Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  After acknowledging decades of advice from Lindemann, he risked losing his audience by quoting a long passage from ‘Fifty Years Hence’, which had looked forward to the release of nuclear energy, seven years before the discovery of fission. ‘I hope the House will not reprove me for vanity or conceit,’ he commented before reading the extract. In the climate of the Cold War, ‘which we detest but have to endure’, he argued that the ‘only sane policy’ was for Britain to have the H-bomb, preserving its influence on the United States. It was essential, he argued, for the Soviets to know that if they attacked the West, they would suffer immediate retribution, but that the door was always open for friendly talks.

  He took pains to avoid alienating his political opponents, stressing instead that, in pursuing the next stage of Britain’s programme of nuclear deterrence, he had ‘tried to live up to [the leader of the opposition’s] standard’. The House was silent. This was an event too momentous to be spoiled by heckles and points of order – the Members were as attentive to his every word as they had been in the summer of 1940. On this form, Churchill’s delivery had a grand sweep, a soaring baritone that glided and then plunged into a near-whisper, his hands grasping the dispatch box one moment, gesturing expressively the next.

  In a thrilling coup de théâtre, he set out the stakes of the debate, pointing out that it ‘does not matter so much to old people, they are going soon anyway’. His voice trembling, he switched his focus to children growing up in the nuclear age, adding a comment he had made nine years before to Bernard Shaw about God’s reaction to it all:26

  I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind.

  He had long sought, he pointed out superfluously, for a summit where the superpowers could discuss these matters ‘plainly and bluntly’. Then it may be that ‘we shall by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’. With that phrase, probably polished for hours, he had reached a fitting crescendo.

  For the moment, he pointed out, the H-bomb was now an unavoidable reality, so what should Britain do? ‘The best defence would of course be bona fide disarmament,’ he said, adding that ‘sentiment must not cloud our vision’. The only sane policy at that time was ‘defence through deterrence’, he argued, with each side of the Cold War holding a gun to the other’s head. He was careful to acknowledge that this reasoning by no means guaranteed the country’s safety: ‘The deterrent does not cover the case of lunatics or dictators in the mood of Hitler when he found himself in his final dugout.’

  After forty-five minutes, his voice was still strong. As he approached his conclusion, he set out his credo – that ‘the growing sense of unity and brotherhood between the United Kingdom and the United States and throughout the English-speaking world’ should be preserved at all costs. In the climax, he strove to be optimistic about the Cold War: ‘All deterrents will improve and gain authority during the next ten years’, when ‘the deterrent may well reach its acme and reap its final reward’. If his audience was disappointed by those words, his parting ones were irresistible reminders of his finest hour: ‘Never flinch, never weary, never despair.’

  He sat down to reverberating cheers. The first opposition MP to reply was Manny Shinwell, a former minister and for several years a respectful adversary of Churchill’s: ‘We shall all agree that the Right Honourable Gentleman has made an impressive speech – one which will undoubtedly make its impact on many millions of people in our country and throughout the world.’ For the last time in the Commons, Churchill’s words had worked their magic: the opposition’s vote of censure was overwhelmingly rejected.

  After Shinwell’s speech, Churchill returned to his room in the Commons, panting and eager to know how his performance had gone down with journalists.27 The Tory Party’s Chief Press Officer Christopher O’Brien walked in and assured him excitedly that all was well: ‘If you never made another speech, that was a very fine swansong.’ Churchill’s face fell before he commented gloomily, ‘I may not make many more speeches in the House.’ He was right. In the next few weeks, he spoke a few times in comparatively minor debates, but he was winding down, his heart no longer in it. His final premiership had been successful if much less distinguished than the first, and certainly quieter. When he left the Cabinet Office for the last time, the sheaf of ACTION THIS DAY labels he had been given in October 1951 was still there. None of them had been used. He stood down on 6 April and never spoke in the Commons again.

