“Death stands at attention,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1924: in the next war mankind would possess, for the first time, “the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own destruction”. Yet when he came to sanction the development of the atomic bomb during the second world war, Churchill displayed none of his characteristic vision and imagination.
His early prescience owed less to science than to science fiction. Although as a boy he liked playing with model trench-diggers and conducting the odd experiment with gunpowder, he was much too expensively educated to be taught anything scientific. Later, when given an elementary explanation of radar, he confessed that it was beyond him. But Churchill did become a fan of HG Wells, regarding him as a “seer” and especially admiring “The Time Machine”, “one of the books I would like to take with me to Purgatory”. Churchill was also fascinated by Wells’s military predictions, notably about the role of aircraft and “land ironclads”, otherwise known as tanks. These he championed during the first world war, inviting Wells to see prototypes in action.
The two men parted company, though, on the question of whether wars were best run by technocrats. Churchill was profoundly suspicious of experts — he once told his oculist: “I entirely disagree with your diagnosis.” He believed that the boundless ignorance of the plain man was a safer guide than the limited understanding of the specialist, above all the military specialist, from whose dominion, he prayed, “good Lord deliver us”.
But then even Ernest Rutherford, who achieved fame by splitting the atom in 1917, was fallible in his chosen field. He insisted that the “nucleus is a sink, not a source of energy” and that anyone proposing to find power in the transformation of atoms “was talking moonshine”. Still, Rutherford (assisted by his “boys” at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, such as James Chadwick, Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft) had a far more sophisticated grasp of nuclear physics than his Oxford counterpart, Frederick Lindemann. Yet Lindemann was the one expert in whom Churchill did have faith, much to the detriment, Graham Farmelo writes in this dazzling book, of Britain’s wartime endeavours to develop the atomic bomb.
“The Prof”, as Churchill called Lindemann, was an odd sort of friend for him to have. He was a teetotaller, non-smoking vegetarian, resolutely buttoned-up and bowler-hatted. A snob and an antisemite, he pursued vendettas that were savage even by academic standards, once attempting to enforce an obscure statute enjoining celibacy on the canons of Christ Church. He was said to run the Clarendon lab, which admittedly resembled a medieval alchemist’s den when he took it over in 1919, like a Prussian dictator. Lindemann was “a genuinely horrible figure”, wrote Isaiah Berlin. “He is the only person, I think, whom I have ardently wished to murder.”
Nevertheless the Prof appealed to Churchill. He was a staunch anti-appeaser. He was also outstandingly brave: having worked out what caused spin in aeroplanes, he learned to fly in order to prove his theory; and during the blitz he was unfazed, reading PG Wodehouse in bed. Churchill admired him as a sorcerer with a slide rule, who could work out how much champagne he had drunk during his lifetime (only enough to fill half a railway carriage, to his disappointment) and helped with his lucrative articles on subjects such as “Death Rays” and “Are there Men on the Moon?”
Lindemann also had a knack of giving comprehensible (if not flawless) accounts of scientific arcana such as quantum theory. Churchill became intrigued by the subject, noting that the process of radioactivity “constitutes a liberation of energy at the expense of structure”, something that suggested “the break-up of empires into independent states”. He and the Prof also shared a fondness for new battlefield contraptions, which Churchill called “funnies”. Before the war they favoured aerial mines (to the disadvantage of radar) and during it they endorsed the construction of experimental weapons such as the “Great Panjandrum”, a devastating rocket-propelled wheel that regularly ran amok.
Farmelo’s main charge is that Churchill, as prime minister, relied too exclusively on the Prof for scientific advice, particularly over the crucial matter of the atomic bomb. It is true that Lindemann sanctioned its development in 1941, when Chadwick reported that it could be made in two and a half years. But, overestimating British capacities, he did not press Churchill to accept President Roosevelt’s offer of equal collaboration in creating nuclear weaponry. Consequently America went ahead alone, pouring vast resources into the Manhattan Project and freezing Britain out. According to Farmelo, Churchill thus squandered the lead of British scientists and “missed one of the great opportunities of the war”. He temporarily recouped Britain’s position at the Quebec conference in 1943, persuading Roosevelt to sign an agreement whereby their two countries would cooperate over production of the bomb and have a mutual veto on its use. But after Hiroshima — something Churchill never regretted, even hankering to threaten Russia with something similar at the inception of the Cold War — Harry Truman tore up what was essentially a private accord. Britain made its own bomb (a policy Clement Attlee concealed from everyone except Stalin’s spies) and the special relationship became so one-sided, Churchill was perturbed to discover in 1951, that the White House was entitled to launch nuclear strikes from US air bases in East Anglia without even consulting Downing Street.
This made Britain a prime target, and no one had a more apocalyptic view of the possible consequences than Churchill. Having described the explosion of the atomic bomb as “the second coming in wrath”, he said that the hydrogen bomb was as much of an advance on it as it had been on the bow and arrow. Britain had to have the H-bomb, he believed, to preserve the balance of terror. But Churchill spent much of his last premiership seeking détente with the Soviet Union, a noble but doomed enterprise.
Farmelo, prize-winning biographer of the physicist Paul Dirac, recounts this important story with skill and erudition. But he does make the occasional slip (Labour had no “programme” to dismantle the empire after 1945, quite the contrary) and his essential case is not altogether watertight. As the global colossus, America was bound to take the lead in nuclear development and Churchill, though slow off the mark, played a weak hand well. Ultimately, moreover, he had to adjudicate between the boffins and he was sometimes startlingly right.
For instance, he sided with RV Jones against Henry Tizard on the question of whether German bombers were being guided by radio directional beams, thus making a vital contribution to the wizard war. And even Lindemann had his plus points: he made jobs in Oxford for Jewish scientists facing Nazi persecution and encouraged Churchill to create hise ponymous college in Cambridge to promote British science and engineering. Still, it is the paradoxes and the nuances that make this episode in history, now illuminated as never before, so compelling.
Piers Brendon’s “Eminent Elizabethans” is published by Vintage.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
