by Andrew Brown
The Soviet Government makes coordinated use of military, economic, propaganda and political weapons and also of the Communist ‘religion’. It is submitted, therefore, that we must at once organise and coordinate our defences against all these and that we should not stop short of a defensive-offensive policy.
British diplomats and military chiefs were beginning to think as one.
On 13th April 1946, Hulme (who by this time was also Scientific Adviser to the Air Ministry) presented a twenty-page ‘Preliminary note’, summarizing the work he and Bernal had undertaken over the previous six months. Their simple model was intended ‘to provide a very tentative estimate of the situation ten years hence’.63 They grouped cities together into targets suitable for individual bomber raids. Realizing that the attacks on Russia would be deep into defended territory, so that the chances of a single bomber reaching a target in the presence of radar-controlled fighters would be virtually nil, the chosen tactic was to send large protective forces to accompany a relatively small number of planes carrying atom bombs. This large force would peel off close to the target cities in each defined group, and the bombs would be dropped. There were fifteen Soviet groups and a further eleven cities that would need to be attacked individually, (26 raids), in order to demolish those centres housing 88 per cent of the urban Russian population. For this wholesale destruction, 242 atom bombs would need to hit their target, and so about 370 would have to be dispatched. An equivalent degree of devastation could be visited on the largest 42 British cities by just seven large Russian raids, needing 159 atom bombs to hit their target.
Hulme’s paper was considered at the JTWC meeting on 16th April and formed an important component of their final revision of the Tizard Report, which was delivered to the Chiefs of Staff in May. The revised report also included data, collected in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on fatalities and material damage. The JTWC pointed out that the United Kingdom, mainly for reasons of geography, was far more vulnerable to nuclear attack than the USA or the USSR. As few as 30 atom bombs dropped on British cities ‘with the promise of more to follow’ could produce national collapse. By contrast, the collapse of Russia ‘would require the rapid delivery of several hundred bombs on target’.64 If an attack on Russia was not well coordinated, the spread of terror could be controlled by an authoritarian government and the remaining cities evacuated. Atom bombs would need to be stockpiled in peacetime because wartime production would be negligible. Within the projected defence budget over the next decade, the cost of producing several hundred atomic bombs would be relatively small; the JTWC also pointed out that although there was no operational experience, the use of biological warfare might be just as devastating and cheaper.
It is hard to imagine more sensational or dangerous official documents than the revised Tizard report and Hulme’s Preliminary Note. There were ‘severe repercussions at COS level’ when one JTWC paper that identified ‘a particular Power’ as a potential enemy and another that contained ‘“Top Secret” material vital to the security’ of the UK were allowed ‘a dangerously wide circulation’ in the revision of the Tizard Report.65 Leaving aside the moral and historical issues raised by these documents, there are two obvious questions concerning Sage’s role in their preparation. First, why was a man recognized as being as ‘red as the flames of hell’ at the start of the war, allowed to take part in such a sensitive strategic exercise? Second, why did Sage agree to do it? As we shall see later, Zuckerman maintained vehemently that by the end of the war, Bernal was a recognized security risk. There are reasons to doubt Zuckerman’s memory on this, but it is incontestable that in June 1945 Sage was prevented by the British Government from visiting the USSR. If one looks at the eight who were refused permission to travel, only one, Sir Charles Darwin, had any recent connection with the Manhattan Project; but Blackett and Bernal were probably thought to be communist sympathizers with knowledge of sensitive military information.
Julian Lewis, the historian, suggests: ‘The involvement of Bernal in the revision of the Tizard Report, notwithstanding his co-authorship of the original version, would appear to have been an early instance of the implications of the change in potential enemies not being fully thought through in terms of governmental personnel recruited during the war.’66 Sage never sought, and never declined, any job that was offered to him as part of the war effort. He became one of a handful of scientists to gain direct access to military and political leaders, who in turn came to recognize his exceptional abilities and to trust him. He was also very agreeable company, as Mountbatten found. He did make some political statements during the war, mostly at scientific gatherings, but once the war was over his opinions on the state of the world were readily available in print and through the BBC’s home and overseas services. It would still have needed a sharp-eyed security service to identify Sage as a potential misfit within the defence establishment, although the arrest of the first atomic spy, Alan Nunn May, in the spring of 1946 should have triggered a systematic review of scientists in government service.