  EPILOGUES

  1954 ONWARDS

  1: Churchill’s nuclear scientists

  ‘Some of us, who were called to take part in the war projects, often thought of Rutherford and modestly strove to act in the way which we imagined he himself would have taken.’

  NIELS BOHR, 19581

  Churchill’s swansong speech went down well with the cleverest inmate and chess champion of Wakefield Prison: Klaus Fuchs.2 Talking with an assistant governor of the jail, Fuchs drew attention to the Prime Minister’s most striking passage, pointing to the ‘sublime irony’ that safety and survival may well follow, now that the superpowers had the horrible new weapon. ‘I suppose the process of sublime irony won’t extend to my being released early,’ Fuchs commented. He was right.

  Fuchs’s former peers in the scientific community were rather less sanguine about the future of the world in the nuclear age. Two weeks before, in February 1955, Einstein enthusiastically supported a manifesto drafted by Bertrand Russell in the UK. The philosopher implored world leaders to acknowledge publicly that ‘their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them’.3 In early April, Einstein signed a modified version of the document, a few days before he died. The Russell initiative focused the attention of many Manhattan Project scientists on their role in helping to build the first Bomb. They included most of the nuclear physicists who had worked for Churchill’s government during the war. A decade on, there was still no consensus among them on the wisdom of their collective role.

  After the war, many of Rutherford’s former ‘boys’ often got together to reminisce. For several of them, the romance of their golden research years at the Cavendish had been succeeded by a workaday grind at the new nexus of nuclear physics and geopolitics. Among these physicists, Cockcroft and Oliphant met especially often. Although they had very different personalities, they got on well and talked for hours about the future. It was often suggested that, had Rutherford lived another decade, ‘the course of history might have been rather different, perhaps rather better’, as Oppenheimer remarked.4

  Oliphant had been appointed a research director at the new Australian National University in Canberra. A Pickwickian figure – with twinkling eyes, gold spectacles and a paunch – he tried to build the most powerful sub-atomic particle accelerator in the world, but managed only to deliver what became known locally as ‘the white Oliphant’. By then, he was a self-proclaimed ‘belligerent pacifist’ and an energetic campaigner against nuclear weapons.5 When he read about a Commons debate on the Quebec Agreement, he was shocked to hear Churchill deny that it enabled the United States to have a virtual monopoly on nuclear energy. Oliphant wrote: ‘This was the first time I had ever heard a PM tell a deliberate lie and it so shocked me that I could never regain my wartime regard for him.’6

  After the war, Blackett drifted away from his Cavendish friends. In the late 1950s, he moved to Imperial College London and made several valuable contributions to the nuclear debate, following many years of silence.7 Looking back on his controversial book Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, he accepted that he had made some minor factual mistakes, but still believed he had been right: ‘I had committed the unforgivable sin of being a premature military realist.’8
There was now a ‘strategic atomic stalemate’ between the Soviet Union and the US, he accepted, and the main danger was not so much nuclear war as a great waste of national resources.

  Having been persona non grata to Attlee’s government for several years, Blackett re-established his influence on the Labour Party’s thinking on science and technology. This was mainly through his friendship with Harold Wilson, who became Party leader in 1963 and Prime Minister a year later.9 Blackett turned down an offer of a ministerial appointment, preferring to exercise his influence as President of the Royal Society. Having declined official honours for decades, he began to accept them. In 1974, after Blackett accepted a place in the House of Lords, the elderly A. V. Hill considered commenting to him, ‘How are the mighty fallen’,10 but thought better of it.

