Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War by Kevin Ruane

Author:Kevin Ruane [Ruane, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472532169
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2016-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

What would be our position … if Europe were overrun, as it would be but for the immense American ascendancy in the atomic bomb, and the deterrent effect, not necessarily upon the Russians but upon the Communist Kremlin regime, of this tremendous weapon? … It is said that we are getting stronger, but to get stronger does not necessarily mean that we are getting safer. It is only when we are strong enough that safety is achieved.97

The prospect of a Churchill return to Number 10 was brought closer when the Prime Minister – whom Churchill had been lampooning for months as a ‘lion-hearted limpet’ – called an autumn election.98 Approaching 77 years of age, this was clearly Churchill’s last chance to wield political power and exert direct influence on the course of international affairs. Polling day was set for 25 October. It would be the fourteenth national campaign of his career and his seventeenth parliamentary joust in all. If 1900 was the “Khaki” election, and 1918 the “coupon” election, 1951 is remembered today as the “warmonger” election. Soviet propaganda had been routinely condemning Churchill as ‘an aggressor, clanking with atomic weapons’ for some time, but this theme was now taken up and amplified by the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror, which portrayed the Tory leader as a reckless opportunist determined to launch an atomic war against the USSR.99 ‘Whose finger do you want on the trigger …?’, the newspaper asked its four million readers early in the campaign, ‘Attlee’s or Churchill’s?’100

The Mirror’s attacks on Churchill, while politically motivated, chimed with what many people felt, or feared, and not just Labour supporters. Even in Conservative circles there was doubt. ‘Winston has wound up [the campaign] with an impassioned defence of himself as a lover of peace’, wrote Leo Amery. ‘I am sure he does in principle, but he has always thoroughly enjoyed a war.’101 Macmillan, while despising the Daily Mirror for its ‘bunk and bawdiness’, later calculated that the war-mongering accusations ‘must have swayed hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of votes’.102 Needless to say, Churchill denied the charge, referring back several times in the campaign to his Edinburgh initiative by way of exculpation.103 In a speech in Plymouth two days before polling, he dismissed the ‘false and ungrateful charge’ of war-mongering and maintained that, on the contrary, the quest for a summit was one of the main reasons he remained in public life. Rearmament, which he supported, was necessary not to fight but to ‘parley’. From negotiations with the Soviet Union he hoped that some kind of settlement, ‘the last prize I seek to win’, would emerge. The maintenance of Empire and Commonwealth, the need to rebuild close Anglo-American relations after several years of alleged neglect under Labour, and the ongoing need to improve Western European defence and develop NATO, were themes which regularly featured in his statements on the stump, but his principal foreign policy goal was ‘a friendly talk’ with Stalin from which might emerge ‘a fruitful and durable peace’.104

The Daily Mirror was unimpressed.

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