Churchill's Bomb Read online

  Beginning in October 1951, the prospect of an imminent nuclear war gradually became the great theme of Churchill’s second premiership. He spent most of his final two years in office trying to avoid such a catastrophic conflict, believing that he could bring the Soviets and Americans to the conference table and talk them into a more rational approach to living with the ‘frightful’ H-bomb.14 Churchill pursued his perhaps quixotic cause with all the tenacity and courage he had shown in 1940, against widespread derision and after a stroke that, he boasted, ‘would have killed most men’.15 Only when it was clear that there was no chance that either the Americans or the Soviets would cooperate, and that his hopes of becoming a latter-day global saviour were over, did he finally throw in the towel. His failure to make headway in what was – at that time – a hopeless cause was one of the tragedies of his political career, though its prosecution did him credit and helped to erase his reputation as a warmonger. This was the defeat of a statesman years ahead of his time – he was trying too early to hurry along the détente agenda that brought such credit to later leaders, notably Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

  One curiosity of Churchill’s second term was that at first he showed no interest in developing nuclear power, which he had foreseen and discussed in widely read articles decades before. As usual, he trusted in the goodwill of the Americans – he wanted his country to piggy-back on their technology, but was persuaded to change his mind by Lindemann, who became one of the godfathers of the nuclear industry in Britain. By that time, Churchill felt comfortable in the company of several senior scientists other than the Prof, even with a few leading nuclear physicists. In the four months before he began to prepare his valedictory speech on the H-bomb, he had talked at length three times with Sir John Cockcroft, one of the duo that first artificially split the atom. Two of these discussions on nuclear policy were held over long, bibulous lunches, with the Prime Minister in fine form.

  By late February 1955, Churchill was spending most mornings polishing the text of his speech, sitting up in his silk dressing gown. He was still an imposing figure, though he was small in stature and looked like an outsize doll, with skin as smooth and shiny as pink celluloid.16 Usually holding a cigar, he dictated for hours on end to his secretary Jane Portal, later Lady Williams of Elvel, who sat a respectful distance away with her pen and notepad.17 She now remembers that ‘he was absolutely determined to go out on a high, to prove that he was still on top of his job, dealing with the biggest threat to the world’. He was in no doubt that he was better equipped than any other international leader to deal with the crisis.

  Near the beginning of his speech, he intended to quote a long passage from ‘Fifty Years Hence’ to underline how far ahead of his time he had been – almost a quarter of a century before – in appreciating how close scientists were to tapping huge reservoirs of nuclear energy. This was sure to impress his audience. One of the other far-sighted sections of the essay that he did not quote, about the demands new science would place on future democracies, would probably not be welcomed so favourably. So great were the challenges, he had written in 1931, that the current generation’s leaders would probably not be up to the task:

  Great nations are no longer led by their ablest men, or by those who know most about their immediate affairs, or even by those who have a coherent doctrine. Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes.

  This censorious passage may well have given him pause and led him to ask himself two obvious questions. How well had he risen to the nuclear challenge, having foreseen it so long in advance? And how effectively had he worked with the scientists who had created it?

  1

  TOWARDS THE NUCLEAR AGE

  1894–1925

  Wells and his liberating ‘atomic bombs’

  ‘Wells is a seer. His Time Machine is a wonderful book . . . one of the books I would like to take with me to Purgatory.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, 7 December 19471

  Winston Churchill almost certainly first heard about ‘atomic bombs’ from his friend and irritant H. G. Wells, who gave the weapons their enduringly inaccurate name. The term first appeared in Wells’s novel The World Set Free, published in January 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the First World War. Churchill probably purchased the book shortly after it was published, as he was exceptionally interested in Wells’s work. Almost two decades later, he wrote that he had ‘shouted for joy’ after wolfing down The Time Machine and afterwards read every book Wells wrote, twice.2

  Later, neither Churchill nor Wells could remember their first meeting. It probably took place at one of the garden parties or gentlemen’s clubs they frequented in the summer of 1900, cultivating their most talented and influential peers. Both were celebrity socialites, relatively new to the limelight and enjoying every minute of it in their different ways. Churchill, a twenty-five-year-old scion of one of the country’s wealthiest political families, had trained as a soldier and fought in active service in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa. In the Boer War, still raging in South Africa, he had been – in modern parlance – an ‘embedded reporter’. After his recent return, he had been feted internationally as a hero, having escaped from prison and come home with a twenty-five-pound bounty on his head. Already well known as a lively writer, his work showed the influence of Wells – in Churchill’s modest debut novel, Savrola, his description of the universe ending as ‘cold and lifeless as a burnt-out firework’ echoed a passage in Wells’s Time Machine.3 Intent on a political career, Churchill had earlier told his mother that he was ‘a Liberal in all but name’, but was so fiercely opposed to their policy of granting self-rule to Ireland that he chose to stand as a Conservative.4

  Wells, eight years older, was at the forefront of the new wave of novelists. A son of struggling shopkeepers, he was a proselytising Socialist and in his student days had sported a plain red tie to underline his political allegiance, though now his wardrobe was more discreet, even dapper. By 1900, he had several commercial successes under his belt, including his scientific romances The Island of Dr Moreau and The Invisible Man, works that showed him to be the kind of energetic, forward-looking thinker that Britain needed in the new century. Dismissing Thomas Carlyle’s lament that the modern age had sacrificed its spirituality to machines and materialism, Wells looked forward to an age when scientists and engineers would sweep away the moth-eaten brocade of sentimentalism, replacing it with a sturdy infrastructure of new inventions and innovative methods of production.