The May case came too late to affect Bernal’s role in the revision of the Tizard Report, as did a sharp denunciation of his morals, his totalitarian outlook and his ‘pompous and slovenly’ prose by George Orwell. Taking as his text an essay on ‘Belief and action’67 that Bernal had written as ‘an attempt to set down briefly and logically the canons of a modern faith, one essentially as humanistic as it is scientific’, Orwell reduced Bernal’s message to the following propositions:
Apart from ‘truthfulness and good fellowship’, no quality can be definitely labelled good or bad. Any action which serves the cause of progress is virtuous.
Progress means moving towards a classless and scientifically planned society.
The quickest way to get there is to co-operate with the Soviet Union.
Cooperation with the Soviet Union means not criticising the Stalin regime.
To put it even more shortly: anything is right which furthers the aims of Russian foreign policy.68
One can imagine the looks of dismay on the faces of any Foreign Office or military chiefs connected with the revised Tizard Report, who happened to read the May issue of Polemic.
As to the second question of why Sage would undertake such a distasteful task, several reasons come to mind. The obvious one would be to inform the Soviet Union of these sinister plans. No evidence for this has ever come to light, and for him to do so might run the risk of escalating a theoretical military contingency into a genuine conflict with incalculable consequences (that potential transition had certainly troubled the Foreign Office). Just as there was some inertia on the side of the Establishment, it would have taken a deliberate step by Sage to exclude himself from the process. He regarded the discovery of atomic energy as a revolutionary event in human history: he told the Fabians in his January 1946 talk that the advent of agriculture was the only previous discovery of the same magnitude. He was convinced that scientists needed to play a central role in guiding governments towards an international system of control that would banish the use of atomic bombs, while maximizing the benefits of the civil use of atomic energy. This was no time for Sage to withdraw from the debate – rather he needed to immerse himself in the challenge. A logical analysis of the insane deployment of atomic bombs might persuade the British Government to repudiate them forever.
14
Rebuilding
Bernal’s wartime contact with Birkbeck College was slight and somewhat peevish. Breams Buildings had closed after being hit by incendiary bombs in September 1940, but reopened the following month, with lectures being given at weekends rather than in the evenings. Lewis Simons became acting head of the Physics Department, and in March 1941 word reached Sage that he had sacked Mr Reggie Dobb, the senior laboratory technician. Bernal immediately wrote a letter of protest, but the dismissal was upheld on the basis that staff numbers needed to be reduced. Sage then decided that since the College was in operation at weekends only, he should take up the reins again (t
his was at the time he was starting to work at Bomber Command). After several Faculty meetings, a compromise was reached whereby Mr Dobb would be re-employed, perhaps on a part time basis, when conditions improved. Eventually, he was rehired for four days per week, and Sage asked the College to pay him for a full week ‘to lay the last ghosts of a controversy’.1 H. Gordon Jackson, the Acting Master, complained to Sage, asking ‘Where is this to stop?’ Sage’s response was judged by the College administration to be ‘a complete travesty of the facts’.2
Gordon Jackson explained that he was much more concerned about welfare of the Physics Department as a whole and Bernal’s inability to spend more than a few hours per month at Birkbeck, although he understood that he was carrying out work of paramount importance. Gordon Jackson was therefore going to recommend to the Governors that Simons be reappointed as acting head. Sage was ‘extremely surprised’ by Gordon Jackson’s letter and in his own defence stated: ‘As far as I am aware there have been no difficulties in the running of the Department of Physics in the present year, in marked contrast to the previous year.’3 He could not countenance the appointment of any deputy in whom he did not have full confidence and wished to put his views to the Governors in person. At this point, the Acting Master relented and explained that he was not unsympathetic to Bernal’s difficulties and suggested that they should meet for lunch. At the lunch, he seems to have persuaded Bernal that he could not run the Physics Department himself and that Simons was not such a bad deputy. He also suggested that Bernal’s original five-year appointment should be suspended for the duration of the war, with four years left to run after hostilities ceased. At the end of the four years, Sage could decide whether he wanted to stay and would be offered a lifetime appointment. This was mutually agreed in October 1942.4
