Churchill's Bomb by Graham Farmelo

Author:Graham Farmelo [Farmelo, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780465069897
Publisher: Basic Books

1 JULY TO 5 AUGUST 1945

Churchill says yes to dropping the Bomb

‘If the Russians had got [the Bomb first], it would have been the end of civilisation . . . [The Bomb] has come just in time to save the world.’

WINSTON CHURCHILL, 23 July 19451

The Potsdam Conference was the first gathering of the Allies’ leaders at which the Bomb was mentioned, if only briefly and in the wings. Churchill was poorly prepared for the imminent arrival of the nuclear age, having taken little interest in his Tube Alloys briefings, or in the development of the Manhattan Project and its consequences.2 As Sir John Anderson had told Niels Bohr in March 1945, the problem with Churchill was that his ‘mind was so far from being of a scientific nature that he had difficulties in viewing the project in its proper perspective’.3 Churchill’s main concern – the opposite of Bohr’s – was to keep the Bomb a secret from the Soviets to maximise the diplomatic advantage over them after the war. He believed that the 1943 Quebec Agreement guaranteed that Britain would share in the Americans’ triumph, though it remained to be seen if Truman would endorse Roosevelt’s view.

Unlike Stalin, neither Truman nor Churchill was looking forward to the Potsdam Conference. Churchill, wearied by political worries at home and pessimism about the future of Central Europe, predicted to his doctor Lord Moran that the gathering would be of no consequence. Truman was in a more positive frame of mind, but was apprehensive about his debut on the international stage and his first trip to Europe for twenty-seven years. He was also anxiously awaiting news of the outcome of the Trinity test.4 Churchill and Truman had not yet met, but they had exchanged cables and talked on the phone, confident that the Soviet leader knew nothing about the Manhattan Project.

Truman had begun his presidency ill-briefed. In the eight months since he had won the Vice-Presidential nomination, Roosevelt had told him almost nothing about military, diplomatic or even administrative matters, apart from a vague mention over lunch in August 1944 of the special new weapon the military was developing.5 The Manhattan Project had been probably Truman’s biggest surprise when officials told him about it soon after the Presidency was thrust upon him.6

Decent and dedicated, Harry Truman kept Roosevelt’s team of advisers and officials almost intact, and strove to continue virtually all of his policies, domestic and foreign, including the use of the nuclear bomb and the fostering of the United Nations. On the train to Norfolk, Virginia, en route to the Potsdam Conference, the journalist Merriman Smith asked him about his enthusiasm for this international forum.7 Truman bashfully reminded Smith that the organisation was not his idea but was an old one. He took out of his wallet a neatly folded piece of paper on which he had written out Tennyson’s prophetic poem ‘Locksley Hall’.8 The President then read the couplets that Churchill had quoted in his 1931 essay ‘Fifty Years Hence’, the same

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