1 00:00:00,180 --> 00:00:05,309 Thank you, Pedro, for that gracious if somewhat flattering introduction. 2 00:00:05,310 --> 00:00:12,090 It's very good to be back in Oxford with so many friends from further back than I care to remember. 3 00:00:12,390 --> 00:00:18,660 Christopher Smith below shot and many others, and also where I had the pleasure of getting close to Dick Dale. 4 00:00:18,660 --> 00:00:25,059 It's your fondly remembered colleague who was so very helpful to me in the writing of of my direct biography. 5 00:00:25,060 --> 00:00:30,090 It wouldn't have had the quality it had at the beginning if it hadn't been for his his contribution. 6 00:00:30,750 --> 00:00:34,260 But today I'm talking about something something different. 7 00:00:35,460 --> 00:00:38,040 Exactly 100 years ago, 8 00:00:39,750 --> 00:00:52,170 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. 9 00:00:53,580 --> 00:01:02,130 He had just coined the phrase atomic bombs in a book called The World Set Free, 10 00:01:02,790 --> 00:01:09,750 which envisaged a nuclear holocaust in Europe, followed by the liberating effects of that war. 11 00:01:10,800 --> 00:01:20,760 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. 12 00:01:22,540 --> 00:01:27,520 Among the readers of that book, and there were lots of them. 13 00:01:28,660 --> 00:01:33,010 One of them was Lord Rutherford, doyen of nuclear physicists, 14 00:01:33,880 --> 00:01:46,390 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. 15 00:01:46,540 --> 00:01:50,410 But, you know, we really can't take this this kind of stuff seriously. 16 00:01:50,890 --> 00:01:58,030 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. 17 00:01:58,480 --> 00:02:07,000 Always doubtful that the work that he and his colleagues had done would ever come to fruition, at least in the foreseeable future. 18 00:02:08,590 --> 00:02:15,520 Another reader was a extremely successful politician by the name of Winston Churchill. 19 00:02:16,510 --> 00:02:21,250 He read each of H.G. Wells his books as they came out twice. 20 00:02:22,600 --> 00:02:26,020 And. This idea of an atomic bomb. 21 00:02:26,020 --> 00:02:32,740 He actually featured in a book in excuse me, in an essay ten years later called Shall We All Commit Suicide? 22 00:02:33,760 --> 00:02:38,380 It was one of the cultural reflections of of Wells's book. 23 00:02:39,790 --> 00:02:47,049 Now, today, what I want to do is to look at what I think is one of the most remarkable what's the 24 00:02:47,050 --> 00:02:55,990 plural of nexus nexuses in our subject physics in its overlap with political science. 25 00:02:56,710 --> 00:03:06,860 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. 26 00:03:06,860 --> 00:03:12,410 And I might say in no trivial degree here on this plot of land. 27 00:03:14,960 --> 00:03:19,970 And the way that al our colleagues in nuclear physics, 28 00:03:19,970 --> 00:03:26,990 in early nuclear physics interacted with the person who found himself as prime minister 29 00:03:27,140 --> 00:03:34,200 when Britain started to nurture the secret of building and building those weapons. 30 00:03:34,280 --> 00:03:43,520 Winston Churchill, whom I shall argue can reasonably be called without stretching it too much, the first political nuclear visionary. 31 00:03:44,370 --> 00:03:49,219 That was an unusual talk, of course, because for you here in a distinguished physics department like this, 32 00:03:49,220 --> 00:03:57,410 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, 33 00:03:57,410 --> 00:04:04,760 somewhat sobering to think that the physicists who were working here and all over all over the Western world in nuclear physics, 34 00:04:05,240 --> 00:04:15,560 they in the 1930s were going about their curiosity driven research, thinking that it really wouldn't have any application in their lifetime. 35 00:04:16,250 --> 00:04:25,489 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, 36 00:04:25,490 --> 00:04:30,950 sordid collaborations with with governments, but still less warfare. 37 00:04:31,820 --> 00:04:37,700 So it's sobering to think we've had it easy, I think, in our lifetimes compared with that particular generation. 38 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:40,750 So let me begin. 39 00:04:43,420 --> 00:04:55,000 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, 40 00:04:55,510 --> 00:05:06,280 February 1932, at Cambridge, where Chadwick, number two two Rutherford discovered the neutron predicted by Rutherford, 41 00:05:06,280 --> 00:05:16,420 what was it, ten years before in a absolutely beautiful desktop experiment, six weeks before then, 42 00:05:16,990 --> 00:05:25,450 hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country in Britain were reading with their sherry and mince pies. 43 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:30,480 A an article that featured these sentences. 44 00:05:32,310 --> 00:05:41,190 High authorities tell us that these new sources of power, vastly more important than any we yet know, will surely be discovered. 45 00:05:42,510 --> 00:05:50,790 Nuclear energy is incomparably greater than the molecular energy, which we use today at least 1 million times more powerful. 46 00:05:51,990 --> 00:05:56,940 There is no question among scientists that this is a gigantic source of energy and that it exists. 47 00:05:57,390 --> 00:06:05,580 What is lacking is the match to set the bonfire alight, or it may be the detonator to cause the dynamite to explode. 48 00:06:06,420 --> 00:06:09,630 The scientists are looking for this, and that was it. 49 00:06:09,930 --> 00:06:16,020 CHADWICK We now know, had discovered that detonator. And the writer of those words was Winston Churchill. 50 00:06:16,830 --> 00:06:19,870 And he was writing in Strand magazine. 51 00:06:19,890 --> 00:06:26,550 You see him advertised on the front here, along with P.G. Wodehouse and other star style commentators. 52 00:06:27,060 --> 00:06:28,620 You can read this article on the Web. 53 00:06:28,770 --> 00:06:40,050 And it's still it's still rewarding to see the farsightedness that that that Churchill had and displayed in that article. 54 00:06:41,220 --> 00:06:44,400 Now, you may know that Churchill was regarded by many of his colleagues as a kind 55 00:06:44,400 --> 00:06:47,910 of scientific dunce and something I don't think he would have disagreed with. 56 00:06:48,450 --> 00:06:51,210 So someone was briefing him on this, and that is true. 57 00:06:51,270 --> 00:07:03,720 The person who drafted that article for Winston Churchill seen at that time here was the former Dr. Leigh, professor here, Frederick Lindemann. 58 00:07:05,150 --> 00:07:16,280 He's on your left here with Erwin Schrödinger, who whom he brought from from Europe as a refugee in the 1930s. 59 00:07:16,610 --> 00:07:19,850 And this is, I think, him in Schrodinger's garden. 60 00:07:22,190 --> 00:07:29,450 Now, Lindemann plays an extremely important role in this in this story. 61 00:07:29,450 --> 00:07:34,910 So very briefly. He was born in Germany. 62 00:07:35,930 --> 00:07:45,950 Much he was disgusted with his mother for not giving birth to him in England and was an outstandingly good physicist, 63 00:07:45,950 --> 00:07:53,750 very well known for his versatility, ingenuity and his and indeed his skills as an inventor. 64 00:07:54,920 --> 00:08:03,020 It was all those skills that got him the Oxford chair in 1919, and he won it fair and square. 65 00:08:03,320 --> 00:08:07,160 Rutherford was one of his references. Michelson was another. 66 00:08:07,490 --> 00:08:15,559 There was no question that Oxford had landed themselves a very good person to take the Clarendon Laboratory and and 67 00:08:15,560 --> 00:08:24,410 make it one that could compete with the powerhouse that Rutherford was leading over at the over at the Cavendish. 