After that, Bernal’s thoughts did not return to Birkbeck until early in 1945. In February of that year, he drew up a ‘Draft Scheme for a Biomolecular Centre’.5 This would be a multi-disciplinary department that would seek to exploit all of the available physical techniques to investigate the structure and biological functions of proteins. His proposals echoed those of the fictional Constantine in The Search for a National Institute of Biophysical Research. Sage would still be honouring the gentlemen’s agreement he made with Astbury before the war, that he would concentrate on crystalline proteins and leave the long-fibre structures to Astbury in Leeds: the Centre ‘would not be concerned with the high polymer molecules either natural or synthetic, the structure of which has been so ably elucidated by Professor Astbury and his co-workers. It would include both extensive study of the largest number of proteins readily available in a pure form, particularly those of agricultural or medical interest’, besides taking up work on viruses again and making ‘a particular drive’ to examine the protein constituent of chromosomes. He foresaw the laboratories being divided into six sections: biological (to prepare and assay the proteins to be analysed); biochemical (mainly for protein purification); physico-chemical (to measure the electrical and surface characteristics of the biological molecules. A good ultracentrifuge would be an essential piece of equipment); optical (ultraviolet and polarizing microscopy as well as the best light microscopes available); electronic (for the use and development of the newly invented electron microscope); X-ray (with diffraction apparatus suitable for examining structures such as viruses with very large unit cells, and for liquids. Improved X-ray tubes more suitable for biological work would be developed in this lab).
Bernal’s stock was at its zenith at the end of the war. With Blackett, Waddington and Zuckerman, he was a founding father and leading exponent of operational research. The Royal Society gave him the Royal Medal in recognition for his X-ray analysis of the structure of proteins and other substances. One month after drawing up his scheme for a Biomolecular Centre, Sage received a letter from Tizard informing him that the Nuffield Foundation, of which he was a trustee, would buy the necessary equipment and support the salaries of senior research staff; Tizard also mentioned that since there was no viable laboratory space at Birkbeck, Sage might be given temporary accommodation at the Royal Institution.6
While others rightly saw Sage as the country’s leading exponent of structural analysis of biomolecules, he was acutely aware of his six-year enforced absence from the field. He admitted this concern in a lecture to a conference at the Institute of Physics, but knowing little of recent work, he thought he would ‘not fail to see the wood for the trees’.7 The one piece of current work that he had followed closely was Dorothy Hodgkin’s Oxford project on the structure of penicillin. He referred to this obliquely in his talk ‘as one of the triumphs of crystallography’ resulting in ‘the complete determination of the structure of one extremely important compound before the chemists had unravelled its structural formula’.8 When Dorothy told him about the β-lactam structure of penicillin, sitting on the steps of the Royal Society, Sage said to her, ‘You will get the Nobel Prize for this.’ She replied that she would rather be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he commented, ‘That’s more difficult.’9
Bernal wrote back to Tizard in the summer of 1945 to say that although the Royal Institution was prepared to put five rooms at his disposal from 1st September until 31st July 1946, it could not guarantee the space for any longer than that. He asked the Nuffield Foundation for £1,000 to buy equipment and £8,000 annually for five years towards running costs.10 In the meantime Bernal set about assembling his research team. He would have loved to bring Fan back from Brooklyn, but in his absence approached Harry Carlisle (who had taken the Birkbeck cameras to Oxford during the war) to head the crystallography section that would work on proteins and viruses. Helen Megaw, who had spent several years teaching science in a