by Andrew Brown
Peacebroking
Just as the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan acted as the immediate stimulus for the disarmament movement after the war, the US thermonuclear weapon test at Bikini atoll on 1st March 1954 re-ignited global fear. The device, fuelled by lithium and an isotope of hydrogen, was at least one thousand times more powerful than the fission bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Its yield was also three times bigger than the Americans expected, because the scientists who developed it at Los Alamos had overlooked an important nuclear fusion reaction.1 The underwater explosion vaporized much of the atoll and caked the crew of the Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon, with radioactive fallout though they were 80 miles away, outside the exclusion zone. The test had been preceded by the announcement of a new strategic policy of ‘massive retaliation’ by the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in January.
Bertrand Russell, the elder statesman of mathematics and philosophy in England, felt compelled to sound the alarm that mankind was in danger of exterminating life on the planet through the development of the H-bomb. He gave a talk on ‘Man’s Peril’ at Christmas 1954 on BBC radio, which attracted a good deal of public comment. Among the hundreds of letters received by Russell was one from Joliot-Curie in his capacity as president of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW). In his opinion, Joliot-Curie said, ‘The danger that faces humanity appears so terribly real that I believe it essential for scientists whom people respect for their eminence to come together to prepare an objective statement on the matter.’2 Taking up this suggestion, Russell wrote to Einstein asking if he could recruit scientists in America to join the campaign to bring home to people and governments the looming disaster of war in the thermonuclear age. Two days before his sudden death in April 1955, Einstein replied to Russell endorsing his proposed message; this was announced to the world as the Russell–Einstein Manifesto in London later that summer.
Sage proposed Russell, an ardent anti-communist, for the 1955 Stalin Peace Prize, but warned his fellow committee members that he would probably refuse it.3 Bernal continued to be convinced that the major nuclear danger came from the US – with some reason. The US National Security Council had pledged secretly in October 1953 to ‘consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions’ in the case of war with the USSR or China.4 Bernal seemed to sense this covert American policy, when addressing a public meeting in Holborn Town Hall in March 1955:
The truth is that there exists a very definite intention in some quarters to use these weapons. The pretence of using them only for retaliation has been dropped, and military commanders are boasting of their incorporation in normal military establishments. Therefore, there are people who will always find reasons for saying that control is not possible. It follows that the answer to the problem of the abolition of atomic weapons lies not in devising more ingenious methods of control, but in beginning to establish control. This will not be done as long as there is the intention to use the nuclear weapons, but when that intention is dropped, control will be easy. The people know this. They know that the ‘grand deterrent’ wanted by Churchill and Eisenhower is not what they want themselves, and for this reason they are resisting certain official policies. A remarkable feature of the situation is the extreme reluctance of the governments of both Britain and the US to state that they will not use the bomb first. Apparently they are too scrupulous to make a statement they may not keep.5
At the beginning of March, there had been a defence debate in parliament, centering on Britain’s decision to produce her own H-bomb. Prime Minister Churchill defended the policy as necessary to reinforce the Western world’s deterrence against the communist bloc; he held out the hope that ‘safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’.6 The main political rift was not between Churchill’s government and the Labour opposition, but within the ranks of the Labour party, where Aneurin Bevan accused Attlee of ‘a monstrous evasion of a cataclysmic issue’.7 Small anti-bomb organizations began to spring up, some endorsed by church leaders and trade unions – women’s groups in north London (where Sage was living with Margot Heinemann) were particularly active. At this pivotal time, Bernal felt that it was his duty as a scientist to ‘study the facts about the effects of nuclear weapons and to use every means at [his] disposal to communicate them’.8
There was a World Assembly for Peace in Helsinki in June 1955, which Labour MPs were forbidden to attend. Bernal, of course, was there and regretted that the ban had resulted in the British contingent being almost entirely communist. He spoke about the overwhelming threat posed by the H-bomb with its unprecedented destructive power that