  Although James Chadwick was only six years older than Cockcroft and Blackett, they saw him as a remote figure, probably because for many years they had to answer to him as Rutherford’s deputy. Two years after Chadwick returned to Liverpool from the United States in the summer of 1946, sallow and spent, he accepted the Mastership of his former college in Cambridge. He was joined by a former MAUD colleague in 1952, when G. P. Thomson became the Master of Corpus Christi College. Both men saw their moves to Cambridge as a way of moving into calmer pastures. For Thomson, the move worked out well – his combination of pugnacity and charm made him a popular figure. He also became an accomplished populariser in the press and on the radio, a formal though lucid speaker, with a talent for making striking analogies. In one of his first talks on the H-bomb, he told his Third Programme audience that unstable heavy atoms were like ‘overgrown empires which are ripe for dissolution’, an analogy Churchill had made independently almost a quarter of a century before, when he first learned about the nucleus.11

  Chadwick did not fare so well – Gonville and Caius College never took him to its heart, nor did its Fellows take him to theirs.12 Regarded by his colleagues as backward-looking and authoritarian, he was often ill and overcome by lassitude. During the nine unhappy years of his mastership he sought no pleasure in nostalgic visits to the Cavendish, which he visited only once for a routine meeting. In December 1958, he and his wife left Gonville and Caius, retired and moved to the deep peace of rural north Wales. There, he cultivated his hobby of gardening, began to edit a collected edition of Rutherford’s papers – a task he would never complete – and reflected on his involvement in Tube Alloys, whose director Wallace Akers had died in 1954. Although Chadwick never regretted his role in making the Bomb, or the nuclear attacks on Japan, he worried about the next generation of weapons:13

  The H-bomb can hardly be classed as a weapon at all. Its effect is out of all proportion to its military effect. Most people would agree that it would be morally wrong to use the H-bomb – the only possible exception could be to use it in retaliation, even then only to the extent necessary to make the enemy stop its use.

  Chadwick wanted to put his years on Britain’s nuclear project behind him. He agreed, however, to comment on the first full official account of its history when the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s historian Margaret Gowing sent him her draft manuscript in 1960.14 They later became friends. In Chadwick’s notes were surprisingly forthright comments on the meeting between Churchill and Bohr in May 1944. ‘I still think that [Bohr] was right,’ he told her.15 The problem was that Churchill did not understand Bohr’s argument, Chadwick wrote. And even if the Prime Minister had understood, ‘The US military machine would have stopped it and Roosevelt would not have been able to go against them.’ Chadwick’s former colleague Robert Oppenheimer also continued to lament the outcome of Bohr’s meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt – it showed, Oppenheimer believed, ‘how very wise men dealing with very great men can be very wrong’.16

  Among Gowing’s interviewees were Peierls – who became a close friend – and Frisch. After a brief spell at Harwell, in 1947 Frisch accepted a professorship at the University of Cambridge, where his research never had a second wind and eventually lost momentum (on one occasion, Genia Peierls bawled him out for allowing his work to drift).17 He was in demand as a science populariser, always ready to talk about any subject in nuclear science except his time on the Manhattan Project, which he seemed to want to put firmly behind him. By contrast, Rudi Peierls was always willing to talk about the development of the Bomb. He was unwavering in his belief that, because of the Nazi threat, physicists in Britain had no choice but to work on the weapon. But he regretted that he and his colleagues ‘did not insist on more dialogue with military and political leaders’.18 Whether such conversations would have made much difference was another matter – he doubted it. Although he never quite recovered from the shock of Fuchs’s betrayal, it was typical of Peierls’s generosity that shortly before the former spy was released from prison in June 1959, Peierls wrote to him offering to help find him a job in England.19 Fuchs did not reply, nor did he answer any other correspondence from his former colleagues.

