Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (80 page)

Hitler’s only prospect of achieving stalemate by a decisive technical advance lay in marrying the A10 rocket to a nuclear payload. There was never much prospect of him achieving this within the time-scale of the war. Yet there was a continuing fear on the Allied side that Hitler would come into possession of atomic bombs. Many scientists believed the Second World War would become nuclear. There was a certain symmetry in the development of atomic knowledge in the inter-war period. The notion of a man-made explosion of colossal power was implicit in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. If the vast energy binding particles into the closely packed entity of the nucleus could be released – the heaviest elements containing the greatest energy – then uranium-235, at the top of the weight-table, was the raw material of the quest. High-energy physics was the great expanding science of the 1920s. In 1932, as Germany turned towards Hitler, the results began to come in, all over Europe and North America. That year, at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, J.D.Cockcroft and E.T.S.Walton, using a £500 piece of equipment – which Lord Rutherford, head of the Cavendish, thought an outrageous sum – split the atom. Their colleague Sir James Chadwick discovered the neutron, consisting of proton and electron,
with a binding energy of 1–2 million electron volts. In 1934 the Joliot-Curies, in France, made radioactive isotopes artificially and Enrico Fermi, in Italy, successfully slowed down (that is, controlled) neutrons, and went on to produce transuranic elements with even heavier masses than on the atomic table. The process of developing the theoretical notion of atomic fission, involving scientists in Germany and America as well, culminated in the first nine months of the fatal year 1939, so that by the time Hitler invaded Poland it was already clear that a man-made atomic explosion was possible. The dramatic advances of 1939, and the outbreak of war, constitute one of the most striking and sinister coincidences in history: a review article in January 1940 was able to summarize over one hundred significant publications over the previous year. The most important of them, by the Dane Nils Bohr and his American pupil J. A. Wheeler, explaining the fission process, appeared only two days before the war began.
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From the very beginning applied atomic physics had its ideological and moral dimensions. The concept of the bomb was born among the mainly Jewish refugee scientific community, who were terrified that Hitler might get it first. It was one of them, Leo Szilard, who proposed a self-imposed censorship of scientific publication. The bomb was created by (among others) men who put ideological considerations before national self-interest, just as it was betrayed by such men. Many of those who worked on the British project, the greatest of wartime secrets, were excluded for security reasons from other war work.
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Fear was the primary motive. Robert Oppenheimer, a Jew, built the first A-bomb because he feared Hitler would do it first; Edward Teller, a Hungarian, built the first H-bomb because he was terrified of a Soviet monopoly.
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Hence the real father of the atomic bomb was Hitler and the spectres his horrifying will conjured up. In March 1940 Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls of Birmingham University produced an astonishing memorandum, of three typed pages, showing how to make a bomb of enriched uranium. The high-powered ‘Maud’ Committee (whimsically called after Maud Ray, a Kentish governess) was created to crash-develop the idea. In June it was joined by the French nuclear team, who brought with them the world’s entire stock of heavy water, which they had snatched from Norway: 185 kilograms in twenty-six cans, which was first temporarily housed in Wormwood Scrubs prison, then put in the library at Windsor Castle.
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At Einstein’s request (he also feared an ‘anti-Semitic bomb’), Roosevelt had set up an ‘Uranium Committee’ in October 1939. It was jolted into activity in the autumn of 1940 when the two leaders of the British scientific war-effort, Sir Henry Tizard and Sir John Cockcroft,
went to Washington taking with them a ‘black box’ containing, among other things, all the secrets of the British atomic programme.

At that time Britain was several months ahead of any other nation, and moving faster. Plans for a separation plant were completed in December 1940 and by the following March the atomic bomb had ceased to be a matter of scientific speculation and was moving into the arena of industrial technology and engineering. By July 1941 the Maud Committee report, ‘Use of Uranium for a Bomb’, argued that such a weapon, which it thought could be ready by 1943, would be much cheaper, in cost per pound, than conventional explosives, highly economical in air-power, more concentrated in its impact and with a profound effect on enemy morale. Even if the war ended before the bomb became available, the effort was essential because no nation ‘would care to risk being caught without a weapon of such decisive capabilities’.
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Already, then, the bomb was seen in post-Hitler terms as a permanency of international life. But its supposed imminence made it a natural ingredient in the bombing policy. There can be no doubt that an all-British bomb, if available, would have been used against German cities, with the approbation of the British public, which throughout supported the area bombing policy.

