johndoe@gmail.com
FacebookAre you sure you want to reset the form?
Your mail has been sent successfully
Are you sure you want to remove the alert?
Your session is about to expire! You will be logged out in
Do you wish to stay logged in?
In 1898, as a young soldier in the Sudan, Winston Churchill participated in the Battle of Omdurman and witnessed one of the last cavalry charges in British military history. Such was the longevity of his subsequent political career that, half a century later, as Prime Minister of his only peacetime administration, he had to deal with the implications of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon of such vast destructive power that it could lay waste to entire cities, killing hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in the process. In the popular memory Churchill remains the classic Cold Warrior, determined to stand up to Soviet power, but in truth, by the time he retired in 1955, he had transformed himself into a committed advocate of détente. Still a firm anti-communist, he had become convinced that in nuclear war, unlike the battle of Omdurman, there would be no winners, only losers.
At the start of the Second World War, British scientists were aware at a theoretical level of the military potentialities of atomic energy but for a time they struggled to convince the government that an atomic bomb was a realistic proposition. In August 1941, however, Lord Cherwell, the scientific advisor to the cabinet and an atomic convert, helped persuade Prime Minister Winston Churchill to give atomic weapons research the very highest priority. As is well known, Churchill had always been fascinated by war, but his interest also extended to advances in the science of warfare. As far back as 1909, as a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence, he recommended getting in touch with the American Wright brothers to see whether their new-fangled invention, the flying machine, could be utilized for military purposes. [ 1 ] But science, in and of itself, devoid of military application, also exerted a powerful and long-lasting hold on his imagination [ 2 ] . His enduring friendship with Cherwell – or Frederick Lindemann, Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Oxford, as he was before being raised to the peerage in 1941 – did much to feed his enthusiasm. As early as 1924, under the influence of the ‘Prof’ (as Lindemann was known to those close to him), Churchill wrote an article in Nash’s Pall Mall magazine which, in retrospect, is striking in its atomic prescience: ‘Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings – nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?’ [ 3 ]
In 1931, he confessed to enjoying reading the science-fiction books of H.G. Wells so much that ‘I could pass an examination in them’. [ 4 ] A decade or so later, the atomic bomb may well have struck Churchill, as it did his personal physician, Lord Moran, as ‘H.G. Wells stuff’. [ 5 ] At any rate, in August 1941, when Cherwell put the case to him in favour embarking on atomic research and development, Churchill found the combination of warfare, new weapons and science irresistible. Such doubts as he possessed about the project were extinguished by Cherwell’s sombre warning: ‘It would be unforgiveable if we let the Germans develop a process ahead of us by means of which they could defeat us in war or reverse the verdict after they had been defeated.’ [ 6 ] Although ‘personally quite content with existing explosives’, Churchill told the Chiefs of Staff, ‘we must not stand in the path of improvement’, and he immediately authorized a full-scale effort, codenamed Tube Alloys, to harness the power of nature in a bomb. [ 7 ]
Tube Alloys would be the most closely guarded of secrets: not even the War Cabinet or the Service Ministers were told about it. [ 8 ] The American pursuit of atomic weapons, the equally secret Manhattan Project, got going in earnest in 1942, prompted in part by British research findings. Tube Alloys soon became subsumed by the US project as the British (and Canadians) melded their research with that of the Americans. Eventually around two dozen UK scientists, together with a number of European émigré physicists who had made England their home before the war began, crossed the Atlantic to join the Manhattan Project at its weapons development headquarters in Los Alamos. [ 9 ]
