Thank you, Pedro, for that gracious if somewhat flattering introduction.
It's very good to be back in Oxford with so many friends from further back than I care to remember.
Christopher Smith below shot and many others, and also where I had the pleasure of getting close to Dick Dale.
It's your fondly remembered colleague who was so very helpful to me in the writing of of my direct biography.
It wouldn't have had the quality it had at the beginning if it hadn't been for his his contribution.
But today I'm talking about something something different.
Exactly 100 years ago,
readers of novels in this country and in North America were talking about a new book by one of the most popular authors in our language, H.G. Wells.
He had just coined the phrase atomic bombs in a book called The World Set Free,
which envisaged a nuclear holocaust in Europe, followed by the liberating effects of that war.
Afterwards, when nuclear energy became too cheap to metre and everybody abjured, the whole idea of war and started to use energy in a peaceful way.
Among the readers of that book, and there were lots of them.
One of them was Lord Rutherford, doyen of nuclear physicists,
and he twice in public dismissed the futurism of H.G. Wells in that case, saying, well, you know, it's it it's a good story.
But, you know, we really can't take this this kind of stuff seriously.
I'd rather have continued in that vein for the next whatever it was, 20 odd years when he was chief among the nuclear sceptics, so to speak.
Always doubtful that the work that he and his colleagues had done would ever come to fruition, at least in the foreseeable future.
Another reader was a extremely successful politician by the name of Winston Churchill.
He read each of H.G. Wells his books as they came out twice.
And. This idea of an atomic bomb.
He actually featured in a book in excuse me, in an essay ten years later called Shall We All Commit Suicide?
It was one of the cultural reflections of of Wells's book.
Now, today, what I want to do is to look at what I think is one of the most remarkable what's the
plural of nexus nexuses in our subject physics in its overlap with political science.
Because what I want to look what I want to. Discuss is the way that nuclear weapons in many ways had their provenance in this country.
And I might say in no trivial degree here on this plot of land.
And the way that al our colleagues in nuclear physics,
in early nuclear physics interacted with the person who found himself as prime minister
when Britain started to nurture the secret of building and building those weapons.
Winston Churchill, whom I shall argue can reasonably be called without stretching it too much, the first political nuclear visionary.
That was an unusual talk, of course, because for you here in a distinguished physics department like this,
because it's more about physicists than physics, but I hope nonetheless it will have some interest to you because it it is, I think,
somewhat sobering to think that the physicists who were working here and all over all over the Western world in nuclear physics,
they in the 1930s were going about their curiosity driven research, thinking that it really wouldn't have any application in their lifetime.
I'd rather have told them so, and all they wanted to do was to keep their head down and work on their research and not not worry about horrible,
sordid collaborations with with governments, but still less warfare.
So it's sobering to think we've had it easy, I think, in our lifetimes compared with that particular generation.
So let me begin.
I want to begin by reminding you of one of the great experiments of 20th century physics, really achingly beautiful experiment done by James Chadwick,
February 1932, at Cambridge, where Chadwick, number two two Rutherford discovered the neutron predicted by Rutherford,
what was it, ten years before in a absolutely beautiful desktop experiment, six weeks before then,
hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country in Britain were reading with their sherry and mince pies.
A an article that featured these sentences.
High authorities tell us that these 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 at least 1 million times more powerful.
There is no question among scientists that this is a gigantic source of energy and that it exists.
What is lacking is the match to set the bonfire alight, or it may be the detonator to cause the dynamite to explode.
The scientists are looking for this, and that was it.
CHADWICK We now know, had discovered that detonator. And the writer of those words was Winston Churchill.
And he was writing in Strand magazine.
You see him advertised on the front here, along with P.G. Wodehouse and other star style commentators.
You can read this article on the Web.
And it's still it's still rewarding to see the farsightedness that that that Churchill had and displayed in that article.
Now, you may know that Churchill was regarded by many of his colleagues as a kind
of scientific dunce and something I don't think he would have disagreed with.
So someone was briefing him on this, and that is true.
The person who drafted that article for Winston Churchill seen at that time here was the former Dr. Leigh, professor here, Frederick Lindemann.
He's on your left here with Erwin Schrödinger, who whom he brought from from Europe as a refugee in the 1930s.
And this is, I think, him in Schrodinger's garden.
Now, Lindemann plays an extremely important role in this in this story.
So very briefly. He was born in Germany.
Much he was disgusted with his mother for not giving birth to him in England and was an outstandingly good physicist,
very well known for his versatility, ingenuity and his and indeed his skills as an inventor.
It was all those skills that got him the Oxford chair in 1919, and he won it fair and square.
Rutherford was one of his references. Michelson was another.
There was no question that Oxford had landed themselves a very good person to take the Clarendon Laboratory and and
make it one that could compete with the powerhouse that Rutherford was leading over at the over at the Cavendish.
He was quite an unusual character, not the most popular of people, but a deeply loyal friend.
Deeply sarcastic. If you made an enemy of him even once, he would remember that for life.
And this made him a controversial character in Oxford and as we hear later elsewhere.
