Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  Yet Churchill did not pursue the matter with the President. Two weeks later in the White House, at their final meeting of the visit, the Prime Minister was sheepish about pressing for the Quebec Agreement to be released.29 According to the British record, ‘This was not a matter which he wished to bring up formally but he wanted to mention it to the President’ (Truman was content for it to be published, but not for the time being). When Lindemann was similarly circumspect about the possibility of revising the McMahon Act, Truman brushed his concerns aside, commenting that there was ‘no prospect of amending this law in the present session of Congress’. Senator McMahon certainly made no effort to reverse it before he died of cancer later that summer.

  At the end of the visit, when asked by a journalist how he felt about the imbalance between British and American power, Churchill replied, ‘I don’t feel on uneven terms, with your might and my prestige.’30 Privately, he had spoken of talking to Truman ‘as equals’, but it was a delusion. Before the visit, American officials had agreed that ‘we do not want to reconstruct the Roosevelt–Churchill relationship’. They had achieved their goal and Churchill’s hopes of setting up a summit with the Soviets rested with the election of a new President in November.

  In the thirty years of friendship between Churchill and his favourite scientist, 1952 was to be the stormiest year of all. They first clashed a few weeks after their return from Washington, when Churchill withdrew his half-hearted support for Lindemann’s scheme to take the British nuclear project out of direct government control. The policy was, in Churchill’s view, causing more political trouble than it was worth. At Chequers one Sunday in early March, the Prime Minister dictated a minute approving the transfer of the British nuclear project to the Ministry of Defence, with Lindemann in the room to make quite sure he did it. Only a few hours later, the Prof heard that the Prime Minister had changed his mind. By the end of the month, Churchill was angry with Lindemann, who was so frustrated that he was ready to throw in the towel. The Prof’s doctor had counselled him to give up ministerial office, he told Churchill, whose own physician had dispensed the same advice a few months before.31 They both stayed put, Lindemann perhaps hoping that his political fortunes would be buoyed in the early autumn, when Britain’s first nuclear weapon was to be tested.

  Churchill was staying with the Queen at Balmoral Castle when he heard, on 3 October 1952, that the Bomb had been tested successfully. It had been detonated inside the hull of a 1,450-ton frigate, HMS Plym, which was all but vaporised, as Churchill reported to the Commons a few weeks later. The explosion had gone almost exactly as predicted and he paid handsome tribute to Penney and even complimented Attlee, sitting opposite, for initiating the Bomb programme.32 Penney had given his political masters good value for money: they had acquired a nuclear weapon for only a tiny fraction of Britain’s total defence budget over the past seven years – less than one per cent.33

  Eight days later, the Americans raised the stakes again by detonating an even more powerful weapon, the first hydrogen bomb, obliterating an entire island in the Enewetak Atoll, some three thousand miles west of Honolulu. The device had an explosive power equivalent to 10.4 megatons of TNT, twice the total power of all the explosives used in the Second World War. Advised by Lindemann, Churchill knew that it was only a matter of time before the H-bomb was in the hands of the Soviets, who by then also had a substantial stockpile of fission weapons. In a top-secret report, the Atomic Energy Intelligence Estimates Unit advised Churchill that, partly because Soviet bombers were not yet able to reach the US, ‘The primary target will be the UK.’34 The havoc that would follow such a nuclear attack had been spelled out a few months before in another secret report that, for the first time, made Churchill think seriously about the consequences of a nuclear assault on Britain.

  His response to these challenges was weak. A decade before, he would have given his colleagues a vigorous lead, but he was now bereft of ideas and energy, dominating his Cabinet ‘more like Buddha than Achilles’, as Jock Colville noted.35 Deafness was now making it hard for Churchill to talk with his colleagues, especially those who spoke quietly. Microphones were installed around the Cabinet table, along with loudspeakers to project the amplified voices.36 At home, Churchill avoided hard work and retreated into novels, including Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he regarded as ‘a very remarkable book’.37

  Lindemann was less disturbed by his hero’s hearing than by his erratic judgement. The Prof began to run out of patience with Churchill after he denied that he had ever pledged support for Lindemann’s plans for the British nuclear industry, ‘still less that I made a bargain with you about it when I took office’.38 The Prime Minister was interested only in developing a nuclear policy that aligned Britain ever more closely to the United States, even though he was ‘greatly disturbed’ by the election to the Presidency of General Eisenhower: ‘I think this makes war much more probable,’ Churchill told Colville.39 Shortly after Christmas, Lindemann was at the end of his tether. He sent Churchill two memos on the case that Britain should continue to make its own nuclear weapons and on its relationship with the United States.40 The Prof argued forcefully that it was now time for Britain to go it alone in nuclear research, fostering close relations with uranium-rich Commonwealth countries and to stop chasing ‘the will-o’-the-wisp of full American collaboration’ – working with Truman’s officials had been fruitless and there was no reason to believe that the new administration would be any more accommodating. Churchill’s response showed that he had changed his mind again about the wisdom of acquiring nuclear weapons. Would it be possible for Britain to acquire H-bombs? Churchill asked him. Lindemann replied:41 ‘We think we know how to make an H-bomb’ – a statement Penney would have regarded as cavalier, to say the least – ‘but at this stage we can only make very rough estimates of the various materials required.’ Such explosives did far more damage than ordinary nuclear weapons, the Prof wrote, underlining the fact that – unlike the type of Bomb dropped on Hiroshima – there is no theoretical limit to the explosive power of an H-bomb. All this seemed to wash over Churchill. It would be almost another year before he got the point.

