Seventy years ago, a BBC newsreader began the 9pm news bulletin by announcing that British and American scientists “have made the atomic bomb at last”. That was a surprise, but nothing compared with what came next: “The first one was dropped on a Japanese city this morning.”
For the millions listening, this was a lot to take in. More shocks were to come in the next few days. As reporters struggled to find out exactly what had happened in Hiroshima, it was announced that another bomb had been used on Nagasaki.
These first uses of the most destructive explosives ever invented have had more impact on global politics than any other weapon. Nations across the planet had to come to terms with the knowledge that an enemy could obliterate an entire city using a single bomb, dropped from an aircraft. The world would never be quite the same again.
Weapons like this had been foreseen for decades. One popular author wrote in 1924 of “a bomb no bigger than an orange” able to blast away “a township at a stroke”. He worried what might happen if such devices got into the hands of “a base, degenerate, immoral race”.
The writer of those words was Winston Churchill, who almost certainly was thinking of the H.G. Wells novella The World Set Free, where the great science-fiction writer introduced the idea of “atomic bombs” and suggested that, after they were used in a European war, the world would come to its senses, war would become obsolete and leaders would develop the potential of atomic energy (better called nuclear energy) to provide electrical power at minimal expense. This would herald a utopian age in which “the majority of our population consists of artists”.
New trends
Churchill had no time for Wells’ socialist politics or his utopias, but he had a lot of time for the writer’s ability to foresee new technological trends.
In the Thirties, Churchill wrote several articles pointing out that the nuclear age was on the way, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that leaders would face when it arrived. He could scarcely have foreseen that he would become the first British prime minister to have to deal with the advent of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
As Europe braced itself for the Second World War, scientists queued up to reassure the public that nuclear weapons were all but inconceivable in the foreseeable future. This helps to explain why the Hiroshima bombing came as such a shock.
Churchill and Roosevelt strove to keep development of the bomb top secret. Hardly anyone knew, for example, that the basic idea of how to build a nuclear bomb was conceived by two physicists at Birmingham University, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, a month before Churchill became prime minister. By the time the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, Churchill had been voted out of Downing Street, but at Attlee’s request he presented the project to the British public with his usual eloquence and optimism.
In his stirring conclusion, he echoed Wells’ hopes that the release of nuclear energy would ultimately be for the benefit of humankind: “We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce peace among nations, and that, instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe, they may become a fountain of world prosperity.”
How far, then, have those prayers been answered? The day after the Hiroshima bombing, Churchill told his friend Lord Camrose, the proprietor of The Daily Telegraph, that it was vital for the United States to exploit its monopoly. But that monopoly did not last long. Stalin’s scientists tested their first nuclear weapon in August 1949 — a testimony to how well Soviet spies had infiltrated the Manhattan Project.
The birth of deterrence
By the mid-Fifties, however, this equality of arms had already settled into a form of deterrence, albeit a precarious one. In his final great parliamentary speech, on March 1, 1955, Churchill noted that “by a process of sublime irony, [we] have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation”.
There was one caveat. Deterrence did not “cover the case of lunatics”, like Hitler. Today, with the spread of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and other forces that want no part of international political conventions, there are many who still live in fear of such “lunatics”.
More needs to be done to prevent proliferation and to minimise the chance of nuclear accidents. But lunatics have not, so far, destroyed us. Indeed, in recent years, enough uranium to make thousands of warheads has been rendered useless for bombs by Washington and Moscow.
Meanwhile, Churchill’s optimism about generating electrical power from nuclear sources has been justified. And there is more to come. Wells’s utopian vision of limitless cheap nuclear energy may yet be realised.
As we remember those who died when the age of nuclear technology began so destructively seven decades ago, we must not forget its power to be an overwhelming force for good today.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
Graham Farmelo is the author of Churchill’s Bomb (Faber).