One of the things that made him an unusual character was he he was an extraordinarily good tennis player.
The year after he he came here to Oxford as the chair, he was, I believe, the only leading physicist ever to play at Wimbledon.
He got to the second round in a men's double championship the year after that.
His life changed.
Lindemann, a very conservative with a capital C and made it his his task not only to do right by Oxford, but to to make a splash in politics.
And the person he saw as the the the the person he wanted to follow was Winston Churchill.
And they met in 1921. And it was absolutely classic.
They met at the Duke, one of Duke of Westminster's garden parties,
where Lindemann would typically be going from one duke and duchess to another, cultivating his.
He's his reputation, deservedly so,
as as actually a rather charming person and somebody who would come from the rarefied world of science and talk to the nobility.
He he apparently if you believe Geoff Thompson, he ruled the the Oxford Physics Department with the sort of tact and subtlety of a Prussian general.
But he did get things done. And as will as you'll know, we're where we had our tea this afternoon, the Clarendon Laboratory, new building.
That was his greatest success in administrative terms.
He was an effective administrator, as I say, if not popular with with everyone.
Now, all the time he was here he's and based over at Christchurch he his industry was was remarkable
and much of that industry was in service of helping the journalistic career of Winston Churchill.
And he drafted quite a few articles that made Churchill one of the most prominent popular writers on science in the 1930s.
I mean, I know there's Haldane out there. I know there's a superstars like that,
but Churchill had the common touch and he often wrote in in organs that were very popular and wrote about science.
And behind that was the, the ghost of, uh, of Frederick Lindemann.
This is one of the articles vision of the future through the Eyes of Science.
The Churchill was extremely well paid for these for these articles by the standard by modern times.
He was earning tens of thousands of pounds for individual articles and they had a huge reach.
So please don't think that the things I'm going to be talking about now are just being read by a few people in drawing rooms in Westminster.
These were read by huge numbers of people up and down, up and down the country.
And they identified Churchill as someone who was a friend of science and who knew what he was talking about, albeit as everyone knew.
Briefed by Lindemann, whom Churchill and everybody else called the Prof.
Now. This is another of those articles, the last one of those series.
And this is actually exceptional one, because by the time this was published in 1937, Churchill,
who had been in what he called the wilderness years away from the front bench, not close to his party any more, and making a fortune in journalism.
He was prominent again in parliament.
The two reasons the one that we're all we're all familiar with, of course, is he, along with Chamberlain's brother,
Austen Chamberlain, were the two people who were warning of the threat of Hitler and German rearmament?
Chamberlain died actually just one aside before that, before the Second World War.
So Churchill gets virtually all the credit now, which is a little bit unfair.
Anyway, Churchill was a was extremely prominent in that, and one of his favourite causes was the need for Britain to cultivate air defence.
He again was briefed very, very carefully by Lindemann and they became a kind of double act.
And if people like Henry dissolved, who was the was the scientists favourite administrator and thinker in Westminster,
regarded them as a kind of evil duo. And I written about in my book, I don't want to go into it here,
but they basically thought that Tizard and his company were dragging their feet and that what was really needed,
the real brains, as Churchill put it, was to put Lindemann in charge of those defence initiatives.
And everyone knew this in the House of Commons.
Churchill was was accused of crying wolf and was and he was deeply unpopular about these these initiatives.
And Lindemann was becoming more and more interested in politics and indeed stood for election twice but failed to win a seat.
Now, this article is important because he it was published on the 23rd of October, 1938,
had been written just almost a year before Rutherford's funeral, which Lindemann attended.
Now, this article was the last one of several where Churchill was saying to the public.
There's this thing called nuclear energy and we could be on the threshold of a nuclear age.
This energy really could be grasped. And I remind you again that I'd rather physical then date.
But but the prevailing orthodoxy in science was that this was way, way too futuristic and that there was no need to worry about these things.
Seven weeks after that article was published, nuclear fission was discovered in Hitler's capital, Berlin.
It's a pleasure, but it's always been I don't need to describe in detail the physical significance of that.
It was a complete bombshell in physics, almost entirely unexpected.
And it was this, if you like. That was the first sign of this monumental trick of fate,
whereby human beings as a whole got their hand on this huge source of energy right on the cusp of of the Second World.
What would be the Second World War?
But people knowledgeable about physics, the people we admire, the cool headed people who weigh up all the possibilities,
knew that the bomb was very unlikely within a couple of years.
Niels Bohr then seen as the the greatest nuclear theoretician, and he'd been Rutherford's only theoretical protege, Protegé.
He and John Wheeler had demonstrated in, in a brilliant piece of physics that the the fissile isotope of uranium two, three,
five that it was it that was the thing that was that would fission and it was so rare in isotope in in minerals that
there was really very little possibility it was neglected that that that a bomb would be possible in the near future.
Bush said later in a public lecture that resources of a whole country would be needed in order to garner that amount of you two,
three, five, in order to make a viable weapon which he.
Which he dismissed as inconceivable. Quote.