In fact the optimism of the British planners was not justified. The industrial and engineering problems involved in producing pure U-235 or plutonium (the alternative fissionable material) in sufficient quantities proved daunting; as did the design of the bomb itself. The success of the project was made possible only by marrying European theory to American industrial technology and, above all, American resources and entrepreneurial adventurism. The Maud Report became the basis for America’s ‘Manhattan’ project, with a budget of $2 billion, which spent $1 billion in 1944 alone. In order to race Hitler to the bomb (as they thought), three completely different methods of producing bomb-material, two types of uranium enrichment plants (gaseous diffusion and electro-magnetic) and a set of plutonium reactors, were pursued simultaneously. Each involved building some of the largest factories ever conceived.

The project was under the direction of an army engineer general, Leslie Groves, who shared to the full the giganticist philosophy of the new Forties phase of American capitalism.
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Given a clear and attainable objective, he was impervious to qualitative or quantitative difficulties. He took a fierce delight in prodigality. ‘We have so many PhDs now that we can’t keep track of them’, he boasted. He asked the American Treasury for thousands of tons of silver for electric wiring and was told: in the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver. Our unit is the troy ounce.’
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But he got the silver. The effort to invent nuclear power involved creating a series of new technologies: the first
fully automated factory, the first plant operated by remote control, the first wholly sterile industrial process – 6 million square feet of leak-proof machinery – and a variety of revolutionary gadgets.
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The waste was enormous, and much of it in retrospect seemed inexcusable. But then war is about waste; war
is
waste. The Americans were compressing perhaps three decades of scientific engineering progress into four years. There was no other way of being sure to get the bomb. There was no other country or system which could have produced this certainty. It was Hitler’s bomb; it was also and above all a capitalist bomb.

It is ironic that totalitarianism, having generated the fear which made the bomb possible, made only feeble efforts of its own to justify the righteous terror of the legitimate powers. The Leningrad physicist Igor Kurchatov had asked for funds to build a reactor in the late 1930s, in response to the prodigal outpouring of Western published data. When one of his pupils noticed that this flow had halted, Kurchatov alerted his political superiors (May 1942) and eventually got a Uranium Institute established in Moscow. The Soviet programme began only a few months after the Manhattan Project, but with a low resource-priority which reflected doubt about the feasibility of a bomb.
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According to Nikita Khrushchev it was not until the day after the Hiroshima explosion that Stalin put his secret police head, Beria, in charge of a crash project with absolute priority over all else in the state.
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The Japanese, too, had an A-bomb project under their leading physicist, Yoshio Nishina, and built five cyclotrons. But that, too, lacked resources and in 1943 the Japanese concluded that not even the US economy could produce a bomb in the foreseeable future.
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Germany, despite the scientific exodus, retained enough nuclear scientists to conceive a bomb. But to Hitler, the nuclear field was identified with Einstein and ‘Jewish physics’. Perhaps deliberately, they failed to ignite Hitler’s enthusiasm, though a nuclear explosive was exactly what he needed to make his rocket programme effective. In its colossal destructive power, it was an archetypal Hitler weapon: the destroyer-state incarnate. Even before the war he had grimly outlined to Hermann Rauschning the price of Nazi failure: ‘Even as we go down to destruction we will carry half the world into destruction with us’.
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The atomic bomb could have brought this reckless boast closer to reality. But the bomb never possessed Hitler’s mind as the rocket did. The failure in the imagination of this romantic nihilist rendered groundless the fears of the scientific exiles who caused the bomb to be made.

