That document gave a bureaucratic overview of the bomb’s evolution, from abstract theory to manifest obliteration. It catalogued the crucial discovery of uranium fission in the years before war, the vital role of British science in applying that knowledge while at the same time fighting for its very existence against Nazi Germany, and the unprecedented melding of human intellect and manufacturing muscle that finally brought the weapon to fruition in the United States.
The moment that caused greatest discomfort for the Australian couple, as they sat silently in their beachside apartment, was the roll call of British experts so prominent in this awesomely savage moment of history. With ‘Professor Oliphant’ among those singled out for laudable mention.
During that weekend, Rosa had noted her husband’s edginess as hourly new bulletins neared, and the closer than usual attention with which he scoured the morning newspapers, but she had remained oblivious to the extent of the tumult he harboured. Despite his litany of indiscretions, Mark Oliphant had successfully withheld from his wife all information about his role in the development of this definitive killing device.
‘He doesn’t talk about his work,’ Rosa would recall when interviewed months after the 9pm bulletin confirmed Mark’s involvement in the bomb’s production. ‘Naturally, it’s too important. I knew, of course, that he had been working on atoms, but I didn’t know how successful it was until the news was officially released. It was a terrific surprise.’4
There was also alarm as she watched the colour drain and the usually sunny expression fade from Mark’s cherubic face as the wireless set spoke of the force unleashed on an unsuspecting Japanese city. They were characteristics that remained absent from his visage when the couple rose next morning, after a fitful night’s sleep.
The same text as had been read on radio was then laid out in the newspapers. Mark Oliphant’s preferred broadsheet, The Times, pointedly printed ‘The First Atomic Bomb’ alongside its emblematic front-page masthead. Beneath the ensuing report stood four decks of headline in large capital letters:
FIRST ATOMIC BOMB HITS JAPAN
EXPLOSION EQUAL TO 20,000 TONS OF T.N.T.
ANGLO–US WAR SECRET OF FOUR YEARS’ RESEARCH
‘RAIN OF RUIN’ FROM THE AIR5
Among the three columns of densely packed newsprint, along with the names of Oliphant and other scientists, was the deposed prime minister’s declaration that ‘by God’s mercy British and American science outpaced all German efforts [to construct an atomic bomb]. These were on a considerable, scale, but far behind.’6
As Mark Oliphant would spend the subsequent fifty-five years of his life explaining, the effort he had invested in the atomic bomb was founded on a single burning belief: that the genocidal doctrine pursued by Adolf Hitler could not be allowed to succeed. The consequences if Germany secured the bomb outweighed any concern as to how it might be used by the Allies. Fused with the terror and devastation he had seen wrought upon Britain’s cities through nightly Nazi bombing raids, Oliphant’s antipathy towards Germany had fermented into unconcealed hatred.
What Oliphant, and others, would not know until long after the war concluded was that Nazi Germany was even further from mastering nuclear technology than Churchill’s statement had suggested. That reality had been confirmed to intelligence agencies through the capture and internment of Germany’s foremost physicists, who were secretly held at a Georgian manor not far from Cambridge University following the Allied victory in Europe.
Every room at Farm Hall, the walled residence in semi-rural Godmanchester where the renowned scientists were kept under house arrest, was fitted with listening devices. Through the elaborate surveillance program, each fleeting utterance and shared conversation was recorded, laboriously translated into English and cabled on a daily, highly confidential basis to General Leslie Groves in Washington.
Among those who were held captive for six months were two Nobel Prize winners, and a third – Otto Hahn, discoverer of nuclear fission – would learn of his Nobel honour during internment. Another of the ten inmates was Paul Harteck, the man who had worked shoulder to shoulder with Oliphant and Rutherford in the discovery of tritium at the Cavendish Laboratory before returning to Germany.
But the true moribund state of Germany’s bomb program was not fully understood until the unguarded astonishment that was betrayed by the men when they learned of Hiroshima’s devastation. The news was relayed to them via the same 9pm BBC radio bulletin that so troubled Mark Oliphant.
As that Monday evening progressed, and the scientists nearest to Germany’s bomb program numbed their shock with house wine, their raw reactions confirmed to Groves that the Nazis had been nowhere near the successful completion of an atomic weapon. They could not hide their disbelief that the Allies had finished a functioning bomb in such a timeframe, and some dismissed the news report as a propaganda hoax.
It would be decades before edited sections of the Farm Hall transcripts were publicly released, but by then details of the Germans’ attempts to build a bomb had leached out. The mutual mistrust between Hitler’s government and many of the senior scientists involved in the project, as well as the defection of so many crucial scientific personnel to Germany’s wartime rivals, meant the Third Reich had not even managed to develop a functioning nuclear reactor by the time it was defeated. Given that the Japanese never seriously embarked on a nuclear weapons program, it became clear to Oliphant that his relentless drive to secure the bomb before Britain’s enemies did so had been forged upon a deeply flawed premise.
* * *
By the time the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, three days after the destruction of Hiroshima, the Oliphants’ much-awaited family vacation had been cut short. Realising the device he had doggedly believed would curtail the atrocities of war had instead been used to escalate them, Oliphant had rushed back to Birmingham.
