The conference was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in the heart of Manhattan. After lunch on the final day, 30 October, as the representatives sipped their coffee, Hinton approached the lectern, where a huge microphone awaited him.13 He began bullishly, declaring: ‘It would be a mistake to imagine that, on peacetime standards, you in the US had only three years’ lead over us.’ He pointed out that the huge investment by American industry in the Manhattan Project – far greater than would be conceivable in peacetime – meant that by the end of 1945 the American lead over Britain in nuclear power was not three years of normal activity, but ‘something like six years’. Making no mention of nuclear weapons or the McMahon Act, he outlined the British nuclear-energy undertaking. Government-overseen organisations would get the project off the ground, with the intention of eventually handing it over to private industry, which would run it at a profit.
Hinton spoke for almost an hour, making eye contact with all parts of the audience and holding his glasses at his waist with both hands. Safety was the most pressing challenge for nuclear engineers, he said. They had to find ways to dispose of radioactive waste without polluting the environment and to run their reactors without risking a disaster: ‘We have no practical experience of what happens if a reactor runs away.’ The United States might benefit handsomely in the long run, he concluded, if its engineers investigated what happened when a nuclear reactor melts down, an experiment that ‘would cost no more than the trial of a single atomic bomb’. His advice was declined by the American authorities, a decision that did not look wise in the aftermath of the accident at Three Mile Island twenty-six years later.
Hinton’s talk appears to have gone down well, attracting media attention on both sides of the Atlantic. But compared with the H-bomb, nuclear power was low on the political agenda. The weapon’s development had divided nuclear scientists in America, where Senator McCarthy’s campaign to purge alleged Communists from the government’s employment was in full swing. Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence were among the scientists who argued that America should acquire ever more powerful nuclear artillery to stay ahead of the Soviet foe. Others wanted to rely much less on the H-bomb but more on arms control, conventional forces and less powerful nuclear weapons. This cohort included James Conant (now US Ambassador to Germany) and his former boss Vannevar Bush, then out of favour in Washington after campaigning to halt the first H-bomb test on the grounds that it would cause a dangerous escalation of the arms race.14 The most prominent opponent of the unfettered development of thermonuclear weapons was Robert Oppenheimer, who had made well-publicised calls for debate on the American nuclear strategy. He was now in the cross-hairs of the business executive Lewis Strauss – appointed chair of Eisenhower’s Atomic Energy Commission early in the summer – who told the FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover that he would ‘purge Oppenheimer’.15 Strauss meant business, as he quickly demonstrated.
An edition of Time magazine with Strauss on the cover caught Hinton’s eye soon after he arrived in North America.16 The article, for the most part a gushing portrait of the ‘US Atom Boss’, was shot through with anxiety over the inevitable moment when the Soviets would have H-bombs of their own. ‘Does the armed free world just sit back and wait for the clock to strike in 1956 or 1957 or 1958?’, the article concluded ominously. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Eisenhower and his officials had assumed that the new Soviet leadership would not be interested in establishing more constructive relations with the West, so tried to put them under unremitting psychological pressure to reform.17 When Hinton returned home, desperately in need of a long vacation after an enervating year, he saw that his Prime Minister was approaching the Cold War very differently.18
MARCH 1953 TO FEBRUARY 1954
Churchill the nuclear missionary
‘The PM feels that Stalin’s death may lead to a relaxation in tension. It is an opportunity that will not recur . . . He seems to think of little else.’
LORD MORAN, 7 March 19531
By March 1953, Churchill’s plans to set up another ‘Big Three’ summit had gone nowhere. President Eisenhower – a high-ranking underling, in Churchill’s opinion – refused to cooperate, believing the British leader too old to be Prime Minister and stuck in the mindset of the recent world war.2 Churchill had always been confident that he could do business with Stalin, and when the Soviet leader died, the Prime Minister was no less convinced that at least a few of the new leaders in the Kremlin would be equally susceptible to his eloquence. Churchill could be accused of naivety and of being a political anachronism, but his buoyancy was undeniable.