By mid-1943, the Americans were starting to exhibit what, to Churchill, was a decidedly proprietorial attitude towards the atomic venture, even seeking to exclude the British, and consequently he sought to protect the UK’s position by cementing a formal Anglo-American partnership. [ 10 ] A conventional treaty requiring Congressional endorsement was ruled out because of the secrecy involved so he settled instead for a private understanding with the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Quebec Agreement of August 1943 confirmed the pooling of US and UK ‘brains and resources’ as well as the principle of mutual ‘consent’ if it came to using atomic weapons against a third party. [ 11 ] A year later, in September 1944, another secret understanding, initialled at Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park in upstate New York, confirmed that US–UK atomic collaboration would continue after the cessation of hostilities. [ 12 ]
Churchill believed that these agreements not only protected Britain’s rights but ‘almost amounts to a military understanding between us and the mightiest power in the world’. [ 13 ] In retrospect, implementation depended on the two signatories remaining in political office, but Roosevelt died suddenly in April 1945, Churchill lost the July 1945 general election, and in 1946 the US Congress passed the McMahon Act prohibiting the United States from sharing atomic intelligence with any other country. Churchill regretted this ‘breach of faith’ but vented his frustration less on the Americans than on Clement Attlee’s Labour government for its failure to protect the position he had won for Britain. [ 14 ]
Meanwhile, in May 1945, the German surrender brought an end to hostilities in Europe, but in Asia the war against Japan continued. In July, Churchill attended the last Big Three conference of the Second World War at Potsdam, close to the ruins of Berlin. [ 15 ] On the second day – 17 July – the Americans informed him that an atomic bomb had just been successfully detonated in the New Mexico desert with an explosive yield exceeding all expectations. A fortnight earlier, in keeping with the Quebec Agreement, Churchill had given Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, his consent for the new weapon to be used against Japan, and the destructive force revealed by the subsequent Trinity test did not occasion any moral or ethical doubts. [ 16 ] On the contrary, he likened the atomic bomb to ‘the Second coming’, a deliverance in the sense that the war might now be ended without the need for an invasion of Japan and thus without excessive Anglo-American casualties. [ 17 ]
‘Bombs are as old as hatred itself’, Gerard DeGroot reminds us, but only since August 1945 have people have spoken of ‘the Bomb’. [ 18 ] On 6 August, the US Air Force dropped an atomic bomb (equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT) on the city of Hiroshima. A second bomb (with the power of 22,000 tons of TNT) was used against Nagasaki on 9 August. The combined death toll was well over 100,000, with thousands more dying in the months and years that followed from burns, injuries and radiation-related illnesses. [ 19 ] On 14 August, Japan surrendered. In a public statement, Churchill, now leader of the opposition, expressed his hope that the scientific endeavour that had created ‘these awful agencies’ would henceforward be channelled into peaceful purposes. [ 20 ] It was not to be. For even as the Second World War ended, the contours of another conflict, the Cold War, were becoming visible.
Publicly, Churchill might extol the peaceful potential of atomic energy, but in private he was interested in the Bomb as a military instrument for thwarting Soviet expansionism. By mid-1945, the USSR was in occupation of much of Eastern and Central Europe, including half of Germany, and the worry on the British and American side was that Stalin, despite earlier promises to permit democratic freedoms in countries liberated by the Red Army, was intent on carving out a sphere of domination. To Churchill, the wartime alliance with the USSR had always been a means to an end: a committed anti-communist, he nonetheless realized back in 1941 that Britain and the Soviet Union needed to set aside their ideological differences and combine to defeat their shared enemy, Nazi Germany. Now, with that job accomplished, his mistrust of Moscow’s intentions resurfaced. [ 21 ] The problem was that the UK and USA lacked any real leverage when it came to persuading Stalin to pull back his armies from Eastern Europe. Until, that is, the Trinity test.