girl’s grammar school and the last two years of the war in industry, needed little persuasion to return to academic life; she was to be in charge of a group studying the structure of cement and other building materials (an area in which Bernal held official responsibilities). Werner Ehrenberg, who had been brought to Birkbeck by Blackett, would be in charge of developing new apparatus – especially fine-focus, high-intensity X-ray tubes that would cut down on the exposure times and give much better resolution. The final section chief was to be Andrew Donald Booth, a self-confident man in his late twenties, with a recent PhD in crystallography from the University of Birmingham. Sage was not particularly interested in his abilities as a crystal-lographer, but wanted him for his mathematical and engineering talents. Booth was a computer pioneer. At Birmingham, he had already built an analogue computer, which he used to calculate the reciprocal spacings for a crystal X-ray diffraction pattern. Dorothy Hodgkin had begun to explore the use of computers for Fourier analysis, and no doubt Sage had seen how they speeded up the painstaking calculations. Booth found Sage ‘as interested in computing as I was’.11
Although Booth was an inventor at heart, he had to do his share of teaching. In the autumn of 1945, the evening physics classes were still held in the bomb-damaged Breams Buildings. Booth was assigned to give a ‘modern physics’ course (relativity and quantum theory). For the first lecture, he was shown up several flights of stairs to a room containing a demonstration table, some chairs and a large blackboard. One of the seasoned lecturers gave him some tips on how to keep the class awake and then advised him not to lean on the blackboard. When he asked why not, he was invited to look through a gap in the wall and saw that there was a forty-foot drop to a heap of rubble below.
Sage wrote to Fan giving a progress report that reflected the shortages and skimping, which were such a feature of post-war life in England.
I am afraid, however, that at present my new Institute is definitely embryonic. The organisers are there but there is very little to organise. I am back where I started, on the top floor of the Davy–Faraday [Laboratory of the Royal Institution], with one X-ray tube which works about one day a fortnight between breakdowns, and vague prospects of getting three more and a few of my old cameras. Beside [Sam] Levine, I have Helen Megaw, Ca
rlisle and a very bright Fourier merchant called Booth, an electronics man called Ehrenberg, whom you probably remember at Birkbeck, Katie Schiff and a number of small fry.
Our proposed programme is to pick up more or less where we left off plus all the experience we can get from published material in the interval. Bill Pirie is going to supply us with viruses and I hope also to do some work on antigens and antibodies. The main idea is to link the long range forces with the biological systems…. Another line I am running is on the apparatus side. I want to improve the type of X-ray tubes by using electron lens methods in the way Goldsztaub has done in Paris. We are going to work together on this. As a side-show, mostly from Ehrenberg, I am going to work on semi-conductors, both X-ray and electronically. Besides all this, I have a general plan of work for the building industry on the shrinkage of cements, which is going to be Helen’s particular field as it is mostly hydroxides.
The chief snag at the moment is apparatus and information. What I need, of course, is an electron microscope but there is faint chance of that now that Lease/Lend has come to an end, so I will probably have to make one… My chief trouble, however, is X-ray tubes. There is some hope of getting back to Dutch made Philips tubes but the RAF seems to have done their work there too thoroughly.
How are you getting on with encouraging American manufacturers? Has anything come of your idea about the X-ray flash bulb? I thought it very practical but more use to radiologists than to us. The real trouble is that I have not really got into the picture on X-ray work and other work on proteins and high polymers. Could you possibly get me some kind of critical bibliography of papers that have appeared in the last five years in the States and any reprints you can lay your hands on? We have very little to show here except for Max’s work which is extremely exciting but I expect he sends you reprints. As a matter of fact I have never seen a copy of my own paper to the Cell Congress in 1939 which I believe has been published in a book, but I don’t even know its title. If you can trace it I should be very grateful to have it.