No. It was a few years later.
In fact, it was in March 1940, probably in the second week of March 1940, that two physicists working here at Birmingham hit on the idea,
hit on the central idea, which that enabled people to to believe that it really might be possible to make a uranium nuclear weapon.
Those two physicists were. Otto Fraiche on the left, as usual, at his piano.
And a former professor here. Rudy Pyles, with his wife, Jennifer Frisch.
And Piles were working in a brand spanking new building on the University of Birmingham campus right next to them in that brand new
building where a bunch of colleagues working on what his art called the most important technological invention of the Second World War,
which was the cavity wave magnetron. They weren't allowed to participate in that research because it was too secret.
But will they allow we're allowed to work on what was nuclear physics,
which they were doing about seven or eight feet or it's true, seven or eight feet away.
I've actually looked at the geometry of this building.
It's quite funny, but it was a strict dividing line between them and the people who were working on the really important stuff on radar.
It was. Paul's always the most generous of people. I only met him once, but I was extremely impressed with his fairness and all the other things.
He's so famous for his generosity. It was fresh. You put that question.
What would happen if you could isolate you? Two, three, five.
If you put sufficient resources in to extract that pure fissile material.
And again, through searching through your bodily archives, there's lots and lots of letters from piles.
Within a few days, that's a quote from him.
They had written one of the masterpieces of physics literature in the 20th century, known as the Fresh Piles memorandum, actually two memoranda.
But let's not split hairs. What they did was write a quite beautiful paper which a decently qualified civil servant could read,
explaining the basic mechanism, namely that you take these two lumps of two, three, five,
but above or at or above a critical size and blast them towards each other at very high energy
so that you could set up what we would call a nuclear chain reaction and form an explosion.
And they not only looked at the viability of that by doing some straightforward calculations,
which they outlined in a non-technical way, but even looked at the likely effects of dropping such a weapon on a on a on a city.
As I said, it's a quite glorious piece. Cleese A piece of writing in excellent English, I might say as well.
That was in March 1940. And I have to say it's rather tedious for me as an author this, but they and their colleagues behaved immaculately.
It's very nice to slag off people and say how naive they were. Friction has behaved, in my opinion, quite in a way that was beyond praise.
They took their idea to their boss, and their boss was sir, not sir.
It was Mark Oliphant who had joined the Birmingham Physics Department on exactly the same day a few years before, as as Rudi Piles.
He was one of Rutherford's boys, one of the Rothfuss favourites who had done a dirty and left Rutherford's rather
domineering leadership in the Cavendish and set up his own show here in Birmingham.
Oliphant It was a real, real go getter.
He really sold to the to the people of Birmingham the need for a physics department there and the need for a cyclotron.
Right. He said in May, May 30, in May 1939, and that was just a few months before he told a journalist there, and he spoke to a lot of them.
The purpose of the machine is not to release energy for destruction.
It is for humanitarian work. Well, the humanitarian work was on the horizon now, which is a bomb.
He took in total secret to Sir Henry Tizard, who was ensconced in Whitehall as the great mind.
I think that's a fair statement. The great talent of mind at using physics and science and deploying it in a military context.
Tizard had already fallen out with with with a person who we originally was very friendly with Lindemann,
but with for the moment was in Central in Whitehall and he was a person that could make things happen.
Now, it's very,
very important to bear in mind here because I'm telling a particular story that Britain and its empire had its back to the wall at that time.
This was looked look this must have looked like an extremely improbable, extremely improbable notion.
All the talk. My mother still alive, tells me all the talk was of a of a of a Nazi invasion.
Was it worth even thinking about something as far fetched as this?
So it's very important to bearing in mind just how stressed those those departments work and just how how can I put it peripheral?
This activity must have seemed at at that time with fresh piles banging hard
because they piles in particular had seen the work of Hitler at first hand.
And for him, it was it was terrifying that his former boss, Heisenberg, who he knew was a truly great physicist, very, very smart,
very, very quick with the industrial might of Germany, if I can think of this, we can think of this, so can Heisenberg.
And it's very easy for us to forget how frightening that must have been.
When I spoke just at one time to Piles,
he said he sometimes had to go back and remind himself of just how frightened they were in those in those months in
Birmingham when they saw the machinations of the British government turning over much more slowly than they would have liked.
But it wasn't that slow. I mean, they just took it. After all, I've said that it might surprise you that the committee set up to develop that idea,
set up by these two guys, both classified as enemy aliens, technically, right.
They were still people who were not British citizens. The first committee meeting was within a month of their having that idea.
It was on the 10th of April 1940, which I actually find very impressive.
And it was chaired by G.P. Thomson, the son of J.J. Thomas of the discoverer of the electron himself.
I had done great work by blight, by being one of the first people to to demonstrate the wave nature of the electron.
He had on that small committee. So small didn't even have a secretary.
He was working in a very small group in the headquarters of the Royal Society.
Now, most of us would go to the Royal Academy of Art in London.