68 00:08:27,340 --> 00:08:36,280 He was quite an unusual character, not the most popular of people, but a deeply loyal friend. 69 00:08:37,150 --> 00:08:43,600 Deeply sarcastic. If you made an enemy of him even once, he would remember that for life. 70 00:08:44,110 --> 00:08:52,150 And this made him a controversial character in Oxford and as we hear later elsewhere. 71 00:08:53,800 --> 00:08:58,990 One of the things that made him an unusual character was he he was an extraordinarily good tennis player. 72 00:08:59,560 --> 00:09:09,440 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. 73 00:09:09,460 --> 00:09:14,800 He got to the second round in a men's double championship the year after that. 74 00:09:15,040 --> 00:09:16,030 His life changed. 75 00:09:16,780 --> 00:09:32,379 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. 76 00:09:32,380 --> 00:09:39,220 And the person he saw as the the the the person he wanted to follow was Winston Churchill. 77 00:09:39,490 --> 00:09:43,750 And they met in 1921. And it was absolutely classic. 78 00:09:44,410 --> 00:09:48,490 They met at the Duke, one of Duke of Westminster's garden parties, 79 00:09:48,670 --> 00:09:54,990 where Lindemann would typically be going from one duke and duchess to another, cultivating his. 80 00:09:55,440 --> 00:09:59,530 He's his reputation, deservedly so, 81 00:09:59,800 --> 00:10:07,480 as as actually a rather charming person and somebody who would come from the rarefied world of science and talk to the nobility. 82 00:10:09,640 --> 00:10:19,360 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. 83 00:10:20,740 --> 00:10:29,710 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. 84 00:10:29,830 --> 00:10:34,420 That was his greatest success in administrative terms. 85 00:10:34,840 --> 00:10:40,060 He was an effective administrator, as I say, if not popular with with everyone. 86 00:10:41,290 --> 00:10:49,000 Now, all the time he was here he's and based over at Christchurch he his industry was was remarkable 87 00:10:49,690 --> 00:10:56,560 and much of that industry was in service of helping the journalistic career of Winston Churchill. 88 00:10:57,610 --> 00:11:09,940 And he drafted quite a few articles that made Churchill one of the most prominent popular writers on science in the 1930s. 89 00:11:10,310 --> 00:11:13,360 I mean, I know there's Haldane out there. I know there's a superstars like that, 90 00:11:13,480 --> 00:11:23,379 but Churchill had the common touch and he often wrote in in organs that were very popular and wrote about science. 91 00:11:23,380 --> 00:11:28,900 And behind that was the, the ghost of, uh, of Frederick Lindemann. 92 00:11:29,680 --> 00:11:34,840 This is one of the articles vision of the future through the Eyes of Science. 93 00:11:39,840 --> 00:11:46,020 The Churchill was extremely well paid for these for these articles by the standard by modern times. 94 00:11:46,230 --> 00:11:52,080 He was earning tens of thousands of pounds for individual articles and they had a huge reach. 95 00:11:52,440 --> 00:11:59,460 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. 96 00:11:59,580 --> 00:12:04,440 These were read by huge numbers of people up and down, up and down the country. 97 00:12:04,500 --> 00:12:12,390 And they identified Churchill as someone who was a friend of science and who knew what he was talking about, albeit as everyone knew. 98 00:12:12,750 --> 00:12:17,370 Briefed by Lindemann, whom Churchill and everybody else called the Prof. 99 00:12:19,150 --> 00:12:26,450 Now. This is another of those articles, the last one of those series. 100 00:12:26,810 --> 00:12:33,590 And this is actually exceptional one, because by the time this was published in 1937, Churchill, 101 00:12:33,890 --> 00:12:46,400 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. 102 00:12:46,850 --> 00:12:49,130 He was prominent again in parliament. 103 00:12:49,280 --> 00:12:56,929 The two reasons the one that we're all we're all familiar with, of course, is he, along with Chamberlain's brother, 104 00:12:56,930 --> 00:13:04,430 Austen Chamberlain, were the two people who were warning of the threat of Hitler and German rearmament? 105 00:13:06,440 --> 00:13:11,390 Chamberlain died actually just one aside before that, before the Second World War. 106 00:13:11,600 --> 00:13:14,600 So Churchill gets virtually all the credit now, which is a little bit unfair. 107 00:13:14,750 --> 00:13:26,120 Anyway, Churchill was a was extremely prominent in that, and one of his favourite causes was the need for Britain to cultivate air defence. 108 00:13:27,710 --> 00:13:33,380 He again was briefed very, very carefully by Lindemann and they became a kind of double act. 109 00:13:34,160 --> 00:13:44,059 And if people like Henry dissolved, who was the was the scientists favourite administrator and thinker in Westminster, 110 00:13:44,060 --> 00:13:49,430 regarded them as a kind of evil duo. And I written about in my book, I don't want to go into it here, 111 00:13:49,670 --> 00:13:57,590 but they basically thought that Tizard and his company were dragging their feet and that what was really needed, 112 00:13:57,590 --> 00:14:03,950 the real brains, as Churchill put it, was to put Lindemann in charge of those defence initiatives. 113 00:14:04,680 --> 00:14:06,560 And everyone knew this in the House of Commons. 114 00:14:07,280 --> 00:14:13,340 Churchill was was accused of crying wolf and was and he was deeply unpopular about these these initiatives. 115 00:14:13,640 --> 00:14:20,930 And Lindemann was becoming more and more interested in politics and indeed stood for election twice but failed to win a seat. 116 00:14:22,310 --> 00:14:29,560 Now, this article is important because he it was published on the 23rd of October, 1938, 117 00:14:29,570 --> 00:14:37,040 had been written just almost a year before Rutherford's funeral, which Lindemann attended. 118 00:14:37,970 --> 00:14:45,380 Now, this article was the last one of several where Churchill was saying to the public. 119 00:14:46,610 --> 00:14:51,430 There's this thing called nuclear energy and we could be on the threshold of a nuclear age. 120 00:14:51,440 --> 00:14:56,780 This energy really could be grasped. And I remind you again that I'd rather physical then date. 121 00:14:56,980 --> 00:15:06,950 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. 122 00:15:08,690 --> 00:15:16,430 Seven weeks after that article was published, nuclear fission was discovered in Hitler's capital, Berlin. 123 00:15:18,600 --> 00:15:24,720 It's a pleasure, but it's always been I don't need to describe in detail the physical significance of that. 124 00:15:24,870 --> 00:15:30,840 It was a complete bombshell in physics, almost entirely unexpected. 125 00:15:31,470 --> 00:15:36,720 And it was this, if you like. That was the first sign of this monumental trick of fate, 126 00:15:37,140 --> 00:15:47,010 whereby human beings as a whole got their hand on this huge source of energy right on the cusp of of the Second World. 127 00:15:47,220 --> 00:15:49,320 What would be the Second World War? 128 00:15:50,670 --> 00:15:57,120 But people knowledgeable about physics, the people we admire, the cool headed people who weigh up all the possibilities, 129 00:15:57,300 --> 00:16:03,300 knew that the bomb was very unlikely within a couple of years. 130 00:16:05,100 --> 00:16:14,970 Niels Bohr then seen as the the greatest nuclear theoretician, and he'd been Rutherford's only theoretical protege, Protegé. 131 00:16:15,240 --> 00:16:27,220 He and John Wheeler had demonstrated in, in a brilliant piece of physics that the the fissile isotope of uranium two, three, 132 00:16:27,240 --> 00:16:38,879 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 133 00:16:38,880 --> 00:16:47,190 there was really very little possibility it was neglected that that that a bomb would be possible in the near future. 