Dreams of Earth and Sky (34 page)

The match to light the nuclear fire was the fission of uranium, discovered in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin.

Lindemann worked at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough during World War I and became famous for solving the problem of
tailspin. Many pilots were losing their lives because their aircraft would stall during combat maneuvers, fall into a tailspin, and helplessly spin into the ground. Lindemann worked out the theory of tailspin and found a remedy. He calculated that the pilot could give a counterintuitive push to the rudder, which would convert the spin into a straight dive and allow the pilot to regain control. He then borrowed an airplane, put it into a tailspin, applied the push that he had calculated, pulled out of the straight dive, and flew the plane safely home. This combination of scientific wizardry and courage won him the lifelong admiration of Churchill.

Lindemann met Churchill for the first time in 1921 and explained recent scientific discoveries in simple language. Churchill found him to be a kindred spirit, an old-fashioned patriot who saw no shame in using science to win wars. In 1924, Churchill wrote an essay about the future of warfare with the title “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” describing apocalyptic visions of anthrax weapons and “a bomb no bigger than an orange … [with] a secret power to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke.” Before writing the piece, he turned for advice to Lindemann and not to Wells.

Still Wells remained faithful to his old love. In 1908 he had written a piece for the
Daily News
, “Why Socialists Should Vote for Mr. Churchill.” In 1940 he wrote a piece for
Collier’s
magazine, “Churchill, Man of Destiny.” His verdict on Churchill in 1940: “He has pulled himself together. He is pulling us all together. It is like awakening from a nightmare to think of what might have happened to my country without him.” When the chips were down, Wells was an old-fashioned patriot too.

Wells was a spinner of fanciful tales while Lindemann was a real scientist. Paradoxically, the information that Wells gave to Churchill was mostly right, while the information that Lindemann gave was
mostly wrong. Wells had been right about airplanes and tanks before World War I. Lindemann was wrong about radar in 1935, when it was first proposed for defending Britain against attack from the air. He gave low priority to radar, which turned out to be the decisive technology of World War II and was crucial to the defense of Britain in 1940. One of the offshoots of radar was the proximity fuse, which enabled an antiaircraft shell to destroy an aircraft without hitting it directly. The proximity fuse multiplied the kill rate of antiaircraft artillery by a factor of ten. In 1944, when the V-1 drone airplanes were attacking London, a massive line of antiaircraft guns with proximity fuses was deployed along the coast and succeeded in shooting down 70 percent of the V-1s before they reached England. If the Germans had had proximity fuses for their antiaircraft guns, they could probably have stopped our large-scale bombing of Germany.

Lindemann gave the highest priority to aerial mines. Aerial mines were his pride and joy. The idea was to destroy airplanes with mines floating in the air, just as ships were destroyed by mines floating in the water. The big difference between air and sea is that the air has three dimensions while the surface of the sea has two dimensions. An aerial mine has to kill airplanes over a wide range of heights. The mine with the explosive charge must hang at the bottom of a long steel wire with a parachute at the top. If an airplane flies into the wire, the wire will bite into the skin of the wing until it reaches solid metal. Pulled upward by the drag of the parachute, the wire will slide up through the wing until the explosive charge reaches the airplane and detonates. Lindemann continued to play with this toy all through the years of World War II. It absorbed a large amount of money and attention that might have been put to better use.

It was obvious to almost everyone except Lindemann that aerial mines could not be an effective defense. The wire had to be thousands of feet long and correspondingly heavy. Even with a big parachute,
it would not stay in the air for more than a few minutes. To defend an important target, a fleet of airplanes would be required to continue sowing mines over the area as long as the attack continued. If many targets were to be defended, the defense would quickly run out of mines. And it was easy to invent countermeasures. A system of small clippers along the leading edge of an airplane wing could cut the wires and make aerial mines harmless.

When I was working for the British Bomber Command toward the end of World War II, we would from time to time receive inquiries from some high level of government, asking whether damage to returning bombers gave any evidence that the Germans were using aerial mines. Our answer was always negative. My boss told me confidentially that the inquiries were coming from Lindemann.

Lindemann was enthusiastic about technical toys such as aerial mines, but he remained unenthusiastic about nuclear weapons. One week after the beginning of World War II, he moved from Oxford to London to become a full-time scientific adviser to Churchill, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty. Lindemann was well aware of the discovery of fission and the possibility of nuclear weapons, but he waited for two years before advising Churchill to begin a project to develop a British bomb. Toward the end of the war, Lindemann visited the American bomb laboratory at Los Alamos and remarked privately to his friend Reginald Jones, “What fools the Americans will look after spending so much money.” Jones had been Lindemann’s student before the war, and worked closely with him as the head of scientific intelligence. Jones said that until the bomb exploded at Alamogordo, Lindemann never really believed that the thing would work.

The title
Churchill’s Bomb
is misleading. It was probably chosen by the publisher to attract readers rather than to describe the book. Graham Farmelo’s main subject is the personal rivalry surrounding the British nuclear weapons project, in which Churchill played a
leading part. But the book is not a history of the bomb. It does not answer some of the obvious questions that a reader might ask: What were the technical obstacles to be overcome? What did the scientists actually do while the politicians argued about it? How was the bomb built? How was it supposed to be delivered? What effect has it had? Is the bomb still relevant in the world of today, sixty years after it was built? Why is it called Churchill’s bomb rather than Attlee’s bomb? After all, it was Clement Attlee and not Churchill who gave the order to build it.

