During the next two months, Churchill piled pressure on the government to make the text of the agreement public. As it was now no longer in force, it would do no harm to release it, he argued in the Commons.19 This was a lonely battle – even Lindemann refused to join him. ‘Frankly I had never thought of your agreement with the President as binding in perpetuity,’ the Prof wrote to Churchill. ‘It was, I thought, a provisional agreement.’20 But Churchill did find an ally in the new Labour MP Raymond Blackburn, who, in August 1945, had scandalised Parliament by revealing the existence of the secret agreement. Blackburn was an occasional spokesman for the UK Atomic Scientists’ Association and a regular weekend visitor at Chartwell.21
In Whitehall, civil servants found the clamorous Blackburn ‘clearly impossible to satisfy’. Nor did Attlee find it much easier to deal with Churchill, who refused to accept the Prime Minister’s argument that while the signing of the agreement was a ‘great achievement’ in August 1943, the document was not a treaty and so had to be renegotiated after the war.22 Publishing it now would embarrass the American government, at a time when Britain was winning back trust after the Fuchs affair. In what appears to have been a tense tête-à-tête in Downing Street on 31 January, Churchill seemed to be all but clueless about recent developments in nuclear politics.23 Most worrisome for Churchill was that the new arrangements with the US allowed America to launch a nuclear attack from one of its air bases in East Anglia without even consulting the British.24 If Blackett had been with them, he would have been cheering Churchill on.
After the meeting, Attlee reluctantly agreed to sound out the American authorities. But Churchill was in too much of a hurry to wait for the response and wrote to Truman asking him to release the agreement. Two weeks later, a brief handwritten reply reached Churchill via special courier:25
I hope you won’t press me in this matter. It will cause unfortunate repercussions both here and in your country, as well as embarrassment to me and to your government. The reopening of this discussion may ruin my whole defense program . . . Your country’s welfare and mine are at stake in that program.
The message had the desired effect – Churchill quietly dropped the matter, at least for the time being.
Churchill had an opportunity to shed light on the origins of the Anglo-American nuclear partnership in The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of his Second World War memoir, published in the US in November 1950. The critics were almost unanimous in their praise. Edward Murrow, the distinguished American broadcaster, was especially complimentary, declaring the book to be ‘the most revealing document to come from the pen of this great craftsman of the English language’.26 Given that the Bomb was one of the hottest topics of the day, none of the leading critics remarked on the sketchiness of Churchill’s description of its origins. He mentions them only in two passages, an account of the project’s development that amounts to a white-wash.27 The first passage begins with Roosevelt’s suggestion in October 1941 that the British and American nuclear projects might ‘be coordinated or even jointly conducted’. Then follows a description of the leaders’ meeting eight months later in Hyde Park, at which Churchill falsely claims that Tube Alloys was high on their agenda. It was during this meeting that Roosevelt first told him that the US ‘would have to do it’. Churchill also writes implausibly that if the Americans had declined to go ahead with the project, the British would have done it ‘in Canada [or] . . . in some other part of the Empire’.28
Nowhere in The Hinge of Fate does Churchill mention – or even allude to – the breakdown of the Anglo-American relationship, or the political machinations that followed, after he and his colleagues failed to respond quickly to Roosevelt’s offer of collaboration. Tube Alloys resurfaces only much later in the book, when Churchill disrupts his narrative by quoting a brief message of good news about the project written in May 1943. In this note, written to Sir John Anderson, Churchill reports that Roosevelt agreed that the exchange of information on the project should resume and that ‘the enterprise should be considered a joint one’. Careful readers will have been perplexed by this, as Churchill had said nothing earlier about the Americans freezing the British out of the Manhattan Project in late 1942. More seriously, the quoted message gives no sense of the junior role that Britain had accepted.29
Churchill had the opportunity to put this right in the next volume of his memoir, Closing the Ring, which covered the period between June 1943 and June 1944, including the signing of the Quebec Agreement. His problem was that in July 1945 he had gone along with the US government’s request to keep the agreement secret, a policy Attlee had been unable to overturn. The result was that although Churchill regarded the Quebec Agreement as the linchpin of the Anglo-American nuclear relationship, his memoir did not even mention it.
