Jock Colville walked into the room to find an agitated Churchill with his copy of the newspaper open on his bed-table.34 The Prime Minister’s halitotic poodle was probably, as usual, yapping at the foot of the bed, his budgerigar chirruping in its cage or flying round the room.35 Churchill insisted on reading the article aloud:
. . . the heat and blast generated in the 1952 hydrogen test would cause absolute destruction over an area extending three miles in all directions . . . The area of severe-to-moderate damage would stretch in all directions to several miles . . . the Russians would be able to deliver [such an attack on the US] in ‘one or two years from now’.
Churchill said – ‘with a mixture of triumph and indignation’, Colville later wrote – that he had called his Foreign Secretary, the Cabinet Secretary and all three Chiefs of Staff to see if they knew what had happened. None of them knew anything about it. Colville later recalled Churchill’s conclusion: ‘It was lucky that at least one person in Whitehall read the newspapers.’
From that morning, Churchill was obsessed with the H-bomb. He told Colville that the world was now almost as far from the original nuclear weapon as the Bomb had been from the bow and arrow. When the Soviets caught up with the US, the consequences did not bear thinking about: the UK was extremely vulnerable to a Soviet attack, which could lay waste to London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast in seconds.
He was now more determined than ever that the ‘Big Three’ leaders should meet to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war. Hinting that a few felicitous phrases – no doubt his own – might put an end to the threat, he told Eisenhower: ‘I can even imagine how a few simple words, spoken with the awe which may at once oppress and inspire the speakers, might lift this nuclear monster from our world.’36 Two days after Churchill wrote those words, he told Rab Butler: ‘I feel like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.’37 He now had a grand cause to power him smoothly to the tarmac.
First, however, he needed to be briefed on the H-bomb. He did not – as he would have done during the Second World War – turn only to Lindemann, but also to Bill Penney, and to the most laconic and enigmatic of Rutherford’s ‘boys’, Sir John Cockcroft.
MARCH TO DECEMBER 1954
Cockcroft becomes a confidant of the Prime Minister
‘Dear Mother, I was sorry not to see you this week but to lunch with Winston Churchill does not come often in a lifetime.’
JOHN COCKCROFT, 17 December 19541
It was no surprise that Cockcroft was called in to advise Whitehall on the hydrogen bomb. Quiet, determined, resilient and straightforward, he was the Clement Attlee of nuclear science.
Like Attlee, Cockcroft was often underrated, especially by those who preferred talent to be flaunted rather than quietly made plain. ‘John is more a manager than a physicist,’ Mark Oliphant once commented – a remark that contains more than a grain of truth.2 Such aspersions were common in nuclear circles, but they did not trouble Cockcroft, especially after he and Ernest Walton shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in physics for being first to split the atom artificially. The award burnished Cockcroft’s reputation in Whitehall as one of the most dependable scientist-administrators, blessed with a rare combination of specialist knowledge and common sense. Rutherford aside, no other British Nobel laureate had ever been more effective in what C. P. Snow later described as ‘the corridors of power’.
In 1954, Cockcroft achieved a distinction unequalled by any of his former Cavendish colleagues – he got to know Churchill, advised him personally on nuclear policy, and even became a valued lunch guest. It is perhaps surprising that the Prime Minister’s confidence had been won by someone so reserved, so short of fine words and so lacking in allure. At gatherings, Cockcroft was content to be a wallflower, but would chat amiably with all-comers, who could easily mistake him for a modestly prosperous businessman.
He had accepted the job of running the government’s nuclear-research establishment in January 1946, when he was still directing the Chalk River facility in Canada. Chadwick had supported him for the post, but noted with rather unbecoming candour that Cockcroft’s ‘knowledge is wide but it is not at all profound’ and that ‘his views are of rather a dull, every-day hue’.3 It did not take Cockcroft long to prove that, pedestrian thinker or not, he was exceptionally well qualified for the job. Drawing on his experience in North America, he led the conversion of a bleak airfield at Harwell into what was, in effect, a new university of nuclear science.
