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  Advance Praise for Churchill’s Bomb

  “This is a fascinating book. Graham Farmelo offers a fresh and thoroughly researched history of the development of atomic weapons in his insightful and engaging account of Winston Churchill’s failure to forge a partnership of equal exchange between Great Britain and the United States in the development of the bomb. Farmelo offers vivid vignettes of political and scientific personalities, with special attention to the widely disliked Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, who became Churchill’s science and technology guru in the 1920s.”

  —Mary Jo Nye, Professor of History Emerita, Oregon State University, and author of Michael Polanyi and His Generation

  “An excellent book. Graham Farmelo draws on many sources to show how Churchill, his scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann, and a host of other scientists and politicians developed the atomic bomb. Churchill’s Bomb brings these characters back to life with anecdotes, quotations, and personal sketches. But Farmelo’s book does more than unfold the hopes, doubts, and fears engendered by the bomb: it illuminates the relationship between big science and modern democracy.”

  —James W. Muller, University of Alaska, Anchorage

  “What a brilliant and compelling book! Graham Farmelo sensitively and eloquently deconstructs the twists and turns of Winston Churchill’s involvement with nuclear weapons over nearly half a century, setting this unfamiliar tale in the context of the turbulent times. At its heart are the ambiguities of the World War II relationship between a scientifically innovative but economically weakened Britain and the inexhaustibly energetic USA with unlimited resources.”

  —Sir Michael Berry, University of Bristol

  “A nicely detailed and balanced record of the British ambivalence toward building an atom bomb in favor of the American effort. . . . A tremendously useful soup-to-nuts study of how Britain and the U.S. embraced a frightening atomic age.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  CHURCHILL’S BOMB

  CHURCHILL’S

  BOMB

  How the United States Overtook

  Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race

  GRAHAM FARMELO

  BASIC BOOKS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Graham Farmelo

  First published in the United States in 2013 by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Faber and Faber Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

  Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 978-0-465-06989-7 (e-book)

  LCCN: 2013940827

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR LINDSEY JONES, F.S.

  In the next fifty years mankind will make greater progress in mastering and applying natural forces than in the last million years or more. And the first question we must ask ourselves is: ‘Are we fit for it? Are we worthy of all these exalted responsibilities? Can we bear this tremendous strain?’

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL, 14 November 1937

  Scientists on the whole are a very docile lot. Apart from their own particular job they do just what they are told and are content to sit down and be very minor entities.

  —MARK OLIPHANT, 20 April 1940

  Devil: ‘In the arts of life Man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself . . . his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness.’

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman, 1903

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  FEBRUARY 1955: Churchill, his nuclear scientists and the Bomb

  1TOWARDS THE NUCLEAR AGE

  1894–1925: Wells and his liberating ‘atomic bombs’

  1924–1932: Churchill glimpses a nuclear future

  1932: Rutherford: nuclear sceptic

  March 1933 To December 1934: The Prof advises ‘a scientist who missed his vocation’

  September 1933 To February 1935: Szilárd’s nuclear epiphany

  February 1934 To October 1938: Churchill fears war – and that nuclear energy will soon be harnessed

  November 1938 To September 1939: Bohr thinks the Bomb is ‘inconceivable’

  2WORLD WAR II

  August To December 1939: Churchill – nuclear weapons will not be ready for the war

  September 1939 To February 1940: Chadwick doubts that the Bomb is viable

  October 1939 To July 1940: FDR receives a nuclear warning

  March To June 1940: Frisch and Peierls discover how to make the Bomb

  May and June 1940: Churchill has more pressing problems

  June To September 1940: Thomson and his MAUD committee debate policy on the Bomb

  August 1940 To August 1941: In his finest hour, Churchill begs America for help

  July and August 1941: Chadwick believes Britain should build its own Bomb

  August To October 1941: Lindemann backs a British Bomb

  August 1941 To January 1942: Oliphant bustles in America

  November 1941 To July 1942: Churchill talks about the Bomb with FDR

  January 1942 To January 1943: Akers attempts a merger

  October 1942 To July 1943: Bush aims for an American monopoly

  January To September 1943: Churchill’s nuclear deal with FDR

  September 1943 To May 1944: Bohr takes a political initiative

  April To September 1944: The Bulldog meets the Great Dane

  February 1944 To July 1945: Chadwick witnesses the first nuclear explosion

  1 July To 5 August 1945: Churchill says yes to dropping the Bomb

  3CHURCHILL AS LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

  August 1945 To January 1949: Blackett: nuclear heretic

  August 1945 To August 1949: Churchill the Cold Warrior

  February and March 1950: Peierls and ‘the spy of the century’