By a further, though predictable, irony, the race to get the weapon intensified as the moral and military necessity for it diminished. As enemy power receded in 1943 and 1944, and it became clear that
total victory was only a matter of time, the need to forestall Hitler was replaced by the gruesome urge to make the bomb while the war still provided the chance to use it. By the end of December 1941 it was manifest that Hitler and his Japanese allies could not win the war. By the late summer of 1942, after the Japanese disaster at Midway and the petering out of Hitler’s Volga-Caucasus offensive, it was also obvious that the Axis could not achieve a stalemate either. The hinge-month was November 1942. On 2 November the British began the decisive battle of Alamein, to clear North Africa and the Mediterranean, followed by Anglo—American landings in Morocco and Algeria six days later. The next day the Japanese failed in their last major effort to win the battle of Guadalcanal Island in the Solomons, which their army commander described as the ‘battle in which the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire will be decided’. Nine days after this catastrophe the Russians launched their counter-offensive at Stalingrad. Roosevelt told the
Herald Tribune:
it would seem that the turning point in this war has at last been reached.’

Italy was the first to accept the logic of Allied power. As early as December 1940 Mussolini had told his son-in-law Ciano that the Italians of 1914 had been superior to those of the fascist state. It reflected, he said, badly on his regime.
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By the time the Allies invaded Sicily on 10 July 1943 he was in a mood of invincible pessimism. He did nothing to prevent his critics summoning the fascist Grand Council fifteen days later, having listened to the ten-hour debate; and waiting apathetically for his arrest, he autographed a photograph for a woman
‘Mussolini defunto’.
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While Italy hastened to make terms with the Allies, Hitler turned the country into an occupied zone, rescued the fallen dictator and allowed him to run a puppet regime. In his twilight, Mussolini reverted to his Lenin-type totalitarian socialism, always the bedrock of his political philosophy, and preached the destruction of ‘plutocracy’ and the supremacy of syndicalism. By the end of March 1945 he had carried through, albeit largely on paper, a socialist revolution which had nationalized all firms employing more than one hundred workers. And just before he was captured and hanged, upside down alongside his mistress, he had resumed his violent Germanophobia of 1914–15: ‘Il
tedeschi sono responsabili di tutto’
was one of his last
dicta.
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It was essentially Hitler’s decision to fight the war to its now inevitable finish. For a time at least Stalin was always prepared to revert to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He offered to negotiate with Hitler in December 1942 and again in summer 1943. In the autumn, fearing that Anglo—American long-term strategy predicated a Nazi—Soviet war of exhaustion, he sent his Deputy Foreign Minister and former
Berlin ambassador, Vladimir Dekanozov, to Stockholm, with an offer of a return to the 1914 frontiers and an economic deal.
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No doubt Stalin hoped to resurrect his 1925 strategy, pull out of the war and re-enter it later. But in November 1942, on the anniversary of his
putsch
, Hitler had said, ‘There will no longer be any peace offers coming from us’, and he stuck to that resolve, fulfilling the menacing prediction he had made on numerous occasions in the 1920s and 1930s that Germany had the choice only between world leadership and national destruction.

This saved the legitimate powers a damaging internal debate. It became apparent early in 1942 that official opinion in both Britain and the USA was divided into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ armistice formulae. To resolve the dilemma, the State Department in May 1942 and the Defence Department in December 1942 recommended ‘unconditional surrender’ as a working principle. Roosevelt, to avoid Wilson’s difficulties in 1918–19, pushed the idea on a reluctant Churchill at the Casablanca Conference on 24 January 1943, then unilaterally made it public. But there is no evidence to justify Churchill’s fear that Hitler would exploit Allied intransigence to bolster German resistance.
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No power in Germany could compel or persuade Hitler to make peace on any terms whatever. The German professional officer class, or what was left of it, made no move until it was clear that the Allied invasion of Europe, begun on 6 June 1944, had been successful. Then on 15 July Marshal Rommel sent a teletype to Hitler: ‘The unequal struggle is nearing its end. I must ask you immediately to draw the necessary conclusions from this situation.’
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When Hitler made no response, a
Junker
bomb-plot took place on 20 July. If Hitler had been killed, a military dictatorship would have followed, but it is not at all clear that Roosevelt would have been prepared to bargain with it, following the Italian example (Italy was excluded from the Casablanca “unconditional surrender’ formula).