… is so horrible and so extensive that it has almost served to prevent any intelligent reaction to it. With disasters of this magnitude the human mind is fascinated and paralysed. People cannot bear to believe it and rather tend to await it passively like the predicted end of the world. But this cannot be our attitude for if man brings universal destruction about by his own efforts he will stand self-condemned in that last judgment. We in the peace movement must not allow ourselves to be terrified or hypnotized but rather we must think clearly and act deliberately. Exaggeration and apathy have equally to be avoided…. we must however clearly distinguish between those who prepare for atomic war which they see as inevitable and the far greater number who have been persuaded that the production of atomic bombs in some way guarantees peace. We must find ways to make it clear to them that the mere existence of such weapons is a permanent threat to peace and inevitably increases international tension… The central case is that these weapons are inhuman in themselves and that their use cannot be tolerated whatever the excuse… Atomic bombs are evil things, whatever government makes them – American, Soviet or British.9
Bernal’s main sphere of activity remained the Soviet-funded World Peace Council (WPC), on which he had served as vice-president since its inception in 1949. By the mid-1950s non-aligned peace organizations were beginning to emerge that infuriated the WPC by pointing out the USSR, and not just the USA, posed a nuclear threat to the world. The prominent Methodist leader, Rev. Donald Soper, denounced the WPC and its national spin-off, the British Peace Committee, as organs of Russian propaganda in a letter to Tribune. He cautioned peace lovers in England against ‘allowing themselves to become the well-meaning but inevitable pawns of the Russian Party line, with its insistence that war is the original sin of the Western powers and that peace is the immaculate conception of the Soviet bloc’.10 As if to illustrate Soper’s point, the WPC found no contradiction in condemning the Anglo-French invasion of Suez, while excusing the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising on the grounds that ‘serious divergences and… opposing theses have not permitted the formulation of a common opinion’.11 The need for a better image did strike some within the USSR. One of Bernal’s fellow committee members for the Stalin Peace Prize, Dimitry Skobeltzyn, suggested changing the name to the Lenin Peace Prize. Sage wrote to Academician Skolbeltzyn saying that he was ‘not very enthusiastic about the project as it seems to me somewhat too obvious a change from the name which has now become a liability’.12
Many British communists did leave the Party over Hungary and threw their lot in with the Labour Party instead. They supported the Bevanite wing in its unsuccessful attempt to make unilateral nuclear disarmament official Labour policy, and then joined other activists to form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), with Bertrand Russell as its president. At Easter 1958, CND was one of the groups who took part in the first Aldermaston march, to the site of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment.13 The marchers, who included Sage, Margot Heinemann and Jane, had an extra spring in their steps because the Soviets had just announced a unilateral suspension of nuclear tests, for an unspecified period. One of their prime motives for doing so was to mobilize public opinion and increase ‘pressure on the USA and England’ to follow suit.14
Joliot-Curie had been in poor health for some years: he once complained that ‘many were the
days when I felt like death, but just had to go on. I noticed this particularly in travel abroad. Everyone was kind, but it was only my conscience that kept me going.’15 He was depressed when he wrote to Bernal in January 1954, reflecting on the recent loss of his sister: ‘I am now the last of a family of six children, and it is painful no longer to have witnesses with whom I can exchange memories of my parents and my childhood.’16 His wife, Irène, died in the spring of 1956 (like her mother, a victim of radiation-induced leukaemia). Two years later, Joliot-Curie summoned up his energies to make a final visit to Moscow, where he had a long meeting with Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Joliot-Curie found him an exciting character – more sympathetic than other world leaders. He thought Khrushchev wanted to inject some liberalism into Soviet affairs but realized that there had to be strict limits, if the ultimate control of the Party was to be preserved. Khrushchev told Joliot-Curie that the WPC should act on principle, even if this meant going against the USSR at times; he also warned of the rapid development of nuclear affairs in China.17
Word reached Bernal that his great friend died in Paris on 14th August 1958. After a State funeral, Joliot-Curie’s body was laid to rest next to Irène’s in a small cemetery at Sceaux. The streets outside were packed with thousands of people, standing in the rain. The main eulogy was delivered by Bernal, in French, on behalf of the WPC. He told the crowds that Joliot qualified as a great man of the twentieth century on two counts. He was firstly ‘a scientist [who] contributed to fundamental discoveries, which have shown how to liberate the giant forces of the atom’; secondly ‘by his public actions he waged a fight so that these forces do not doom mankind to destruction, but assure it benefit by liberating it of age-old ills’.18 It was Joliot-Curie, Bernal said, who more than anyone else reminded scientists of the saying of Rabelais: ‘Science without conscience is nothing but the ruin of the soul.’
