Churchill's Bomb

by Graham Farmelo

  In private, Penney was sometimes scathing about the way governments had handled nuclear weapons. When Lorna Arnold asked him why the superpowers had stockpiled more of them than they could possibly use, he replied, ‘Because they were mad, mad, MAD!’28

  To the surprise of some of his colleagues, Penney joined Pugwash, an organisation that brought together leading scientists to discuss how to minimise the threat of nuclear war, with the aim of providing apolitical advice to governments. Formed after the launch of the Einstein–Russell manifesto in July 1955, Pugwash was named after the town in Nova Scotia where its first meeting was held in January 1957. Its attendees included Mark Oliphant and Leó Szilárd, who had switched fields to biology after the war and campaigned vociferously against the spread of nuclear weapons. One disappointment for the meeting’s organisers was the absence of the indisposed Niels Bohr, who neither joined Pugwash nor attended any of its meetings.29 After August 1945, he had campaigned for all countries to share scientific information openly, urging leaders to refrain from stockpiling nuclear weapons. But he had little tangible success.

  Pugwash succeeded where the Great Dane failed, mainly because of the energy and diligence of its co-founder Jo Rotblat, who had a passion equal to Bohr’s and more political flair. Courteous but peppery, retiring yet assertive, Rotblat proved to be the most effective figure in Pugwash, which was continually hampered by poor funding, shambolic administration and sniping comments in the press. After he left the Manhattan Project and returned to Britain, he had changed his scientific speciality to medical physics and worked at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He spent most of his spare time on Pugwash, administering, chivvying his colleagues and putting a spring in its step.

  Among Rotblat’s Pugwash colleagues in Britain were Cockcroft, Blackett, Thomson, Frisch and Peierls, though he was just as close to scientists in other countries. Gradually, the influence of Pugwash increased and it played an influential role in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties of the early 1990s. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly in 1995 to Rotblat and Pugwash ‘for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms’. Rotblat did more than any other nuclear scientist to refute Churchill’s principle that unelected scientists should keep out of politics.

  When it came to Churchill’s wartime handling of science and technology policy, nothing upset his academic scientists more than his closeness to Lindemann and the sidelining of Tizard. Although bruised, Tizard said nothing about this in public. In private, he was not above telling stories of Churchillian double-dealing. He told a colleague that Churchill once took him by the arm and said: ‘You think, Henry, that I rely on [Lindemann] for my scientific advice but I don’t. [Lindemann] does my calculations for me but it is on you that I rely.’30

  It was not until April 1959, six months before he died, that Tizard went on the record with comments on Churchill’s achievement, and about his influence on science and technology:31

  . . . in my experience [he] has had neither a great influence on science and engineering, nor indeed has he displayed any real interest in science . . . As for his interest in applied science, I think I can truthfully say that when I was quite intimately concerned with his doings in this respect . . . [he] was always pressing for the wrong developments against the advice of most scientists concerned. This does not mean that he had no influence on applied science and engineering; the very fact that he was enthusiastic about everything that in his opinion could help to win the war, was of great value.

  Tizard took care to put his views in perspective: ‘I think he is such a great man that it is a pity to exaggerate his doings in every direction,’ concluding with a quote adapted from lines written early in the eighteenth century by the poet Matthew Prior: ‘Be to his virtues ever kind and to his faults a little blind.’

  At the time Tizard spoke those words, however, Churchill had not finished with science and technology. He was making his final contribution to them, supported by the Prof.

