Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  Fuchs quickly replied, pleading that he had not thought about what he was doing.16 He had suffered from ‘controlled schizophrenia’, he said, trying unconvincingly to explain his actions. ‘I didn’t control the control; it controlled me.’ Now that he had decided to come clean and get everything off his chest, he said, his greatest fear was that the prison authorities ‘would discover the safety pins which held my pants together’. Fuchs thanked Genia for being kind enough not to mince her words, writing that it was ‘funny that women see things so much clearer than men’. In a postscript, he added that at least he had now learned again how to love and cry – tears stained his letter, too.

  In Britain and America, Fuchs’s face stared expressionlessly from dozens of newspapers, his ample forehead shining above circular-framed glasses.17 His unmasking occurred at a time when fears of a Cold War were growing alarmingly. On 1 October 1949, eight days after President Truman’s announcement that the Soviets had exploded a nuclear device, Mao Zedong formed the Marxist-Leninist People’s Republic of China, after besting his nationalist enemies. When the Fuchs story broke, Mao was in Moscow negotiating what became the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance, concluded on 14 February. According to Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, Communism was on the march. Five days before, he had launched his campaign to expose hundreds of spies that he alleged were working in the US government and military. It was these people, he insisted, who must have enabled the Soviets to acquire the Bomb so soon. His claims resonated with the public mood of fear and panic.

  Other nuclear spies had been unmasked, but none of them had been given Fuchs’s access to top-secret information. Day after day, the British newspapers castigated MI5, imagining the secrets that Fuchs might have divulged to the Kremlin and the effect this embarrassment was having on Britain’s relationship with America. There was no choice for the British security services but to sit in the stocks, mute and red-faced, while they were pelted with richly deserved abuse.

  On the day the Fuchs story broke, General Groves testified for two and a half hours in Washington before a closed session of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Its chairman Brien McMahon called in the press and summarised the General’s testimony. He gave the Washington Post the impression that Fuchs had handed to Russia ‘data involving the super-secret hydrogen bomb’, fanning worries that the Soviets might beat the Americans to an even more powerful type of nuclear weapon.18 Republican Senator John Bricker remarked: ‘I’ve always opposed the use of foreign scientists on [nuclear] projects [and] the arrest of Fuchs makes me even more certain that I am right.’19 This argument, Peierls observed, missed the fundamental point that without foreign-born scientists America would have no nuclear weapons at all.20

  The vortex of the Fuchs scandal swirled over the United States for weeks but it dissipated within a few days in Britain. There, most people were more interested in the imminent election, in which Churchill was apparently poised to give Attlee a bloody nose. Peierls kept up with the Fuchs story in radio news bulletins and reports in The Times. He regarded himself as politically centrist and a thoroughgoing democrat, content to respect the decisions of Parliament, which he believed were almost always reasonable.

  It was in this spirit that he led the UK Atomic Scientists’ Association. His politically neutral leadership confounded MI5’s suspicions both of him and of his organisation. One report concluded that he believed the Association was needed only as a watchdog that needs to do ‘very little, so long as politicians and others are sensible about atomic energy’.21 The organisation concentrated mainly on promoting discussions between scientists about nuclear matters and on public education initiatives, including a drab Atom Train exhibition about nuclear physics organised by Chadwick’s colleague Jo Rotblat. It chugged its way round Britain in 1947–8.22 Of Peierls himself, the security services found nothing more incriminating than the fact that he was married to a Russian, and nothing more unpleasant than a comment by one of its agents that he was ‘a shifty and rather oily individual’.23

  Peierls’s colleagues would not have recognised that description. He was popular and admired for his integrity, his ability both as a theoretical physicist and a cultivator of fresh academic talent. Having turned down professorships from Oxford, Cambridge and other leading universities,24 he built the reputation of theoretical physics in Birmingham. He worked on an impressive variety of problems, concentrating on trying to understand the behaviour of the electron and other sub-atomic particles using quantum theory and relativity. After the war, his experimental colleagues had been led by Mark Oliphant with a good deal of sound and fury, but with precious little success. Oliphant had returned to settle permanently in Australia during the previous summer, having lost patience with what he regarded as the Attlee government’s poorly coordinated and parsimonious support for basic science. Peierls had proved to be a much more effective leader: his theoretical physics group was now the best in Britain, according to his protégé Freeman Dyson, who was lodging with the Peierlses when they heard of Fuchs’s treachery.25

  Eleven days after the news broke, shortly after Fuchs’s first court hearing, Peierls still found his colleague’s behaviour incomprehensible,26 and was in no doubt about its consequences. Unburdening himself in a letter to Bohr, Peierls concluded that spying was inevitable in open societies, but not in the Soviet Union:27

  Russia has found how to stop leakages very effectively. If this is the only effective solution do we want to go that way ourselves or should we not say that at that price security is not worth having [?]