Sage spoke from the heart and in doing so moved not only the French crowd but also his colleagues from the WPC, who immediately demanded that he should take on the presidency. In Joliot-Curie’s house that afternoon, he said that he could not be president in rank, but, ‘if he must, he would be in function’.19 It was not in Sage’s nature to refuse the challenge, but he must have realized that he was adding the load of a diplomat to those of a senior academic and still creative scientist – not forgetting he was also the father of a five-year-old daughter. Three days into Bernal’s presidency, Eisenhower announced that from 31st October the US would suspend nuclear tests for one year. The Soviet moratorium of March had succeeded to the extent that the United States appeared ‘in the eyes of the world as a “warmonger”’, Eisenhower told the French foreign minister at the time.20
Bernal gave his first presidential address to the WPC, on home turf in Moscow, six months after Joliot-Curie’s funeral. Under the inspirational leadership of Joliot, he said, the WPC had mobilized public opinion among hundreds of millions to make them understand the dangers of war. In the past decade, the WPC had not only stopped the outbreak of a new world war, but helped to bring to an end serious wars in Korea and Vietnam.21 He was to change his optimistic view on Vietnam during his trip to China that autumn, when he met Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh contrasted the intolerable conditions in South Vietnam under the US-backed government with those in the North, where the peasants were reaping the benefits of reorganization along Leninist lines. He told Sage that the government of South Vietnam was ‘utilizing the refined methods of tyranny, combining the worst of the Nazi’s methods of direct brutality with the legal and inquisitorial methods of American McCarthyism. At the same time the economic conditions in South Vietnam were desperate owing to the effects of American imports and suppression of native industries, and the general diminution of agricultural productions so that the country which had been one of the major riceexporting countries of the world was now being forced to import rice.’22
Ho Chi Minh told Bernal that he was very concerned that Laos, whose royal army was supported by the US, would enter the war against the Vietcong. If they did, he thought China might well be drawn in as well. He urged Bernal to inform world public opinion about what was really happening in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Sage had spent the night before meeting Ho Chi Minh dancing to rock and roll music in Peking, and had no time to rest before setting off to see Khrushchev later that morning. The Soviet leader had just completed a barnstorming tour of the USA, which was just one reason why Mao Zedong was angry with him. The two communist leaders did not manage a civil word between them, and Khrushchev decided to leave on the third day of his official visit.23 It seems probable that his meeting with Bernal was the most relaxed and substantive discussion of his trip. In the circumstances, it was not surprising that Khrushchev advised Bernal that the WPC would have to deal with China direct and not look to the Soviets as intermediaries. Not knowing how dispirited Khrushchev was as a result of the spiteful atmosphere, Sage found him very vague and formed the impression that he would have to do everything for himself. Mao’s interpreter said of the visit that ‘Mao saw himself as the bullfighter and Khrushchev as the bull’,24 but the Soviet leader, who had such a mercurial temper, was measured and thoughtful in his conversation with Bernal. He pointed out that the Chinese were ‘very new at the game’ and fairly trustworthy, but must not be expected to adopt diplomatic methods at this stage of their development.25 He said to Sage ‘we were very like that ourselves when we were 10 years old’.