Around this time, the nuclear agendas of Churchill and Lindemann began to differ in emphasis. Whereas Churchill focused on Attlee’s surrendering of the Quebec Agreement, Lindemann was concerned only with what he believed to be the slow progress of the British nuclear project. For the Prof, the government had made a disastrous error in placing the venture – at Patrick Blackett’s insistence – under the aegis of the Ministry of Supply, a languorous bureaucracy capable of grinding down even the liveliest innovator. It was vital, the Prof believed, to free the scientists and technologists contributing to the programme by allowing them to work in a fleet-footed organisation that operated at arm’s length from government.30 Without this change, Lindemann believed, Britain’s capacity to build bombs would suffer and ‘The possibility of achieving full collaboration concerning plutonium and hydrogen bombs with the US will vanish unless we have something of our own to show.’
Lindemann was keeping a close eye not only on the government’s nuclear plans but also on the deliberations of his fellow scientists in the Atomic Scientists’ Association. With an irony that always eluded him, he condemned every attempt by any scientist to influence politics. Peierls bent over backwards to keep the Association free of party-political bias and in particular to ensure that Lindemann was not provoked to resign. The two men had rubbed along for the past decade, but their superficial amity ended on a conference platform in Chicago. Peierls joked that Lindemann’s defeatist attitude to arms control demonstrated that, in his attitude to history, he was at root a Marxist.31 That did it. Peierls was now beyond the pale for the Prof, who briefed the security services against him, telling them that he neither liked nor trusted him, and that he ‘frequently behaves like a silly ass in matters of security’.32 In MI5’s sheaf of security records on Peierls, these are the only words a fellow scientist spoke against him.
Churchill showed little interest in either the organisation of the government’s nuclear scientists or their attempts to lobby politicians. He was more perturbed by the time they were taking to build the Bomb. But he had no idea of the huge nuclear enterprise that Attlee had funded, led by a scientist Churchill had scarcely heard of, soon to be nicknamed ‘the British Oppenheimer’.
AUGUST 1945 TO OCTOBER 1951
Penney delivers the British Bomb
‘The discriminative test for a first-class power is whether it has made an atomic bomb and we have either got to pass the test or suffer a serious loss in prestige . . .’
WILLIAM PENNEY, 19511
Bill Penney’s sobriquet ‘the smiling killer’ had not stuck, rightly: he was so peaceable that he would think twice about crushing an ant. Yet underneath his beatific calm he was absolutely determined to provide his country with the most advanced nuclear weapons. During the British Bomb project – a ‘comic opera’, as he later described it – he did more than anyone else to deliver the weapons, and won the admiration of the leader who later commissioned him to deliver the H-bomb, Winston Churchill.2
Penney was remarkably self-possessed. At Los Alamos, he had been as stoical as a martyr after his wife died of post-natal depression in the spring of 1945, three and a half years after the birth of their second child. None of Penney’s colleagues sa
w any sign of grief.3 He also had a singular ability to separate the strategic imperative of making the Bomb from the awful consequences of dropping it on civilians. Alone among the British nuclear scientists, he had witnessed the obliteration of Nagasaki, on board one of the aircraft shadowing the plane that dropped the Americans’ second Bomb. A few years later, he recalled the distress of everyone on the flight: ‘We realised that a new age had begun and that possibly we had all made some contribution to raising a monster that would consume us all.’4 A few days after he saw Nagasaki destroyed, he and two American colleagues walked the city, examining everything that remained – parts of buildings, the odd telegraph pole and gravestone. Back in his hotel room, he analysed the data with the detachment of a pathologist and the rigour of a mathematician. He eventually concluded that the explosion was equivalent to twenty-two kilotons of TNT, ten per cent higher than President Truman had announced.5
Penney was without peer as a curator of nuclear carnage, which is why he was the only British scientist the Americans regarded as indispensable. He was valued equally highly by the British government – unusually for a top-flight scientist, he worked as effectively with ministers and officials as he did with his academic colleagues. Penney was popular, too, for his accessibility – everyone who knew him well called him not Professor Penney, but ‘Bill’.
