Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson

Author:Paul Johnson [Johnson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, World, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780062010049
Google: EIOcU6JkC08C
Amazon: B003JBI3AG
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

The Bandung Generation

The same historical process which created the superpowers placed traditional powers in a dilemma. What was their role? The defeated nations, France, Germany and Japan, were driven by necessity to a fundamental reappraisal. But Britain had not been defeated. She had stood alone and emerged victorious. Could she not carry on as before? Churchill had fought desperately for British interests. He rejected utterly Roosevelt’s notion of America and Russia as the two ‘idealist’ powers and Britain as the greedy old imperialist. He knew of the bottomless cynicism reflected in Ambassador Maisky’s remark that he always added up Allied and Nazi losses in the same column.1 He pointed out to the British Ambassador in Moscow that Russia had ‘never been actuated by anything but cold-blooded self-interest and total disdain for our lives and fortunes’.2 He was sombrely aware that Russia was anxious to tear the British Empire to pieces and feast on its members, and that America too, aided by the Dominions and especially Australia and New Zealand, favoured ‘decolonization’. H.V.Evatt, Australia’s cantankerous Foreign Minister, got such notions written into the UN charter.3 Churchill snarled at Yalta: ‘While there is life in my body no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted.’4

Six months later Churchill had been thrown out by the electorate. His Labour successors planned to disarm, decolonize, make friends with Russia and build a welfare state. In practice they found themselves at the mercy of events. In August 1945 Lord Keynes presented them with a paper showing the country was bankrupt. Without American help, ‘the economic basis for the hopes of the country is non-existent’.4 Ernest Bevin, the trades union leader turned Foreign Secretary, began with the slogan ‘Left can talk to Left’ and hoped to share atomic secrets with Russia. But he was soon telling his colleague Hugh Dalton: ‘Molotov was just like a Communist in a local Labour Party. If you treat him badly, he makes the most of the grievances, and if you treat him well he only puts his price up and abuses you the next day.’6 Gradually Bevin came to embody Britain’s determination to organize collective security. He told Molotov in 1949, ‘Do you want to get Austria behind your Iron Curtain? You can’t do that. Do you want Turkey and the Straits? You can’t have them. Do you want Korea? You can’t have that. You are putting your neck out and one day you will have it chopped off.’7

Bevin’s foreign policy meant Britain had to stay in the strategic arms race. Exactly a year after Keynes delivered his bankruptcy report, the Chief of Air Staff indented with the government for nuclear bombs. Specifications for the first British atom bomber were laid down 1 January 1947.8 Britain’s leading nuclear scientist, P.S.M.Blackett, opposed a British bomb, but then he thought that Britain could and should adopt a posture of neutrality vis-à-vis America and Soviet Russia.9 The chief scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard, was also against an independent nuclear force: ‘We are not a great power and never will be again.

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