134 00:16:48,720 --> 00:16:56,580 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, 135 00:16:56,580 --> 00:17:00,120 three, five, in order to make a viable weapon which he. 136 00:17:00,120 --> 00:17:03,540 Which he dismissed as inconceivable. Quote. 137 00:17:07,250 --> 00:17:11,420 No. It was a few years later. 138 00:17:11,810 --> 00:17:23,210 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, 139 00:17:23,360 --> 00:17:35,870 hit on the central idea, which that enabled people to to believe that it really might be possible to make a uranium nuclear weapon. 140 00:17:38,760 --> 00:17:45,270 Those two physicists were. Otto Fraiche on the left, as usual, at his piano. 141 00:17:46,160 --> 00:17:52,879 And a former professor here. Rudy Pyles, with his wife, Jennifer Frisch. 142 00:17:52,880 --> 00:18:06,350 And Piles were working in a brand spanking new building on the University of Birmingham campus right next to them in that brand new 143 00:18:06,350 --> 00:18:14,360 building where a bunch of colleagues working on what his art called the most important technological invention of the Second World War, 144 00:18:14,360 --> 00:18:20,690 which was the cavity wave magnetron. They weren't allowed to participate in that research because it was too secret. 145 00:18:21,650 --> 00:18:25,370 But will they allow we're allowed to work on what was nuclear physics, 146 00:18:26,030 --> 00:18:30,440 which they were doing about seven or eight feet or it's true, seven or eight feet away. 147 00:18:31,930 --> 00:18:33,740 I've actually looked at the geometry of this building. 148 00:18:33,760 --> 00:18:40,000 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. 149 00:18:42,380 --> 00:18:49,280 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. 150 00:18:49,280 --> 00:18:53,180 He's so famous for his generosity. It was fresh. You put that question. 151 00:18:54,420 --> 00:18:57,540 What would happen if you could isolate you? Two, three, five. 152 00:19:00,140 --> 00:19:05,120 If you put sufficient resources in to extract that pure fissile material. 153 00:19:06,260 --> 00:19:12,590 And again, through searching through your bodily archives, there's lots and lots of letters from piles. 154 00:19:13,550 --> 00:19:15,650 Within a few days, that's a quote from him. 155 00:19:16,130 --> 00:19:24,709 They had written one of the masterpieces of physics literature in the 20th century, known as the Fresh Piles memorandum, actually two memoranda. 156 00:19:24,710 --> 00:19:35,000 But let's not split hairs. What they did was write a quite beautiful paper which a decently qualified civil servant could read, 157 00:19:35,600 --> 00:19:41,900 explaining the basic mechanism, namely that you take these two lumps of two, three, five, 158 00:19:42,020 --> 00:19:48,230 but above or at or above a critical size and blast them towards each other at very high energy 159 00:19:48,410 --> 00:19:54,800 so that you could set up what we would call a nuclear chain reaction and form an explosion. 160 00:19:55,280 --> 00:20:00,259 And they not only looked at the viability of that by doing some straightforward calculations, 161 00:20:00,260 --> 00:20:08,450 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. 162 00:20:08,480 --> 00:20:14,870 As I said, it's a quite glorious piece. Cleese A piece of writing in excellent English, I might say as well. 163 00:20:15,980 --> 00:20:25,430 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. 164 00:20:25,820 --> 00:20:34,520 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. 165 00:20:34,730 --> 00:20:42,460 They took their idea to their boss, and their boss was sir, not sir. 166 00:20:42,470 --> 00:20:52,330 It was Mark Oliphant who had joined the Birmingham Physics Department on exactly the same day a few years before, as as Rudi Piles. 167 00:20:52,760 --> 00:20:59,209 He was one of Rutherford's boys, one of the Rothfuss favourites who had done a dirty and left Rutherford's rather 168 00:20:59,210 --> 00:21:04,160 domineering leadership in the Cavendish and set up his own show here in Birmingham. 169 00:21:05,210 --> 00:21:07,700 Oliphant It was a real, real go getter. 170 00:21:08,540 --> 00:21:18,200 He really sold to the to the people of Birmingham the need for a physics department there and the need for a cyclotron. 171 00:21:18,870 --> 00:21:27,019 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. 172 00:21:27,020 --> 00:21:31,400 The purpose of the machine is not to release energy for destruction. 173 00:21:31,880 --> 00:21:39,050 It is for humanitarian work. Well, the humanitarian work was on the horizon now, which is a bomb. 174 00:21:39,380 --> 00:21:46,880 He took in total secret to Sir Henry Tizard, who was ensconced in Whitehall as the great mind. 175 00:21:47,060 --> 00:21:56,660 I think that's a fair statement. The great talent of mind at using physics and science and deploying it in a military context. 176 00:21:57,560 --> 00:22:04,220 Tizard had already fallen out with with with a person who we originally was very friendly with Lindemann, 177 00:22:05,150 --> 00:22:10,490 but with for the moment was in Central in Whitehall and he was a person that could make things happen. 178 00:22:11,860 --> 00:22:12,819 Now, it's very, 179 00:22:12,820 --> 00:22:21,430 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. 180 00:22:22,150 --> 00:22:28,690 This was looked look this must have looked like an extremely improbable, extremely improbable notion. 181 00:22:30,190 --> 00:22:36,430 All the talk. My mother still alive, tells me all the talk was of a of a of a Nazi invasion. 182 00:22:38,410 --> 00:22:41,590 Was it worth even thinking about something as far fetched as this? 183 00:22:42,840 --> 00:22:53,370 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? 184 00:22:53,370 --> 00:23:00,060 This activity must have seemed at at that time with fresh piles banging hard 185 00:23:00,510 --> 00:23:04,500 because they piles in particular had seen the work of Hitler at first hand. 186 00:23:05,160 --> 00:23:12,750 And for him, it was it was terrifying that his former boss, Heisenberg, who he knew was a truly great physicist, very, very smart, 187 00:23:12,750 --> 00:23:19,650 very, very quick with the industrial might of Germany, if I can think of this, we can think of this, so can Heisenberg. 188 00:23:20,160 --> 00:23:24,870 And it's very easy for us to forget how frightening that must have been. 189 00:23:25,290 --> 00:23:27,929 When I spoke just at one time to Piles, 190 00:23:27,930 --> 00:23:35,909 he said he sometimes had to go back and remind himself of just how frightened they were in those in those months in 191 00:23:35,910 --> 00:23:41,940 Birmingham when they saw the machinations of the British government turning over much more slowly than they would have liked. 192 00:23:43,110 --> 00:23:51,450 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, 193 00:23:51,450 --> 00:23:56,530 set up by these two guys, both classified as enemy aliens, technically, right. 194 00:23:56,580 --> 00:24:04,799 They were still people who were not British citizens. The first committee meeting was within a month of their having that idea. 195 00:24:04,800 --> 00:24:08,430 It was on the 10th of April 1940, which I actually find very impressive. 196 00:24:09,690 --> 00:24:16,710 And it was chaired by G.P. Thomson, the son of J.J. Thomas of the discoverer of the electron himself. 197 00:24:16,950 --> 00:24:26,250 I had done great work by blight, by being one of the first people to to demonstrate the wave nature of the electron. 198 00:24:28,270 --> 00:24:31,360 He had on that small committee. So small didn't even have a secretary. 199 00:24:31,370 --> 00:24:37,580 He was working in a very small group in the headquarters of the Royal Society. 200 00:24:37,680 --> 00:24:42,219 Now, most of us would go to the Royal Academy of Art in London. 