It was in Burlington House there, and he got moving this committee that looked at the viability of the first year of Paul's idea,
while of course not allowing for should pass to be on the committee,
they were enemy aliens and they were even sent a note asking them to keep their idea very
secret because the Germans might actually get hold of this as if they needed telling that.
I just want to pause just a few seconds here that there was a huge problem, as you will.
Many of you will be aware in the in the appalling environment that that Hitler set up in Germany.
So there was this appalling problem of Jewish physicists and their families having to leave their academic posts.
One of them was Francis Simon, another of the most distinguished people to work in Oxford.
A very, very good friend of Lindemann. And Lindemann did a whip round the some of the leading universities in Berlin in 1933, chauffeur driven.
Of course, he had a bed in the back of his Rolls-Royce going going around recruiting physicists.
And this was with Schrodinger. One of his prize catches a great physical chemist, great thermodynamics.
And he was one of the people who did most to to work out the technology of separating you to three five in case Britain needed to build that weapon.
But I think almost as important, he was lindemans eyes and ears here in Oxford.
Lindemann, as would was assumed as the war broke out was was close to London.
But when Churchill became prime minister in May 1940,
just a few weeks after friction paths came up with their their idea, then he joined at Churchill in Westminster.
And this gentleman here was his art was his eyes and ears,
because they were doing experiments here that were relevant to the the development of the development of that that that weapon.
The best physicist in nuclear physicist in Britain at that time was widely acknowledged to be this gentleman here, James.
James Chadwick. He was the person who eventually finalised the report.
No, for reasons I don't want to go into as the Maude report in August 1941.
Chadwick an awkward person, not particularly comfortable in company,
but a nonpareil nuclear physicist and gifted with this ability to write muscular and clear prose.
And he also got on very well with Lindemann, which was very, very important, because if you didn't get over Lindemann,
there's no way that the the report would have been taken seriously by Churchill.
So in 1941 he finalised that report. And again, sorry to be boring.
It was another glorious piece of work. If you read it, you see a great physicist writing in very plain language why he didn't get everything right.
But the it is absolutely nothing or nothing serious to discredit of Chadwick and his colleagues.
That includes fresh and piles, ICR representatives and what have you.
They had thought this thing out quite carefully. The one thing that is easily forgotten is that they did really considerably underestimate the ease,
if that's the right word, with which the bomb could be manufactured in Great Britain.
Now, of course, they didn't think it was going to be actually easy,
but they actually thought it was viable, something that later on would be shown to be totally ridiculous.
And there was one person, particularly, who stood out and thought they were talking nonsense.
And that was that Lindemans noire.
This gentleman here, Patrick Blackett. Now, Patrick Blackett and Lindemann apparently took an instant dislike to each other.
Now, that wasn't difficult in the case of Lindemann.
I know that for some people, but but this this was the kind of person that really got up Lindemans nose.
Very briefly, just a bit of gossip here. Certainly he was far to the left and that would immediately make him suspicious to the Lindemann.
But also, remember, apart from being a absolutely terrific experimenter, the great experiment he did in 1932, which showed us cosmic ray showers.
That to me is just the kind of thing that Lindemann would have loved to have done right.
You know, the ingenuity he showed with Leni, his colleague of getting cosmic rays in effect to photograph themselves and then you turn anti-matter
was something that was extremely difficult to see right into something where anybody could do it,
basically if they had if they if they had a reasonable piece of equipment.
And I always think that Lindemann, who loved ingenious devices, must have been so envious of that.
That speculation, it may be wrong.
Anyway, whatever happens that Blackett and Lindemann were, there was absolutely no love lost between them and black.
It, I have to say. We know he was right now. He circulated memos that you can read at the National Archives saying that this
conclusion that Britain could build this weapon here is absolutely ludicrous.
And actually, he was right, but he did not hold sway among the among the others, although events did take that over.
Churchill gave the go ahead to the development of the bomb.
In a memo, which he was enormously proud and he quoted it a lot, I can think of six cases where he quoted this.
It was on the 31st of August, 1941.
Worth reading. Just take 15 seconds.
Although personally I'm quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
And he then gave the go ahead for the project to be overseen by the great functionary Sir John Anderson with Lindemann at his his side.
So Britain was the. We now know the first country to give the go ahead to the development of of a nuclear weapon.
And what they then did was what many physicist regarded as something extremely unfortunate which is that they basically and I'm speaking crudely here,
but I think it's accurate enough they handed it over to people who had worked at.
I see. I know John Cockcroft, one of my favourite people, the Clement Attlee of physics, I would call him very, very sober person, very fair minded.
He thought this was a disaster. He thought that it was a terrible thing to do to hand this over to people,
even though it was fair to say that you needed people with industrial industrial sense in order to consider the manufacturer of these things.
But I want to say it strictly fair. CHADWICK Staunch Tory voter, staunch Churchill supporter.
He always thought actually that was quite a reasonable thing to do, even though he accepted that it was it was not handled.
It was not handled well. So the project ticked ticked over with Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge,
Liverpool and several other centres here doing with their neck their nuclear counterparts of your good cells
were working were in total secret on the on various parts of nuclear physics that pertained to this weapon.