  February 1950 To Spring 1951: Churchill softens his line on the Bomb

  August 1945 To October 1951: Penney delivers the British Bomb

  4CHURCHILL’S SECOND PREMIERSHIP

  October 1951 To December 1952: Churchill – Britain’s first nuclear Premier

  1953: Hinton engineers nuclear power

  March 1953 To February 1954: Churchill the nuclear missionary

  March To December 1954: Cockcroft becomes a confidant of the Prime Minister

  April 1954 To April 1955: Churchill’s nuclear swansong

  EPILOGUES

  1954 Onwards: 1: Churchill’s nuclear scientists

  6 April 1955 Onwards: 2: Churchill and his Prof

  Acknowledgements

  References

  Notes

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  FEBRUARY 1955

  Churchill, his nuclear scientists and the Bomb

  ‘I do not pretend to be an expert or to have technical knowledge of this prodigious sphere of [nuclear] science. But in my long friendship with [Frederick Lindemann] I have tried to follow and even predict the evolution of events.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL
to the Commons, 1 March 19551

  His swansong was sure to have a nuclear theme. In February 1955, when Churchill was eighty years old and inching reluctantly towards his resignation as Prime Minister, he set his heart on making one last great speech in the Commons. The hydrogen bomb, his obsession, supplied the perfect theme – it made all the other business of the day look trifling. As he had told his doctor a few months before: ‘I am more worried by [the H-bomb] than by all the rest of my problems put together.’2

  The H-bomb was, Churchill believed, the greatest threat to civilisation since the Mongols began their conquests three-quarters of a millennium before.3 This threat had become a monomania for him, driving his final great diplomatic initiative: to bring the Soviet Union and the United States together to ease the tensions of the Cold War and so minimise the risk that H-bombs would be used.4 He was certainly going to mention that campaign in his speech, but his main task was to argue that the UK must acquire the weapon he feared so much, as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. This argument was almost certain to win the day in the Commons – his main challenge was to give his country a sense of hope at a time when the world seemed to be careering towards a nuclear holocaust.

  He threw himself into the speech, researching the nuclear story and his role in it, all the way back to the articles he had written in the 1920s and 1930s about the potential of nuclear energy to change the world. Among the best of the pieces was ‘Fifty Years Hence’, a four-thousand-word speculation on the effects science might have on life in the future, first published in late 1931. In it, he drew attention to the likely advent of nuclear weapons and the challenges their invention would pose. He even glimpsed the destructive power of the H-bomb, which would be detonated for the first time twenty-one years later:5

  High authorities tell us that new sources of power, vastly more important than any we yet know, will surely be discovered. Nuclear energy is incomparably greater than the molecular energy which we use today . . . If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine together and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand horse-power engine for a whole year . . . There is no question among scientists that this gigantic source of energy exists . . .

  Churchill had based the article on a draft by his scientific Grand Vizier, Frederick Lindemann, an acid-tongued professor of physics at the University of Oxford. Lindemann was ‘one of the best scientists and best brains in the country’, in Churchill’s opinion, a view not shared by many leading academics.6 To most of them, ‘the Prof’, as Churchill called him, was a distinguished scientist with a gift for summarising complex arguments simply and accurately, but not a deep or imaginative thinker and certainly not an expert on nuclear science.

  One of the services the Prof rendered to his admiring friend was to nourish his inquisitive mind with briefings on the latest advances in basic science. In the spring of 1926, when the new and revolutionary quantum theory of matter was the talk of physicists, Lindemann sent Churchill – then Chancellor of the Exchequer – a book on how the structure of atoms can be understood using basic quantum ideas. The text grabbed Churchill’s attention so completely that, for a few hours, he was incapable of concentrating on his Budget.

  A few years later, Lindemann kept Churchill abreast of the headline-making advances in nuclear physics made by Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues at Cambridge University, including the first artificial splitting of the atom. Soon afterwards, Churchill marvelled at the scientists’ achievements and said so after chairing one of Lindemann’s non-specialist talks on nuclear physics: ‘Here is this great study of science proceeding.’7 The Prof ensured that Churchill had been aware of the opportunities and threats of nuclear technology for longer than any other leading politician, living or dead. In return, Churchill made his friend one of the most politically influential scientists ever to serve in government.

  The speech Churchill was preparing in late February 1955 was part of his final bid for a glorious place in Britain’s post-war history, having positioned himself as a link between the reigns of the British Empire’s two most recent queens.8 During the closing years of Victoria’s reign, he had read about the widely publicised discovery of radioactivity, which involved the release of nuclear energy, as scientists later understood. Now, in the new Elizabethan era, he was commissioning a weapon that would release this energy with a destructiveness he had first fully appreciated only a year before, when he read a front-page article in the Manchester Guardian, ‘Devastation and the Hydrogen Bomb’. It almost made the eyes stand out of his head, as he told President Eisenhower a few months later.9

  His colleagues in Parliament were now expecting a great speech from him, to round off his second premiership. Although they all knew of his obsession with the H-bomb, few of them appreciated the full extent of his involvement in the development of nuclear weapons. The handful in Whitehall who were familiar with the details of his record knew that it had been not been especially distinguished by his standards. He had almost always responded to events rather than shaping them, had shown poor judgement in his choice of advisers, and demonstrated none of his fabled vision and imagination until it was too late.

