Clouds of Deceit (7 page)

But it was a job Penney fulfilled single-mindedly and apparently without hesitation. He gave his reason in a brief and rather testy answer to a question at the Australian Royal Commission hearings in London in 1985. ‘I thought we were going to have nuclear war,' he said. ‘The only hope I saw was [that] there should be a balance between the East and the West. That was why I did this job, not to make money. What I wanted was to be a professor.'

Demonstrating the power of the bomb by testing it unannounced, by devastating two Japanese cities, and by testing it again at Bikini had, of course, more to do with showing off the West's superiority than keeping a non-existent balance. Many scientists realized fully the dangers of this course - Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist in charge of Los Alamos, devoted himself at the end of the war to the problem of how to set up a regulatory agency for the post-war period.

Unlike Penney, some of the British contingent at Los Alamos did have doubts. Joseph Rotblat left the Manhattan Project before the end of 1944 when he knew that Hitler was not going to get the bomb - and because he feared the US intended to exploit its nuclear advantage in a conflict with Russia. He has since campaigned consistently against nuclear weapons. Earlier in 1944, the great scientist Niels Bohr, whose key work with Rutherford had determined the structure of the atom, had come to the view that the only way to prevent a catastrophic war between East and West was a form of international regulation of the atom which would involve some sharing of nuclear secrets with the Russians. In a memorandum to President Roosevelt in July 1944, he urged that ‘the terrifying prospect of a future competition between nations about a weapon of such formidable character can only be avoided through a universal agreement in true confidence.'

Bohr wanted the Russians to be told about the existence of the
atom bomb before it was dropped. To keep it secret would appear to justify the USSR's suspicions of American intentions, he believed, and would wreck the hope of any post-war cooperation to control it. Bohr succeeded in obtaining personal interviews with both Churchill and Roosevelt. The result was disastrous, and presaged the attacks that would be made on scientists worried by the bomb in the 1950s: the politicians became convinced Bohr himself might be a security risk.

They were certainly not going to give up the massive advantage they believed Britain and the US to have. Churchill wrote to Lord Cherwell, his scientific adviser, that he thought ‘Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.'

Meanwhile, Leo Szilard, who had persuaded Einstein to write to Roosevelt in 1939 and had worked on the Manhattan Project, was equally worried. On 11 June 1945, just over a month before the first bomb was tested at Alamogordo, Szilard and six other scientists from the University of Chicago sent a report to the US Secretary of War: the Franck Report. It took its name from the chairman of the committee set up to produce it, the Nobel Prizewinner James Franck, and warned that an unannounced attack on Japan would deeply shock not only Russia but allied and neutral countries. ‘If the United States were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction on mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race for armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such a weapon,' it said.

In 1946, Albert Einstein joined in the warnings. ‘Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation,' he said. ‘This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster.' If he had known the Germans were so far from getting the atom bomb, he said, ‘I would never have lifted a finger.' In April 1957, eighteen German scientists issued a statement that none of them would work on ‘the production, the testing, or the stockpiling of atomic weapons in any manner'. Two of the signatories were Otto Hahn, whose letter to Lise Meitner in 1938 led to the
realization that nuclear fission had been achieved, and Max Born.

Born had, in the early 1930s, been part of a brilliant group of scientists at Göttingen which was broken up by Hitler. Born took refuge in Edinburgh. During the war, his principles did not allow him to take part in war work. But one of his students, also a refugee from Germany, went to work first with Rudolf Peierls in Birmingham, then at the Manhattan Project. He was Klaus Fuchs.

When Fuchs was arrested in 1950, he was head of the theoretical physics section at Harwell. His father, Pastor Emil Fuchs, later posed the question as to whether his son had not been acting more in the interests of the British people than their government when he passed secrets to do with the atom bomb to the Russians. Alan Nunn May, a British scientist who was convicted of spying in 1946, said he gave the Russians information about nuclear power because he did not believe nuclear energy should be confined to the US.