201 00:24:42,220 --> 00:24:50,830 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, 202 00:24:50,920 --> 00:24:53,469 while of course not allowing for should pass to be on the committee, 203 00:24:53,470 --> 00:24:58,510 they were enemy aliens and they were even sent a note asking them to keep their idea very 204 00:24:58,510 --> 00:25:02,080 secret because the Germans might actually get hold of this as if they needed telling that. 205 00:25:06,850 --> 00:25:16,020 I just want to pause just a few seconds here that there was a huge problem, as you will. 206 00:25:16,060 --> 00:25:24,940 Many of you will be aware in the in the appalling environment that that Hitler set up in Germany. 207 00:25:25,180 --> 00:25:33,730 So there was this appalling problem of Jewish physicists and their families having to leave their academic posts. 208 00:25:33,820 --> 00:25:38,139 One of them was Francis Simon, another of the most distinguished people to work in Oxford. 209 00:25:38,140 --> 00:25:53,860 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. 210 00:25:53,860 --> 00:25:59,440 Of course, he had a bed in the back of his Rolls-Royce going going around recruiting physicists. 211 00:25:59,560 --> 00:26:07,060 And this was with Schrodinger. One of his prize catches a great physical chemist, great thermodynamics. 212 00:26:07,450 --> 00:26:19,060 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. 213 00:26:19,300 --> 00:26:24,580 But I think almost as important, he was lindemans eyes and ears here in Oxford. 214 00:26:24,910 --> 00:26:32,139 Lindemann, as would was assumed as the war broke out was was close to London. 215 00:26:32,140 --> 00:26:35,710 But when Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, 216 00:26:36,040 --> 00:26:45,010 just a few weeks after friction paths came up with their their idea, then he joined at Churchill in Westminster. 217 00:26:45,160 --> 00:26:49,840 And this gentleman here was his art was his eyes and ears, 218 00:26:50,110 --> 00:26:56,470 because they were doing experiments here that were relevant to the the development of the development of that that that weapon. 219 00:27:02,020 --> 00:27:07,400 The best physicist in nuclear physicist in Britain at that time was widely acknowledged to be this gentleman here, James. 220 00:27:07,420 --> 00:27:15,880 James Chadwick. He was the person who eventually finalised the report. 221 00:27:15,910 --> 00:27:20,740 No, for reasons I don't want to go into as the Maude report in August 1941. 222 00:27:22,600 --> 00:27:28,380 Chadwick an awkward person, not particularly comfortable in company, 223 00:27:28,390 --> 00:27:36,760 but a nonpareil nuclear physicist and gifted with this ability to write muscular and clear prose. 224 00:27:36,760 --> 00:27:42,399 And he also got on very well with Lindemann, which was very, very important, because if you didn't get over Lindemann, 225 00:27:42,400 --> 00:27:46,180 there's no way that the the report would have been taken seriously by Churchill. 226 00:27:47,800 --> 00:27:52,450 So in 1941 he finalised that report. And again, sorry to be boring. 227 00:27:52,690 --> 00:28:01,480 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. 228 00:28:01,660 --> 00:28:08,710 But the it is absolutely nothing or nothing serious to discredit of Chadwick and his colleagues. 229 00:28:09,340 --> 00:28:13,510 That includes fresh and piles, ICR representatives and what have you. 230 00:28:13,810 --> 00:28:26,230 They had thought this thing out quite carefully. The one thing that is easily forgotten is that they did really considerably underestimate the ease, 231 00:28:26,500 --> 00:28:32,110 if that's the right word, with which the bomb could be manufactured in Great Britain. 232 00:28:32,860 --> 00:28:35,559 Now, of course, they didn't think it was going to be actually easy, 233 00:28:35,560 --> 00:28:39,850 but they actually thought it was viable, something that later on would be shown to be totally ridiculous. 234 00:28:40,690 --> 00:28:45,850 And there was one person, particularly, who stood out and thought they were talking nonsense. 235 00:28:46,750 --> 00:28:49,890 And that was that Lindemans noire. 236 00:28:50,560 --> 00:28:59,770 This gentleman here, Patrick Blackett. Now, Patrick Blackett and Lindemann apparently took an instant dislike to each other. 237 00:29:00,240 --> 00:29:02,590 Now, that wasn't difficult in the case of Lindemann. 238 00:29:02,590 --> 00:29:08,380 I know that for some people, but but this this was the kind of person that really got up Lindemans nose. 239 00:29:09,550 --> 00:29:18,220 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. 240 00:29:18,520 --> 00:29:28,750 But also, remember, apart from being a absolutely terrific experimenter, the great experiment he did in 1932, which showed us cosmic ray showers. 241 00:29:29,170 --> 00:29:34,660 That to me is just the kind of thing that Lindemann would have loved to have done right. 242 00:29:34,830 --> 00:29:44,229 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 243 00:29:44,230 --> 00:29:49,470 was something that was extremely difficult to see right into something where anybody could do it, 244 00:29:49,480 --> 00:29:53,020 basically if they had if they if they had a reasonable piece of equipment. 245 00:29:53,320 --> 00:29:58,660 And I always think that Lindemann, who loved ingenious devices, must have been so envious of that. 246 00:29:58,780 --> 00:30:00,250 That speculation, it may be wrong. 247 00:30:00,580 --> 00:30:08,500 Anyway, whatever happens that Blackett and Lindemann were, there was absolutely no love lost between them and black. 248 00:30:08,500 --> 00:30:14,860 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 249 00:30:14,860 --> 00:30:19,120 conclusion that Britain could build this weapon here is absolutely ludicrous. 250 00:30:19,120 --> 00:30:27,820 And actually, he was right, but he did not hold sway among the among the others, although events did take that over. 251 00:30:30,630 --> 00:30:36,630 Churchill gave the go ahead to the development of the bomb. 252 00:30:37,350 --> 00:30:43,150 In a memo, which he was enormously proud and he quoted it a lot, I can think of six cases where he quoted this. 253 00:30:43,890 --> 00:30:46,890 It was on the 31st of August, 1941. 254 00:30:46,920 --> 00:30:49,020 Worth reading. Just take 15 seconds. 255 00:30:49,500 --> 00:30:57,420 Although personally I'm quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement. 256 00:30:57,810 --> 00:31:07,680 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. 257 00:31:08,640 --> 00:31:19,230 So Britain was the. We now know the first country to give the go ahead to the development of of a nuclear weapon. 258 00:31:19,860 --> 00:31:27,689 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, 259 00:31:27,690 --> 00:31:33,480 but I think it's accurate enough they handed it over to people who had worked at. 260 00:31:33,510 --> 00:31:42,479 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. 261 00:31:42,480 --> 00:31:48,900 He thought this was a disaster. He thought that it was a terrible thing to do to hand this over to people, 262 00:31:48,900 --> 00:31:59,010 even though it was fair to say that you needed people with industrial industrial sense in order to consider the manufacturer of these things. 263 00:31:59,280 --> 00:32:06,480 But I want to say it strictly fair. CHADWICK Staunch Tory voter, staunch Churchill supporter. 264 00:32:06,660 --> 00:32:12,840 He always thought actually that was quite a reasonable thing to do, even though he accepted that it was it was not handled. 265 00:32:13,410 --> 00:32:21,900 It was not handled well. So the project ticked ticked over with Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge, 266 00:32:22,080 --> 00:32:30,360 Liverpool and several other centres here doing with their neck their nuclear counterparts of your good cells 267 00:32:30,450 --> 00:32:38,370 were working were in total secret on the on various parts of nuclear physics that pertained to this weapon. 