by Andrew Brown
Bernal and Zuckerman had met two or three times in the weeks after D-Day, mostly to discuss the latest threat posed by German flying bombs.41 Now that he was on the new Tizard Committee, Sage wanted to talk to Zuckerman and to learn as much as possible of the observations made by the Bombing Analysis Unit on the targets hit in France. In early April, Zuckerman ‘arranged a splendid tour of which the first four days were spent in Paris, where Desmond had some business of his own to conduct’.42 There was an Anglo-French Scientists dinner with old friends such as the Joliot-Curies, whom Sage had not seen for five years. Through Solly, there were introductions to new acquaintances like Air Marshal Tedder, and the Duff Coopers, who gave an Easter dinner for Bernal and Zuckerman at the British Embassy. Since they were going into the war zone, both scientists were in uniform. Sage wore his naval lieutenant’s uniform from D-Day, and Zuckerman’s staff pointed out that he had far too much hair sprouting from under the outsized cap. At their insistence he had a haircut before driving north-east with Zuckerman past Arnhem and up the Rhine to Cologne. There, Bernal was astounded by the degree to which the allied air raids had levelled the city. The Cathedral seemed to be the only structure left standing, and Sage was of course eager to examine its architectural features at close quarters. He and Zuckerman were prevented from approaching it by a platoon of American rangers, who politely told them that it was structurally unsafe and that there were still German guns trained on it from the east side of the river. Later that day they visited the collapsed Remagen Bridge, which had been the only bridge on the Rhine captured intact by the advancing American army the previous month, and which was now blocking traffic on the river.
In early 1945, Churchill was increasingly concerned that the French and the Russians were attempting to find out about the Manhattan Project.43 All the scientists on the Tizard Committee except Bernal had been closely involved, at various stages, with the British wartime atomic energy programme. When Churchill, in January 1945, agreed with Sir John Anderson that the Chiefs of Staff should finally be let into the secret of the Manhattan Project, he stated specifically that he did not want Tizard told. By that time so many British scientists were in North America that it was common knowledge amongst senior physicists that a major attempt was in hand to build an atomic weapon. Tizard made an approach to the COS to include atomic weapons in his Committee’s remit, but again Churchill forbade it.
Sir Henry Tizard… surely has lots of things to get on with without plunging into this exceptionally secret matter. It may be that in a few years or even months that this secret can no longer be kept. One must always realise that for every one of these scientists who is informed there is a little group around him who also hears the news.44
Even with no up-to-date evidence on the development of the atomic bomb, when the Tizard Committee released its report on the 16th June, there was reference to this horrendous new possibility. Even if the population were to be subjected to a ‘troglodyte existence’ underground, with whatever comforts modern engineers could provide, the members of the Committee doubted that there would be ‘any defence on which a country could rely’.
The only answer that we can see to the atomic bomb [they wrote] is to be prepared to use it ourselves in retaliation. A knowledge that we were prepared, in the last resort, to do this might well deter an aggressive nation. Duelling was a recognised method of settling quarrels between men of high social standing so long as the duellists stood twenty paces apart and fired at each other with pistols of a primitive type. If the rule had been that they should stand a yard apart with pistols at each other’s hearts, we doubt whether it would long have remained a recognised method of settling affairs of honour.45
One of the Tizard Committee’s firm conclusions was that the close liaison between scientists and the Services that had developed in wartime should be continued in peacetime. Their prescription was:
to concentrate much of the scientific effort available for defence on to basic research into the physical principles underlying the design of weapons of war, and not on improvements in detail for which there is naturally always a persistent demand from the Service departments… in the effort to provide for the immediate needs of everyone we run the risk of grasping at the shadow of things of the past and losing the substance of things to come.46
Among the things to come that they foresaw were supersonic jet fighters, nuclear-powered submarines, guided missiles and torpedoes, anti-ship weapons that would home in on radar transmitters (and counter-measures against the same), and great refinement in radar communications. The Navy would rely increasingly on submarines, and battleships would be obsolete because surface ships had to be large enough only to carry their complement of guided missiles. While the Navy would remain central to the protection of the British Isles, ‘alone [it] is no longer our sure defence and the scientific development that we foresee forces us to the conclusion that the air and sea war are indivisible’.47
Two days before the Tizard report was presented to the Chiefs of Staff, Bernal was meant to have flown to Moscow in a group of thirty scientists invited to celebrate the 220th Anniversary of the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Hours before their planned departure, Bernal, Blackett and six others had their exit visas cancelled; a press release was issued saying that they could not go because they ‘were engaged on work of the greatest importance in the production of war materials and research’.48 There seems little doubt that Churchill and Cherwell were concerned with possible security breaches about atomic energy, even though none of those prevented from going had worked directly on the Manhattan Project. The scientists were furious and saw it as an unwarranted restriction on their freedom of speech and movement. Blackett staged a magnificent, one-man walkout from the Admiralty in protest. Sage with two others wrote to Lord Woolton, the Lord President of the Council, seeking an assurance that participation in government research would not limit their freedom of contact with scientists in other countries. Woolton replied that he and all his colleagues owed a debt to British scientists for ‘the great and indispensable contribution’ made in the war. He recognized that progress in science ultimately depended on the freest possible interchange of ideas between scientists and hoped ‘this wartime restriction will be brought to an end with all speed’.49
Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary, wrote an apologetic note to Bernal the following month. He said that ‘the decision was the Prime Minister’s in his capacity as Minister of Defence and the reason publicly given was his reason’. He also revealed that Churchill had instructed that ‘the names of those excluded [from the visit] should be so jumbled up as to make it as difficult as possible to draw any inference about any particular individual’.50 While admitting that he had been influenced by ‘the probable attitude of America’, Anderson gave his personal assurance that there had been no loss of confidence in any particular individual, ‘nor any consideration of the political views of any individual’. This last claim seems preposterous. The fact that Anderson wrote to Bernal personally suggests that he was one of the scientists the government did not want to risk in Moscow, and Blackett was surely another, given that he was a nuclear physicist with intimate knowledge of the bomb. It is also likely that their membership of the Tizard Committee weighed in the balance.