  6 APRIL 1955 ONWARDS

  2: Churchill and his Prof

  ‘If I were God Almighty, and humanity blew itself to bits, as it most certainly could, I don’t think I’d start again in case they got me too next time.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, 13 September 19571

  Six days after Churchill left Downing Street, he began his final science-related initiative while he was on vacation in Sicily, at the grand Villa Politi in Syracuse. Accompanied by his wife Clemmie, Jock Colville and Lindemann, Churchill planned to spend three weeks reading and painting, but it rained almost non-stop and the entire party returned home a week early. The washout gave Lindemann plenty of opportunities to press his favourite case on Churchill – the need to do something radical to increase the number of high-quality engineering graduates in Britain, that is, to train more ‘technologists of the highest grade, the officer class, the people who invent and introduce new processes and products’.2 Although Churchill was not in the best of moods, he was won over and agreed to put his name to a new institution that would help solve the problem, ideally along the lines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  After Churchill returned home, he comfortably retained his seat in the General Election, which saw the Conservatives remain in power. He withdrew almost entirely from public life and entrusted his diary and the management of his affairs to the former Foreign Office diplomat Anthony Montague Browne, who became the Man Friday of his winter years. Shielded from requests for his time that arrived daily in his office, Churchill was able to complete the four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which he had set aside in the early months of the war. The account ended, rather oddly, in 1900 – he had no wish ‘to write about the woe and ruin of the terrible twentieth century’.3 Nor had he any wish to write about his second term as Prime Minister. Having produced some ten million words, he finally laid down his pen.4

  To most intents and purposes retired, he spent several months each year on the French Riviera, staying with Lord Beaverbrook and Emery Reves in their luxurious villas. Churchill spent most of his time reading and playing six-pack Rubicon bezique but was still interested in extending his palette of cultural tastes – he took a course in modern art that introduced him to Manet, Monet and Cézanne, though not, apparently, to Picasso.5 Listening to Reves’s collection of gramophone records, he gradually acquired a taste for Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven, sometimes venturing into the chillier waters of Sibelius.6

  On these visits to the Riviera, he was seldom accompanied by Clemmie, who was unwell with neuritis and rarely felt at home in the company of millionaire voluptuaries.7 For her, Churchill’s most unattractive trait was a craving for luxury so intense that he was willing to accept hospitality from almost anyone able to offer it. Clemmie disliked Beaverbrook and had even less time for Reves’s fiancée Wendy Russell, with whom Churchill was ‘absolutely obsessed’, according to Noël Coward: ‘He followed her about the room with his brimming eyes . . . staggering like a vast baby of two who is just learning to walk.’8 Whenever Churchill ventured outside the villas – usually to visit nearby casinos and Michelin-starred restaurants – he was rarely left alone, well-wishers lining up to touch the hem. More often than not, he resented the importunities of passing celebrities, as when a stranger bounced up to him, vigorously shook him by the hand and exclaimed: ‘I’ve wanted to do that for twenty years.’ Churchill bellowed, ‘Who the hell was that?’ It was Frank Sinatra.9

  One of Churchill’s rare British visitors on the Riviera was Lindemann, who amused the locals when he marched along the sunny promenades dressed in a business suit, overcoat and bowler hat.10 With the Prof now in his twilight years, the British establishment knew it was time to give him his valedictory honours. The Royal Society awarded him its Hughes Medal for the science he had done decades before, but he refused to collect what he called this ‘leaving present’ from an organisation that had never shown him any more than polite
respect.11 Much more gratifying to him was his appointment as a Viscount on the recommendation of Anthony Eden, an honour that meant he then ranked ‘above all those damned science barons’. Oxford’s back-room scribblers ensured that a few lines were soon circulating round the college common rooms:12

  And now a greater honour yet:

  He gets a leg up in Debrett.

  For he becomes a nobler lord

  Than Ernest Baron Rutherford.

  Lindemann took up his new, more elevated position in the House of Lords, with his sponsor Lord Waverley (formerly Sir John Anderson) at his side. It was one of the last times they met.

  After Lindemann left the government and returned to Oxford University, he retired and successfully lined up his old friend Francis Simon as his successor as Chair of Experimental Philosophy. However, less than a month after taking the post, Simon died of coronary heart disease, leaving Lindemann stricken and the Clarendon Laboratory bereft. This was one of the worst times of the Prof’s life. Grieving for Simon, and worried about the future of his physics department, he also witnessed Britain’s humiliating withdrawal from its Suez operation after an ill-considered invasion, while the United States kept its distance from the farce. This ignominy dispelled once and for all the illusions of Eden, the last British Prime Minister to believe that Britain was still a first-rank power. He soon left office and was succeeded by Harold Macmillan.