  He had been a talented student of science, taking a good combined honours degree in zoology and geology, albeit at the second attempt.5 His principal scientific talent, however, was the one that shone through in his writings and impressed even the best and most conservatively minded scientists – his ability to see where their new theories might take society. Some of the period’s finest writers admired him, too, including Henry James, who told him, ‘You are for me . . . the most interesting “literary man” of your generation.’6 Oscar Wilde had described him as ‘a scientific Jules Verne’.7 Although these literary luminaries knew that Wells was no great stylist, they acknowledged him to be the new era’s secular priest, praising science and materialism in prose that, though often pedestrian, had an appealing undertow of optimism. This quality is likely to have appealed strongly to Churchill.

  In November 1901, ten months after Queen Victoria’s death, Wells published his first work of non-fiction, Anticipations, a rambling rumination on the future of technology, the Western economy, education and warfare. The book was studded with exciting predictions and had irresistible verve, but was not without flaws – some of its more opinionated passages read as if they had been dictated from the top of a soap box. Less than a week after Anticipations appeared in bookstores, Churchill received a copy from the publishers. Only six months before, he had spoken thoughtfully on the future of w
arfare, commenting that in modern conflicts ‘the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury’.8 He found plenty in the book to nourish his military thinking, especially Wells’s point that warfare was then being waged using strategies long out of date but ‘is being drawn into the field of the exact sciences’.9 It was time, Wells believed, for governments to stop thinking that wars could be won by drunken armies led by ignorant generals who were proud of their old-fashioned ways. Rather, conflicts should be run by technical experts, supported by aerial intelligence. He predicted the invention of aeroplanes (‘very probably before 1950’) and foresaw the crucial importance in war of dominating the sky, imagining civilians far below the coming aerial battles: ‘Everybody, everywhere, will be perpetually looking up, with a sense of loss and insecurity.’

  He was rather less convinced of the strategic importance of submarines. ‘I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea.’ Predictions like that did not much trouble him in the coming years – he preferred to be specific and wrong rather than vague and correct.

  Wells received an eight-page letter on his new book from Churchill, who had read it within days of its arrival.10 ‘I read everything you write,’ Churchill began, before launching a thoughtful critique of Wells’s technocratic view of government, demonstrating that he was not just another of the scientifically illiterate dullards Wells despised. One of Churchill’s fundamental objections was that Wells seemed to assume that the advent of new technology would be accompanied by a concomitant improvement in human nature. ‘It is the nature of the beast that counts,’ Churchill insisted: ‘You may teach a dog all kinds of tricks . . . but you can’t improve the breed of a dog in a hurry.’

  Churchill was stung by the suggestion that politicians should not be bumbling generalists, learning as they went along, but should come to their posts armed with a technical training. His response summarises a point of view that he held for the rest of his life, as politicians and scientists who worked with him would find out in the decades to come:

  Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide than any vigorous direction of a specialised character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers etc. are drones or worse? . . . Is not government itself both an art and a science? To manage men, to explain difficult things to simple people, to reconcile opposite interests, to weigh the evidence of disputing experts, to deal with the clamorous emergency of the hour; are not these things themselves worth the consideration and labour of a lifetime? . . . Wherefore I say, from the dominion of all specialists (particularly military specialists) good Lord deliver us.

  That last line hit home with Wells.11 He replied immediately, saying that he agreed on that point, adding that he should have said that ‘the predominating people to come’ should be properly educated, not necessarily technically trained. Wells did not agree, however, that he had overestimated the speed at which humans could progress, telling Churchill why he had got this wrong: ‘You belong to a class that has scarcely altered internally in a hundred years. I really do not think that you people who gather in great country houses realise the pace of things.’

  Soon afterwards, Wells accepted an invitation from Churchill to meet for dinner, replying with more than a touch of condescension, ‘To me you are a particularly interesting & rather amiable figure,’ adding that he expected humanity to have to face great challenges in the coming years, although he fancied that Churchill was ‘a little too inclined towards the Old Game’ to be able to deal with them.12 It was not until the following year that they were able to get together, eventually agreeing to meet at 8 p.m. in the lobby of the House of Commons on 6 March 1902.13 They then headed out into the fog of London, the horse-drawn carriages only rarely encountering one of the new-fangled automobiles on the city’s reeking streets.

