to give the Syndicate colleagues unprecedented access to files and papers that custom and practice decreed should normally remain under lock and key for decades.
The headquarters of the writing project was Chartwell. In the summer of 1946, the unsustainable burden of running the property was removed by Lord Camrose and other philanthropists who clubbed together to finance a scheme that enabled Churchill to live there for the rest of his life, at a peppercorn rent.31 At the Churchills’ London home near the Royal Albert Hall, the Syndicate pored over thousands of documents retrieved after months of rummaging through Whitehall files, marshalling facts, composing summaries and text for Churchill to rework, and commenting on his drafts. The first volume, The Gathering Storm, included coverage of the period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, telling of Hitler’s rise, Germany’s rearmament and the feeble response of the English-speaking peoples.32 The story – a rich, character-driven drama – had a resonant subtext: 1948 may be like 1938 all over again, with different actors.
The genesis of nuclear weapons was one of Churchill’s themes.33 He makes no mention of the articles on the subject he wrote before the war, remarking only that ‘from time to time Professor Lindemann had talked about atomic energy’. When Churchill introduces the subject, he quotes in full a letter he claimed to have sent to the Air Ministry in early August 1939 – after a briefing by Lindemann to pour cold water on scare stories that the Germans had a nuclear weapon on the eve of war. This recollection was inaccurate – he was actually consulting the Ministry about whether to send the letter, drafted by Lindemann, to the Daily Telegraph.34 Churchill had begun his account of the development of nuclear weapons as he would continue, with a misremembered anecdote, unqualified praise for the Prof, and no personal regrets.
Although the completion of the volume, in late 1947 and early 1948, cost Churchill a huge amount of work, it was a welcome respite from the grinding frustration of opposition. Burrowing away on the book project, he was a young journalist reborn, driving his publishers to distraction with his quest for perfection. He demanded ever more sets of proofs, tweaking previously finalised passages, agonising over difficult sections and adding new perspectives right up to the wire.
The Gathering Storm, published in the United States in June 1948 and four months later in the UK, was an instant hit, selling by the truckload and winning laudatory reviews.35 Among the book’s admirers was Noël Coward. He later wrote to Churchill to thank him for writing it, praising his ‘impeccable sense of theatre’, ‘sublime use of words’ and for telling the story with ‘so little bitterness’.36 Many critics pointed to Churchill’s brazen self-centredness and faulted his account of the 1920s and ’30s – there was no mention of the defence cuts he had made at the Treasury – and of his relaxed attitude to the aggression of General Franco, Mussolini and the militaristic leaders in Japan. However, none of the reviewers in the leading publications commented on Churchill’s distortions of the history of the British radar programme, especially his false implication that he had always strongly supported it. He minimised Tizard’s role while building Lindemann’s to the sky.37 Yet these few shameful pages and other shortcomings did nothing to mar the book’s appeal, and its publication made 1948 a banner year for Churchill.
The business of parliamentary opposition bored him, and it showed. In early March 1949, his wife was so upset by the rumblings of discontent in the Tory ranks that she told him in a letter: ‘I have felt chilled & discouraged by the deepening knowledge that you do only just as much as will keep you in power. But that . . . is not enough in these hard anxious times.’38 He took her advice, cutting short his next trip to the US, where he was to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Uneasy about addressing an audience certain to contain a preponderance of scientists, including Sir Henry Tizard and G. P. Thomson, Churchill turned to Lindemann for advice. The Prof took the opportunity to promote one of his favourite causes – the standard of engineering teaching in British universities was in his view now so poor that the UK’s status as a military and economic power was under threat.39 Britain needed its own MIT, Lindemann believed.
Churchill’s arrival in New York on 23 March 1949 afforded a welcome opportunity to draw attention to the second volume of his war memoir, Their Finest Hour, due to be published six days later. At the New York quayside, he posed for the flotilla of photographers, one hand holding a fat cigar and huge hat, while the other made his now-trademark V-sign.40 ‘Nodding like a beaming pink cherub’, as the New York Times put it, he was given a stirring welcome by the crowds.
His main reason for making the journey was not to give the well-paid talk, which turned out to be boilerplate Churchill – sparklingly delivered but bereft of new ideas. Rather, he wanted to talk with President Truman, recently re-elected against all the odds, and the former Secretary of State George Marshall, whose Recovery Plan (warmly endorsed by Churchill) was assisting several of the crippled economies in Europe.41 In their meetings, Churchill urged the President to make clear to Stalin that the US was prepared to deploy the Bomb against the Soviets. Truman obliged soon afterwards, and in late June Churchill wrote to him with all the obsequiousness the President had come to expect:42
I was deeply impressed by your statement about not fearing to use the atomic bomb if the need arose . . . Complete unity, superior force and the undoubted readiness to use it, give us the only hope of escape. Without you nothing can be done.