Although Harwell produced some useful blue-sky research, its four thousand scientists and engineers focused on providing technical advice and data for the British government’s nuclear projects, as well as radioactive materials for medical researchers. Dearest to Cockcroft’s heart was the project to supply nuclear energy to the national grid – he was determined to make the project a reality and tended to underplay weapons research in his public talks.4 Equipped with state-of-the-art nuclear reactors and sub-atomic particle accelerators, his experimenters worked alongside theoreticians and mathematicians, enthusiastically collaborating with nuclear physicists overseas. Cockcroft stressed that the toughest challenges were chemical, for example, isolating minute quantities of rare and extremely toxic substances, while maintaining the highest standards of health and safety. The chemists were not allowed to leave their laboratories until they were certified sufficiently clean ‘to go out and mix with the physicists’.5
Like many of Rutherford’s most successful protégés, Cockcroft was a cross between a physicist and an engineer, though he also had another skill – after studying mathematics at Cambridge, he had graduated as a Wrangler. Young colleagues at Harwell teased him that his heyday in the early 1930s was ‘the Stone Age of nuclear physics’,6 but they knew their leader was no Neanderthal. A conscientious reader of the technical literature in the nuclear field, he had a good feel for the best lines of research to pursue and was quick to detect attempts to pull the wool over his eyes. He even brought to Harwell some of the brio of his hero Rutherford, going so far as to license a ‘Crazy Committee’ to abandon temporarily the constraints of scientific conservatism.7 The committee amply justified its name.
Cockcroft’s Zen-like calm deserted him only occasionally. He later said he panicked only when his Chalk River colleague Alan Nunn May was exposed in 1946 as a Soviet spy, though others occasionally saw him lose his equilibrium during rows with Christopher Hinton over the design and operation of nuclear plants.8 Cockcroft never raised his voice during even the most tense exchanges, though his family remember him yelling encouragement to his five children as they learned to ski during their winters in Canada. At home, he was a caring and involved father, though exceptionally reserved: the children had a rule that Daddy was not allowed to leave the dinner table until he had uttered two complete sentences.9 Physics was never far from his mind. When working at home in the afternoon, he would sit down with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits and mull over his problems, a gramophone record playing soothingly in the background, perhaps Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake or Copland’s Appalachian Spring.
Cockcroft’s reticence sometimes drove his Harwell staff to distraction. In meetings, he spoke no more than was absolutely necessary, often leaving staff with little sense of being led. His economy with words sometimes led to serious misunderstandings – he had appeared to be sympathetic to his staff’s opposition to Lindemann’s plan to transfer the British nuclear industry out of the Ministry of Supply, though he supported the plan in Whitehall. As a result, several of his colleagues felt betrayed.10
Although Cockcroft had amicable relationships with all the leading politicians and his scientist peers, he was in no one’s pocket. Of the government’s top nuclear administrators, he was the only one active in the Atomic Scientists’ Association, giving upbeat lectures to thinly attended gatherings in village halls. He knew that most people regarded scientists as ‘a race apart – long-haired gentlemen without any normal human
desires or weaknesses who go coldly about our esoteric researches without any contact with the community’.11 The onus was on scientists, he believed, to engage effectively with the public – ‘Many of us are learning, by painful experience, the techniques of making ourselves understood.’