  Peierls visited Fuchs again in late February, this time accompanied by Genia, but they learned nothing new. By that time, Peierls had convinced himself that his friend’s contrition was genuine and told Fuchs’s defence lawyer to say that his client understood how much he had let down the scientific community. ‘This is his worst punishment,’ Peierls wrote, ‘worse than whatever the judge may impose.’28 The lawyer, alarmed by the deep sympathy evinced in these words, immediately alerted the security services.29

  Fuchs came to trial at the Old Bailey on 1 March, less than a month after his arrest. The public gallery was crammed with reporters from all over the world, as well as celebrities including H. G. Wells’s former mistress Rebecca West. Fuchs pleaded guilty on all counts, and the proceedings were over in ninety minutes, after which he thanked the court for a fair trial.30 Ill-acquainted with English law, he had earlier thought he would be executed, but that was not permissible as his crime of passing secret information to allies during wartime was relatively minor. The judge, Lord Chief Justice Goddard, was nonetheless in no mood to be lenient. He concluded that ‘the maximum sentence Parliament has ordained is fourteen years: that is the sentence I pass upon you’. He banged his gavel and security guards promptly whisked Fuchs off to Wormwood Scrubs.

  The story of his imprisonment livened up the post-election bathos in Britain. Attlee’s Labour government had won a second term, though its majority had collapsed to only six, putting Churchill within sniffing distance of a return to power. On 14 February 1950, nine days before polling day, he had been the first leading politician to talk openly about the possibility of nuclear war. As the Manchester Guardian reported, he introduced the Bomb into the election campaign ‘with explosive effect’.31

  FEBRUARY 1950 TO SPRING 1951

  Churchill softens his line on the Bomb

  ‘I really do not know why it is that when we were so far advanced in this new, mysterious region of atomic war we should have fallen so completely behind in these last four years.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, Edinburgh, 14 February 19501

  Churchill made his explosive remarks about nuclear policy towards the end of a long speech in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, to an audience of almost three thousand. Having complained that the British government had not yet been able to equip its military with the Bomb – ‘one of the most extraordinary administrative lapses that have ever taken place’ – he moved on to the Col
d War.2 Things were now so grave, he intoned, that it was ‘not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit’. This was the first use of the word ‘summit’ in this context – perhaps he chose it to chime with the national obsession with conquering Mount Everest.

  Although he made the best of the United States’ lead in the nuclear race – it had ‘almost a monopoly’ – he implicitly accepted that the time for making veiled threats to the Soviet Union was over. Labour politicians dismissed all this as a gimmick, but Churchill had assuredly changed his views. He never again spoke of showdowns and attacks on Moscow, but switched to the need to talk with the Soviets to avoid a nuclear Armageddon. This new stance was to become the leitmotif of his final years as a political leader.

  Before he could press this new line in Parliament, he had to deal with the matter of Klaus Fuchs, who had been recruited on his watch. After the Fuchs arrest, Whitehall officials had closed ranks and declared that no one was at fault, although the security investigations unearthed material that would have made General Groves blanch. As soon as news of the arrest broke, Attlee agreed with Sir John Anderson that ‘there was no case against the Security Services’ and promised to have a quiet word with Churchill, probably to keep him on side.3 Attlee addressed the ‘deplorable and unfortunate incident’ near the beginning of the new Parliament’s first full session, on 6 March, exonerating both his own government and Churchill’s wartime administration.4 The Commons listened to him in silence, Churchill showing little interest.

  This was to be a tetchy, unpleasant Parliament, permanently on the verge of dissolution. Attlee tried to prolong his previous government’s programme of nationalisations, high taxes and austerity measures, but his slender majority forced him to steer a moderate course and to avoid any danger of a rebellion.

  Though sometimes taunted by Labour backbenchers, Churchill remained a revered figure in the House, feted on the fiftieth anniversary of his election to Parliament, and honoured when the Members’ entrance was named after him. But in the Commons he sometimes stooped to behaviour that was below the standards his admirers expected of him, repeatedly taunting Attlee and trying to put him off his stride.5 Yet, over a whisky in the Commons’ Smoking Room, Churchill could turn the sourest of resentments into the sweetest of amities. Despite his sometimes frail health and increasing deafness, he was impatient to win back what he regarded as his job, whatever it took.

  Early in the new Parliament, in June 1950, the Cold War entered an exceptionally dangerous phase when war erupted in Korea after a hundred thousand North Koreans, with Sino-Soviet backing, invaded their southern neighbour.6 To the Americans, this was almost as great a shock as the Pearl Harbor attack. Two days after the invasion, President Truman issued a statement: ‘it is plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will use armed invasion and war.’ Under the auspices of the United Nations, the Americans went to South Korea’s aid, and Churchill supported the Attlee government’s decision to provide an auxiliary fighting force. It remained to see how many casualties the Americans would tolerate before they considered playing a nuclear card.

  Although Churchill almost always backed initiatives that promoted Anglo-American military collaboration, he was concerned about Attlee’s decision to allow American bombers to be based on British soil, in East Anglia. He wrote privately to Attlee that the base was ‘the bull’s eye of any Soviet target, should they decide to make war’.7 The Baruch plan for international nuclear controls also appealed to Churchill, partly because he believed its inevitable rejection meant that America would not be obliged to share any of its nuclear know-how with the Soviets. Churchill wrote to his colleague Anthony Eden:8

  The Baruch Commission had to find some way of refusing to disclose or share the Atomic weapon with the Soviets. They therefore insisted upon inspection[,] feeling sure that this would never be accepted by the Russians.