Yet Truman was more cautious about using the Bomb, as Churchill realised when he read the President’s reply a few days later:43 ‘I am not quite so pessimistic as you are about the prospects for a third world war. I rather think that eventually we are going to forget that idea, and get a real world peace. I don’t believe even the Russians can stand it to face complete destruction . . .’.
Churchill’s memories of the Bomb project were hazy, probably reflecting the fitful attention he paid it during the war. He began to reconstruct the story in early 1949, tracking down facts and documents to clarify his confused recollections. By the late summer,
he had written a brief semi-technical introduction to the Tube Alloys story and, after lunching with Lindemann, asked him to comment on a draft.44 Although Churchill did not use the passage in the published book, his text has survived, along with annotations by Lindemann and R. V. Jones.
The passage displays Churchill’s ability as a vivid writer about basic science. When setting the scene for the physicists’ foray into the heart of the atom, he used what he described as ‘simple metaphors and [linking] to a more scientific basis in the reader’s mind’:45
Until recent years all chemical processes – whether it be digesting our food, the burning of coal in our grates, or the detonation of high explosives, like TNT – entailed merely the rearrangement of the [electrons]. No one had interfered with the nuclei. These powerful bodies dwelt unperturbed each with their own cluster of gnats (electrons) buzzing about them.
He gives a clear account of nuclear chain reactions, though he makes no explicit mention of Frisch and Peierls’s memorandum or of any other contribution by refugee scientists. Churchill does, however, outline the work of the MAUD committee – ‘Their battlefield was the laboratory’ – and comments that he relied on Lindemann ‘to give me a prod if any action were needed [as] I had a lot of other things to do at the time’. No extant document or diary entry from the spring of 1941 makes any mention of his emotional reaction to the committee’s report, though he writes in his war memoir that he was profoundly concerned:
I had a very deep fear of a new explosive and was much alarmed to learn that it was approaching the threshold of a war which already seemed bad enough. If we had found out so much, what about the enemy? We knew they were groping in this direction . . .
American scientists were kept apprised of the MAUD proceedings, Churchill writes, so he was ‘not surprised to receive a note from President Roosevelt’ in the late autumn of 1941. This was the offer of equal partnership that Churchill did not answer for seven weeks. Making no mention of this, he simply remarks: ‘I naturally replied I would be delighted to receive his nominee and to put him into the picture . . .’ The draft passage ends there. After he wrote it, he continued his struggle to get his nuclear story straight and to present it as another vindication of his policy of working hand in glove with America.
Two days after Lindemann began working on Churchill’s draft, President Truman announced that his military had determined that the Soviets had successfully tested a nuclear weapon, at 6 a.m. on 29 August 1949. Stalin at first said nothing and confirmed only later that it was true. His acquisition of the Bomb so soon shook the American and British governments to the core – virtually every expert in the West was taken by surprise.
Churchill now had to think afresh about nuclear strategy and Britain’s bond with the United States. It was not long before the relationship was again under strain, when it was revealed why the Soviets had been able to build the Bomb with such astonishing speed: they had been receiving inside information on the Manhattan Project. As Lindemann later remarked: ‘Despite their elaborate spying system, it is incredible that in 1945 the Russians should have known more about the production of atomic bombs than we did . . .’46 It soon emerged that the principal mole was one of the scientists sent to America seven years before by Churchill’s officials.
FEBRUARY AND MARCH 1950
Peierls and ‘the spy of the century’
‘My Russian childhood and youth taught me not to trust anybody else, and to expect anyone and everyone to be a Communist agent.’
GENIA PEIERLS to Klaus Fuchs, 4 February 19501
Rudi Peierls never forgot the events of Friday 3 February 1950, especially the phone call he received shortly after noon. He was working in Birmingham University’s department of theoretical physics, housed in a former army hut, the site of what was now one of Britain’s leading research centres. His office looked every inch the workplace of an academic – a bicycle in a corner, a blackboard covered with quantum hieroglyphics, faculty papers stacked on his desk and piles of books covered in chalk dust.
A few minutes later, rain beating against the windows, he took the call that would scar him for life. It was a reporter on the line. This was no surprise – the press had been hounding him since President Truman, three days before, had ordered the Atomic Energy Commission to produce the hydrogen bomb.2 The prospect of building much more powerful nuclear weapons and another escalation in the arms race had prompted Peierls – along with G. P. Thomson, Jo Rotblat and several other scientists – to sign a petition urging that ‘utmost attempts’ should be made now ‘to eliminate atomic warfare’.3 But this journalist, from London’s Evening Standard, wanted Peierls’s views on something quite different, news that had just broken in the capital: his old friend and colleague Klaus Fuchs had been arrested and charged with being a spy.4 Shattered, Peierls refused to comment.