  Lindemann was not down in the mouth for long. In May, he was on his most caustic form on the letters page of The Times, a few days after Bill Penney and his team tested Britain’s first hydrogen bomb in the Pacific. Contemptuously dismissing ‘the expected outcry in left-wing journals with the discreditable personal attacks on myself’, he ridiculed critics of the tests, including the Pope.13 He could still stun a roomful of dons with one of his barbs or with an outrageous turn of phrase. The most important event of the age will be seen to be ‘the abdication of the white man’, the Prof once announced portentously. He appeared to believe this was true in his favourite sport, too, as he demonstrated in the college’s television room during the Wimbledon Championships, on the hot and sticky afternoon of 2 July 1957.14 When he saw the great African-American tennis player Althea Gibson trouncing the British Christine Truman, he heckled Truman unmercifully for letting the side down. Feeling unwell, Lindemann went for a walk in Christ Church Meadow and then made a few final adjustments to his will, before retiring to bed. The next morning his valet found him dead of a heart attack.

  ‘He is gone and I am left to linger on,’ Churchill murmured when he heard the news.15 At the funeral in Christ Church Cathedral, the mourners stood in unison when Churchill and his wife entered the building.16 As the Prof’s friend Roy Harrod later recalled, after the service Churchill walked in the procession up the cemetery path and beyond, advancing ‘over the difficult tufts of grass, with unfaltering but ageing steps’ towards the awaiting coffin. Several friends had suggested that he return to Chartwell after the service, but he insisted repeatedly: ‘I must go to the grave.’

  Sir John Anderson died six months later. Normally the epitome of discretion, he was sometimes surprisingly blunt towards the end of his life, telling Lord Moran in August 1956: ‘Left to himself, Winston’s judgment was a menace.’17 A year later, Anderson told the visiting Robert Oppenheimer that ‘he had never been reconciled to the fact that Bohr’s counsel had not been followed’ by Churchill and Roosevelt.18

  After Lindemann’s death, Churchill often pointed out to his friends the Prof’s wisdom and insights on nuclear matters. There was an instance of this late in the summer after Lindemann’s death, when Churchill read Nevil Shute’s recent novel On the Beach, set after a nuclear apocalypse in which most of the bombs were encased with a cobalt compound to maximise their destructiveness. Lindemann had first told Churchill of this loathsome idea, which would later feature in the movie Dr Strangelove, as the basis of the ‘doomsday machine’.19 Churchill now believed that ‘the Earth will soon be destroyed by a cobalt bomb’. More in hope than expectation, he sent a copy of Shute’s book to Khrushchev but not to Eisenhower, who was, in Churchill’s view, now too ‘muddle-headed’ to benefit from it.20

  Churchill was as disconcerted as anyone in the West by the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in October 1957. As he wrote to his wife, it was proof of Lindemann’s thesis ‘of the forwardness of Soviet Science, compared to the American’.21 ‘We have fallen hopelessly behind in technical education,’ he wrote, adding his own spin to the Prof’s explanation: ‘The necessary breeding ground has failed. We must struggle on; & looking to the Union with America.’