Many of those people didn't even know they were working towards a nuclear bomb.
All they knew was that they couldn't actually discuss with each other and anybody else what they were, what they were working on.
If I happen to believe that that cockcroft view is more accurate, as I said, you may differ,
but it lost a huge amount of momentum at that time as it became more and more clear that the scale of this
project was something way beyond Britain could Britain could manage in the wartime with the Luftwaffe bombing,
Europe, our cities, the country sliding into an increasingly difficult economic state.
But anyway, Churchill deserves at least the credit for allowing the thing to go forward.
Six weeks after that, something I think pretty momentous happened.
Very, very brief bit of background. Our friends and colleagues in America, having been cheated by the great Oliphant,
were starting to with with Fermi and Szilard and people like that over there.
They were starting to get into a much higher gear on nuclear weapons.
I think it accurate to say that Britain was ahead, which is remarkable, bearing in mind the state that Britain was in at the time.
But America was catching up very, very fast.
And of course, they had a an economy that was much, much stronger than ours and a huge influx of refugee physicists all world class.
Not not least, not least Fermi. By October 1941, I'm glossing over a lot of politics here.
Franklin Roosevelt, advised by the great believer Bush wrote to Churchill in a hand-delivered letter to ten Downing Street,
not letter cable dated 12th of October 1941.
And this was what he wrote to Winston Churchill. It appears desirable that we should soon correspond or converse concerning the subject,
which is under study by your mode committee that says Nuclear bomb,
commit nuclear bomb in power committee in order that any extended efforts may be conducted, conducted and coordinated jointly.
Now, perhaps with the wisdom of hindsight, this was a remarkable opportunity.
Churchill did not reply to that memo for seven weeks.
And even then after that, it was very tepid the way he was following it up.
And soon after that, of course, we had Pearl Harbour when Hitler, in his monumental act of folly, declared war on the United States of America.
Sealing his own fate, incidentally. But it completely changed the atmosphere in Washington, D.C., about the attitude to the bomb.
And it as fast as you could flick flick your fingers.
The bomb shot up the the give the pump shot up the agenda.
And General Groves is is ensconced as leader of that project,
a tremendously effective chief executive who built the Pentagon and the American system took off Britain.
To quote Margaret Gowing, also of this parish had missed the bus.
Churchill. I have to say I can't see any other way of describing it.
He was quite slow in picking this up, not just about that answering that note from FDR,
but if you look at the papers in the National Archives, you see very, very little activity from Churchill on this.
And I know it wasn't the most important thing on his agenda. That's obvious, but it was only in April 1943.
This is quite important.
It's not mentioned in Gowing that the activity in physicist language or in graphical language went from like this suddenly shot up.
And this was when FDR was colleague, Harry Hopkins was shamelessly stringing Churchill along.
Yes, yes, yes. We'll talk. We'll talk. We'll talk. He was right.
Shamelessly stringing the British along while the Americans were investing more and more resources in the development of this thing.
It's quite clear that Britain was going to get left behind and Churchill finally snapped.
And that's when we get the Churchill of that we of legend, so to speak, firing off of articulate memos,
commissioning a brilliantly written report from Lindemann on what the bond meant, convening committees, and then following it up.
So what happened then was that with with FDR, one of the most difficult characters to deal with, someone Churchill revered him tremendously.
But tremendously difficult character to deal with, much less straightforward than Churchill.
It was in August 1943 that Churchill finally pinned Roosevelt down and got him to sign what we now call the Quebec agreement.
And I say this was pretty much an act of desperation.
I remember America was charging ahead with this colossal Manhattan Project, you know, a gigantic ocean liner.
And Britain had this leaking coracle. That was the Baloise project in Britain.
Somehow, Britain needed to get in on that man Manhattan Project, if only because if this weapon were deliverable.
Because I didn't know at that time whether it would be that Britain would have to know how from that project.
And Roosevelt did agree to that and signed it in in August 1943, with the condition that Britain America wouldn't use a bomb on each other,
though they would have a veto on each country, would have a veto on the use of the bomb.
And in America, this is something that really would have gone up Rutherford's nose,
that America could veto Britain's civil civil nuclear power program after the war if they saw fit.
And the reason for that was because the Americans, in my view, in my judgement, rightly, were extremely sceptical of ECI,
a big commercial operation, having such a large role in the British program, because they thought it was going to basically benefit ECI.
And in my view, they were quite they were quite right to be sceptical about that.
The great historian, one of my great favourites in this field, David Reynolds,
I think hits the hits the right note when he says of Churchill and Roosevelt that they
treated the nuclear bomb and its and its politics as a kind of personal fiefdom.
And I think those words are perfectly correct. Churchill did not tell his deputy about the program, nor did FDR tell his deputy about the program.
Hardly anyone. I mean, it was only a small smattering of people knew on the record.
Some of them some of them had no clue about it in Westminster. And yet for America, they were about to spend billions of dollars on this thing.