To realise his dream of another summit and follow on from where he left off at Potsdam, Churchill needed a theme to justify the urgency. It arrived in an epiphany eleven months after Stalin’s death, when he first fully understood the potential impact of thermonuclear conflict, which would make even the Second World War look like a fracas. Avoiding such a catastrophe by easing the tensions of the Cold War was to be his final great cause, the nuclear successor to his campaign for rearmament and air-defence research in the 1930s.
In the first few weeks after Stalin’s death, Churchill trod cautiously. The politician wielding the most power in the Soviets’ new ‘collective leadership’ appeared to be Georgy Malenkov, who struck an encouraging note at Stalin’s funeral. During a tearless eulogy, he declared that the Soviet Union wanted a ‘prolonged coexistence and peaceful competition of two different systems, capitalist and socialist’.3 This, together with a few signs that the Soviets wanted to ease tensions with the West, encouraged Churchill to believe that it would do no harm to meet them halfway. His Foreign Secretary and deputy, Anthony Eden, was initially supportive, but officials soon talked him out of it.4 For Churchill – now Sir Winston – this was going to be another lonely struggle.
In the next two months, he wrote thirteen times to Eisenhower, gently leaning on him to begin talks with the Soviet leaders.5 The President’s replies were courteous, but privately he found Churchill’s messages ‘tiresome’.6 For Eisenhower, concerned that the West was being lulled into a false sense of security, this was no time to extend the hand of friendship to the Soviet Union, a leopard that was not going to change its spots.7 The opposition from the White House took the Prime Minister by surprise, as did the cool response from the Kremlin. Having failed to persuade the President, and with his Foreign Secretary on long-term sick leave following a botched operation, Churchill cut loose. If necessary, he decided, he would travel alone to Moscow. On 11 May, he delivered the most emotional speech he had given to the Commons since he returned to office, and became the first Western leader to suggest publicly a new approach to relations with the Soviet Union.8 It was time for the West to focus not only on the threat posed by the Red Army, he argued, but also to take into account the Soviets’ security interests. He even suggested the possibility of a neutral, reunified Germany. Most importantly, ‘the leading powers’ should meet, at the earliest opportunity:9
This conference should not be overhung by a ponderous or rigid agenda, or led into mazes and jungles of technical details, zealously contested by hoards [sic] of experts and officials drawn up in vast, cumbrous array. The conference should be confined to the smallest number of Powers and persons possible. It should meet with a measure of informality and a still greater measure of privacy and seclusion.
Churchill’s speech went down badly with Eisenhower, with the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, with the West German government, with the British Foreign Office and the Cabinet. It was of little help to Churchill that the Soviet government tentatively welcomed his proposals or that Attlee’s Labour opposition was encouraging. To win widespread support for this first proposal of an East–West détente was going to be exceedingly difficult.
Undeterred by the welter of opposition, Churchill believed he was making good progress, until his initiative was curtailed by a medical trauma. It happened in Downing Street late in the evening of 23 June, at a dinner in honour of Italian Pr
ime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, one of the architects of the European Community.10 Churchill had appeared to be on fine form, giving a witty after-dinner speech on the Roman conquests of Britain. Afterwards, as the diners were leaving, he could take only a few faltering steps from the table before flopping into the nearest chair. ‘I want a friend,’ he said to his guest Lady Clark, taking her hand as his voice trailed off. ‘They put too much on me. Foreign affairs . . .’ Officials called for help and hustled the guests away.
