Churchill's Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics

  • Graham Farmelo
Faber & Faber: 2013. 9780465021956 | ISBN: 978-0-4650-2195-6

Britain and the United States, which cooperated so effectively as military allies during the Second World War, collaborated only intermittently — and from the British point of view inadequately — in the development of the first atomic bombs. The US side of the story has been told more than once; the British side, not recently explored, is now tackled by Graham Farmelo in Churchill's Bomb.

The author, a physicist, ranges across Winston Churchill's long career — from 1901, when Churchill wrote to H. G. Wells to congratulate him on Anticipations, a work of predictive non-fiction, to his final turn as prime minister in the early 1950s, when he pushed for a British hydrogen bomb. Farmelo is especially good on the Second World War years, revealing much about the Anglo–American relationship that has been guarded or unclear.

Winston Churchill on a voyage across the Atlantic in October 1941. Credit: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY

British work on the bomb preceded that by the United States. Britain was at war for more than two years before the United States came in, and was inevitably more urgently concerned with German uranium research. Moreover, Britain's generous policy of taking in refugee Jewish scientists who were fleeing the Nazis supplied a cadre of highly motivated physicists to investigate the explosive properties of uranium at a time when most British physicists were working on radar. In fact, it was the refugee scientists who first alerted the British government to German uranium research, just as their US counterparts famously enlisted Albert Einstein to alert President Franklin Roosevelt.

On both sides of the Atlantic, however, gatekeeper scientific advisers delayed progress. In the US case, the culprit was a government scientist named Lyman Briggs. Briggs, the director of the National Bureau of Standards, so overemphasized secrecy that the meeting minutes he received from the MAUD committee — the group of British officials tasked with researching the feasibility of building an atomic bomb — languished undistributed in his safe. Eventually, Briggs was moved aside and his safe opened to reveal its treasures.

In Britain, Farmelo reports, the problem was more serious because the gatekeeper was Winston Churchill's personal scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann. Lindemann did not quite believe in the bomb, and in any case thought it should be built in Britain or, if that proved impossible, Canada.

At a crucial point in Churchill's ongoing negotiations with Roosevelt, in October 1941, a message arrived from the US president offering to coordinate “or even jointly conduct” a bomb programme. British official opinion still favoured consultation between parallel projects, Farmelo notes, rather than full collaboration. Discouraged by Lindemann and other advisers, Churchill delayed his response. Almost two months passed before he answered the president's note, and even then he did so only tepidly.

Those two months were crucial: the US programme officially expanded to full industrial scale on 6 December 1941, and the following day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, shocking the United States into joining the war. The atomic-bomb programme was soon assigned to the US Army Corps of Engineers and, a few months later, now renamed the Manhattan Project, put under the command of a big, dynamic, no-nonsense engineering general named Leslie Richard Groves, a combative Anglophobe.

Curiously, Groves and his government superior, the science czar Vannevar Bush, worried as much about giving Britain a leg up on post-war nuclear-power development as they did about sharing the 'secrets' of the bomb. Early in 1943, Farmelo writes, Groves blocked British participation almost entirely after Imperial Chemicals' Wallace Akers was chosen to run the British programme. A secret Anglo–Russian agreement to share new and future weapons further soured Groves and Bush when they learned of it, although Farmelo argues that Churchill would have repudiated the agreement instantly had he thought it would quash collaborations with the United States. By the time all these misunderstandings had been sorted out, the British lead was buried in the dust of Groves' multi-pronged, multibillion-dollar race to an almost all-American bomb.

Farmelo's book sometimes falters on technical details. Breeding plutonium in large uranium–graphite reactors in eastern Washington state becomes “the production of chemicals containing weapons-grade plutonium”. The bomb tested in the New Mexican desert in July 1945 was not, as he writes, “the first nuclear bomb” — that was the uranium gun bomb, Little Boy, already sailing towards Japan — but rather the first plutonium implosion assembly, the 'Gadget', its technology so radically new it needed to be tested at full yield. Nor did the scientists assembled in the desert to watch that first test apply suntan lotion to protect themselves from “the radiation blast”. It was the high-intensity light from the nuclear fireball that concerned them.

More egregiously, Farmelo misses what is in my view a crucial part of the post-war negotiations between the United States and Britain over uranium supplies. The United States was at that time believed, for reasons I have never understood, to have only modest domestic sources of uranium ore. The two countries had agreed during wartime that they would share the rich ore resources of the Belgian Congo equally. By late 1947, Britain was approaching bankruptcy, a congressional debate neared on the Marshall Plan and several conservative US senators had been outraged to learn that Britain still had a veto over any US use of atomic bombs. The administration of President Harry Truman demanded changes: Britain would give up its veto as well as its share of the Belgian Congo ore; the United States, in return, would continue to aid its wartime ally economically. It was this ore grab — formalized in a modus vivendi of 7 January 1948 — not bureaucratic dithering, that delayed the British bomb.

Churchill's Bomb is colourful but incomplete, focused more on Churchill than on the bomb. It is a useful adjunct to what is still the best series on the British bomb, Margaret Gowing's official history Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–1945 (Macmillan, 1964) and its successor volumes.