Farmelo Churchill's Bomb

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30028-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Churchill's Bomb - from the author of the Costa award-winning biography The Strangest Man - reveals a new aspect of Winston Churchill's life, so far completely neglected by historians: his relations with his nuclear scientists, and his management of Britain's policy on atomic weapons. Churchill was the only prominent politician to foresee the nuclear age and he played a leading role in the development of the Bomb during World War II. He became the first British Prime Minister with access to these weapons, and left office following desperate attempts during the Cold War to end the arms race. Graham Farmelo traces the beginnings of Churchill's association with nuclear weapons to his unlikely friendship with H. G. Wells, who coined the term 'atomic bombs'. In the 1930s, when Ernest Rutherford and his brilliant followers, such as Chadwick and Cockcroft, gave Britain the lead in nuclear research, Churchill wrote several widely read newspaper articles on the huge implications of their work. British physicists, in 1940, first showed that the Bomb was a practical possibility. But Churchill, closely advised by his favourite scientist, the controversial Frederick Lindemann, allowed leadership to pass to the US, where the Manhattan Project made the Bomb a terrible reality. British physicists played only a minor role in this vast enterprise, while Churchill ignored warnings from the scientist Niels Bohr that the Anglo-American policy would lead to a post-war arms race. After the war, the Americans reneged on personal agreements between Roosevelt and Churchill to share research. Clement Attlee, in a fateful decision, ordered the building of a British Bomb to maintain the country's place among the great powers. Churchill inherited it and ended his political career obsessed with the threat of thermonuclear war. Churchill's Bomb is an original and controversial book, full of political and scientific personalities and intrigues, which reveals a little-known side of Britain's great war-leader.

Graham Farmelo is a Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and an Affiliate Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. His biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won the 2009 Costa Biography Award and the 2010 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Farmelo, Graham

Leseproben

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 postwar 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 , ‘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 postwar 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...