The development of the atom bomb led former colleagues to take such divergent roads that they found themselves in bitter conflict with one other. It is against this background that the subsequent actions of members of the British team at Los Alamos – Bohr, Rotblat, Fuchs and Penney - must be judged.

By the summer of 1945, the Los Alamos laboratory had come up with not one but two types of atom bomb. One, the innocuously-named Little Boy, was what might crudely be called a uranium gun bomb. The other, Fat Man, was a plutonium implosion weapon. The principles on which they were based are simple.

The uranium bomb, Little Boy, used the principle that an explosion would take place as soon as an amount of material greater than critical mass - the quantity required for a self-sustaining chain reaction - was put together. Two lumps of U235 were to be placed at opposite ends of a gun barrel and one would be fired into the other to start the nuclear explosion.

The plutonium bomb, Fat Man, was expected to work by a different method: an amount of plutonium, smaller than the critical mass, was surrounded with high explosives. On detonation of the conventional explosives, the force of the blast would
compress the plutonium into a very dense ball in which the chain reaction would start.

Scientists had greater confidence in Little Boy than in Fat Man; they pressed Oppenheimer to allow a full-scale test of the plutonium bomb. After looking at several sites, including various islands off the coast of California, the Alamogordo bombing range in New Mexico was selected. It was already in use to train US Air Force bomber crews before posting overseas.

A cover story was prepared about an unexpected explosion at an ammunition dump in case the intensity of the explosion provoked unwelcome questions from people in the surrounding areas. Fat Man, encased in an outer shell twelve feet long and weighing nearly 10,000 pounds, was hoisted to the top of a 100-foot metal tower. Oppenheimer, who had given the test the name Trinity, watched from the control point five-and-a-half miles away. The test was scheduled for 5.30 on the morning of 16 July, 1945.

Otto Frisch stood with his back to the bomb, about twenty miles to the north. ‘I looked at the hills, which were visible in the first faint light of dawn,' he wrote later. ‘Suddenly, and without any sound, the hills were bathed in brilliant light, as if somebody had turned the sun on with a switch … The hills appeared kind of flat and colourless, like a scenery seen by the light of a photographic flash…

‘After that [the light starting to diminish] I turned round and tried to look at the light source but found it still too bright to keep my eyes on it. A few short glances gave me the impression of a small, very brilliant core, much smaller in appearance than the sun, surrounded by decreasing and reddening brightness with no definite boundary, but not greater than the sun. After some seconds I could keep my eye on the thing and it now looked like a pretty perfect red ball, about as big as the sun, and connected to the ground by a short grey stem.'

As Frisch watched, the ball rose, remaining connected to the ground by a stem. It flattened out and ‘a hump grew out of its top surface and a second mushroom grew out of the top of the first one, slowly penetrating the highest cloud layers.' When he thought the blast wave was about to arrive, he sat on the ground
with his fingers in his ears. ‘Despite that, the report was quite respectable and was followed by a long rumbling, not quite like thunder but more regular, like huge noisy waggons running around in the hills.' As Robert Oppenheimer watched the successful test, he remembered a line of the Hindu epic, the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.'

The bomb had contained five kilograms of plutonium 239. The yield of atom bombs is measured by comparing them with the energy released by conventional explosives such as TNT. The Alamogordo bomb was equal to 17,000 tons of TNT, usually written as 17 kilotons.

Less than two months later, the uranium bomb, Little Boy, was dropped over Hiroshima by a US air force plane called the Enola Gay. It was dropped from a height of 570 metres on a city of 256,000 people. The yield of the bomb was 12.5 kilotons: official figures put the casualties at 68,000 dead, while some Japanese scientists claim as many as 140,000.

Three days later, the US air force plane Bock's Car dropped a plutonium bomb, like the one tested at Alamogordo, over Nagasaki at a height of 500 metres. The bomb's yield was 22 kilotons and the official figure for the dead is 38,000. Some estimates put it at 74,000.