In the privacy of the Athenaeum club in Pall Mall, and at home with his wife, Cockcroft was sometimes cutting about the government’s nuclear policies, past and present. For him, official accounts of the British nuclear project during the war failed to give ‘a real picture of events’ – for example, he believed that Churchill had been foolish to hand over Tube Alloys to ICI. Cockcroft never regretted leaving the project when the industrialists took over as ‘They did nothing very effective.’12 He deprecated the sidelining of Tizard and Blackett from policy-making circles during the conflict, and the disproportionate influence of Lindemann, whom Cockcroft and his wife described as Churchill’s ‘henchman’.13
At the end of the war, Cockcroft could not understand why the Americans did not demonstrate the first nuclear weapon on an uninhabited island. In Washington a few days before the attack on Hiroshima, he had been disturbed to hear that a senior member of the Manhattan Project was afraid that the war might be over before they could drop the Bomb.14 When a journalist invited him a few months later to express regret for the Allied scientists’ involvement in the project, Cockcroft refused and wearily explained himself:15
We had to do it because we did not know whether the Germans would do it. We had no choice. There was a war on and we couldn’t sit back and let the other fellow do it first . . . At the same time, we felt if we found it impossible to produce, it would be better for the whole world.
After nuclear weapons had proved viable, Cockcroft believed his country needed them in order to defend itself and preserve its international influence, which in his view was almost entirely benign. Like Bill Penney, he could be relied upon not to rock the government’s nuclear boat and to give wholly accurate and constructive advice to support Britain’s emergence as a nuclear power. This was another reason why Churchill’s Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook invited these two experts to his office on 12 March 1954 for a super-secret briefing about the implications of the hydrogen bomb. Also present were Sir Edwin Plowden – recently appointed chair of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, responsible for overseeing all the country’s nuclear programmes – and four senior Ministry of Defence officials, who awaited new information like goldfish expecting their feed.
Cockcroft was chauffeured that morning to Whitehall in his official limousine, a Mark 6 Bentley. At 10.30, Brook opened the meeting with his usual directness, pointing out that the scientists were there to help him brief the Chiefs of Staff about the weapon’s implications. Brook believed the advent of the H-bomb obliged the government to rethink ‘our foreign policy and general strategy and, thereafter, the “size and shape” of the Armed Forces, our civil defence policy and our atomic weapons policy’.16 Bill Penney was first to speak, summarising his understanding of the Americans’ and Soviets’ progress on the weapons. He pointed out that the Soviets had not detonated a real H-bomb, but a ‘hybrid’ weapon, something like a standard nuclear bomb but much more powerful, though it was only a matter of time before they had the real thing.17
The British government had a lot of thinking to do. A few days later, Cockcroft and Penney agreed to prepare a statement for ministers about the ability of the Soviet Union to manufacture the new weapons. Their brief began with two arresting sentences:18
Thermonuclear weapons are undoubtedly simpler to make than scientists thought. Great skill may be required, and precise engineering, but a vast industrial effort beyond that required for producing plutonium and 235U is not needed.
For the Chiefs of Staff, and for their Commander-in-Chief Churchill, none of them known for declining opportunities to acquire new weapons, the crux of the message was that the H-bomb would not be ruinously expensive. Cockcroft and Penney probably guessed that they would soon be told to make the new weapons – and quickly.
One of Cockcroft’s projects at Harwell was to help set up a European nuclear laboratory, later named CERN (an acronym for the French name of its original governing body, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire).19 The idea of such a venture, first mooted after the Second World War, took wing in the closing weeks of the 1940s and was backed in Britain by Cockcroft and several other leading physicists. Many of their colleagues believed, however, that it would be better to invest the UK’s modest resources in research at home rather than risk an unwieldy European collaboration. In the early planning stages, Britain appeared to be leery of the initiative and never formally joined the European organisation. Cockcroft then quietly demonstrated leadership. Backed by his young Harwell physicists, he was among the leading advocates of the idea that European countries should combine their resources to build a high-energy particle accelerator to rival the one at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States. This enthusiasm had been kindled in part during his visit in October 1954 to Brookhaven, where the laboratory’s physicists were still reeling from the decision four months earlier to strip Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance, after a long hearing in Washington.20
Part of the appeal of a European laboratory for Cockcroft was that it would be the fruition of Rutherford’s dream of bringing together leading scientists from all over the world to enquire into the innermost workings of nature. CERN was planning to pool the resources of its dozen contributing countries to build a machine that could accelerate protons to a hundred thousand times the energy Cockcroft and Walton had achieved a quarter of a century before.