  Lindemann’s support for Churchill was as strong as ever. In the Common Room at Christ Church, the ailing Prof railed against Attlee’s defence strategy, which he thought left Britain dangerously exposed to a sudden Soviet attack, and about the red tape that he believed was hindering the production of the first British nuclear weapons.9

  Lindemann was also helping Churchill to complete the fourth volume of his war memoirs. It was proving difficult to tell the story of the Bomb coherently, Churchill found, partly because the paper trail was incomplete but mainly because his recollections were so muddled. At weekends with his family at Chartwell, he spent as much time working on his book as he did painting, entertaining friends and playing with his grandchildren. Much as he did for most of the 1930s, he was now spending more time writing than on politics, though now at least he had the incentive that his return to power could be imminent.

  In early October 1950, he and his wife flew to Copenhagen to receive Denmark’s highest honour, the Order of the Elephant. It was to be presented by the Danish King in the Palace of Fredensborg, an eighteenth-century baroque building a short drive from the capital.10 As Churchill knew, he could scarcely avoid meeting Niels Bohr, one of the few other living civilians to have been given the same honour. A few months before, the great physicist made another ineffectual foray into international politics with an ‘Open Letter to the United Nations’, calling for greater openness in dealing with the challenges of the nuclear age.11

  The three-day trip was one of the highlights of Churchill’s year. It was such an important event in Denmark that its government brought forward the date of the scheduled General Election to avoid a clash with ‘Churchill week’. Many of the former Prime Minister’s Danish admirers remembered huddling around their radios during the war, listening to his defiant speeches. He and his wife were driven to the city centre at dusk in an open-topped limousine, the route lined with cheering crowds waving Union flags, with dozens of shop windows displaying lighted candles – a unique gesture of welcome to a foreigner.

  Churchill had heard himself eulogised hundreds of times since the war, but this praise was especially sincere and particularly appreciative of his intellect. At the University of Copenhagen, where he was awarded an honorary PhD, the Rector went so far as to compare their visitor’s ‘unique concentration of mental power’ to ‘the energy concentration in an atomic nucleus’.12

  After the ceremony, Churchill spoke engagingly about the role of universities, pointing out that the number of exams he had passed was now exceeded by his tally of honorary degrees. In a passage alluding to his early spats with H. G. Wells, Churchill praised his host university’s science, but with a notable qualification:13

  The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not to train, and to confirm character and not impart technicalities. We want a lot of engineers, but we do not want a world of engineers. We want some scientists, but we must make sure that science is our servant and not our master. It may be that the human race has already found out more than its present imperfect and incomplete structure will enable it to digest.

  This was one of the few speeches he gave in Copenhagen that did not call for a united Europe or even for ‘an effective world super-government’.14 He had floated this idea before and it had played well with his audiences in Denmark, and all over the continent.

  Churchill talked with Bohr at the farewell lunch in the Palace of Fredensborg. Like Einstein, Bohr was fond of breaking the ice with new acquaintances by playing with favourite toys. On this occasion, he brought a spinning top that unpredictably and repeatedly flipped over, while still in motion on the floor. Smiling broadly, he demonstrated it, prompting a brief exchange as they leant over the rotating toy: when Churchill commented, ‘I don’t understand that,’ Bohr replied, ‘Neither do I.’15 Thus ended their final conversation – more equable than their first, though no more consequential.

  Two months after Churchill’s visit to Denmark, the world again appeared to be in danger of slipping into nuclear war. The crisis began in the White Ho
use on the last day of November, after President Truman was quizzed in a press conference about the war in Korea, which had taken a turn for the worse – the Chinese soldiers had openly joined the North Koreans in pushing back American forces. Under pressure from the journalists the President, usually cautious about the prospect of using nuclear weapons, said rashly – and inaccurately – that his most senior military commander in the Korean War had the authority to use them against China.16 Within hours, there was global panic. With the British Labour Party close to uproar, Attlee rushed to Washington, his first visit for five years. The result was a calming announcement from the White House, expressing the wish that ‘world conditions would never call for the use of the atomic bomb’.

  In the Commons, Churchill declared in a measured speech that the Washington visit had ‘done nothing but good’.17 He seemed to be in fine form, but beneath his composed demeanour, he was seething – a few hours before Attlee boarded his flight to America, he told Churchill for the first time that the Quebec Agreement had proved unsustainable and was no longer in force. Britain now had no power to veto an American decision to drop the Bomb. Churchill liked Attlee and admired many of his qualities, but never forgave him for surrendering the hard-won agreement, for being so ‘weak and incompetent’.18

  Towards the end of his speech, Churchill turned his attention to the Bomb, taking a swipe at the modish suggestion that it should be used only in retaliation for another nuclear attack. This was tantamount, he said, to saying that ‘you must never fire until you have been shot dead’. Again he prodded Attlee on the government’s nuclear policy, which still had not been set out in the Commons. What, Churchill wondered, was the state of Anglo-American nuclear collaboration now that the Quebec Agreement was defunct?