Fifty years had elapsed from the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen to the first use of atomic weapons against humankind. At the time the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a number of German scientists were interned in Britain. One of them was Otto Hahn, whose work in 1938 showed that nuclear fission had been achieved. His reaction to the attack on Hiroshima was recorded by another scientist in his diary for 7 August 1945: ‘Poor Professor Hahn! He told us that when he first learned of the terrible consequences which atomic fission could have, he had been unable to sleep for several nights and contemplated suicide… At 2 a.m. there was a knock on our door and in came von Laue. “We have to do something, I am very worried about Otto Hahn. This news has upset him dreadfully, and I fear the worst.” We stayed up for quite a while and only when we had made sure that Hahn had fallen asleep did we go to bed.'
Clement Attlee's Labour government took office on 27 July 1945. Few ministers in the wartime coalition government had known about the bomb project and its transfer to Los Alamos. Not a single Labour politician had been in on the secret. At the end of the war, the scientists from Britain who had worked on the wartime project expected it to be continued; their discussions centred on technical questions about whether the weapons should be based on uranium, like the Hiroshima bomb, or plutonium, the type of device used on Nagasaki. The Chiefs of Staff told the government that, if efforts to set up a system of international control failed, Britain should develop the atom bomb.

As might have been expected, William Penney played a crucial role in bringing the government to the point of taking an official decision to make the atom bomb. In 1946, Penney was Chief Superintendent of Armament Research at the Ministry of Supply. Against a background of pessimistic attempts to secure international arms control, Penney came up with a scheme for an Atomic Weapons Section in his research department.

Penney's scheme was sent to Lord Portal, who was Controller of Production at the Ministry of Supply. Penney said the section would need to do two types of work: the production of fissile material, and the manufacture and assembly of other parts of the bomb whose function would be to trigger the explosion. The second part of the work could be argued to be conventional weapons research, he wrote, although this could not be maintained with a clear conscience.

As a result of Penney's letter to Portal, the Ministry of Supply agreed that Penney should have this responsibility. This decision was taken
before
the government had formally decided to make the bomb. Portal wrote a memo to the Prime Minister, who raised it with an
ad hoc
meeting of ministers called Gen 163. This meeting, held in early January 1947, was attended by only Clem Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison (Lord President of the Council), A. V. Alexander (Minister of Defence), Lord Addison (Secretary of State for the Dominions) and John Wilmot (Minister of Supply).

One of the curiosities of the whole affair is that the
ad hoc
committee which gave the go-ahead for the bomb project, Gen 163, was not even the same committee which had been meeting to discuss atomic affairs since August 1945. This committee, which met as Gen 75, had been referred to by Attlee as his Atom Bomb Committee and yet three ministers from Gen 75 did not even attend the Gen 163 meeting.

Gen 163 decided Britain should go ahead with a bomb programme. Penney was told some four months later, in May, and given control of the work, which was to take place under the innocuous title of High Explosives Research. (It was a euphemism which persisted for some years. The Australian Royal Commission was given in 1985 a formerly confidential report which dealt with the meteorological conditions in which the first bomb in the Totem test series in South Australia could be fired: its title was High Explosives Research Report No A32, and its date May 1953.)

If the Attlee government's decision involved moral principles, it does not seem to have given the ministers who took it much pause for thought. Ernest Bevin, for one, did not want to hear any arguments against Britain's acquiring the bomb. When the distinguished scientist, Patrick Blackett, who sat on the government's own Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy, suggested Britain should refrain from developing her own deterrent, Bevin gave the idea short shrift. ‘He ought to stick to science' was the reply he scribbled to Blackett's suggestion. Clearly, this was not the sort of advice the Advisory Committee was supposed to be giving.

On 12 May 1948, an MP called George Jeger asked a question of the Minister of Defence, A. V. Alexander, in the House of Commons. The question was a plant: its object was to allow the Labour government to admit it was making atom bombs with as little fuss as possible. Was the minister satisfied, Jeger asked, that ‘adequate progress' was being made in ‘the development of the most modern types of weapon'?