  It was without doubt a misfortune for him that he had to think about the possibility of nuclear weapons when he was also deeply involved in the tumult of a global war. The news from Birmingham that two ‘enemy aliens’ – as the government classified them – had discovered a viable way of making a nuclear bomb arrived in Whitehall less than two months before he first became Prime Minister in May 1940. During most of the next two years, Churchill’s pool of nuclear advice was too narrow and too shallow. Most damagingly, he froze out Henry Tizard, Britain’s leading expert on the application of science to military problems – a decision that dismayed many leading scientists. The computer pioneer and former radar engineer Sir Maurice Wilkes later remembered: ‘Scientists offered the Prime Minister the man best able to give their consensus, but he chose a maverick.’10 Churchill discussed the new ‘explosives’, as he usually called nuclear weapons before they became a reality, only with Lindemann and with their colleague Sir John Anderson, keeping it secret from almost the entire Cabinet for most of the war. He demonstrated neither his usual sure-footedness nor any of his habitual enthusiasm for innovative new weapons, such as – during World War I – the tank.11

  In August 1941, when Churchill endorsed plans to build the Bomb, he had not grasped the transformative qualities of a weapon that could be delivered by a single aeroplane and wipe out a city in seconds. British nuclear scientists, then far ahead of their American colleagues in this field, had given him a high-value bargaining chip to play in his dealings with Roosevelt, who wrote to suggest that they embark on an equal-harness collaboration to develop the Bomb. Churchill as good as threw the chip away. He did not reply to the President’s generous note for several weeks and even then appeared unenthusiastic about a nuclear collaboration. By that time, the United States had entered the war and was gearing up to begin its gargantuan Manhattan Project, which it pursued with a self-interest so ruthless that it left Churchill floundering. It seems that he first appreciated the strategic significance of the nuclear project only in the early spring of 1943, some eighteen months after Roosevelt. One consequence of the myopia Churchill shared with his closest advisers was that British physicists played only a minor role in the leadership of the project, and the influence they had on the application of their pioneering ideas was limited.

  Churchill’s lack of vision about the Bomb was embarrassingly clear in May 1944, when he met the Danish theoretical physicist Niels Bohr in 10 Downing Street. By common agreement, Bohr was the world’s most accomplished nuclear scientist and a man of exceptional wisdom, though not an articulate speaker. When Bohr mumbled his suggestion that the US and Britain should share the secret of the Bomb with their Soviet allies to help build trust and avert a post-war arms race, Churchill was dismissive, having shown him none of the respect and attentiveness he gave to Lindemann.
Roosevelt also had no time for the Dane’s ideas. Had the leaders thought more deeply about his views, it is at least possible that the worst excesses of the post-war arms race might have been averted.

  Of all the wartime agreements Churchill made with the American administration, he was especially proud of the one he struck on the Bomb when he met Roosevelt in Quebec during the summer of 1943. This agreement brought British scientists into the Manhattan Project after almost a year of exclusion and enshrined an undertaking that Britain and the US would not use the Bomb against another country without each other’s consent. The problem was that this was not a treaty but a private agreement that both Churchill and Roosevelt withheld from all but a tiny number of their colleagues. The leaders regarded the Bomb as an essentially private matter, but after the war the plan predictably backfired, with serious consequences for Britain. Churchill’s successor as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, discovered that Truman and his administration had no wish to continue with the Quebec Agreement: in 1946, the American government passed a brutally self-interested Act forbidding collaboration on nuclear matters with any foreign country.12 Attlee eventually decided to cut his losses and set up a team of nuclear scientists to build the British Bomb, using the skills and scraps of information retrieved from the Manhattan Project, with virtually no assistance from the United States for several years. Rarely had the relationship between the US and Britain, so special to Churchill, been so devoid of practical value.

  It was inevitable that the Soviets would have the Bomb soon after the war, as Churchill knew. Appalled by their military adventurism and their repressive regimes in Eastern Europe, he made the astonishing argument that if there was no rapprochement – his preferred option – then America should stage a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia.13 President Truman wanted nothing to do with this, and Churchill quickly changed his line when the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon in August 1949. The arms race foreseen by Niels Bohr was now well under way and the world appeared to be sliding into an age of mutually assured destruction.