  Lindemann was no less disappointed with Churchill’s attitude to developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes. At a Defence Committee meeting earlier in December, the Prime Minister had refused to sanction the full British nuclear programme until he had talked with the new American administration, which he still believed would supply Britain with ‘atom bombs for our use’.42 This prompted Lindemann to compose the most withering memo he ever wrote to Churchill.43 In the unlikely event that the US gave Britain nuclear weapons, it was crucial that the British nuclear programme went ahead, the Prof wrote, otherwise the initiative would be delayed. Indigenous supplies of fossil fuels in Britain were dwindling so rapidly that it was heading for a shortfall of coal production of twenty million tons in the next thirteen years.44 ‘To give up serious work on the development of atomic energy’ would be, he argued, ‘a disastrous line which might well in the long run spell national suicide’. If Churchill wrote a reply to this note, it has not survived.

  On the question of whether to develop nuclear power, Lindemann himself had made a U-turn, though he apparently never acknowledged it. Soon after the war, he had dismissed plans by Blackett and others to develop this new industry, sneering that there was no hope of running a heat engine off a nuclear reactor – it would be ‘as efficient as Stephenson’s Rocket’.45 One of the experts who changed the Prof’s mind was Christopher Hinton, who was pushing hard to start building nuclear plants in Britain, to make his country a world leader in the field – if Churchill would let him.

  1953

  Hinton engineers nuclear power

  ‘All pioneering engineering is very much like poker; there are some things that you know for certain, some things that you think you know and some things that you don’t know and know that you can’t know.’

  SIR CHRISTOPHER HINTON, 19701

  Whe
n his colleagues nicknamed him ‘Sir Christ’, they were alluding to his virtual near-omniscience as a nuclear engineer, not to his spirituality. Although Sir Christopher Hinton was difficult, short-tempered and sometimes unreasonably demanding, he was as dependable as an atomic clock. In early 1953, he and his team had completed the huge task of delivering the low-enrichment part of Britain’s first gaseous diffusion plant, within a week of its scheduled opening date and well below its 14-million-pound budget.2 Yet he received little thanks from Whitehall. He had been so fierce and unpleasant to deal with that his boss, Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys, did not even send him the traditional note of ministerial congratulation.

  Five months before, Churchill had been more generous. After the Monte Bello trial, the Prime Minister had sent a telegram to Hinton, Penney and Cockcroft, known in Whitehall as ‘the atomic knights’.3 Churchill thanked Hinton and his colleagues for ‘the devoted efforts they have made and the brilliant engineering skill they have shown’ in producing plutonium for the first British nuclear weapon. The telegrams were drafted by Lindemann, who had warmer relations with the atomic knights than they had with each other. The Prof’s admiration was reciprocated, especially by Hinton. From where he stood, Lindemann was the best friend that the government’s nuclear project had in Whitehall – it was certainly not Duncan Sandys or any of his officials, always on hand with more reels of red tape.

  Of the three knights, Hinton had arguably the most demanding task – to set up a national nuclear industry from scratch. He joined the government’s project in late 1945, knowing next to nothing about nuclear science. Officials told him that his job was to build the necessary factories to purify uranium to make reactor fuel, to enrich uranium with fissile 235U and to produce plutonium. The raison d’être of the entire project was to build weapons, even though Parliament had not approved the programme. The overwhelming secrecy made life extremely difficult for Hinton and his colleagues, who harassed contractors to meet barely possible deadlines but were forbidden from explaining the urgency.

  Hinton spent most of his time working in the north-west of England. His headquarters were in the small Lancashire town of Risley, on a bleak site that had been occupied during the war by the government’s munitions factories. The offices he inherited were poorly equipped and some were squalid – an environment unappealing to many potential recruits, one of the reasons why Hinton was dogged with staffing problems. He and his colleagues selected five main locations for their nuclear project. A small prototype nuclear reactor would be built at Harwell in Oxfordshire, where the physics, chemistry and metallurgy research would be done. The other sites were in the north-west of England. At Springfields in Lancashire, uranium would be extracted from its ores and turned into reactor fuel. A huge plant at Capenhurst in Cheshire would be able to enrich this fuel, if necessary. At Windscale (later renamed Sellafield) in Cumbria, the main nuclear reactors would be constructed, along with the facilities for extracting plutonium from their spent fuel.