Churchill had suffered a serious stroke. Against the advice of his doctor Lord Moran, he attended Cabinet the next day, somehow managing to chair it and make several pertinent interventions (‘We thought he was rather quiet,’ Rab Butler later said).11 Kept carefully away from photographers, the Prime Minister was soon whisked off to Chartwell. There, he lay in bed for days, reading Trollope’s political novels, blinking when he wanted an assistant to turn a page. ‘I am a hulk,’ he told his doctor, ‘only breathing and excreting.’12 The loyalty of his closest colleagues and his friends among the newspaper barons ensured that his indisposition was a well-kept secret. He spent several weeks convalescing at Chartwell, and was soon back in Downing Street, chairing Cabinet meetings.13
In mid-August, Churchill heard the news he had long known was inevitable: the Soviet Union had detonated an H-bomb. With the US and the Soviets now able to blow each other to bits, Churchill saw no alternative but to pursue peace, to reduce the chances of a nuclear catastrophe. News of a political upheaval in Moscow did not make his task any easier. Although Malenkov still seemed to be the boss in the Kremlin, its ‘collective leadership’ appeared to be crumbling. Churchill believed that ‘there has been no change of heart in Russia, but she wants peace’ and that Malenkov might just deliver, given the opportunity.14 The consequences of failure were almost too appalling to contemplate, a depressed Churchill told Lord Moran: ‘That hydrogen bomb can destroy two million people. It is so awful that I have a feeling it will not happen.’
Churchill’s wife and his confidants were at one in recommending him to stand down, but he was not going to budge ‘at the present crisis of the world’.15 First, he set himself the task of asserting his authority at the Tory Party conference in the autumn, vowing to resign if he failed. Once again he triumphed: on 10 October, in front of a huge crowd of supporters in a Margate auditorium, he gave a masterful speech, albeit with help from performance-enhancing amphetamines regularly supplied by his doctor.16 A week later, he had even more to be pleased about. After a summer of ministerial in-fighting, and helped by a committee chaired by Sir John Anderson (now Lord Waverley), Lindemann finally won the Cabinet’s approval for his plan to reorganise the British nuclear project.17 The creation of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, as it became known, was an enduring triumph for him – it still exists today. For Churchill, the main benefit of this was that it soothed the running sore in his relationship with the Prof, who was now debilitated by angina, diabetes and a list of other complaints.18 Soon afterwards, Lindemann left the Cabinet to return to Oxford, but remained a close Prime Ministerial adviser and emissary on nuclear affairs. He had left ministerial office on a high note that several of his fellow scientists a decade before would scarcely have believed possible.
The Cabinet, most of them now itching for Churchill to leave, saw him take on a new lease of life in the autumn. In mid-October he was buoyed by the news that he had won a Nobel Prize, though for literature and not for peace, as he had hoped. Preferred by the appointing committee over his fellow nominees – the novelists Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway along with the poet Robert Frost – the Prime Minister was awarded the prize for his ‘brilliant oratory in defence of exalted human values’ and for his biographical work.19 His life of the Duke of Marlborough and his memoir My Early Life had impressed the Nobel committee rather more than his account of the Second World War, whose final volume was published in the US shortly afterwards. It included several passages that he had toned down for fear that they might jeopardise the possibility of a ‘Big Three’ summit by offending Soviet and American leaders.20
Two weeks later in the Commons, Churchill spoke on the need to ease Cold War tensions. He concluded with a bravura passage about the threat of the H-bomb and his forthcoming summit in Bermuda with President Eisenhower.21 The most powerful explosive the world had ever seen may possibly bring ‘an unforeseeable security’ to the world, Churchill argued.
During the preparatory talks for the meeting, the British negotiators discovered that the Americans were now prepared to consider relaxing the McMahon Act. Almost three weeks before Churchill set off from London on 1 December, Lindemann informed him that ‘the Americans have now definitely agreed to exchange [nuclear] information with us (and the Canadians)’ and that the new arrangement would soon be officially ratified. Churchill was delighted – ‘Many congratulations on this great achievement,’ he wrote to the Prof.22
To Churchill’s annoyance, the UK and the US were joined at the summit by France. Making no attempt to hide his irritation, on the flight to Bermuda he voraciously read C. S. Forester’s Death to the French, and soon after arriving at the airport avoided talking to the French Prime Minister by making a clumsy detour, ostensibly to stroke the honour guard’s mascot, a goat.23
The gathering had only limited success. It ended in the routing of Churchill’s attempts to improve relations with the new Soviet regime, by taking every opportunity to promote trade and better cultural relations, but giving them no quarter in military negotiations.24 After he made his case at the first plenary meeting on 4 December, Eisenhower peremptorily dismissed it, declaring that there had been no change at all in the Soviet policy ‘to destroy the capitalist system and the free world by force, lies and corruption’ since the days of Lenin.25 It made no sense, the President argued, to foster relations with the Soviets now.