The Tizard Report was withdrawn from circulation in Whitehall a few days after its release in June 1945, probably because of the references to atomic weapons; but within two months the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had jolted the world into the atomic age. Although British scientists had been actively working on nuclear research for five years, the unprecedented level of secrecy meant that there had been no debate about the implications for the country’s own defence. Attlee had replaced Churchill as Prime Minister less than two weeks before the Hiroshima bomb was dropped; he was just as much a neophyte in nuclear affairs as the new US President, Harry Truman. On the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, General ‘Pug’ Ismay (Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Defence) suggested t
o Attlee that Tizard be asked to revise his recent report in an attempt to provide information about the production and potential use of the bomb and about possible counter-measures because such knowledge was ‘almost completely lacking’.51
Many scientists spoke out in the weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as one would expect, Sage was one of the first in print. While accepting that the use of the atomic bombs had been decisive in ending the war, he shared the common opinion that the actuality of the bomb ‘implicitly changed the whole existence of man in this universe’.52 The fears of further destruction were stronger in the public mind than the hopes of untold benefits because ‘though the people may have little experience of the behaviour of atoms, they have considerable experience of the behaviour of men, corporately and individually. They remember in the past, science has only been fully deployed in human destruction, and this gives a poor augury for the beneficent use of these more powerful forces.’53 Although the benefits of harnessing atomic energy were not yet clear, Sage was optimistic that its most immediate impact might be on undeveloped nations which lacked fossil fuels: ‘such energy can be used to pump water and to make fertilizer… to extend and to intensify agricultural exploitation… in effect, that the basic limitation of food supply, already being felt acutely in the world, will be removed.’ He insisted that the responsibility for controlling atomic energy from the first should be fully international and under the aegis of the United Nations. ‘The maintaining of secrecy on the principles and processes involved and the limitations of their application to the use of particular nations would be doubly disastrous, partly in slowing down the rate of useful progress, but, far more seriously, in withholding the utilisation of atomic energy on account of mutual suspicion.’ The enormous scale of the Manhattan Project, and the collaboration required to achieve its goal made it plain to Sage that science needed to be organized on a world-wide basis; it could no longer be ‘done in holes and corners’.
Bernal covered several of the same themes on a BBC overseas broadcast on 3rd September. He thought atomic power would have great possibilities in countries like India with poor natural fuel sources: ‘in tropical countries, power means water, water means food, and food means people.’54 His sceptical opponent, A.V. Hill, said that there had been a similar enthusiasm for science at the end of the First World War, ‘but only a very small fraction of the plans came to anything’. Sage disagreed saying that he thought there had been a much bigger kick this time to start things off. It was imperative that the country took the right approach to science research and unless scientists were given a say in public policy decisions, ‘the decisions will be nonsense’. Countries without a solid science base would be like savages of the eighteenth century were in relation to Western Europe – unable to affect the civilized world.
At the end of September, Sage shared a platform with Blackett, the Joliot-Curies, Sir George Thomson, Marcus Oliphant and others at a meeting on ‘The social implications of the atomic bomb’. It was resolved that British scientists ‘should continue to make very strong representations, as a body, to influence the use of the weapon; that it was a matter in which there could be no more secrecy. It was agreed also that for Great Britain this was not an offensive weapon, for we are far more vulnerable than almost any other country to attack by atomic weapons, but that the peacetime applications might prove more important to the Empire than to any other nation.’55 In private conversation, Blackett was the most outspoken, railing against ‘the incompetence and sheer stupidity’ of the British atomic effort to date, and describing the Quebec Agreement (the secret 1943 agreement that atomic weapons would be developed as an Anglo-American collaboration and only used against third parties with joint consent) as ‘a degrading document’.56
On 16th October, Blackett and Bernal took their seats as two members of the reconfigured Joint Technical Warfare Committee to revise the Tizard Report. They now had access to official information on atomic energy through the Tube Alloys Directorate (Tube Alloys was the meaningless title given to the British wartime atomic research programme) and from Sir James Chadwick, still in Washington as head of the British scientific team. The original Tizard Committee was dissuaded from identifying any specific country as a potential foe, and its report was criticized subsequently as a technical document written in a strategic vacuum. The new JTWC included senior military representatives, and they were determined to link the revised findings to the world as the Chiefs of Staff saw it. The COS had for some time been convinced, to the discomfort of the Foreign Office, that the possibility of a hostile Soviet Union in the post-war period should be seriously considered. The scientists from the original Tizard Committee must, therefore, have been surprised when Major-General Gordon MacMillan circulated the following, hypothetical queries.
