Graham Farmelo - Churchills Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race

Advance Praise for Churchills Bomb

This is a fascinating book. Graham Farmelo offers a fresh and thoroughly researched history of the development of atomic weapons in his insightful and engaging account of Winston Churchills failure to forge a partnership of equal exchange between Great Britain and the United States in the development of the bomb. Farmelo offers vivid vignettes of political and scientific personalities, with special attention to the widely disliked Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, who became Churchills science and technology guru in the 1920s.

Mary Jo Nye, Professor of History Emerita, Oregon State University, and author of Michael Polanyi and His Generation

An excellent book. Graham Farmelo draws on many sources to show how Churchill, his scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann, and a host of other scientists and politicians developed the atomic bomb. Churchills Bomb brings these characters back to life with anecdotes, quotations, and personal sketches. But Farmelos book does more than unfold the hopes, doubts, and fears engendered by the bomb: it illuminates the relationship between big science and modern democracy.

James W. Muller, University of Alaska, Anchorage

What a brilliant and compelling book! Graham Farmelo sensitively and eloquently deconstructs the twists and turns of Winston Churchills involvement with nuclear weapons over nearly half a century, setting this unfamiliar tale in the context of the turbulent times. At its heart are the ambiguities of the World War II relationship between a scientifically innovative but economically weakened Britain and the inexhaustibly energetic USA with unlimited resources.

Sir Michael Berry, University of Bristol

A nicely detailed and balanced record of the British ambivalence toward building an atom bomb in favor of the American effort.... A tremendously useful soup-to-nuts study of how Britain and the U.S. embraced a frightening atomic age.

Kirkus Reviews

CHURCHILLS BOMB

CHURCHILLS

BOMB

How the United States Overtook

Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race

GRAHAM FARMELO

BASIC BOOKS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York

Copyright 2013 by Graham Farmelo

First published in the United States in 2013 by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Faber and Faber Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-465-06989-7 (e-book)

LCCN: 2013940827

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR LINDSEY JONES, F.S.

In the next fifty years mankind will make greater progress in mastering and applying natural forces than in the last million years or more. And the first question we must ask ourselves is: Are we fit for it? Are we worthy of all these exalted responsibilities? Can we bear this tremendous strain?

WINSTON CHURCHILL, 14 November 1937

Scientists on the whole are a very docile lot. Apart from their own particular job they do just what they are told and are content to sit down and be very minor entities.

MARK OLIPHANT, 20 April 1940

Devil: In the arts of life Man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself... his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman, 1903

Contents

I do not pretend to be an expert or to have technical knowledge of this prodigious sphere of [nuclear] science. But in my long friendship with [Frederick Lindemann] I have tried to follow and even predict the evolution of events.

WINSTON CHURCHILL to the Commons, 1 March 1955

His swansong was sure to have a nuclear theme. In February 1955, when Churchill was eighty years old and inching reluctantly towards his resignation as Prime Minister, he set his heart on making one last great speech in the Commons. The hydrogen bomb, his obsession, supplied the perfect theme it made all the other business of the day look trifling. As he had told his doctor a few months before: I am more worried by [the H-bomb] than by all the rest of my problems put together.

The H-bomb was, Churchill believed, the greatest threat to civilisation since the Mongols began their conquests three-quarters of a millennium before.when the world seemed to be careering towards a nuclear holocaust.

He threw himself into the speech, researching the nuclear story and his role in it, all the way back to the articles he had written in the 1920s and 1930s about the potential of nuclear energy to change the world. Among the best of the pieces was Fifty Years Hence, a four-thousand-word speculation on the effects science might have on life in the future, first published in late 1931. In it, he drew attention to the likely advent of nuclear weapons and the challenges their invention would pose. He even glimpsed the destructive power of the H-bomb, which would be detonated for the first time twenty-one years later:

High authorities tell us that new sources of power, vastly more important than any we yet know, will surely be discovered. Nuclear energy is incomparably greater than the molecular energy which we use today... If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine together and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand horse-power engine for a whole year... There is no question among scientists that this gigantic source of energy exists...

Churchill had based the article on a draft by his scientific Grand Vizier, Frederick Lindemann, an acid-tongued professor of physics at the University of Oxford. Lindemann was one of the best scientists and best brains in the country, in Churchills opinion, a view not shared by many leading academics. To most of them, the Prof, as Churchill called him, was a distinguished scientist with a gift for summarising complex arguments simply and accurately, but not a deep or imaginative thinker and certainly not an expert on nuclear science.