  To complete these projects Hinton and his colleagues spent 74 million pounds, almost twice the combined budget of Penney and Cockcroft.4 It was perhaps for this reason that Hinton was the highest paid of the three and, by 1953, was indisputably Britain’s leading nuclear engineer, on a par with the best in the world. Although the least familiar of the atomic knights to the public, he was a valuable asset to Churchill, enabling him to preside over a new and successful power industry. Hinton and his colleagues were, however, not the first engineers to deliver nuclear energy to the national grid – the Soviets achieved that goal at the Obninsk reactor in June 1954, six months after the date predicted by H. G. Wells in The World Set Free, four decades earlier.5

  Hinton’s exceptional talent as an engineer had shone since he was a teenager. At the age of sixteen, in 1917, he left school to spend six years being trained at the Great Western Railway and Metro-Vickers – ‘the best craft apprentice I have ever had’, one fitter later remembered.6 After winning a place at Cambridge University to study mechanical sciences, Hinton powered his way through the degree in two years, leaving the third free for research. By the time he was in his early thirties, he was one of ICI’s top engineers, responsible for building some of the biggest and most complex chemical plants in Europe, a decade ahead of his peers on the career ladder. He stood out in other ways, too: handsome, well-spoken, forceful and six feet six inches tall, this sequoia of a man could dominate a crowded room merely by walking into it. Marriage and children did nothing to mellow him. During the Second World War he worked for the Ministry of Supply, as a senior manager at the huge armaments plants in Risley, directing the construction of a new cordite factory that broke production records. He emerged from the conflict frazzled but with a reputation so strong that no one was surprised when the Ministry asked him to help found the British nuclear industry. He quickly assembled a team of five former colleagues from the armaments factory, none of whom knew the first thing about nuclear science.7

  Above all, Hinton was an autocrat. He thought nothing of lambasting an errant colleague in public and was slow to compliment even his highest achievers. Praise was unnecessary, he said, because ‘They know that they are good or they would not be working for me.’8 Yet he was a popular leader with a reputation for straightforwardness – everyone on his staff always knew precisely where they stood with him and were rarely on the wrong end of a tongue-lashing that was not deserved. When ideas were being thrashed out, he welcomed open debate but would stick to agreed decisions and policies, though he could never quite bring himself to admit that he had argued a discredited case. Underneath his titanium hide, however, was an unspoken craving for friendship his junior colleagues saw only when his guard was down.

  Hinton had no friends among his peers at the top of the nuclear industry. One difficulty was that he liked to tackle problems head-on, bringing every challenge out in the open – an approach that appeared congenial to William Penney but not to Cockcroft, who irritated Hinton by shying away from every confrontation. Cockcroft’s scientists at Harwell were doing almost all the fundamental research that underpinned the design and operation of Hinton’s factories. This included the techniques to handle industrial quantities of uranium, to isolate every last microgram of plutonium from the reactors’ spent fuel rods and then to transport it safely to its destination. If Cockcroft’s team took longer than expected to solve a problem Hinton’s team had set them, the inevitable consequence at Risley was missed deadlines, redrawn production charts and frayed tempers.

  Involved in every decision taken about every site under his command, Hinton was as knowledgeable about the minutiae of local geology as he was about the choice of the suppliers of his office stationery. At the same time, he oversaw the finances of the entire operation with the fastidiousness of an actuary. He played his hand like the accomplished player of poker he had once been, though the game had lost its appeal for him now that he was gambling not merely with cards but with millions of pounds.9

  As a negotiator, Hinton was powerful and often intimidating, qualities that helped to lay the foundations of the British nuclear-power industry in early 1953. After over a year of discussion and argument, Churchill’s government finally approved a programme in which nuclear weapons and power would be developed together, using a group of new reactors with the dual functions of making plutonium and delivering energy to the national grid. Initially, the plan had been to build reactors that produced plutonium as a by-product of generating energy, but the outcome was the opposite: the top priority was to make nuclear weapons, not to solve a national fuel crisis. As Hinton repeatedly pointed out, Britain’s coal industry was doomed and nuclear power might solve the problem, but with the important proviso that it could be delivered safely and economically.10

  Cockcroft had wanted to take the lead in designing these new reactors, but Hinton outmanoeuvred him. On the day after Churchill’s officials had given the go-ahead, in February 1953, Hinton was at his desk in Risley drawing up the master cha
rts for the construction of four new reactors.11 He had undertaken to deliver the first of them at Calder Hall, near the Cumbrian coast in the north-west of England, within three and a half years.

  With Britain’s policy on nuclear energy now clarified and operational, Hinton accepted an invitation to present it publicly for the first time, at a conference in New York, in front of hundreds of representatives of the embryonic international nuclear-power industry. Before the gathering, he joined Lindemann and Cockcroft to lobby American officials to relax the restrictions on nuclear cooperation imposed by the McMahon Act. Hinton had long believed that the Act had been good for Britain, forcing it to develop its own ideas rather than depend on American expertise. The prospects for improved Anglo-American collaboration were now much brighter. Soon after taking up the Presidency, Eisenhower had announced that he wanted to see a freer exchange of nuclear information with Britain – Churchill’s negotiators, armed with clear evidence of success in the nuclear field, were no longer approaching the Americans as humiliated supplicants.12