Like many anti-Nazi students in the early 1930s, Fuchs had associated with Communists, but Peierls had never detected any sign that his friend was on the far left, still less that he was a Soviet sympathiser. Nor, in Peierls’s view, had Fuchs ever seemed capable of such disloyalty to the country that had given him a home and a good living when he was a desperate refugee.5 Fuchs was now the UK government’s leading nuclear theorist, and had brought dozens of secrets from Los Alamos that were extremely valuable to the British Bomb project. The two men had spoken on the phone only the day before and, to Peierls, nothing seemed amiss.6
As usual when Peierls had to deal with difficult news, he phoned his wife and soul mate Genia at their home. She prided herself on her ability to take the measure of anyone and give them wise advice on everything under the sun (‘I am the cleverest person in Birmingham,’ she once told a friend).7 Yet even Genia was bewildered. Fuchs had been a close friend of the family for nine years, a lodger for eighteen months. He was now a regular guest, good with the children and helpful around the house.8 The notion that he had been lying to them all for years was inconceivable. As they struggled to put words to their anguish, Rudi and Genia’s conversation was fragmented and barely coherent:9
GENIA: But, my dear, you are in the same danger yourself.
RUDI (replying in Russian): No.
GENIA: How?
RUDI: I don’t know, but I couldn’t care less now, anyway.
This exchange was recorded by the British security service MI5. Some of its officers had installed a phone tap at the Peierlses’ home that morning, just in time to catch their reactions to Fuchs’s arrest (Peierls’s university correspondence had been tapped since his return from Los Alamos). A few hours later, Peierls was still reeling. Desperate to talk to his wife, he cycled through the rain to their home, a huge Victorian house in Edgbaston, a fifteen-minute ride from his office. Waiting until their two babies had been put to bed and their two teenage children were out of earshot, the Peierlses mulled over the news again. Neither could believe that Fuchs was a traitor – he was simply not capable of that level of pretence.10 Peierls decided that he must go and see Fuchs to get things straight and make sure he had a solicitor.11 At 9.15 that evening, he telephoned the Metropolitan Police to ask if he could visit Fuchs in London the next day. His request was granted.
In Scotland Yard the next morning, Peierls heard that his friend had confessed eight days earlier. In a four-thousand-word statement, Fuchs had explained to the security services why he had decided to become a Soviet spy soon after joining Peierls in Birmingham to work on the Bomb:12
When I learned the purpose of [Peierls’s] work I decided to inform Russia and I established contact through another member of the Communist Party. Since that time I have had continuous contact with [intermediaries]. At this time, I had complete faith in Russian policy and I believed that the Western Allies deliberately allowed Russia and Germany to fight each other to the death. I had, therefore, no hesitation in giving all the information I had . . .
Peierls – barely able to believe what he had heard – made his way to Brixton Prison. There, he was ushered into the Deputy Governo
r’s office to meet Fuchs, who was brought from his cell shortly after lunch. Their conversation never left first gear, each of them speaking slowly and so softly that the police observers could barely hear what they were saying. Fuchs said that he regretted his disloyalty now, having come to appreciate the virtues of Western life. Now that he had been unmasked, he sought no mercy.13 Peierls, glum and dispirited, asked him if he needed any help, but Fuchs was indifferent to everything except the offer to send him a few books and some clean underwear. After talking for little over a quarter of an hour, the two men exchanged pleasantries and Peierls, shaken by Fuchs’s unutterable naivety and foolishness, headed back to Birmingham.
At home that evening, Peierls poured out his anger and frustration to his wife. He also wrote a statement for the Metropolitan Police, detailing his recollections of the conversation with Fuchs, and putting himself at their disposal.14 Genia, weeping in an armchair close to the fire in the sitting room, reached for her fountain pen and wrote Fuchs a long letter, as excoriating as it was far-sighted:15
Do you realise what will be the effect of your trial on scientists here and in America? Specially in America where many of them are in difficulty already? Do you realise that they will be suspected not only by officials but by their own friends . . .?
Fuchs could now never be happy, she wrote angrily, but he should at least ‘Try to save as much as you can of this decent and warm and tolerant [and] free community of international science which gave you so much . . .’ She signed off ‘God help you!’ and handed Peierls the letter to type up and send to Fuchs. The pages, barely legible, were soaked in tears.
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