Churchill did, however, make some headway with his nuclear policy. On the following morning, he met to discuss it in Eisenhower’s quarters at the Mid Ocean Club with Admiral Strauss, Lindemann and the President himself (Churchill refused to allow the ‘bloody frogs’ to attend this session). Despite the success of the Prof’s preparatory talks with the Admiral,26 Churchill seemed to want from Eisenhower nothing less than an unconditional promise that the Anglo-American cooperation first spelled out in the 1943 Quebec Agreement should resume. The one-and-a-half-hour conversation appears to have been amicable, and was later notable mainly for Lindemann’s premature assurance that Britain did not intend to do any work on the hydrogen bomb.27
Shortly before the meeting broke up at lunchtime, the discussion turned to the desirability of sharing intelligence information about Soviet weapons. Sensing that the Americans were being evasive, Churchill decided to tackle head-on what he believed to be the fundamental problem – he pulled out a photocopy of the Quebec Agreement and read it to Eisenhower. The official record does not mention the President’s response, but does note Strauss’s surprise – he claimed never to have seen the document before. Churchill moved swiftly on, proposing that it was now time to publish the agreement and to delegate the matter to Strauss and Lindemann. Later, apparently after the gathering, the President remarked to officials that he was ashamed of the McMahon Act, which he described as ‘one of the most deplorable incidents in American history’.28
During the remainder of the summit, Churchill was inconsistent about nuclear policy. After declaring that he ‘quite accepted’ Eisenhower’s intention to use nuclear weapons on military targets if the Communists broke the truce recently negotiated in Korea, Churchill backtracked.29 When he read a draft of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech the President was to give at the United Nations directly after the Bermuda meeting, Churchill asked Eisenhower to replace a phrase about the US being ‘free to use the atomic bomb’ with a more emollient reference to ‘reserving the right to use’ the Bomb.30 The requested change illustrates a difference between the leaders’ attitudes to nuclear arms, as Jock Colville learned when he talked with the P
resident, who believed they were simply ‘just the latest improvement in military weapons’, and would soon be regarded as merely conventional. Churchill initially agreed but then changed his mind, insisting that ‘the atomic weapon [is] something entirely new and terrible’.31
Eisenhower’s speech at the United Nations contained an initiative that gave Churchill pause for thought. The President suggested that governments should begin to make ‘joint contributions from their stockpiles of normal uranium and fissionable materials to an international agency under the aegis of the UN’.32 This went against Churchill’s previous line on international control, but he now accepted the proposal and went out of his way to support it. After returning to London, he told the Soviet Ambassador that the American initiative ‘was not a mere propaganda move’ and that the Soviets should take it seriously.33 He was doing his best to bring the superpowers together, but was preaching into a void.
With his détente agenda all but played out, Churchill was tired, bored and contemplating leaving office. He repeatedly promised to leave, only to think better of it soon afterwards, leaving his colleagues – especially Anthony Eden – close to despair. What Churchill needed was a reason to carry on, preferably a grand cause that only he could pursue. He found it in his Downing Street bedroom on the morning of Thursday 18 February 1954, while flicking through the daily newspapers. On the front page of the Manchester Guardian, he read a five-hundred-word article that brought home to him the extent of the H-bomb’s destructiveness. The piece reported the after-lunch speech given in Chicago the day before by no less an authority than Sterling Cole, chair of the US Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Cole described the aftermath of America’s first H-bomb test, which had wiped out an entire island, he said, hinting that even more destructive weapons were on the way.
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