268 00:32:38,610 --> 00:32:42,179 Many of those people didn't even know they were working towards a nuclear bomb. 269 00:32:42,180 --> 00:32:47,190 All they knew was that they couldn't actually discuss with each other and anybody else what they were, what they were working on. 270 00:32:48,690 --> 00:32:55,470 If I happen to believe that that cockcroft view is more accurate, as I said, you may differ, 271 00:32:56,190 --> 00:33:04,169 but it lost a huge amount of momentum at that time as it became more and more clear that the scale of this 272 00:33:04,170 --> 00:33:10,890 project was something way beyond Britain could Britain could manage in the wartime with the Luftwaffe bombing, 273 00:33:11,250 --> 00:33:18,690 Europe, our cities, the country sliding into an increasingly difficult economic state. 274 00:33:21,140 --> 00:33:26,870 But anyway, Churchill deserves at least the credit for allowing the thing to go forward. 275 00:33:29,880 --> 00:33:33,540 Six weeks after that, something I think pretty momentous happened. 276 00:33:34,770 --> 00:33:43,440 Very, very brief bit of background. Our friends and colleagues in America, having been cheated by the great Oliphant, 277 00:33:44,700 --> 00:33:49,590 were starting to with with Fermi and Szilard and people like that over there. 278 00:33:49,800 --> 00:33:53,430 They were starting to get into a much higher gear on nuclear weapons. 279 00:33:53,850 --> 00:34:01,080 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. 280 00:34:01,350 --> 00:34:03,690 But America was catching up very, very fast. 281 00:34:03,810 --> 00:34:14,070 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. 282 00:34:14,070 --> 00:34:21,900 Not not least, not least Fermi. By October 1941, I'm glossing over a lot of politics here. 283 00:34:23,220 --> 00:34:32,340 Franklin Roosevelt, advised by the great believer Bush wrote to Churchill in a hand-delivered letter to ten Downing Street, 284 00:34:32,340 --> 00:34:37,590 not letter cable dated 12th of October 1941. 285 00:34:38,190 --> 00:34:47,280 And this was what he wrote to Winston Churchill. It appears desirable that we should soon correspond or converse concerning the subject, 286 00:34:47,280 --> 00:34:51,059 which is under study by your mode committee that says Nuclear bomb, 287 00:34:51,060 --> 00:35:00,420 commit nuclear bomb in power committee in order that any extended efforts may be conducted, conducted and coordinated jointly. 288 00:35:02,570 --> 00:35:08,450 Now, perhaps with the wisdom of hindsight, this was a remarkable opportunity. 289 00:35:09,710 --> 00:35:13,970 Churchill did not reply to that memo for seven weeks. 290 00:35:15,060 --> 00:35:19,500 And even then after that, it was very tepid the way he was following it up. 291 00:35:20,340 --> 00:35:28,380 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. 292 00:35:28,410 --> 00:35:36,630 Sealing his own fate, incidentally. But it completely changed the atmosphere in Washington, D.C., about the attitude to the bomb. 293 00:35:38,040 --> 00:35:42,150 And it as fast as you could flick flick your fingers. 294 00:35:42,480 --> 00:35:46,560 The bomb shot up the the give the pump shot up the agenda. 295 00:35:47,040 --> 00:35:52,619 And General Groves is is ensconced as leader of that project, 296 00:35:52,620 --> 00:36:01,020 a tremendously effective chief executive who built the Pentagon and the American system took off Britain. 297 00:36:01,170 --> 00:36:06,090 To quote Margaret Gowing, also of this parish had missed the bus. 298 00:36:08,540 --> 00:36:12,220 Churchill. I have to say I can't see any other way of describing it. 299 00:36:12,230 --> 00:36:20,120 He was quite slow in picking this up, not just about that answering that note from FDR, 300 00:36:20,390 --> 00:36:27,620 but if you look at the papers in the National Archives, you see very, very little activity from Churchill on this. 301 00:36:28,130 --> 00:36:35,820 And I know it wasn't the most important thing on his agenda. That's obvious, but it was only in April 1943. 302 00:36:35,840 --> 00:36:36,660 This is quite important. 303 00:36:36,680 --> 00:36:44,570 It's not mentioned in Gowing that the activity in physicist language or in graphical language went from like this suddenly shot up. 304 00:36:45,230 --> 00:36:53,060 And this was when FDR was colleague, Harry Hopkins was shamelessly stringing Churchill along. 305 00:36:53,150 --> 00:36:55,850 Yes, yes, yes. We'll talk. We'll talk. We'll talk. He was right. 306 00:36:55,850 --> 00:37:02,809 Shamelessly stringing the British along while the Americans were investing more and more resources in the development of this thing. 307 00:37:02,810 --> 00:37:07,610 It's quite clear that Britain was going to get left behind and Churchill finally snapped. 308 00:37:07,730 --> 00:37:16,910 And that's when we get the Churchill of that we of legend, so to speak, firing off of articulate memos, 309 00:37:16,910 --> 00:37:23,750 commissioning a brilliantly written report from Lindemann on what the bond meant, convening committees, and then following it up. 310 00:37:27,760 --> 00:37:38,740 So what happened then was that with with FDR, one of the most difficult characters to deal with, someone Churchill revered him tremendously. 311 00:37:38,860 --> 00:37:43,120 But tremendously difficult character to deal with, much less straightforward than Churchill. 312 00:37:44,020 --> 00:37:58,360 It was in August 1943 that Churchill finally pinned Roosevelt down and got him to sign what we now call the Quebec agreement. 313 00:37:59,140 --> 00:38:01,930 And I say this was pretty much an act of desperation. 314 00:38:02,260 --> 00:38:08,920 I remember America was charging ahead with this colossal Manhattan Project, you know, a gigantic ocean liner. 315 00:38:09,070 --> 00:38:14,050 And Britain had this leaking coracle. That was the Baloise project in Britain. 316 00:38:14,590 --> 00:38:22,870 Somehow, Britain needed to get in on that man Manhattan Project, if only because if this weapon were deliverable. 317 00:38:22,880 --> 00:38:27,190 Because I didn't know at that time whether it would be that Britain would have to know how from that project. 318 00:38:27,970 --> 00:38:37,180 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, 319 00:38:37,360 --> 00:38:41,530 though they would have a veto on each country, would have a veto on the use of the bomb. 320 00:38:41,740 --> 00:38:45,460 And in America, this is something that really would have gone up Rutherford's nose, 321 00:38:45,610 --> 00:38:53,230 that America could veto Britain's civil civil nuclear power program after the war if they saw fit. 322 00:38:53,950 --> 00:39:00,700 And the reason for that was because the Americans, in my view, in my judgement, rightly, were extremely sceptical of ECI, 323 00:39:00,700 --> 00:39:07,680 a big commercial operation, having such a large role in the British program, because they thought it was going to basically benefit ECI. 324 00:39:08,080 --> 00:39:11,320 And in my view, they were quite they were quite right to be sceptical about that. 325 00:39:12,550 --> 00:39:17,290 The great historian, one of my great favourites in this field, David Reynolds, 326 00:39:17,290 --> 00:39:23,979 I think hits the hits the right note when he says of Churchill and Roosevelt that they 327 00:39:23,980 --> 00:39:29,710 treated the nuclear bomb and its and its politics as a kind of personal fiefdom. 328 00:39:29,980 --> 00:39:41,440 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. 329 00:39:41,440 --> 00:39:46,120 Hardly anyone. I mean, it was only a small smattering of people knew on the record. 