And frankly, for people of the wisdom. Alright, you may think he's boring, but John Anderson could see that this was not going to end well.
What if one of them died? Who knows?
Anyway, whatever else you can say about this, it got British scientists into the Manhattan Project and you have to count that as success.
In the end, about 24 scientists went over from Britain to America,
and the first arrived within 24 hours of the signing of the Quebec agreement, which is which one America said was unseemly.
Haste piles, I believe, is one of those first people on that on that on that tarmac.
And initially, they they they got on well.
But I think it's fair to say that Groves, who had a kind of anger phobia nurtured earlier in his career,
was pretty determined only to use the amount of British expertise that he needed to.
He saw this bomb, right? And he knew what he wanted.
He was a mission delivered guy. He wanted that wrapped very, very strongly in the Stars and Stripes.
Just quickly, the piles fresh.
And as I said, some 20 odd other people would enter this, the Los Alamos site, which was the Physics Research Centre run by the great Oppenheimer.
Through this gate here, this anonymous gate, and then would be driven up the mountainside to to the site.
It's worth stressing here something very important that even by this time here,
if you were totally disinterested and as smart as someone like Oppenheimer,
who was very, very smart, of course, the project already had what we in modern day language called mission creep.
The mission the political dimensions of the mission were that they wanted that
bomb because because the allies were terrified that Hitler would get it first.
I use the word terrified advisedly by 19 late 1943, certainly early 1944.
Very, very few people thought that the intelligence was quite clear that that nobody could
find any evidence that the Germans were making any progress in building that weapon.
You'll know now that they weren't making any progress.
But you have to look as a historian, look at what they knew at the time and what their policy then was,
was to give specifically the American government that that weapon.
There was very, very little long term, serious long term thinking about about that,
about what would happen when the bomb arrived, which many people increasingly thought would happen sooner or later.
And it was Groves. It was his mission to make to deliver a bomb that could be dropped from an aircraft.
Right in in wartime. And many of them actually wanted it to happen before the end of the war so that America could use its leverage.
The first person by, I think, pretty well all accounts and I've read a lot of accounts of this who took this serious,
who took the long term strategy of nuclear weapons seriously, was the gentleman we mentioned earlier, Niels Bohr.
He arrived in late 1943 at Croydon Airport,
met by Chadwick and his wife and was completely dumbfounded to hear that the the term inconceivable about the bomb was completely wrong.
That the United States, in particular with its gigantic resources, with a small contribution from the UK in terms of resources,
well they done a lot of the legwork was actually embarking on this on this project.
Now, I'm sure you know, of, of, of of Bauhaus place in in in physics at that time.
A superb, superbly insightful, not mathematical physicist, wise, avuncular and insightful.
Virtually everybody thought that it might be. It was almost non-PC to say anything else.
The one thing he was not was a good communicator. I'm told, in fact,
what actually one person was actually in one of these seminars that people would
actually be arguing after we said was which language in which he was speaking of.
One of the wasn't Danish, incidentally. Um, he was a, he was not a good communicator.
But it took somewhat of the smartness of Oppenheimer, who was, as I said, extremely smart to say that although this guy may seem incoherent.
Right. He's actually always worth listening to. And as Oppenheimer wrote much later, he, he he he raised the morale of the people at, uh,
at Los Alamos and that he believed that this weapon, he, he didn't believe what many people thought might have thought at the time.
Oh, my God, what a terrible thing to be doing. Build this weapon of mass destruction.
The first serious question he asked Oppenheimer, according to Oppie, was, is this bomb big enough?
He he had a view that if you had a bomb that was unusable, that this this had a chance,
if you played it right to to obviate the possibility of of of nuclear warfare.
But the thing that he thought was disastrous and he doesn't use that word to be fair, he was too polite for that.
But the thing that he thought was very, very worrisome was that Britain and America were doing this.
But they also had another ally, the Soviet Union, who were doing most of the dying in the war.
The vast majority of the dying. And contrary to that, I think while the patronising views of a bore, he knew that Joseph Stalin,
you know what was not Mr. Nice Guy who could be trusted with everything.
But he thought it was extremely unwise to that, to give him no sense whatsoever of the amount of effort that was being put into that weapon.
So what he advocated was that the Soviet Union, through Stalin,
should at least be apprised of the existence of this of this program with a view after the
war to having some kind of rapprochement so that there would not be a nuclear arms race,
which he sought for all very clearly in in in memos that we can now, now read.
Now, bull was, as everyone knows, polite to a fault.
But he was not absolutely not someone who was who wanted to hide his life under a bushel.
He was absolutely determined to get to the top table, both in America and in Britain.
He wanted to meet Roosevelt and he wanted to meet Churchill because he believed that there was so little I'm putting words into his mouth,
but I'm pretty sure it's accurate. He thought it was no way of getting that view across unless he could meet those two people at the top.
And he was prepared to use his prestige and his energy to that to get it.
Now, this was not easy. Churchill was, by early spring, 1944, extremely tired.
For one thing, he said, I'm through, he told, be absolutely exhausted.