As a young researcher, he had collaborated productively with the renowned American quantum theoretician John Van Vleck, who thought highly of him. Although Penney was not among the cream of scientists, he was a fine mathematical physicist, writing admired papers and giving exquisitely well-crafted lectures.6 He was a popular leader of the British nuclear project, especially with his young colleagues. Sometimes he would surprise them by showing up at their desks, enthusiastic and encouraging, dressed in a jumper two sizes too big, and switching easily from the subtleties of mathematical ballistics to the latest fortunes of Arsenal Football Club. As a lad, he had been a gifted sportsman, on the pitch, on the track and in the ring. Now in his late thirties and with an ampler waist bulging over his belt, he was content to spend his weekends tending the roses in his garden and playing a few gentle rounds of golf. It was easy to believe that he had once been a boxer, however, and he brought his sometimes intimidating presence to dozens of inquisitions by government officials. Swathed in the jacket of his baggy double-breasted suit, he spent hours fielding one tough question after another from worried ministers, batting each delivery to the outfield with an artistry no other scientist of his day could match.7
Penney later said that he had been dragged into the British nuclear project. It was C. P. Snow, supported by James Chadwick, who twisted his arm soon after the war ended. Even though the job of leading the Armaments Research Department was unattractive – a knacker’s yard for scientists of Penney’s ambition – Snow argued that Britain was undoubtedly going to build its own nuclear weapons and the job had to be done by someone with Penney’s knowledge and aptitude. ‘Will you do it?’ Snow pleaded.8 Motivated mainly by patriotism, Penney accepted, but no information was forthcoming about the prospect of a British Bomb.9 He had other things to attend to: he remarried, to his children’s nurse, and worked almost full-time as an adviser to the American military. As part of his close involvement with the first peacetime nuclear tests on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, he was responsible for gauging the power of the blasts and the toxicity of the lingering radioactivity.
Having heard nothing for fifteen months about the British government’s intention to build a Bomb, Penney was eventually summoned to Whitehall in May 1947. Lord Portal did not beat about the bush:
We’re going to make an atomic bomb. The Prime Minister has asked me to coordinate the work. They want you to lead it. I am not going to worry about all the details. But I’m prepared to use my influence, with the Prime Minister if necessary, to get all the resources you need. In a few days, bring me a plan saying what you need.
Penney typed out his requirements on two pages, including ‘one hundred scientists and engineers’, new facilities at the Royal Arsenal Research and Development Establishment in Woolwich, and new fences to go round it. The Ministry of Supply must grant all Penney’s requests, Portal told his officials, who quickly found ways round their instructions. As Penney later recalled: ‘I got the fences!’ The comedy had begun.
The entire project was to be administered in London by a dozen Ministry staff working on the fourth floor of Shell Mex House on the Strand.10 The office, protected round the clock by armed guards, was known to insiders as ‘the Cage’ because it was located behind a network of bars, vertical and horizontal. The Ministry was notorious for following the government’s regulations to the letter on every detail, from monitoring orders for the canteen’s cooking fat to the delivery of nuclear warheads. What the project needed was a leader of General Groves’s drive and gumption, but it was never given one. Instead, Penney was expected to deliver with his hands tied by blinkered and uncooperative civil servants. It is hardly surprising that he was, though outwardly as cheerful as ever, privately disillusioned.
He quickly set up his teams at Woolwich and at Fort Halstead, a campus-sized outpost of the Ministry of Supply hidden behind trees on the main road linking London to Sevenoaks. He did not attempt to replicate the hothouse atmosphere of Los Alamos, with its galaxy of research stars and its bountiful resources, nor was he given the opportunity. Instead, he worked within extremely tight budgets and with mostly inexperienced researchers, although he recruited a few alumni of the British mission at Los Alamos, including Ernest Titterton, James Tuck and Klaus Fuchs, at that time assumed to be entirely loyal. Using the notes and memorised details that Fuchs and Penney brought back from The Hill, the team decided to base the design of their weapon on the Americans’ plutonium Bomb.