On arrival at his office, he found the public release of Churchill’s statement had already endowed him with a measure of celebrity. Within a day, he was approached by Hugh Warren, managing director of heavy manufacturing enterprise British Thomson-Houston, to deliver a presentation to the firm’s engineers: ‘now that the lid is off – exposing the top layers [of the bomb project]’.7
As Sir Hugh noted in his invitation, there was a general feeling that Oliphant had received ‘extremely scanty mention’ in official summaries of the nation’s atomic contributions. That was probably because he had not been among the core of scientists working under Oppenheimer, the bomb’s acknowledged ‘father’, at Los Alamos. Plus, he had disentangled himself entirely from the Manhattan Project months before its deadly secret became known. But that did not assuage his own sense of culpability as reports of the horror in Japan became increasingly graphic.
His first public response to the barbarity he had helped inflict came in the weeks after the dual strike on Japan. In the midst of the V-J Day celebrations, after Japan had formally signed surrender documents in early September, Oliphant took up a guest-speaking invitation with Birmingham’s Rotary Club. There he claimed that, having used the bombs in the slaughter of innocents, the war’s victorious parties ‘cannot complain if one is eventually dropped on us’.8 Newspapers in Britain and Australia carried details of that speech, in which his initial distress had clearly distilled into simmering anger.
At the heart of his fury lay his belief that Japan’s submission might well have been achieved by staging an increasingly threatening series of deterrent strikes. It could have begun with the demonstration of the bomb’s frightening potential at a remote location, with the result that human life and property would have been preserved. Then, in addition to an intensive propaganda campaign waged by radio and leaflet drops, a subsequent bomb could have been detonated off the Japanese coast to display its ferocity. If that were not effective, the next step could have been to destroy one of the Tokyo Bay islands utilised as a naval base, and only as a last resort should the device have been used on a city.
‘I’v
e always thought it was a tragic mistake to actually drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They should have been used to blow the top off Mount Fujiyama,’ Oliphant would later reflect.9
However, this overlooked the reality that the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only two in the United States arsenal at that time. Had the warning shots been ignored, the war would have continued for months, possibly longer, with countless more lives lost while uranium was painstakingly collected or plutonium extracted for further devices. In fact, the scientific panel formed to advise President Truman on nuclear matters – which included Oliphant’s friends Lawrence and Oppenheimer – had considered the deterrent option a month before the Japan strikes, and decided the psychological impact would not be the same. They reasoned there was no alternative to direct use.10
Oliphant, however, continued to assert that, had control of the bomb remained with the scientific community that had brought it to life, it would never have been deployed against civilians. And that any odium directed at the scientists among the upper echelons of the Manhattan Project should be aimed, instead, at the politicians who had ultimately hijacked it.
While he would stoutly defend his involvement in the Manhattan Project, and proclaim he was ‘proud to have been associated with the wartime atomic energy project, for the alternatives that Germany or Japan had first possessed the nuclear weapons are too dreadful to contemplate’,11 Oliphant’s retrospective disdain for the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki never diminished. ‘I felt so utterly disgusted and upset by this use of the nuclear weapons against a civilian population,’ he would later reflect.12 ‘During the war I worked practically the whole time on defence research. I worked then on nuclear weapons so I, too, am a war criminal.’13
‘I think nowadays I would not work on a project like that. The trouble is when your country is at war, well, you give yourself completely to its defence.’14
In particular, his soul was scarred by John Hersey’s heart-rending first-person accounts from Hiroshima, published in the New Yorker a year after the bombing. Much of Oliphant’s personal correspondence from before 1957 has been lost or misplaced in vast university archives, but that edition of the magazine stayed with him, as a form of moral touchstone. His wordless markings on the edges of those yellowing pages denoted the most confronting revelations, as a ready reference should his conscience ever waver.
Among the delicately highlighted passages of Hersey’s reportage that had awakened the world to the horror inflicted upon Japan was an excerpt from an eyewitness report. It had been submitted to the Vatican by Father John Siemes of Tokyo’s Catholic university.
Siemes noted: ‘The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result?’15
It was a question that would resonate with Oliphant throughout his life.
There was also a further macabre irony, in that the pinnacle of Oliphant’s work in experimental physics – the 1934 discovery that the collision between two light nuclei could yield a heavier atom – would prove integral to the development of humanity’s most obscene weapon, the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, which superseded its uranium and plutonium predecessors. This was a fusion device ignited by a smaller fission bomb that, when successfully tested in the 1950s, was shown to be hundreds of times more potent than the plutonium weapon that destroyed Nagasaki. Its development also ensured that the convoluted process by which material was gathered for the (far less powerful) atomic bomb was rendered immediately obsolete.
Oliphant’s conflict would be compounded when the third iteration of hydrogen that he had identified and named at the Cavendish – tritium – was identified as a booster agent that was also crucial to detonating these thermonuclear bombs.
His lifelong anger towards nuclear weapons would be fuelled, in no small part, by guilt.