The subtitle, “How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race,” is also misleading. There was never an arms race between the United States and Britain. There was an arms race between Britain and Germany, beginning in 1939 and ending in 1942. During that time the United States was still neutral and not seriously engaged in the race. Britain won the race when Werner Heisenberg and Albert Speer secretly agreed to abandon the German nuclear bomb project. Then, in 1942, with the United States at war, Britain and the United States still believed that they were in a race with Germany, since they did not know that the Germans had given up. The choice for Britain was whether to join forces with the United States or to try to build a bomb independently.

Churchill made the decision to merge British efforts with the American project. A merger meant sharing secrets, and the sharing of secrets was always a delicate problem. A year went by before sharing became effective and British scientists were working at Los Alamos. During that year, the American project took a great leap forward and the British project stalled. Enrico Fermi with his American colleagues built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago and explored the new world of nuclear power. British scientists spent the year waiting for the American authorities to allow them to participate. It was true that the United States overtook Britain, but Churchill was not
racing. Churchill had already decided that he wanted a partnership with America and not a race.

The nuclear partnership began in 1943 and came to a sudden end with the passing of the McMahon Act by Congress in 1946. That year, the United States had bombs and the industrial equipment to make more bombs, and Britain was shut out. Britain had to decide whether to give up or go ahead with building an independent British bomb. Attlee had taken Churchill’s place as prime minister in 1945 and made the decision to go ahead with the British bomb. It was successfully tested in 1952, when Churchill was back in power. In that same year the Americans tested the first hydrogen bomb with a yield of ten megatons. Churchill quietly gave the order for a British hydrogen bomb, which was built and successfully tested in 1957. By that time Churchill had ended his second term as prime minister, but he achieved his goal of restoring the nuclear partnership and the sharing of secrets with America.

Churchill, Lindemann, and Wells did not fundamentally disagree about nuclear strategy. They agreed that nuclear weapons were desirable as instruments of power, immensely dangerous, and historically decisive. Churchill and Lindemann saw the bomb as necessary to preserve the status of Britain as a great power. Wells saw it as necessary to establish the authority of a future world government.

Only one voice spoke out in well-reasoned opposition to these views. The opposing voice belonged to Patrick Blackett, a physicist who had served as a naval officer in World War I, survived the Battle of Jutland in 1916, and led the team of scientists helping the Royal Navy to defeat German U-boats in World War II. He won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for discoveries in particle physics. Both as a scientist and as an expert in war-fighting, Blackett had far better credentials than Lindemann. But Blackett was a socialist and was active in left-wing politics. Lindemann hated him, and Churchill distrusted him.
They made sure that Blackett was kept out of all high-level discussions of nuclear policy so long as Churchill was prime minister.

As soon as Attlee became prime minister in 1945, he appointed Blackett to his Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy. The next year was the decisive turning point in the history of nuclear weapons. Several governments made serious proposals to put the newly created United Nations in charge of the nascent nuclear industries all over the world, with power to prevent any nation from building nuclear bombs. This was the last chance to avoid a large-scale nuclear arms race. Robert Oppenheimer in the United States and Niels Bohr in Denmark were the leaders of a worldwide campaign of scientists for international control of nuclear energy. The United Nations Atomic Energy Commission was created to exercise whatever form of international control the member nations could agree to establish. Everything depended on finding an international legal frame that the United States and the Soviet Union could both accept.

The US proposal for international control was known as the Baruch plan because it was written by Bernard Baruch, a conservative banker and a friend of Churchill. The essential point that made it unacceptable to the Soviet Union was the enforcement clause, which gave the United Nations Security Council power to enforce the agreement by majority vote. In all other actions of the Security Council, each permanent member of the council had the right to veto majority decisions. In the Baruch plan the right to veto was abolished for decisions concerning nuclear weapons. In any dispute involving the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union was likely to be in the minority and the United States in the majority, so the Baruch plan was giving a permanent nuclear hegemony to the United States. Oppenheimer fought hard inside the American government for a plan that would recognize the Soviet need for equal treatment. Blackett fought hard inside the British government. Oppenheimer failed to convince Truman and
Blackett failed to convince Attlee. American hegemony was what both Truman and Attlee wanted and hoped to make permanent.

Stalin knew that the American hegemony would not last long. He said, “The atomic bomb is a good weapon for threatening people with weak nerves.” Stalin did not have weak nerves. He knew that his country had produced more tanks than Germany in wartime and could produce more atomic bombs than the United States in peacetime. In 1946 the Soviet Union proposed a simple prohibition of nuclear weapons, overseen by the United Nations but without any enforcement clause. After a year of argument about details, the negotiations ended and the nuclear arms race began. The American hegemony ended with the first Soviet bomb test in 1949.

Blackett disagreed strongly with Attlee, not only about the Baruch plan but also about the decision to build a British bomb. Blackett believed that the military value of the bomb was illusory while the danger of possessing it was real. He argued that the bomb would be useless in any future wars that Britain might reasonably fight. Any war that was worth fighting could be won with nonnuclear weapons. And if there were ever a nuclear war involving the Soviet Union, the possession of nuclear weapons would make it sure that London and other British cities would be obliterated.

After Blackett failed to find support for these views inside the government, he made them public in a book that was published in Britain with the title
Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy
and in America with the title
Fear, War, and the Bomb.
The book appeared in 1948 and became a best seller with translations published in eleven languages. Farmelo says rightly that the book had no influence on government policies or on majority opinions at the time. He says wrongly that the book is “so dense that much of it is barely readable.” In fact it is highly readable and widely read. It stands after sixty-five years as a classic statement of the case against
the nuclear follies of our age. Some of Blackett’s predictions have been proved wrong and some of his arguments have become irrelevant, but the central theme of his book is still true. He is saying that the military utility of the bomb is small, that its political importance is exaggerated, and that only its danger as an instrument of mass murder is real.