330 00:39:46,570 --> 00:39:53,500 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. 331 00:39:54,310 --> 00:40:01,900 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. 332 00:40:02,080 --> 00:40:05,250 What if one of them died? Who knows? 333 00:40:07,230 --> 00:40:15,360 Anyway, whatever else you can say about this, it got British scientists into the Manhattan Project and you have to count that as success. 334 00:40:15,510 --> 00:40:21,000 In the end, about 24 scientists went over from Britain to America, 335 00:40:21,150 --> 00:40:30,000 and the first arrived within 24 hours of the signing of the Quebec agreement, which is which one America said was unseemly. 336 00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:36,090 Haste piles, I believe, is one of those first people on that on that on that tarmac. 337 00:40:36,510 --> 00:40:40,020 And initially, they they they got on well. 338 00:40:41,040 --> 00:40:47,220 But I think it's fair to say that Groves, who had a kind of anger phobia nurtured earlier in his career, 339 00:40:47,400 --> 00:40:52,440 was pretty determined only to use the amount of British expertise that he needed to. 340 00:40:52,560 --> 00:40:55,920 He saw this bomb, right? And he knew what he wanted. 341 00:40:56,160 --> 00:41:03,240 He was a mission delivered guy. He wanted that wrapped very, very strongly in the Stars and Stripes. 342 00:41:06,070 --> 00:41:09,670 Just quickly, the piles fresh. 343 00:41:10,510 --> 00:41:19,300 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. 344 00:41:19,900 --> 00:41:26,650 Through this gate here, this anonymous gate, and then would be driven up the mountainside to to the site. 345 00:41:28,240 --> 00:41:34,330 It's worth stressing here something very important that even by this time here, 346 00:41:34,960 --> 00:41:38,680 if you were totally disinterested and as smart as someone like Oppenheimer, 347 00:41:38,710 --> 00:41:44,260 who was very, very smart, of course, the project already had what we in modern day language called mission creep. 348 00:41:45,340 --> 00:41:51,280 The mission the political dimensions of the mission were that they wanted that 349 00:41:51,280 --> 00:41:56,450 bomb because because the allies were terrified that Hitler would get it first. 350 00:41:56,470 --> 00:42:05,770 I use the word terrified advisedly by 19 late 1943, certainly early 1944. 351 00:42:06,340 --> 00:42:13,059 Very, very few people thought that the intelligence was quite clear that that nobody could 352 00:42:13,060 --> 00:42:17,680 find any evidence that the Germans were making any progress in building that weapon. 353 00:42:18,430 --> 00:42:20,709 You'll know now that they weren't making any progress. 354 00:42:20,710 --> 00:42:27,430 But you have to look as a historian, look at what they knew at the time and what their policy then was, 355 00:42:27,430 --> 00:42:32,050 was to give specifically the American government that that weapon. 356 00:42:33,770 --> 00:42:39,950 There was very, very little long term, serious long term thinking about about that, 357 00:42:40,040 --> 00:42:47,600 about what would happen when the bomb arrived, which many people increasingly thought would happen sooner or later. 358 00:42:47,810 --> 00:42:55,280 And it was Groves. It was his mission to make to deliver a bomb that could be dropped from an aircraft. 359 00:42:55,410 --> 00:43:03,860 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. 360 00:43:05,030 --> 00:43:12,350 The first person by, I think, pretty well all accounts and I've read a lot of accounts of this who took this serious, 361 00:43:12,530 --> 00:43:19,130 who took the long term strategy of nuclear weapons seriously, was the gentleman we mentioned earlier, Niels Bohr. 362 00:43:20,490 --> 00:43:26,630 He arrived in late 1943 at Croydon Airport, 363 00:43:26,640 --> 00:43:38,000 met by Chadwick and his wife and was completely dumbfounded to hear that the the term inconceivable about the bomb was completely wrong. 364 00:43:39,020 --> 00:43:46,490 That the United States, in particular with its gigantic resources, with a small contribution from the UK in terms of resources, 365 00:43:46,550 --> 00:43:53,060 well they done a lot of the legwork was actually embarking on this on this project. 366 00:43:53,600 --> 00:44:01,580 Now, I'm sure you know, of, of, of of Bauhaus place in in in physics at that time. 367 00:44:02,750 --> 00:44:11,210 A superb, superbly insightful, not mathematical physicist, wise, avuncular and insightful. 368 00:44:11,240 --> 00:44:16,100 Virtually everybody thought that it might be. It was almost non-PC to say anything else. 369 00:44:17,690 --> 00:44:22,360 The one thing he was not was a good communicator. I'm told, in fact, 370 00:44:22,370 --> 00:44:26,269 what actually one person was actually in one of these seminars that people would 371 00:44:26,270 --> 00:44:32,530 actually be arguing after we said was which language in which he was speaking of. 372 00:44:32,600 --> 00:44:38,060 One of the wasn't Danish, incidentally. Um, he was a, he was not a good communicator. 373 00:44:38,300 --> 00:44:48,770 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. 374 00:44:48,890 --> 00:45:01,440 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, 375 00:45:01,450 --> 00:45:09,979 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. 376 00:45:09,980 --> 00:45:13,430 Oh, my God, what a terrible thing to be doing. Build this weapon of mass destruction. 377 00:45:13,580 --> 00:45:20,300 The first serious question he asked Oppenheimer, according to Oppie, was, is this bomb big enough? 378 00:45:21,640 --> 00:45:27,340 He he had a view that if you had a bomb that was unusable, that this this had a chance, 379 00:45:27,340 --> 00:45:35,440 if you played it right to to obviate the possibility of of of nuclear warfare. 380 00:45:35,890 --> 00:45:40,960 But the thing that he thought was disastrous and he doesn't use that word to be fair, he was too polite for that. 381 00:45:41,260 --> 00:45:47,800 But the thing that he thought was very, very worrisome was that Britain and America were doing this. 382 00:45:48,340 --> 00:45:53,560 But they also had another ally, the Soviet Union, who were doing most of the dying in the war. 383 00:45:53,860 --> 00:46:03,910 The vast majority of the dying. And contrary to that, I think while the patronising views of a bore, he knew that Joseph Stalin, 384 00:46:05,170 --> 00:46:08,080 you know what was not Mr. Nice Guy who could be trusted with everything. 385 00:46:08,410 --> 00:46:17,500 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. 386 00:46:17,860 --> 00:46:23,380 So what he advocated was that the Soviet Union, through Stalin, 387 00:46:23,440 --> 00:46:30,309 should at least be apprised of the existence of this of this program with a view after the 388 00:46:30,310 --> 00:46:37,270 war to having some kind of rapprochement so that there would not be a nuclear arms race, 389 00:46:37,270 --> 00:46:42,820 which he sought for all very clearly in in in memos that we can now, now read. 390 00:46:43,840 --> 00:46:48,070 Now, bull was, as everyone knows, polite to a fault. 391 00:46:48,280 --> 00:46:54,880 But he was not absolutely not someone who was who wanted to hide his life under a bushel. 392 00:46:55,120 --> 00:47:01,360 He was absolutely determined to get to the top table, both in America and in Britain. 393 00:47:01,390 --> 00:47:09,070 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, 394 00:47:09,070 --> 00:47:14,770 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. 395 00:47:14,770 --> 00:47:19,330 And he was prepared to use his prestige and his energy to that to get it. 396 00:47:21,130 --> 00:47:31,320 Now, this was not easy. Churchill was, by early spring, 1944, extremely tired. 397 00:47:31,330 --> 00:47:36,430 For one thing, he said, I'm through, he told, be absolutely exhausted. 