At Potsdam on 23 July 1945, the Americans gave Churchill a detailed briefing on the test results. ‘We now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians’, he told Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke afterwards, and contemplated telling Stalin that ‘we can just blot out Moscow’ if the Red Army refused to leave Eastern Europe. [ 22 ] Throughout the war, the British and Americans had sedulously avoided telling the Soviets anything about the Manhattan Project, but on 24 July, Truman, with Churchill’s blessing, casually remarked to Stalin that the USA had lately acquired a bomb of ‘unusual destructive force’. The Soviet leader appeared unperturbed, a reaction that convinced Truman and Churchill that he did not understand the significance of what he had been told. [ 23 ]
Historians continue to debate the reasons behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with one of the more controversial explanations revolving around the idea of ‘atomic diplomacy’. The argument here is that by the summer of 1945, with Japan essentially defeated and putting out peace feelers, the Bomb was used primarily to impress the USSR with America’s new military might and therefore to strengthen the USA’s diplomatic hand in negotiations with the Soviets over the future of Eastern Europe. [ 24 ] For his part, Churchill certainly hoped that the Bomb would shorten the war, but he was also attracted by atomic diplomacy: had he still been Prime Minister, he reflected following the Hiroshima bombing, he would have urged the Americans to have a ‘show-down’ with Stalin and to ‘use this power to restrain the Russians’. [ 25 ] As for Stalin, despite his poker-faced performance at Potsdam he knew a great deal about atomic weapons development thanks to spies at Los Alamos, and the failure of his allies to share the atomic secret convinced him of their baleful intentions (‘A-bomb blackmail’, he attested, ‘is American policy’) and reinforced his determination to obtain a Soviet Bomb as soon as possible. [ 26 ]
As the Cold War began to bite over the next few years, Churchill’s public statements blended warnings about the gravity of the Soviet menace, appeals for Western unity and military strength, and periodic calls for a negotiated settlement of East–West differences. Privately, however, he seems to have looked on negotiations as an occasion for the USA to flaunt its atomic advantage. In November 1947, he wanted to issue an ultimatum to Stalin to relinquish his grip on Eastern Europe or else ‘we will attack Moscow and your other cities and destroy them with atomic bombs’. [ 27 ] Similarly, in April 1948, he was inclined ‘to tell the Soviets that if they do not retire from Berlin and abandon East Germany … we will raze their cities’. [ 28 ] The closest he came to expressing such views in public was in October 1948 when he told the Conservative Party Conference at Llandudno that the West was more likely to secure a satisfactory negotiated settlement ‘if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the Russian Communists have got it too’. [ 29 ] This kind of talk went down well with the Tory faithful but The Times dismissed his view that ‘the threat of the bomb would make Russia consent to a settlement on western terms’ as ‘dangerously simple’. [ 30 ]
A corollary of Churchill’s interest in atomic diplomacy was a rejection of international control of atomic power: in his March 1946 ‘iron curtain’ speech he condemned as ‘criminal madness’ the idea, then being mooted, that the United States should surrender its atomic secrets to the United Nations. [ 31 ] On the contrary, he consistently argued that it was only the ‘deterrent power of the atomic bomb’, held solely and safely in American hands, that prevented the ‘enslavement’ of all of Europe. [ 32 ] But the credibility of this deterrent depended on more than possession. ‘You have not only to convince the Soviet Government that you have superior forces’, he declared in March 1949, ‘but that you are not restrained by any moral consideration ... from using that force with complete material ruthlessness’. [ 33 ] Moreover, grateful as he was for American atomic protection, Churchill often criticized the Attlee administration for failing to build a British Bomb and for what he held to be its broader neglect of national security. [ 34 ] In truth, the government did its best to maintain the momentum of the Tube Alloys programme, but the McMahon Act meant that the UK Bomb took longer, and cost more to make, than might otherwise have been the case. [ 35 ]
On 29 August 1949 the US atomic monopoly was shattered when the USSR successfully tested its first atomic weapon. Two months later, with the communist victory in the Chinese civil war, the global balance of power seemed to have shifted in favour of the communist bloc. In consequence, Churchill’s Cold War outlook also shifted. Speaking in Edinburgh on 14 February 1950 in the midst of a general election campaign, he added a twist to his now ritual denunciation of the USSR, namely the ‘idea’ of seeking to reduce ‘the hatreds of the Cold War’ through ‘a parley at the summit’. [ 36 ] This was the first time that the word ‘summit’ had been used to describe a meeting of the leaders of the great powers, and though Labour was quick to accuse him of an electoral stunt, in fact the old Cold Warrior was beginning to transform himself into an advocate of détente. [ 37 ] The process had some way to go before it was complete: for example, he remained confident that the superior size and power of the US atomic arsenal would enable the West to approach a summit from a position of great strength and therefore achieve a satisfactory settlement. At the same time, though, the prospect of a growing Soviet atomic stockpile, and Stalin’s related capacity ‘to terrorise the free world, if not, indeed, to destroy it’, prompted fears for Britain’s vulnerability and led him gradually to abandon all thoughts of a showdown. [ 38 ]
In May 1950, Churchill warned Attlee that the UK would soon become ‘a prime target for attack’ by atomic-laden Soviet bombers, partly because of the government’s 1948 decision to grant the US Air Force base rights in East Anglia for its atomic-capable B-29 bomber, and partly because of Labour’s ‘perilous and strange’ lack of investment in air defence. Urgent remedial action was required. [ 39 ] The outbreak of the Korean War the following month and the attendant danger that this local Asian crisis could trigger global war confirmed for Churchill the wisdom of ‘a resolute effort to come to a settlement’. [ 40 ] In the meantime, the worry that the USSR might take advantage of the distraction of Korea to mount a conventional military assault on Western Europe encouraged the Attlee government to join with the other NATO powers in the kind of large-scale defence build-up that Churchill had been urging. When, as part of this programme, Washington committed several divisions of US troops to the garrisoning of Western Europe, he was even more gratified. ‘What reason and foresight could not achieve the Soviet aggression in Korea has accomplished’, he reflected. [ 41 ]
Korea, however, remained a dangerous Cold War flashpoint in its own right. At the end of 1950, President Truman, responding to communist China’s entry into the conflict, admitted publicly that the use of the atomic bomb was under active consideration. [ 42 ] In December, a troubled Attlee flew to Washington for emergency talks, but before he left he informed Churchill that the Quebec Agreement, including the mutual consent clause, had been allowed to lapse following passage of the McMahon Act. [ 43 ] Churchill was outraged that the government had failed to defend the undertakings he had obtained from Roosevelt, not just on consent but on collaboration. When Attlee returned from Washington to tell Parliament that he had secured satisfactory (though unspecified) assurances from Truman concerning the Bomb, Churchill criticized the vagueness of this arrangement at a time when the UK was in the bullseye of Soviet atomic targeting. [ 44 ] He even sought Truman’s permission to publish the Quebec Agreement to prove how well he had defended the national interest compared to Attlee, but the request was rejected and he was left to nurse his grievance. [ 45 ]
The Korean situation stabilized somewhat with the start of armistice talks in July 1951, but fears about global war still lingered. In the autumn, during the British general election campaign, the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror portrayed Churchill as a warmonger itching to press the metaphorical atomic button and attack the USSR. If the charge had been levelled two years earlier it might have had some substance, but now it was out of date. Badly frightened by the Soviet Bomb, and increasingly of the view that in an atomic war there would be no winners, only losers, he avowed that détente was ‘the last prize I seek to win’. [ 46 ] A majority of the British electorate, albeit a small one, shared his outlook, and in October 1951 he was back in No.10 Downing Street.
Although Churchill continued to see the Bomb as the ‘supreme deterrent’ as well as the ‘most effective guarantee’ of victory if war came, one of his first priorities as Prime Minister was to firm-up Attlee’s loose arrangements with the Americans over its use. [ 47 ] In talks with the Truman administration in January 1952 he achieved some success: opposed to giving the UK a general veto, the Americans accepted that in the specific case of their atomic-laden B-29 bombers based in East Anglia, their deployment should be a matter for joint Anglo-American decision. [ 48 ]
Shortly after resuming the premiership, Churchill discovered – much to his delight – that the previous government had done far more than he realized in developing a British Bomb. In October 1952 the UK successfully tested its first atomic weapon at Monte Bello off the north-west coast of Australia, and in November 1953, the Blue Danube A-bomb was incorporated into the RAF’s arsenal. [ 49 ] Churchill seized on British membership of the exclusive atomic club to press the Americans to revise the McMahon Act, and in August 1954 the US Congress consented to a greater, but by no means full, exchange of information with states such as Britain that had independently achieved a high degree of atomic know-how. [ 50 ]
Meanwhile, the Monte Bello test was quickly overshadowed by the US Atomic Energy Commission’s announcement in November 1952 that a thermonuclear device had been successfully detonated at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific and that manufacture of an American hydrogen bomb – a weapon at least a thousand times more powerful than those used against Japan – was only a matter of time. [ 51 ] The United States had been working on the so-called ‘super bomb’ since 1950, but Churchill considered the prospect ‘so awful that I have a feeling it will not happen’. [ 52 ] He was wrong. Worse still, it was the Soviet Union that won the race, with Moscow announcing its hydrogen bomb breakthrough in August 1953. [ 53 ] ‘[W]e were now as far from the age of the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow’, Churchill sombrely judged. [ 54 ]
The spectre of the H-bomb made Churchill even more determined to bring about an easement in East–West tensions, but the Republican administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which took office in January 1953, as well as ministers in his own government, opposed the convening of a great power summit until NATO’s defence build-up was complete. [ 55 ] Nearing eighty years of age, Churchill did not have time on his side. Nor did he feel that a world threatened by the growing proliferation of nuclear weapons had that luxury either. Accordingly, he reacted to the news of Stalin’s death in March 1953 by renewing his public campaign for a summit: it ‘might well be that no hard-faced agreements would be reached’, he conceded, but ‘there might be a general feeling among those gathered together that they might do something better than tear the human race, including themselves, into bits’. [ 56 ]
Over the next year, the USA emerged as the main obstacle to the fulfilment of Churchill’s summitry ambitions and he grew anxious lest Eisenhower, under pressure from institutionalized anti-communists in his administration, agree to an atomic showdown with the Soviets while the American arsenal remained the larger and more destructive of the two. The President himself was personally convinced that nuclear weapons, through a process of military evolution, had acquired conventional status and should be used accordingly, and in his letters to Churchill he was sometimes worryingly apocalyptic. [ 57 ] A few years earlier, a showdown had been Churchill’s hope. Now it was his fear. Mindful also of the fact that Soviet bombers had the range to reach London but not Washington, he set out to resist the more bellicose aspects of US policy, especially in Asia where American involvement in local crises in Korea and Indochina could easily to spill over into war with communist China and ultimately with the Soviet Union. [ 58 ]
In February 1954, the United States confirmed that it now possessed a deliverable hydrogen bomb, much more powerful that its Soviet counterpart and reportedly capable of laying waste to a city the size of New York. [ 59 ] An agitated Churchill wrote to Eisenhower to remind him that US bases in East Anglia made the UK a priority target for Soviet nuclear attack and how ‘several million people would certainly be obliterated by these latest H-bombs’ if war came. [ 60 ] Secretly, the British Chiefs of Staff were even more pessimistic: depending on the size of the H-bombs, they put the death toll at anywhere between five and twelve million. [ 61 ] It is little wonder, then, that the hydrogen bomb became for Churchill ‘a nagging pain in his head, robbing him of all peace of mind’. [ 62 ]
In April 1955, a combination of age, infirmity and political pressure brought about Churchill’s retirement. To his great regret, his quest for a summit failed – although, ironically, one took place at Geneva just three months after he left office. Nor did he succeed in his attempt to ‘lift this nuclear monster from our world’ so as to allow the wonders of science and technology to be diverted from killing people to ushering in ‘a golden age of peace and progress’. [ 63 ] At first sight, Churchill’s decision (in July 1954) to approve production of a British hydrogen bomb sits uneasily alongside his search for détente, yet there was a logic to his reasoning. Leaving aside his interest, as a patriot, in the H-bomb as the status symbol of a great power, he wanted Britain to possess the most up-to-date weapons so that if or when it became necessary to counsel restraint in Washington, the UK would be taken seriously. Furthermore, to the extent that the British H-bomb helped to deter Soviet aggression, it left the door open to détente, still Churchill’s overriding objective. [ 64 ]
Despite his fear of nuclear war, Churchill belatedly recognized the Bomb’s potential as a source of stability in East–West relations. When ‘the advance of destructive weapons enables everyone to kill everybody else, nobody will want to kill anyone at all’, he suggested in November 1953. [ 65 ] In March 1955, in one of his last speeches in the House of Commons, he juxtaposed the revelation that his government was working on a hydrogen bomb with a vision of hope for the future. By a ‘process of sublime irony’, he declared, the world appeared to be approaching ‘a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’. [ 66 ] The Cold War would continue for another thirty-five years, but it never became a hot war largely because, as Churchill recognized well before the term Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) became popular, weapons of war could also double-up as weapons of peace.
Kevin Ruane is Professor of Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University. His doctoral research was concerned with Churchill’s peacetime administration, 1951–5, and he has gone on to publish widely on postwar international history. An expert in Cold War history, his books include The Rise and Fall of the European Defence Community (2000) and The Vietnam Wars (also 2000), while his more recent research focuses on novelist Graham Greene, his travels in Indochina in the 1950s, and the true story behind Greene’s iconic Vietnam-based novel, The Quiet American. He is currently completing a book for Bloomsbury Academic on Churchill and nuclear weapons.
(c) 2014 Kevin Ruane