What scale of effort would be required on the target to knock out all cities of (a) over 100,000 or (b) over 50,000 in, for example, the U.S.S.R. assuming that there were no other targets worthy of attack? What then would be the total number of atomic weapons we should have to produce?57
He also asked what nuclear arsenals the Russians would need to mount similar attacks against the major cities in the United Kingdom, the Dominions and the USA. The JTWC met frequently over the next few weeks, and while atomic weapons remained its main priority, it also heard evidence from leading experts on chemical and biological warfare. By mid-November, MacMillan concluded that given the projected ranges of bombers and rockets over the next decade, it was improbable that either the USA or the USSR could target the other’s major cities for nuclear attack. The general problem of an attack using atomic bombs, therefore, ‘may conveniently be reduced to the particular case of a war between the UK and the USSR, not because such a war is likely, but because it presents a suitable example of different vulnerability in each country’.58 He asked Bernal and Dr Henry Hulme, who had succeeded Blackett at the Admiralty, to compile a report on the weight of attack required ‘to knock out for practical purposes’ target cities in the UK and USSR, the best modes of delivering such attacks, and the resulting losses.59
Bernal and Hulme gave a progress report on 22nd January.60 They had identified 84 Soviet cities with populations over 100,000, and calculated their distances from three hypothetical British bases: the English city of Norwich, Nicosia on the island of Cyprus, and Peshawar then in north-west India. They had made the reciprocal calculations for 49 large British cities in terms of their distances from bases in Soviet-controlled Germany and Latvia. The pair was authorized to continue their work. That month, Sage gave a lecture to the Fabian Society on ‘Atomic energy and international security’.61 Quoting General Groves on the advent of far more powerful atom bombs, Sage urged his audience not to think of the present weapons as the last word in destructiveness, rather the first word of the atomic age which should be stopped ‘at the very beginning of its career’. There was, he warned, no defence against an atom bomb – ‘there is only retaliation’. It was essentially a weapon of terror because it was most effective against populations concentrated in cities; and of course about half of the most beautiful cities in Europe had been destroyed in the war just ended. That war did not ‘destroy civilization, but it is not the kind of thing we want to repeat on a larger scale’. The bomb was only a new technical device and as such would not prevent war: ‘the only way in which a new technical device can bring an end to war is if it stirs people into effective political action against war.’ It could not be used in war ‘unless a previous state of mind has grown up in which the governments of large countries, or… the people of large countries, are capable of thinking that the inhabitants of other large countries belong to a different species, are subhuman… The one sure protection against the atom bomb is the prevention of any kind of international and inter-racial attitude of contempt, fear or hatred. We must begin by outlawing the bomb because once we decide that human beings are not to be bombed and slaughtered in hundreds of thousands totally indiscriminately, we shall begin to see that slaughte
ring them by tens of thousands more or less discriminately is not a particularly good idea either.’
Although Bernal seemed not to understand it, the behaviour of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe was giving rise to deep distrust and alarm in the United Kingdom and the United States. Far from honouring the promises made at Yalta in 1945 that liberated peoples should exercise choice in ‘the form of government under which they will live’ through free elections, the Soviets were imposing their despotic rule across a block of countries. In March 1946, Churchill made his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri, which provoked a furious response from Stalin. On 2nd April, the Warner Memorandum62 setting out ‘The Soviet campaign against this country and our response to it’ circulated in the Foreign Office. Reflecting on recent speeches by Stalin, Molotov and other members of the Politburo, Warner identified three major trends in Soviet policy:
the return to the ‘pure doctrine of Marx–Lenin–Stalinism’;
the intense build-up of industrial and military strength;
the revival of ‘the bogey of external danger to the Soviet Union’.
Accepting that the Soviet Union was war-weary and the British COS view that the Russians ‘do not wish to get involved in another war for at least the next five years’, Warner still thought the Soviets were ‘practising the most vicious power politics’ and seemed ‘determined to stick at nothing, short of war, to obtain [their] objectives’. In his opinion, it would be ‘in the highest degree rash’ to assume that the Russians would not continue to attack Great Britain ‘which they must regard as the leader of Social Democracy and the more vulnerable of the two great Western powers’. He concluded that: