Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  Cockcroft was impressed to see the Prime Minister propounding his views on world affairs with the vim of a young man. Churchill declared himself ‘pretty concerned’ with the discussions at the NATO meeting then taking place in Paris. That gathering was chaired by its Secretary General Pug Ismay and attended by the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a politician Churchill loathed (‘a terrible handicap . . . this bastard’25). NATO was contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons to supplement its conventional forces, and delegating the authority to deploy nuclear arsenals to its military commanders.26 The use of battlefield nuclear weapons was in line with President Eisenhower’s ‘New Look’ defence policy, summarised in the popular slogan ‘More bang for the buck’. The discussion was driven in part by the need to reduce military budgets and to deter the Soviets in case they were tempted to invade Europe. Churchill appears to have been concerned that the new policy might cause a mere skirmish to escalate into a nuclear conflict.

  After the Prime Minister had fed his poodle, the party sat down to a four-course lunch. Over the Stilton and fruit, Churchill discoursed on the changing landscape of geopolitics, occasionally probing his guests on nuclear matters. He commented that he would like to visit the Aldermaston weapons establishment and Harwell. Scientists there were already working on the H-bomb with American help – after the renewed exchanges that followed Eisenhower’s election to the Presidency – though without authorisation from Parliament.27 This was more than polite small talk: shortly afterwards, Cockcroft and Penney heard that their establishments would be visited after Christmas by the Prime Minister.

  Sure enough, at 3 p.m. on 30 December, the day after his secret tour of Aldermaston, Churchill arrived in a Humber Pullman at Harwell’s security fence.28 Wrapped in a greatcoat with huge furry lapels, he could have passed – were he not so well known – as one of the better-fed members of the Soviet politburo. After Cockcroft climbed into the back of the car, they were driven into a hangar to see the establishment’s most powerful nuclear reactor. Wearing one of his capacious hats and carrying his walking stick, Churchill climbed out of the car to join a posse of officials, including the wan and doddery Lindemann.

  ‘Take me to the neutron!’ Churchill demanded.29 It fell to Cockcroft to point to the invisible beams emerging from holes in the reactor and heading towards a target, surrounded by a tangle of detectors. After explaining what was going on, Cockcroft sat the Prime Minister down at the control desk and invited him to terminate the nuclear chain reaction raging inside the reactor by twiddling some knobs and pushing a button. Churchill had concluded his first, and last, nuclear experiment.

  Cockcroft steered his visitor to some exhibits and models illustrating the benefits of Harwell’s work for industry and cancer research, but Churchill seemed only intermittently interested. Entering the chemistry laboratories, he perked up in the ante-room, where he seemed surprised to have to submit to the standard safety procedures. Smoking was forbidden, two laboratory assistants told him, relieving him of his hat, overcoat and stick, before fitting him with a matching set of white accessories – a freshly laundered lab coat, rubber over-shoes and a linen hat, soon discarded.30 Churchill entered the laboratory looking like an extra from the television series The Quatermass Experiment.

  After the tour of the laboratory’s ‘Plutonium Bank’, containing nothing to see beyond a few specks of fissile material, it was time for Churchill to leave. By this stage of the visit, Cockcroft wrote soon afterwards, the Prime Minister ‘was taking quite an intelligent interest’, and was showing his anxieties about the new technology. After one last safety check, when technicians scanned his body with a Geiger counter, Churchill commented: ‘I’m glad I was born when I was.’

  The afternoon had been one of the highlights of Cockcroft’s life, but for Churchill it was only a diversion from the business of staying in office. His Cabinet wanted him out.

  APRIL 1954 TO APRIL 1955

  Churchill’s nuclear swansong

  ‘What a wonderful thing it would have been if [Sir Winston] had called on the Members of the House of Commons yesterday to get on their knees in prayer to call humbly on God for His guidance in this dark and terrible hour.’

  BILLY GRAHAM, New York, 2 March 19551

  Eight days before Churchill visited Harwell, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and five other Cabinet ministers confronted him in Downing Street, insisting on a firm date for his resignation. All of them had now had more than enough of his leadership: the vacillations, the H-bomb obsession, the ramblings in the Cabinet meetings he bothered to attend. When Churchill snapped that it was clear they wanted him out, none of them demurred. He concluded menacingly that he would reflect on their words and let them know his decision, having been given plenty to ponder over Christmas.

  Whatever Churchill’s shortcomings as Prime Minister, he had put his party in a strong position to win the next election, and he was not going to be bullied out of office. As promised, he had led a politically moderate administration. He had ended rationing, built more houses and put the economy back on an even keel, although not energised it, and he had not attempted to roll back the welfare state introduced by the Attlee government. But the Tories now needed a more energetic leader, in tune with the times – John Osborne was looking back in anger, and the skiffle groups were warming up teenagers for the arrival of Elvis Presley. Newspaper photos and newsreels juxtaposed images of the white-haired, shuffling Prime Minister with those of the glamorous young monarch Queen Elizabeth, six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe.

  By the spring of 1954, it was clear that, for all his reputation as a great statesman, Churchill was no longer able to get things done on an international scale. The Soviets did not even bother to respond to his speeches calling for a summit, and his initiatives were largely ignored by the Eisenhower administration. Churchill’s obsession with ‘the special relationship’ with America, his relative indifference to European alliances and his fixation on the power blocs that dominated the Second World War combined to make him appear outmoded.

  His domestic authority was also on the wane, as his colleagues saw in the Commons debate on the H-bomb on 5 April 1954. Beforehand, Michael Foot and other Labour MPs taunted him for his failure to confront the Americans’ apparently blasé attitude to the H-bomb’s arrival. Furious, Churchill resolved to ‘put Attlee on his back’. The opposition leader opened the debate with a dignified speech, seeking ‘no party advantage’, and complimenting Churchill on his summit initiatives to lessen the threat of thermonuclear war.2 Blind to this goodwill, Churchill turned on his Labour opponents, denouncing what he believed to be the previous government’s abandonment of the Quebec Agreement. Repeatedly interrupted, he struggled to make himself heard above opposition cries of ‘Disgraceful!’, ‘Shocking!’, ‘Resign!’ Behind him, rows of Tory MPs sat glum and silent.3 With Attlee quivering with anger, Churchill fought on to the end of his prepared text, the pitch of his voice ascending to a squeak.

  Away from this and other Punch and Judy spats in the Commons, the Prime Minister kept up with developments in nuclear politics, including Oppenheimer’s security hearing. After Churchill requested a briefing on the American physicist, the Prof supplied a balanced assessment of the case on 13 April, the day after the proceedings began in Washington.3 Oppenheimer appeared to have ‘vaguely left-wing sympathies’ and ‘sort of feeling of guilt about having made the original atom bombs’, the Prof wrote, concluding that it was ‘very unlikely that he should ever have betrayed any secrets.’ Churchill read the letter and forwarded it to Anthony Eden, asking him to return it. A month later, the Prime Minister was once again shaken by another insight into destructive potential of H-bombs, this time in an article that explained how it could easily be converted into a ‘suicide device’.4 The piece in the Manchester Guardian reported comments by G. P. Thomson on ‘an imaginative attempt to do the worst’ by jacketing the Bomb with a cobalt-based chemical. If such a device were detonated, the entire upper atmosph
ere of the Earth would be poisoned. The idea had been conceived in the United States by Leó Szilárd during a live television broadcast, when he said the modified weapon was so dreadful that no nation would dare use it.5 Asked by Churchill to comment on the idea, Lindemann confirmed that it was quite feasible – with a cobalt-enhanced H-bomb ‘It might well be possible to poison the entire world,’ he wrote.6

  Churchill had another shot at convincing Eisenhower of the need for a summit in late June, when they met in Washington. The Bomb was at the top of the draft agenda, alongside tensions in the Middle East and Indo-China, but the Prime Minister persuaded the American leader to add ‘Possibility of high-level talks with the Soviets’. Even after Churchill made a heartfelt proclamation of his fears of thermonuclear war,7 Eisenhower refused to give ground. A summit was premature, he said, and would give Malenkov a chance ‘to hit the free world in the face’.