He was also working on the plans for D-Day, which he thought was could well end up with a bloodbath.
So he was not in a particularly alert frame of mind by his standards.
But there was a campaign at the top echelons of British science to persuade Churchill, who didn't like scientists invading the political sphere,
to see this person who was described by General Smuts, one of Churchill's friends, as on a par with Shakespeare and Napoleon.
Now I think that's going a bit far, but those are the kind of words that were being bandied, bandied about.
Finally, by dint of work from Lindemann and so John Anderson and the Royal Society and others,
they got a place in Churchill's diary on the 16th of May 1944.
At 3 p.m. Now, that's not a good time for you, because that's when he normally took his nap.
That may or may not be significant. But we know that this meeting, described by several sources, bore sung for himself.
RV Jones and one or two others. It started off really quite badly and then got worse.
Churchill walked in to the meeting in Downing Street and it was Lindemann and Bloor sitting there waiting for him.
And Lindemann had excuse me, Churchill had just read a well-intended but disastrously worded note from Sir Henry Dale, president of the Royal Society.
That said two things, one of which was very wise, actually, which was that in his hands?
Possibly. Quite possibly. Right. What were matters that would affect the well-being of the world for the next few decades?
That's not an unreasonable statement, in my view.
The thing that you said was so unwise was this vein that they were about to meet had been angling to get an interview with President Roosevelt.
Now, that would have put Churchill's hackles right up because he did not like scientists importuning him and others.
He wanted to need to be elected unless it was Lindemann. He wanted them.
He did not like scientists elbowing their way into into the sphere.
So it started off with with Churchill haranguing Lindemann because Lindemann had just been so critical of that Quebec agreement.
Incidentally, I think Lindemann was right. Incidentally, I think Lennon was absolutely right to be critical of that agreement.
But anyway, Churchill deeply resented that. And off he went.
And I dread to think what it must have sounded like with Baugh speaking in three languages over a kind of superposition of each other,
a a a policy that Churchill would surely have disagreed with, namely that the secret should be shared with the with the with the Soviet Union.
So it was a disaster.
And you might know that again, a former colleague of yours, R.V. Jones, met Bull outside, just down the road from Downing Street.
And Churchill said it was a disaster. We were treated just like schoolboys.
And that was the first of bulls to failures there.
And he was treated much more, much more in a much more friendly way by FDR a few months later.
And FDR basically convinced Boer that he was listened to and totally ignored him.
So Boer was was maybe well-intended, maybe naive, but it did not work.
And he, if you like, retired, hurt and it was left to other forces to to intervene.
You'll know that as we came to the conclusion of the bomb project in 1945, the summer of 1945, there were committees set up by the powers that be.
In particular, it was a group based in Chicago which finished their Manhattan Project first and looked
very carefully into what we call the the the ethics of dropping a bomb on a Japanese city.
And one of the things that I thought was such a shame was that the British had been told by British scientists to keep out of all of those projects.
So they felt somewhat disempowered, to put it mildly, because they had no say whatever in in in passing their comments to government.
Something that I know that Pyles regretted very, very, very deeply.
Meanwhile, Churchill routinely put WSC on 11th of July 1945 to the dropping of of the nuclear weapon.
And if you weren't there,
you will you will know of that momentous event reported gradually in Great and Great Britain and America of the first atomic bomb.
And it it's worth just remembering here that six years before here,
the scientific community were telling people out there it is inconceivable that such a weapon would exist.
And here it is. This was the result of a totally secret thing that no no member of the public knew about.
I'm not going to discuss the, uh, the the ethics of dropping the nuclear bombs.
There there's always been different views on this.
I will say one thing that Churchill never regretted signing that thing because he believed that that it saved more lives than it cost.
I know there are other views and and we can talk about that later, if you wish.
Churchill's reward for providing what I think most people would regard as the
outstanding leadership in the Second World War was to be thrown out before the end.
Something that our American colleagues could never quite understand.
And he was replaced by someone he respected very much, totally different person, Clement Attlee,
who found himself at the at the end of the war, representing Britain with Harry Truman and Stalin at the round table at the Potsdam.
At least one of these people, if you would, you would talk about not standing out in the crowd.
He wouldn't stand out if he stood at a podium.
But this was a person who saw very quickly that this was a topic that the international leaders needed to address very quickly,
and soon found out that the collaboration that Churchill had trumpeted with the United States was yielded very,
very little in terms of the atmosphere after the war.
Put simply, I think it accurate to say that very soon after the war, Britain was frozen out of the development of nuclear weapons.
People were physicists were discharged from Los Alamos, not even allowed to take with them the notes that they were developing.
And America turned in on itself.
And this culminated in the McMahon Act, which made it an offence to actually talk to any other power, including Britain, about nuclear weapons.
So this dream that Churchill undoubtedly had of an Anglo American collaboration in this and many other things was was ended up as a handful of dust.
Blackett, whom I describe earlier on, was ferociously critical.
He said that Chadwick and his colleagues who supported Churchill and sold Britain down the river,
that that they'd been unconscionably naive in dealing with their American friends and expecting that all would be rewarded later on.