On the subject of the crises in SE Asia, Bernal found that Khrushchev attached far less significance to Laos than Ho Chi Minh did. The Soviet leader did not think that widespread war arising from Vietnam was likely, but that priority should always be given to disarmament, and if one could get relaxation in the West it was bound to spread sooner or later to the East. Sage was perhaps surprised when Khrushchev ‘stated that these problems had not been discussed between him and President Eisenhower’26 during his recent US visit. As far as the peace movement was concerned, Khrushchev thought the WPC should support an immediate major campaign on disarmament and also insist on the great powers coming together at a summit – a meeting that he had been calling for since the previous year. Bernal formed the impression that Khrushchev ‘was obviously anxious not to compromise relaxation in the West by any openly anti-imperialist or anti-American policy’.27 Khrushchev’s trip to the US had convinced him that the time was right for a summit, but he did not expect immediate success. He told Bernal he was prepared to wait for years for the achievement of a complete disarmament programme and for settlement of outstanding questions such as Germany. Again he did not think that Germany, where he wanted America to recognize East Germany and not to install nuclear weapons in West Germany, would lead to a crisis in the near future.
As a result of his talks with Khrushchev, Sage began 1960 in an optimistic frame of mind. At a WPC meeting in January, he commented that the popular momentum towards nuclear disarmament and a test ban treaty was going to be difficult for the advocates of the Cold War to resist. Those advocates had not yet surrendered and were fighting a tough delaying action, notably in Geneva where an agreement to end nuclear testing had ‘been stalled on a pettifogging technical point of difference’.28 Sage advertised for a peace secretary in The Daily Worker and interviewed a middle-aged woman of child-like intensity, named Vivien Pixner. She was a good organizer and a talented linguist, fluent in French and German. When she accepted the job, she mentioned that there was no phone at her home. Sage said you must have a phone, ‘Get in touch with the Post Office and explain that you will be working for Professor Bernal. The phone will be installed very quickly because MI5 will want to listen to our conversations.’29 She did as she was instructed, and the phone arrived with none of the usual delays.
Nowhere was the battle over a test ban treaty more evenly balanced than in Washington. There were powerful political arguments on both sides – the doves pointed to public fear over radioactive fallout and the arms race, and 1960 was an election year. The hawks
were worried that the British would sign an unenforceable agreement with the Soviets, and that the Soviets would simply cheat in the absence of effective monitoring. At the Pentagon, there was concern about the supposed ‘missile gap’ (with the US lagging the Soviets). The stunning success of the Sputnik programme in 1957 reinforced anxieties about Soviet technical capabilities. Attempting a compromise within his own administration, Eisenhower announced that the USA would not be bound by its moratorium on testing after 1959, but would not resume tests without warning and would continue to negotiate in Geneva for a treaty.30 Bernal wrote to Eisenhower, regretting his statement that the USA was free to resume weapons’ testing. He told the President that the WPC believed the difficulties cited over verification were political rather than technical.31
The nuclear silence that had lasted over a year was broken not by the USSR or the USA, but by France making its conspicuous entry into the nuclear club in early February 1960. Oblivious to protests in Paris and throughout Africa, the French detonated a fission device in the Sahara desert. Sage reacted as though he had been betrayed by an old friend:
The world has heard with indignation of the explosion of the first French atomic bomb, despite appeals voiced in the UN and by many governments and peoples to refrain from such a step. The peoples of Africa will not readily forgive this action carried out on their soil in defiance of their express wishes.
This action occurring as it does in the midst of a truce on tests by the major atomic powers and when negotiations were reaching a decisive stage can only do harm… The real glory of France would have been to adhere to the declaration of the French Government before the UN in 1946 that it would use atomic energy only for peaceful purposes. This was the spirit of the great scientist Frédéric Joliot-Curie who had done so much to help France to master the new powers of science. It is a sad and retrograde step.32