  Churchill backed off, but was unbowed and as determined as ever to talk with the Soviet leadership. Sailing home on the Queen Elizabeth, he was in a pensive mood, dining in the Verandah Grill, whiling away hours playing bezique with Anthony Eden and their aides, and absorbed in his first reading of Harold Nicolson’s Public Faces. The book was ‘remarkable’, Churchill thought, as it was ‘all about the atomic bomb’8 but had been written in 1932. He seemed to have forgotten that he had also written about the Bomb before Nicolson had begun the novel.

  Churchill and Eden were not getting on well. Eden had hoped in vain to secure a firm promise for the date of his succession, while Churchill’s mind was on higher things. Deciding to be bold and ignore the views of Eisenhower, Eden and the rest of the Cabinet, Churchill sent a telegraph to the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, proposing to meet him and his colleagues. The result, a few days later, was that Churchill lost control of his Cabinet.9

  On 7 July, the day after he returned to London, he received a mildly encouraging reply from Molotov and informed his Cabinet that he had sent the message.10 His colleagues were dismayed. They seethed at this fait accompli, and were even angrier a few minutes later to hear of yet another one: Churchill disclosed that he had approved the decision to build the H-bomb in England and that work on it was under way. In his diary, Harold Macmillan described the scene: Leader of the Commons Harry Crookshank ‘made a most vigorous protest at such a decision being communicated to the Cabinet in such a cavalier way’, before rising from his seat and walking out, followed in dribs and drabs by his incensed colleagues.

  Never before had Churchill made such a mess of Cabinet business. The irony was that he had said a few months earlier that he wanted the entire Cabinet to be involved in the H-bomb decision. But these good intentions fell by the wayside during his consultations with the Chiefs of Staff, senior Cabinet colleagues, William Penney, John Cockcroft and the bevy of experts secretly brought together by Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook. In a powerful peroration at one meeting, Churchill had explained why it was essential to acquire the H-bomb. With it, Britain could preserve its global influence, make defence cuts and avoid giving the impression of disarmament and doing anything to ‘weaken our power to influence United States policy’.

  Had he not been so ham-fisted, Churchill would have got his policy through the Cabinet without difficulty. But now his colleagues were going to make him suffer. On the day after the Cabinet walked out, they met again, this time for an equable discussion about the wisdom of building the weapon. They returned twenty-four hours later to consider the Prime Minister’s approach to the Kremlin. Seeing nothing to apologise for, Churchill forced them to read the text of his draft telegram like a class of obeisant schoolboys. The proceedings soon degenerated into the most dramatic Cabinet meeting Macmillan had ever attended, the acrimony abating only after Churchill adjourned it. Unknown to anyone outside Whitehall, the British government was on the point of collapse.

  Stability returned only at the end of the month. On 26 July, Churchill withdrew his proposal to travel to Moscow and his H-bomb policy was nodded through. Macmillan wrote in his diary at the end of the month: ‘All of us, who really have loved as well as admired him, are being slowly driven into something like hatred . . .’11

  Knowing that Churchill was looking for a suitably grand departure, Eisenhower sent him a long and thoughtful letter suggesting how he might stage a ‘fitting climax’ to his career.12 The President set aside the possibility of a détente summit, but suggested that Churchill counter the Kremlin’s tendency to pre-empt the right ‘to speak for the small nations of the world’ by making a big speech to renounce colonialism. The Prime Minister politely declined, admitting ‘I am a laggard’ on colonial policy, having been brought up ‘to feel proud of much that we had done’. Denying unconvincingly that he was casting about for a way to make ‘a dramatic exit’, Churchill reiterated his détente agenda: ‘It will seem astonishing to future generations – such as they may be – that with all that is at stake no attempt was made by personal parley between the Heads of Government to create a union of consenting minds on broad and simple issues.’ Eisenhower ignored this when he replied.