Lindemann was the most influential of the CERN sceptics, dismissing Niels Bohr’s suggestion that the new laboratory might be located in Denmark (‘too vulnerable to Russia’, the Prof told Chadwick).21 As usual, Lindemann’s bark was worse than his bite: in November 1952, members of the British physics community – including Blackett and Peierls – set aside their differences and backed the proposal to set up the laboratory near Geneva. Lindemann supported it in the Cabinet and, at the end of the year, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rab Butler approved the long-term plan for Britain to contribute to the running of CERN. Seven months later, the British representative on the venture signed a document expressing his country’s willingness to contribute to the project’s long-term funding and Parliament ratified the agreement soon afterwards. So it was on Churchill’s watch that Britain began to play its part in the organisation that now operates the Large Hadron Collider.
Cockcroft had much to thank Churchill for when they met on Friday 3 September, the first of their three meetings in 1954. That morning, Cockcroft had been surprised to receive a phone call from the Prime Minister’s office and even more taken aback to be summoned to lunch at Chartwell, along with Bill Penney and their boss Edwin Plowden. With no idea why they were needed, Cockcroft cancelled his other appointments and instructed his chauffeur to drive him to Kent. When he arrived, at 1.15 p.m., he was met by one of the servants, escorted upstairs and introduced to Churchill, who was dressed in a blue striped boiler suit with an open collar. The Prime Minister was sipping whisky and holding court with the other guests in his study. Twenty-eight years before, in this room, Churchill had taken time off from his budget preparations to dictate his understanding of the quantum theory of the atom, demonstrating that he understood the idea of the nucleus. On the shelves were the complete novels of H. G. Wells, including The World Set Free, where Churchill had almost certainly first read of the possibility of harnessing nuclear energy.
Churchill looked younger than Cockcroft had expected. Only when the Prime Minister stuck out his jaw – drawing attention to his neck’s scrotal complexion – did he look his age. Cockcroft was not easily star-struck, but now he was powerless to resist, as is clear from the account of the afternoon he sent his mother.22 Although written in his staccato prose, his words radiate pleasure:
. . . we moved to the drawing room, a cheerful room wit
h flowers and a fine view over the park. Then Lady Churchill and a daughter came in, both very lively and talkative, and we partook of sherry or tomato juice. Then we had lunch – dressed crab and salad, chicken, fruit and cheese, and then good black coffee. There was much talk on both sides – then the ladies left and the PM held forth on World politics till 4 o’clock – most entrancing . . .
Cockcroft ended his letter, ‘I must write a record of what was said for posterity,’ though he never did. It is, however, safe to assume that Churchill rammed home the crucial importance of standing alongside the US, and of the need for Britain to acquire the H-bomb. He probably wanted to know when the weapons would be ready, assuming Parliament approved their acquisition. At the end of the afternoon, following a long walk round the gardens, Cockcroft and his colleagues departed. Churchill then went to sit in an adjacent room for Graham Sutherland, who, at the request of Churchill’s parliamentary colleagues, was painting his portrait as an eightieth birthday present.
Three months later, eight days before Christmas, Cockcroft received another invitation to lunch with the Prime Minister, this time at 10 Downing Street. Again, Cockcroft had no idea why he had been invited, but he found out soon enough, when he was joined by Penney, Plowden, Lindemann and the Cabinet minister Lord Salisbury in the eighteenth-century drawing room upstairs.23 Uncharacteristically punctual, Churchill entered looking smart in a black suit, well-ironed white shirt and spotted bow tie. He was on fine form, apparently still basking in the afterglow of his eightieth-birthday celebrations. However, he had not liked the Sutherland portrait, which seemed to show him as an elderly, almost frangible leader clinging on to power, rather than a veteran statesman resolutely staying in office to oppose tyranny. The painting upset him so much that Clemmie later had it cut up and burnt.24
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