  Although he believed that the world was destined to end in thermonuclear war, he was adamant that a strategy of deterrence was the best way to prevent a catastrophe. He kept an eye on the British H-bomb project and invited Sir Edwin Plowden – head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority – to dinner soon after Britain first detonated one of the bombs. By that time, Churchill rarely went on official visits, but he accepted Plowden’s invitation to Aldermaston ‘to show you something of what has resulted from your decision, just three years ago, to enter the “thermonuclear megaton” club’.22 During the visit, on 3 December 1957, Churchill was shown rough-cut footage of the Monte Bello explosion and the first British H-bomb test. There was no soundtrack but, as Anthony Montague Browne later remembered, the images were powerful enough: ‘The effect was numbing.’23 On the journey back to London Churchill was silent, until he blurted out: ‘What did you think of that?’ After a perfunctory comment from Montague Browne, Churchill said he ‘always feared that mass pressure in the United States might force them to use their H-bombs while the Russians still had not got any’, adding, ‘It’s always been a tendency of the masses to drop their Hs.’ The joke was, according to Montague Browne, one of the ‘increasingly rare sparks in a fire that had already burnt grey’.

  One of the few sustained tasks Churchill undertook towards the end of his life was to keep an eye on the progress of the project to improve the teaching of technical subjects in the UK. Despite an indefatigable fund-raising campaign by Jock Colville, the venture appeared to have run into the sands in early 1957, but it was rescued a few months later when it was yoked together with another plan, to set up an institute of postgraduate technology in Birmingham. The idea of producing a British MIT had proved too ambitious, so the project was altered to the setting up of a new Cambridge college, to be named after Churchill.24 He was disappointed that the initiative was not going to be based at Lindemann’s university, but the Prof had thought the decision wise: ‘Cambridge is the only place it could be; there is no engineering at Oxford.’25

  Churchill chaired the meetings of the college project’s Trustees, who mainly comprised academics and industrial leaders, including executives from ICI, Vickers and the Shell Oil Company. Although his role was low-key, he made several useful contributions to the planning and could always be relied upon to supply ample amounts of ‘suitable lubricants for the discussion’.26 Eventually, his voluminous correspondence was accommodated in the College in a purpose-built archives centre, which now also stores many other records, including the papers of several scientists who worked for Churchill when he was Prime Minister. The Trustees eventually agreed on the college’s undergraduate entry profile: each year, seventy per cent of the new students would study science, engineering or mathematics, the remainder studying humanities. Churchill personally approved the appointment of the college’s first Master, Sir John Cockcroft, who arranged for him to visit the college site on 17 October 1959.27 After planting a tree, Churchill gave what turned out to be his penultimate public speech, praising both pure and applied research, and showing that he had changed his mind about space travel:

  Let no one believe that the lunar rockets, of which we read in the press, are merely ingenious bids for prestige . . . As with many vehicles of pure research, their immediate uses may not be apparent. But I do not doubt that they will ultimately reap a rich harvest for those who have the imagin
ation and power to develop them, and to probe ever more deeply into the universe in which we live.

  He underlined Lindemann’s role in the inception of Churchill College, which could reasonably have been named after the Prof: ‘His inspiration remains and he and his memory should be held bright by the scientists of tomorrow.’ But this was wishful thinking: following a decent interval after Lindemann’s death, his friends and enemies were about to fight an acrid and ill-tempered public battle over his reputation.28

  Two biographies, by Roy Harrod and the Earl of Birkenhead, painted similar pictures of a man whose flaws were a price well worth paying for his brilliance, integrity and loyalty. The haters’ case was made soon afterwards by C. P. Snow in Science and Government, most of it a knockabout account of the Tizard–Lindemann clash in the late 1930s. Stung by criticisms of his account, Snow returned to the fray a few months later and published a brief postscript that restated his case more pointedly.29 After underlining the terrible quality of Lindemann’s judgement compared with that of other wartime scientists, notably Vannevar Bush, Snow concluded: ‘If you are going to have a scientist in a position of isolated power, the only scientist among non-scientists, it is dangerous, when he has bad judgement.’

  One can quibble that Lindemann was not the only scientist in Churchill’s company during the war, but the essence of Snow’s point is correct. In science, authority comes from its communities, not from individuals, no matter how brilliant they are. Churchill made a serious error in putting so much weight on the opinion of one scientist, whose weaknesses were well known to his peers. The final sentence of the postscript was wise: ‘Whatever we do, it must not happen again.’