  Despite all the signs that his cause was lost, Churchill persevered until the last vestige of hope for his initiative was crushed. The Soviet news agency announced in early February 1955 that Malenkov had been demoted.13 In truth, he had been forced out, partly for his warnings of a global nuclear holocaust. The Soviet government’s Central Committee now regarded that view as unacceptable, as it encouraged ‘the emergence of a feeling of hopelessness . . . [that benefited only] . . . the imperialist advocates of a new world war’.14 The new leadership in the Kremlin had no time for Churchill – they well remembered that he had wanted the Soviets killed at birth, and believed that his ‘iron curtain’ speech had begun the Cold War.15 The summit project, the longest and least successful of Churchill’s career, was now over.

  Between the summer of 1954 and the end of the year, Churchill’s government was treading water. Asked by his doctor if he was doing much work, Churchill replied with a grin: ‘I do nothing . . . I am pretty skilful now at avoiding things.’16 The one topic that still held his interest was the H-bomb. A chilling intelligence report he read in December said that the only warning of a thermonuclear attack that Britain could count on was the first twinkling dot on radar screens showing the approach of a Soviet bomber.17 It was time to look four-square at how Britain might survive such an onslaught – the megadeaths, the fall-out, the catastrophic damage to the economy. Churchill quickly approved the preparation of a full report, commenting, ‘Please keep me informed of the details of every step.’18

  In mid-February 1955, the government published a White Paper to explain why the UK should acquire the H-bomb. Churchill was expected to present the policy in Parliament’s defence debate on 1 March – the perfect opportunity for his swansong. He had not yet disclosed his plan to leave to the despondent Eden, preferring to keep the Cabinet on tenterhooks. Every day, his colleagues scrutinised his words and gestures for signs that he might have decided to stand down – this was anything but a dignified departure. Churchill often talked over matters alone with Rab Butler, who later recalled their huge dinners ‘followed by libations of brandy so ample that I felt it prudent on more than one occasion to tip the liquid into the side of my shoe’.19 Their subjects were always the same: Churchill’s retirement, the prospect of a summit with the Soviets and his new preoccupation with space travel: ‘He was very irritated’, Butler recalled, ‘by the idea of going to the moon, which he regarded as a waste of time and money.’

  Many politicians and commentators wanted an open debate on Britain’s acquisition of the H-bomb. A longstanding agreement with the BBC ensured that any subject to be discussed in Parliament would not be aired on radio and television within the two weeks before the debate was scheduled to take place.20 BBC executives and several opposition MPs wanted the agreement relaxed, but Churchill refused to budge, telling the Commons that ‘the bringing on of exciting debates in these vast, new robot organis
ations of television and BBC broadcasting’ might have ‘very deleterious effects on our general interests’.21 In his view, a bunch of chattering nabobs appointed by the left-leaning BBC should never be allowed to pre-empt parliamentary debate.22

  *

  On the morning of 1 March, a few hours before he was due to deliver his speech, he was in his Downing Street bedroom, so excited and so busy polishing his lines that he broke his habit of reading the morning newspapers over breakfast. They lay unopened in a pile on his bed-table, as his doctor was surprised to see when he paid a visit. ‘I’ve taken a hell of a lot of trouble over this speech,’ Churchill declared, ‘twenty hours over its preparation and eight hours checking the facts.’23 Flicking through the seventy-odd pages of typescript, he read out some of his favourite turns of phrase, before making a few final revisions. His secretary Jane Portal delivered the final script minutes before he was driven to the Commons. MPs were hoping that the Old Man still had it in him to brighten up a chilly, overcast day with one last memorable matinée.

  Well before the debate began at 3.45, the Chamber was full of chattering MPs, dozens of them sitting on the floor, squatting on the stairs, craning their necks round the Speaker’s chair for a better view. Among those looking down from the galleries were several of Churchill’s closest friends and family, including, unusually, his wife.24

  His audience’s eyes locked on him from the moment he entered the Chamber. He picked his way along the front bench, appearing to totter before finally flopping into his place.25 When the Speaker called on him to speak, Members on all sides of the House roared him to the dispatch box. By the time he had ended his first sentence, on ‘obliterating weapons of the nuclear age’, the Chamber knew it was in for some vintage Churchill.