* * *
Oliphant would continue to preach against the omnipotent threat that came to be posed by these weapons in the war’s wake. He embraced this task with customary wholeheartedness in an article he penned for London’s Illustrated News barely a month after the conflict’s formal end.
‘We are faced with the alternative – suicide or cooperation,’ Oliphant noted of the race for nuclear superiority that loomed. ‘Without a solution of the problem of war, enjoyment of the fruits of atomic energy will be, for the world, but the feast of the condemned before the execution.’16
His second, inter-related pursuit was to advance the case for nuclear energy as the answer to Britain’s – indeed, the world’s – escalating post-war energy needs. Journalists warmed to his charismatic and enthusiastic advocacy of the nuclear industry. As Britain enforced harsh electricity rationing due to coal shortages, and fears grew that its unfolding fuel crisis might reduce its standing as a world power, Oliphant had no doubts where the answer lay: in the vast source of energy that could be liberated from uranium atoms, and in employing the knowledge British scientists had gleaned during the war.
What none of those scientists had been able to foresee was the breakdown in the nuclear relationship between the United States and Britain come the postwar peace. The supposedly binding agreement to continue sharing the knowledge acquired through both nations’ (and Canada’s) involvement in the Manhattan Project was revealed to have died along with its key signatory, Franklin Roosevelt.
Its detail, and that of the subsequent 1944 Hyde Park Aide-Mémoire, which reiterated that full collaboration should continue after the war, was unknown to Truman. Not only that, but the United States also revealed in 1945 that the physical document could not be found anywhere. It subsequently classified all nuclear data as ‘restricted’ and brought an end to bilateral co-operation. In April 1946, Truman advised Britain that despite the earlier agreement, he did not believe the United States was under any obligation to assist its ally in the design, construction or operation of an atomic energy plant.
Oliphant was especially incensed to learn that Winston Churchill (in the autumn of his first prime ministership in mid-1945) had told Britain’s House of Commons that, in keeping with the Quebec Agreement, the United States was not looking to exercise a virtual monopoly over future uses of nuclear technology. As Oliphant understood it, not only had Truman decreed that the United States would withhold collaboration on nuclear matters, but that volte-face also applied to peaceful as well as military purposes. He was therefore stunned by Churchill’s blatant untruth.
‘This was the first time I had ever heard a Prime Minister tell a deliberate lie and it so shocked me that I could never regain my wartime regard for him [Churchill],’ he wrote decades later.17
Not prepared to simply sit back as political debate on nuclear issues unfolded, Oliphant found an accomplice through whom he could exert direct influence. Captain Raymond Blackburn had served in the Royal Artillery Regiment, and in the 1945 general election that swept Churchill from office, he was installed in parliament as an outspoken Labour MP. Blackburn soon gained notoriety as a fierce critic of new prime minister Clement Attlee’s approach to nuclear energy policy, under which a revised accord was signed that significantly weakened the terms of co-operation between the countries, and led calls for international policing of nuclear weapons.
In November 1945, Blackburn infuriated Whitehall when he regaled the House of Commons with details of the confidential Quebec Agreement. In the ensuing speculation as to the source of Blackburn’s information, it became known that Oliphant was the maverick MP’s unofficial advisor. Blackburn’s willingness to take up the cudgels on Oliphant’s behalf fitted snugly with the Australian’s view that Britain had been betrayed by restrictions on its post-war involvement in the development of nuclear weapons as agreed to by Churchill, and enshrined within the Quebec Agreement. Attlee had subsequently noted that, while the ratification of the original Quebec Agreement under Churchill in 1943 was an important achieveme
nt, the document itself did not constitute a formal treaty and he was (as prime minister) compelled to renegotiate its terms.
‘What we are doing now,’ Oliphant wrote of the decision to effectively sign over Britain’s atomic sovereignty to the United States, ‘gives only the impression that we are trying to muscle in on a racket we have been too dumb to develop ourselves’.18
* * *
An extraordinary missed opportunity the following year galvanised Oliphant’s earlier mistrust for politicians into abject disillusionment. He was persuaded to act as technical advisor to Australia’s delegation at the early sessions of the newly established United Nations General Assembly in New York. That group would be led by former federal attorney-general and external affairs minister Herbert ‘Doc’ Evatt. He had been installed as the assembly’s chairman at the inaugural session, given Australia’s alphabetic primacy among member nations.
The convoluted six-week proceedings – held in the days before simultaneous translation, which meant every speech was repeated over and over in each required language – made for torturous hours of inaction. When proposals were made relating to the use of nuclear weapons, which at that stage resided solely in the grip of the United States, Oliphant was left further disenchanted – most notably with Evatt.
Soviet representative Andrei Gromyko responded to America’s support for the status quo by arguing that existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons should be dismantled. This suggestion brought Robert Oppenheimer, engaged in a similar capacity to Oliphant alongside United States delegate Bernard Baruch, rushing across the chamber to speak with his fellow physicist.
‘For heaven’s sake get your boss [Evatt] to say something in favour of the Russian proposals because that is wonderful,’ Oppenheimer enthused to Oliphant. ‘I think that we should consider them very seriously, and I’ll tell my boss that is what I feel.’
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