398 00:47:36,700 --> 00:47:41,290 He was also working on the plans for D-Day, which he thought was could well end up with a bloodbath. 399 00:47:41,530 --> 00:47:46,300 So he was not in a particularly alert frame of mind by his standards. 400 00:47:46,810 --> 00:47:56,770 But there was a campaign at the top echelons of British science to persuade Churchill, who didn't like scientists invading the political sphere, 401 00:47:57,070 --> 00:48:03,550 to see this person who was described by General Smuts, one of Churchill's friends, as on a par with Shakespeare and Napoleon. 402 00:48:04,110 --> 00:48:08,830 Now I think that's going a bit far, but those are the kind of words that were being bandied, bandied about. 403 00:48:09,820 --> 00:48:17,080 Finally, by dint of work from Lindemann and so John Anderson and the Royal Society and others, 404 00:48:17,260 --> 00:48:23,290 they got a place in Churchill's diary on the 16th of May 1944. 405 00:48:24,450 --> 00:48:28,980 At 3 p.m. Now, that's not a good time for you, because that's when he normally took his nap. 406 00:48:30,090 --> 00:48:40,230 That may or may not be significant. But we know that this meeting, described by several sources, bore sung for himself. 407 00:48:40,740 --> 00:48:46,740 RV Jones and one or two others. It started off really quite badly and then got worse. 408 00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:53,970 Churchill walked in to the meeting in Downing Street and it was Lindemann and Bloor sitting there waiting for him. 409 00:48:54,510 --> 00:49:04,980 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. 410 00:49:05,730 --> 00:49:10,440 That said two things, one of which was very wise, actually, which was that in his hands? 411 00:49:10,890 --> 00:49:19,650 Possibly. Quite possibly. Right. What were matters that would affect the well-being of the world for the next few decades? 412 00:49:19,920 --> 00:49:21,870 That's not an unreasonable statement, in my view. 413 00:49:22,740 --> 00:49:31,290 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. 414 00:49:31,380 --> 00:49:38,810 Now, that would have put Churchill's hackles right up because he did not like scientists importuning him and others. 415 00:49:38,820 --> 00:49:42,960 He wanted to need to be elected unless it was Lindemann. He wanted them. 416 00:49:43,570 --> 00:49:48,360 He did not like scientists elbowing their way into into the sphere. 417 00:49:48,540 --> 00:49:59,490 So it started off with with Churchill haranguing Lindemann because Lindemann had just been so critical of that Quebec agreement. 418 00:49:59,610 --> 00:50:04,439 Incidentally, I think Lindemann was right. Incidentally, I think Lennon was absolutely right to be critical of that agreement. 419 00:50:04,440 --> 00:50:09,570 But anyway, Churchill deeply resented that. And off he went. 420 00:50:09,800 --> 00:50:20,190 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, 421 00:50:20,490 --> 00:50:30,810 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. 422 00:50:30,960 --> 00:50:32,220 So it was a disaster. 423 00:50:32,520 --> 00:50:40,530 And you might know that again, a former colleague of yours, R.V. Jones, met Bull outside, just down the road from Downing Street. 424 00:50:41,310 --> 00:50:44,670 And Churchill said it was a disaster. We were treated just like schoolboys. 425 00:50:45,480 --> 00:50:49,860 And that was the first of bulls to failures there. 426 00:50:50,310 --> 00:50:56,640 And he was treated much more, much more in a much more friendly way by FDR a few months later. 427 00:50:56,850 --> 00:51:01,980 And FDR basically convinced Boer that he was listened to and totally ignored him. 428 00:51:02,850 --> 00:51:07,680 So Boer was was maybe well-intended, maybe naive, but it did not work. 429 00:51:08,040 --> 00:51:16,080 And he, if you like, retired, hurt and it was left to other forces to to intervene. 430 00:51:17,040 --> 00:51:27,870 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. 431 00:51:28,020 --> 00:51:32,400 In particular, it was a group based in Chicago which finished their Manhattan Project first and looked 432 00:51:32,580 --> 00:51:39,120 very carefully into what we call the the the ethics of dropping a bomb on a Japanese city. 433 00:51:39,410 --> 00:51:46,050 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. 434 00:51:46,350 --> 00:51:54,990 So they felt somewhat disempowered, to put it mildly, because they had no say whatever in in in passing their comments to government. 435 00:51:55,140 --> 00:52:00,240 Something that I know that Pyles regretted very, very, very deeply. 436 00:52:00,720 --> 00:52:10,890 Meanwhile, Churchill routinely put WSC on 11th of July 1945 to the dropping of of the nuclear weapon. 437 00:52:11,460 --> 00:52:13,290 And if you weren't there, 438 00:52:15,030 --> 00:52:24,330 you will you will know of that momentous event reported gradually in Great and Great Britain and America of the first atomic bomb. 439 00:52:25,380 --> 00:52:30,720 And it it's worth just remembering here that six years before here, 440 00:52:31,440 --> 00:52:37,260 the scientific community were telling people out there it is inconceivable that such a weapon would exist. 441 00:52:37,440 --> 00:52:45,120 And here it is. This was the result of a totally secret thing that no no member of the public knew about. 442 00:52:46,140 --> 00:52:53,710 I'm not going to discuss the, uh, the the ethics of dropping the nuclear bombs. 443 00:52:53,970 --> 00:52:56,760 There there's always been different views on this. 444 00:52:57,330 --> 00:53:05,580 I will say one thing that Churchill never regretted signing that thing because he believed that that it saved more lives than it cost. 445 00:53:05,790 --> 00:53:10,710 I know there are other views and and we can talk about that later, if you wish. 446 00:53:12,090 --> 00:53:18,070 Churchill's reward for providing what I think most people would regard as the 447 00:53:18,150 --> 00:53:22,260 outstanding leadership in the Second World War was to be thrown out before the end. 448 00:53:23,540 --> 00:53:27,530 Something that our American colleagues could never quite understand. 449 00:53:27,800 --> 00:53:33,500 And he was replaced by someone he respected very much, totally different person, Clement Attlee, 450 00:53:33,920 --> 00:53:43,670 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. 451 00:53:46,280 --> 00:53:50,990 At least one of these people, if you would, you would talk about not standing out in the crowd. 452 00:53:51,270 --> 00:53:53,330 He wouldn't stand out if he stood at a podium. 453 00:53:53,900 --> 00:54:01,760 But this was a person who saw very quickly that this was a topic that the international leaders needed to address very quickly, 454 00:54:02,150 --> 00:54:10,610 and soon found out that the collaboration that Churchill had trumpeted with the United States was yielded very, 455 00:54:10,610 --> 00:54:15,410 very little in terms of the atmosphere after the war. 456 00:54:16,310 --> 00:54:25,280 Put simply, I think it accurate to say that very soon after the war, Britain was frozen out of the development of nuclear weapons. 457 00:54:25,460 --> 00:54:33,620 People were physicists were discharged from Los Alamos, not even allowed to take with them the notes that they were developing. 458 00:54:33,740 --> 00:54:36,140 And America turned in on itself. 459 00:54:36,800 --> 00:54:46,490 And this culminated in the McMahon Act, which made it an offence to actually talk to any other power, including Britain, about nuclear weapons. 460 00:54:46,910 --> 00:54:59,120 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. 461 00:54:59,600 --> 00:55:03,530 Blackett, whom I describe earlier on, was ferociously critical. 