By the time the British Bomb project had been made public in May 1948, Penney realised that he had seriously underestimated the number of staff he needed to deliver it: not one hundred but five times as many. His target delivery date of 1951 was beginning to look precarious. Most frustrating of all, although Attlee had committed his government to the project, Penney had to spend month after enervating month pleading with unsympathetic officials for funds.11 Sir Henry Tizard, whose ‘cake-cutting committee’ apportioned funds to British defence projects, had agreed that Penney’s Bomb should be given overriding priority,12 though by the autumn of 1949 his enthusiasm had waned. The rude shock of the Soviets’ first nuclear test, the apparently high cost of Penney’s project and quite probably his reading of Blackett’s book convinced Tizard that Britain should rethink its defence priorities. In a bold, top-secret strategy paper for the Chiefs of Staff, he reasoned that Britain should focus on working with its military allies to defend mainland Europe against Soviet attack using conventional means. This would be at the expense of acquiring the Bomb, which would not make much difference in any scenario they were likely to encounter, Tizard believed.13 He concluded that Britain ‘should cease for the time being to manufacture [nuclear weapons], but should continue research on a scale necessary to keep in the forefront of knowledge’. The message was clear: Tizard wanted Penney’s budget slashed.
The Chiefs of Staff, eager to have the Bomb, were having none of it. Tizard was humiliated into backing down and overseeing cuts to conventional weapons programmes to help fund the Bomb project, which belatedly gathered momentum. Reinvigorated, Penney waded through the sludge of regulation, but had no luck at all. No sooner was his project back on schedule than he was dealing with the loss of his finest theorist, Klaus Fuchs. Soon afterwards, Churchill piled on the agony with his complaint about the time it was taking Britain to develop the Bomb.14 Maintaining his poise, Penney sustained his campaign for adequate resources by exploiting the urgency that Churchill had helped to promote.
In the spring, Penney took possession of a bleak, disused airfield on the outskirts of Aldermaston, a picturesque village forty-five miles west of London. This was soon to be the headquarters of British nuclear
weapons research and development, as Aldermaston’s unsuspecting residents learned from local reports of nearby ‘atomic devilries’.15
There was still no sign of an end to the infighting at the Ministry of Supply. After Attlee had deemed the project ‘super-secret’,16 Penney could share his frustrations with no one – he seemed destined to spend the next few years starved of resources, and to have to suffer in silence. However, in the House of Lords, one well-placed expert did choose to speak out – Frederick Lindemann. Briefed by Penney’s boss Lord Portal,17 Lindemann tabled a motion in the House of Lords regretting the slow progress of Britain’s nuclear programme. In a speech almost as powerfully argued as it was soporific, he praised the scale of the government’s project (‘they have not grudged men, money or materials’)18 but argued that it should never have been delegated to the clodhopping bureaucrats at the Ministry of Supply.
The British nuclear venture, Lindemann insisted, should be run by a quasi-autonomous organisation, fleeter of foot and untrammelled by outdated customs and practices. The government’s spokesman Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough found himself on the defensive. He offered only a weak defence of the status quo and conceded, rather more readily than the Ministry of Supply would have liked, that Attlee and his colleagues might consider running the project differently.
The Prof had drawn blood. The Lords passed his motion with a handsome majority, an outcome Penney probably found gratifying, though he was too discreet to say so.19 Yet he and his Aldermaston colleagues knew the implications of the Westminster debate: with the government’s hold on power looking precarious and with Lindemann so close to the leader of the opposition, fundamental changes to the British nuclear project might well be afoot.
By the late summer of 1950, Penney was confident enough to inform Lord Portal that the Bomb should be ready to test in about a year, on schedule.20 With the project still a well-kept secret from all but a few of the most senior ministers in Parliament, in May 1951 Attlee’s nuclear confidants began to plan Britain’s first nuclear test, dubbed ‘Operation Hurricane’. By this time, Penney’s patience with the sclerotic Ministry of Supply and his paltry salary had worn desperately thin. He considered quitting his post and taking a well-paid professorship,21 a move that would have put his project’s timetable in jeopardy. This concentrated the minds of ministers wonderfully – they persuaded him to stay and gave him the funds he needed for the project.
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