Anyway. At least you'll know that the Cold War took off, that the Russians regarded Churchill as initiating that and his Fulton speech.
That may or may not be fair, but actually persuaded by a foreign secretary.
Bevin soon. Soon came to believe that Britain had no choice with America going its own way but to build its own nuclear weapon.
And that was done just as Churchill had done in complete secrecy.
Just exactly. He, if you like, gave Churchill exactly the same medicine that Churchill had given him.
Right. That it was discussed in a very elliptical, circumspect way in parliament.
And Churchill was obviously he was not he was not foolish. He was expecting that bomb to be made, but it was done entirely under under wraps.
Churchill's main contribution was to constantly ask the government, where is this nuclear weapon?
And did not know that that actually and his colleagues had allowed the Quebec agreement to lapse.
It was something that was very, very dear to the heart of Churchill, because he believed that had the status of a treaty which manifestly didn't.
Now. I want to I want just to end my treatment here, if I may, because there's a whole other story which I'm about.
You're coming back, uh, age almost 80 to the Premiership and taking up the second stage of his nuke nuclear career.
Because I don't have time to talk about that.
But I just want you to outline it because it it I think it does have a kind of it's an interesting postscript, I think.
When he came back to Downing Street in 1951.
What an achievement, incidentally, that was. I mean, the guy was, you know, just frail.
As I say, frail is too strong. But he was certainly well past his best.
He'd spent most of those intervening years running his memoirs. Right.
He was not a particularly strong leader of the opposition, but he found his way back.
And among the biggest shocks he was to get in Downing Street was when a civil servant
showed him how much money had been spent on the building of that British nuclear weapon,
£100 million, which was a huge amount of money in those days.
And he said many times after that, in private and public, that he was shocked in a parliamentary democracy,
that in peacetime that Attlee had not done what he thought was the right thing and report that to Parliament.
And the historian Peter Hennessy actually agrees with him, incidentally, on that.
I'm afraid. As I say, I can't tell you how. I wish I could, but I won't tell you how.
Churchill dealt with what was on his email inbox, namely a viable nuclear project produced at much,
much lower cost than the American version run by Sir William Penny.
Largely forgotten about now our Oppenheimer and where they were developing civil nuclear plans for civil nuclear power and a British nuclear bomb.
How would Churchill deal with those that as I said, you'll have to if you want to find out about that, you'll have to read my book.
But what I will say is this, that I think that Lindemann, who was so unpopular,
is clinging to Churchill and being so resistant to the impulse unities of
other physics earlier on made a substantial contribution in that second term,
which I think is widely underrated, especially by his many critics and most famously, C.P. Snow.
If you look at Lindemann, he really was prepared to stand up to Churchill, and although I'm not going to describe it in detail,
Churchill, frankly, was pretty clueless about that nuclear policy in those early months.
And I can say now, and I think I have likely more than most people, but his interventions were absolutely were crucial.
And Churchill, although they fought hard, very hard in the 1950s.
Churchill, in my view, wisely went along with with with with Lindemann counsel.
In that second term, incidentally, as well. Just a little postscript. Churchill met Niels Bohr again.
I'm not going to tell you what they said. You have to read the book to find out. So let me just let me let me just conclude.
Most remarkably, perhaps someone who was no good at science, no good at maths.
Winston Churchill was somebody who was seriously clued up on nuclear matters before before the Second World War.
He knew of the potential of nuclear bombs, of nuclear power, and it was his fate, if you want to call it that,
to become prime minister, almost exactly the time that the bomb became viable, courtesy of scientists working in in Britain.
And those scientists, Richard Paulos and plenty of others,
gave Britain the the intellectual ammunition for Churchill to bargain with FDR with his colossal national wealth and intellectual resources.
I personally don't think Churchill made the best fist of that.
Be quite honest.
I know that there are mitigating circumstances, but I think if it was for a character as big as that, I think you've got to tell it as it comes.
And I think that it was it is not among his finest achievements, the way he handled the bomb.
That said, I think in his second term, when he became obsessed with the hydrogen bomb and a pioneer of what we now call detente,
he he to some degree, made made up for that.
The one thing that I think was perhaps most disappointing about Churchill was was the failure to listen to Niels Bohr.
I'm not saying that both ideas were wholly practical.
I'm sure there was an element of a starry eyed naivete in in in Bauhaus approaches.
But I don't think it speaks well of either of Churchill or Roosevelt.
Not at least to have given BAU a hearing on on on his views.
After all, Boer more or less got it right in terms of he saw, I believe,
before anybody else the the dangers of a terrible arms race that he thought might follow the war.
Anyway, that I would simply conclude by saying that I started off this project, uh,
knowing relatively little about Churchill and science, and I would have to say that I.
I've come actually to admire him more for his catholicity of interest.
I mean, the amount of interest he took in nuclear science as a young person.
But in the nuclear field, I think he proved, although he was a visionary in his relative youth,
but he found it much harder to to realise those visionary qualities when in power.
Thank you very much.