  They will have looked an odd pair. Little more than five feet tall, Wells was a weedy man with fiery eyes and a hirsute moustache. It never seemed quite fitting that the author of such astringent prose spoke in a hoarse squeak, which contrasted comically with Churchill’s arresting baritone, marred slightly by a lisp and mild stutter.14 Churchill was taller by six inches, already slightly stooped and with red hair that was starting to recede. Both men oozed ambition, especially Churchill, who had already made it plain that he wanted to be Prime Minister.15

  No record of the conversation remains, but it is a fair bet that the two men explored each other’s geopolitics, Churchill as proud of the British Empire as Wells was ashamed of it. They will also have discovered that they had in common a restless confidence, an impatience for fame and a broad-mindedness that made it natural for them to befriend even some of their political opponents. The first seeds of their unlikely companionship had been sown. Wells next wrote to Churchill in the autumn of 1906, sending a copy of his latest book, A Modern Utopia. This explored how humanity might best function as a one-party state after it had solved its material problems, mainly by making intelligent use of new science and technology.

  The new volume was not to Churchill’s taste. He replied appreciatively, tactfully pointing out that the book’s main weakness was its lack of a good story: ‘I am always ready to eat your suet . . . but I must have the jam, too.’16 For all its shortcomings, A Modern Utopia does appear to have encouraged Churchill to think about where technical developments were taking society – a subject that became one of his favourite themes. By then, he was recognised in Westminster as a conviction politician, unafraid of challenging party bosses. Two years earlier, the rise in support for Protectionism had led him to dramatically cross the floor of the Commons to join the Liberal Party, which supported free trade. In 1908, he married the radical Liberal Clementine (‘Clemmie’) Hozier – charming, attractive, loyal and firmly supportive of her husband, even though her political instincts went against his.17 With her support, he became a leader of popular radicalism, introducing the first proposals for unemployment insurance, and minimum-wage rates in industries whose workers were especially vulnerable to exploitation.

  Wells was so impressed with his friend’s talent that he supported him in a by-election in April 1908, giving his reasons in a controversial newspaper article, ‘Why Socialists Should Vote for Mr Churchill’.18 Churchill was soon back in the House of Commons and making swift progress, becoming a Cabinet minister as President of the Board of Trade when he was only thirty-three and, two years later, the youngest Home Secretary for almost a century.

  Around this time, Wells appeared to turn his back on science fiction in favour of novels with social themes. Perhaps as a result of hints from his friend Joseph Conrad that he was squandering his talent, Wells returned to science and introduced ‘atomic bombs’ to his huge readership in the novel The World Set Free.19 By early 1913, when he started writing the book, Wells was much talked about in literary circles as a self-styled feminist Lothario. The traffic of his bed comprised two wives and dozens of lady friends, most of whom served as muses, a role that seemed essential to maintaining his creative flow. He worked on his story during a stay in the Swiss Alps with a new mistress, the diminutive widow Elizabeth von Arnim, in her gorgeously situated chalet, built using the proceeds of her popular novels and plays.20 Even by his standards, their relationship was intensely physical, he later recalled.

  The World Set Free imagined the consequences of harnessing the energy released in radioactivity. The process had been discovered by the French physicist Henri Becquerel seventeen years earlier and had been the last global scientific sensation of the nineteenth century. Readers of newspapers, magazines and novels had long been gripped by stories of scientists uncovering secrets that would eventually bring the human race to a grisly end.21 Radioactivity supplied rich material for authors attracted to the long-established Armageddon genre, and it was only a matter of time before it caught
the eye of Wells. His interest was piqued by the book The Interpretation of Radium, written in 1909 by the English chemist and radioactivity pioneer Frederick Soddy, who based his account on popular public lectures he had given in Glasgow. The book supplied Wells with just the type of raw material he loved to mould into fiction – exciting new science with the potential to revolutionise the way humans live.

  Soddy pointed out that radium, a new chemical element, is unusual in ‘giving out heat and light like Aladdin’s lamp’.22 If this energy could somehow be harnessed, then ‘We stand today where primitive man first stood with regard to the energy liberated by fire.’23 He foresaw some of the prizes awaiting societies that could capture this energy – they ‘could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden’. The problem was that radium and other radioactive elements are stubborn in the extreme – they give out their energy at the same rate, regardless of any attempt to change them. However they are treated – warmed, crushed or stretched – they decay at exactly the same rate and so slowly that it is not feasible to use the energy to drive turbines or do anything useful. Soddy surmised that if it were possible to utilise this energy, there would be huge benefits. He mentioned one consequence of this on the book’s fourth page, in a phrase that captured Wells’s interest: releases of radioactive energy ‘could with effect be employed as an explosive incomparably more powerful in its activities than dynamite’.24

  Wells read Soddy’s account in the early spring of 1913, near the beginning of his stay with Elizabeth von Arnim. His imagination on fire, he asked friends for more information about radioactivity25 and around May began a novel that he provisionally entitled The Atom Frees the World. It seems he was unaware that he was not quite the first to write about the idea of using radioactive energy to make weapons: five years earlier, the French writer Anatole France had published the satirical novel Penguin Island, featuring terrorists who make explosives using a gas from which ‘radium evolves’.26 Wells’s vision was, however, more graphic, more powerful and ultimately more influential.