462 00:55:03,620 --> 00:55:08,690 He said that Chadwick and his colleagues who supported Churchill and sold Britain down the river, 463 00:55:09,080 --> 00:55:20,000 that that they'd been unconscionably naive in dealing with their American friends and expecting that all would be rewarded later on. 464 00:55:21,690 --> 00:55:30,389 Anyway. At least you'll know that the Cold War took off, that the Russians regarded Churchill as initiating that and his Fulton speech. 465 00:55:30,390 --> 00:55:35,640 That may or may not be fair, but actually persuaded by a foreign secretary. 466 00:55:35,640 --> 00:55:42,930 Bevin soon. Soon came to believe that Britain had no choice with America going its own way but to build its own nuclear weapon. 467 00:55:43,560 --> 00:55:47,340 And that was done just as Churchill had done in complete secrecy. 468 00:55:48,300 --> 00:55:54,150 Just exactly. He, if you like, gave Churchill exactly the same medicine that Churchill had given him. 469 00:55:54,630 --> 00:56:00,960 Right. That it was discussed in a very elliptical, circumspect way in parliament. 470 00:56:02,050 --> 00:56:11,730 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. 471 00:56:12,240 --> 00:56:18,060 Churchill's main contribution was to constantly ask the government, where is this nuclear weapon? 472 00:56:18,300 --> 00:56:25,110 And did not know that that actually and his colleagues had allowed the Quebec agreement to lapse. 473 00:56:25,500 --> 00:56:32,460 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. 474 00:56:34,370 --> 00:56:49,080 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. 475 00:56:49,290 --> 00:56:57,929 You're coming back, uh, age almost 80 to the Premiership and taking up the second stage of his nuke nuclear career. 476 00:56:57,930 --> 00:56:59,400 Because I don't have time to talk about that. 477 00:57:00,330 --> 00:57:07,740 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. 478 00:57:09,090 --> 00:57:12,959 When he came back to Downing Street in 1951. 479 00:57:12,960 --> 00:57:17,910 What an achievement, incidentally, that was. I mean, the guy was, you know, just frail. 480 00:57:17,910 --> 00:57:23,010 As I say, frail is too strong. But he was certainly well past his best. 481 00:57:23,190 --> 00:57:26,850 He'd spent most of those intervening years running his memoirs. Right. 482 00:57:26,970 --> 00:57:30,870 He was not a particularly strong leader of the opposition, but he found his way back. 483 00:57:32,020 --> 00:57:38,550 And among the biggest shocks he was to get in Downing Street was when a civil servant 484 00:57:39,000 --> 00:57:43,890 showed him how much money had been spent on the building of that British nuclear weapon, 485 00:57:44,310 --> 00:57:48,300 £100 million, which was a huge amount of money in those days. 486 00:57:48,630 --> 00:57:54,060 And he said many times after that, in private and public, that he was shocked in a parliamentary democracy, 487 00:57:54,300 --> 00:58:00,120 that in peacetime that Attlee had not done what he thought was the right thing and report that to Parliament. 488 00:58:00,510 --> 00:58:04,320 And the historian Peter Hennessy actually agrees with him, incidentally, on that. 489 00:58:07,390 --> 00:58:11,950 I'm afraid. As I say, I can't tell you how. I wish I could, but I won't tell you how. 490 00:58:11,950 --> 00:58:21,280 Churchill dealt with what was on his email inbox, namely a viable nuclear project produced at much, 491 00:58:21,310 --> 00:58:25,180 much lower cost than the American version run by Sir William Penny. 492 00:58:25,210 --> 00:58:35,810 Largely forgotten about now our Oppenheimer and where they were developing civil nuclear plans for civil nuclear power and a British nuclear bomb. 493 00:58:36,400 --> 00:58:44,110 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. 494 00:58:44,290 --> 00:58:51,070 But what I will say is this, that I think that Lindemann, who was so unpopular, 495 00:58:51,280 --> 00:58:56,230 is clinging to Churchill and being so resistant to the impulse unities of 496 00:58:56,440 --> 00:59:01,509 other physics earlier on made a substantial contribution in that second term, 497 00:59:01,510 --> 00:59:08,800 which I think is widely underrated, especially by his many critics and most famously, C.P. Snow. 498 00:59:10,030 --> 00:59:17,439 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, 499 00:59:17,440 --> 00:59:22,510 Churchill, frankly, was pretty clueless about that nuclear policy in those early months. 500 00:59:22,630 --> 00:59:30,400 And I can say now, and I think I have likely more than most people, but his interventions were absolutely were crucial. 501 00:59:30,400 --> 00:59:35,530 And Churchill, although they fought hard, very hard in the 1950s. 502 00:59:36,530 --> 00:59:42,460 Churchill, in my view, wisely went along with with with with Lindemann counsel. 503 00:59:43,860 --> 00:59:49,140 In that second term, incidentally, as well. Just a little postscript. Churchill met Niels Bohr again. 504 00:59:49,890 --> 00:59:56,100 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. 505 00:59:58,430 --> 01:00:02,660 Most remarkably, perhaps someone who was no good at science, no good at maths. 506 01:00:03,410 --> 01:00:12,890 Winston Churchill was somebody who was seriously clued up on nuclear matters before before the Second World War. 507 01:00:13,550 --> 01:00:23,510 He knew of the potential of nuclear bombs, of nuclear power, and it was his fate, if you want to call it that, 508 01:00:23,840 --> 01:00:33,440 to become prime minister, almost exactly the time that the bomb became viable, courtesy of scientists working in in Britain. 509 01:00:33,950 --> 01:00:37,130 And those scientists, Richard Paulos and plenty of others, 510 01:00:37,340 --> 01:00:53,600 gave Britain the the intellectual ammunition for Churchill to bargain with FDR with his colossal national wealth and intellectual resources. 511 01:00:54,380 --> 01:00:57,530 I personally don't think Churchill made the best fist of that. 512 01:00:57,530 --> 01:00:58,250 Be quite honest. 513 01:00:58,850 --> 01:01:07,730 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. 514 01:01:07,940 --> 01:01:14,330 And I think that it was it is not among his finest achievements, the way he handled the bomb. 515 01:01:14,540 --> 01:01:24,800 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, 516 01:01:25,010 --> 01:01:29,420 he he to some degree, made made up for that. 517 01:01:30,470 --> 01:01:39,140 The one thing that I think was perhaps most disappointing about Churchill was was the failure to listen to Niels Bohr. 518 01:01:40,820 --> 01:01:44,990 I'm not saying that both ideas were wholly practical. 519 01:01:45,200 --> 01:01:56,090 I'm sure there was an element of a starry eyed naivete in in in Bauhaus approaches. 520 01:01:56,330 --> 01:02:01,670 But I don't think it speaks well of either of Churchill or Roosevelt. 521 01:02:01,790 --> 01:02:07,560 Not at least to have given BAU a hearing on on on his views. 522 01:02:07,580 --> 01:02:12,110 After all, Boer more or less got it right in terms of he saw, I believe, 523 01:02:12,110 --> 01:02:19,160 before anybody else the the dangers of a terrible arms race that he thought might follow the war. 524 01:02:20,440 --> 01:02:30,970 Anyway, that I would simply conclude by saying that I started off this project, uh, 525 01:02:31,960 --> 01:02:35,530 knowing relatively little about Churchill and science, and I would have to say that I. 526 01:02:36,070 --> 01:02:41,560 I've come actually to admire him more for his catholicity of interest. 527 01:02:41,950 --> 01:02:46,720 I mean, the amount of interest he took in nuclear science as a young person. 528 01:02:46,900 --> 01:02:52,930 But in the nuclear field, I think he proved, although he was a visionary in his relative youth, 529 01:02:53,050 --> 01:02:58,690 but he found it much harder to to realise those visionary qualities when in power. 530 01:02:59,050 --> 01:02:59,740 Thank you very much.