  In 1963, Peierls moved to Oxford University to head its theoretical physics department, but did not quite repeat his success as a research leader in Birmingham. He was committed to the international movement campaigning for a freeze on nuclear armaments: on Saturday mornings at local shopping centres, whatever the weather, he manned his makeshift stall in a suit and tie, ready to explain his views to all comers, whether or not they agreed with him. Few of the people who chatted with him seemed to be aware that he and his wife had been accused several times in books and in the press of being spies. The charges, traumatic for the Peierls family, all proved groundless.20

  Margaret Gowing’s scholarly book highlighted the roles of the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, the MAUD committee and the Tube Alloys project in the story of the Bomb. Yet they were hardly mentioned in General Groves’s best-selling account of the Manhattan Project Now It Can Be Told, published two years before. He did, however, set out his views on the extent of the British contribution to the venture. For him, the most important role was played by Churchill, ‘probably the best friend that the Manhattan Project ever had [as well as its] most effective and enthusiastic supporter’. Groves singled out Chadwick for special praise, but was rather less generous about the work of Churchill’s other scientists:21

  On the whole, the contribution of the British was helpful but not vital. Their work at Los Alamos was of high quality but their numbers were too small to enable them to play a major role.

  Groves’s views did not seem to upset the elderly Chadwick, who regarded the General as ‘a very great American friend’.22 When it was announced in January 1970 that Groves, Vannevar Bush and James Conant were to receive the Atomic Powers Award from President Nixon in the White House, Chadwick wrote to congratulate all three of them, praising their ‘faith, judgement and courage’ in developing the Bomb, apparently forgetting all they had done to make life difficult for Akers and his colleagues during the war.23

  Margaret Gowing continued her project in the mid-1960s with her colleague Lorna Arnold, looking into the origins of the British government’s post-war nuclear projects to build weapons and generate energy. Their two-volume account revealed the full extent of Cockcroft, Penney and Hinton’s achievement in making Britain a nuclear power. Reviewers commended the breadth of the work as well as its insightfulness – ‘This history is not only official: it is authoritative,’ the military historian Michael Howard concluded.24

  Hinton, despite acclaim from his peers all over the world, was an anonymous figure outside his own industry, in keeping with Britain’s traditional indifference to its engineers. He became the first chairman of the new Central Electricity Generating Board in 1956, and a year later had to deal with a fire in one of the reactors at Windscale.25 It was the world’s first serious nuclear accident and would almost certainly have triggered panic, had the disaster not been eclipsed in the press by the launch of the Sputnik satellite. Commentators all over the Western press dreaded that the Soviets, now demonstrably a leader in advanced technology,
might soon be able to mount attacks from above the Earth’s atmosphere. A few months before, in May 1957, Britain detonated its first H-bomb at Christmas Island in the Pacific, having developed it with remarkably few resources and to the agreed deadline. This was another feather in Penney’s cap. Britain had demonstrated its nuclear competence and was rewarded with the renewal of its close nuclear partnership with the United States, eleven years after the relationship had been sundered by the McMahon Act.

  The escalating East–West nuclear tensions moved J. B. Priestley, author of the post-nuclear-apocalypse novel The Doomsday Men nineteen years earlier, to argue in the New Statesman that Britain should stop making nuclear weapons and declare that it would never use them.26 Within months, the article led to the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. CND then organised a nationally publicised Easter march, led by Bertrand Russell, from Trafalgar Square to Penney’s Aldermaston. Although a clear majority of voters in Britain wanted their country to have a nuclear deterrent, an articulate opposition had found its voice.

  Penney was uncomfortable with his unwanted move into the spotlight. Behind the scenes, he worked on negotiations to ban nuclear tests, but was disappointed when they ended in 1963 with an agreement to outlaw only atmospheric tests, leaving open the option of underground detonations. He retired from the nuclear industry in 1967 and accepted the post of Rector of Imperial College. After several unnerving brushes with the press, he developed an aversion to journalists, destroyed all his correspondence and spoke only rarely about his role as ‘the British Oppenheimer’. He did, however, bare his feelings in 1985 during an aggressive cross-examination at an Australian Royal Commission, which wiped the rictus smile from his face and provoked a rare outburst of anger:27

  I thought we were going to have a nuclear war. The only hope I saw was that there should be a balance between East and West. That is why I did this job, not to make money. I did not make any money. What I really wanted to do was to be a professor.