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Articles
The Atomic Bomb and the Special Relationship: Part 1
- By WARREN F KIMBALL
- | February 1, 2022
- Category: Churchill and America Churchill in the Nuclear Age Explore
“Maud” and the bomb
In 1941, amidst the gloom of uncertainty on the Russian front, the North Africa stalemate, and the deteriorating Pacific situation, there was no reason to imagine that what seemed a small footnote in the 1941 Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence would develop into potential for geopolitical leverage beyond their wildest dreams. The subject under study was the atomic bomb.
It began with a “Most Secret” paper by two German scientists who had fled to England to escape Hitler. The paper was labeled MAUD, after a nurse who had cared for atomic scientist Niels Bohr’s family. It was quickly studied by British government scientists. The MAUD report concluded that a nuclear fission device made from uranium was practical. It would likely lead to “decisive results in the war,” and could be built by the end of 1943.
The British passed MAUD to Roosevelt, whose science advisors were galvanized by it. The President was already awakened to the possibility that the Germans were also working on nuclear weapons. On 11 October 1941, writing “Dear Winston,” he proposed they “correspond or converse” on the “study by your MAUD committee.” In December 1941, before Pearl Harbor, Churchill agreed.1
Time, strategic bombing, and sabotage ultimately kept the Germans from developing such a weapon before their defeat. Anglo-American scientific success came too late for the bomb to be used against Germany. But two were dropped on Japan, which Churchill and Truman thought hastened peace. Before the weapon could make its dark appearance over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, a war had to be fought.2
“Tube Alloys”
With the United States finally in the war, Churchill came for his third meeting with Roosevelt and their second in America, in June 1942. Those talks, appropriately codenamed ARGONAUT since Churchill chose to cross the Atlantic by flying-boat (seaplane)—quicker than by warship but still a dangerous twenty-six hour trip—began on 19 June at the President’s country home in Hyde Park, New York, overlooking the Hudson River. Roosevelt’s cousin, Daisy Suckley, described tea for FDR, Churchill, and others at Top Cottage:
At 4, we drove over to the cottage. George [staff] soon came with supplies for tea. He brought out a card table & put iced tea, sandwiches & some cookies on it. On another table he had scotch & soda. Conversation was a little slow. Everyone sits around waiting for the P. & Mr. C. to speak—it must be quite a strain on them both. The P. said I could take some pictures. The P.M. turned right around in his chair & smiled for me! These two men face a horrible problem: of deciding where the United Nations should attack but the different heads of the army and navies disagree about it.3
Tea talk aside, they focused on Anglo-American cooperation over TUBE ALLOYS, as the atomic bomb project was now known. Churchill expressed concern about significant German progress on atomic research while British research was disrupted by German bombings. The Americans began their Manhattan Project two months later. The two leaders concurred on unrestricted sharing of information, but that agreement was not reduced to writing. As the British ruefully learned, it allowed the Americans in charge of the project to be, or pretend to be, ignorant of the sharing policy.4
Opposite ends
Neither Churchill’s nor Roosevelt’s strategic or political equations included what happened at the University of Chicago six months later. On 2 December 1942, scientists induced a chain reaction. The atomic bomb had been proven possible—but not Anglo-American sharing. From the outset, British officials complained to Churchill that the Americans were keeping them in the dark. Churchill raised the matter at the January 1943 Casablanca Conference and shortly thereafter in messages to FDR’s confidant Harry Hopkins:
Do you remember our conversation about that very secret matter we called “tube alloys” which you told me would be put right as soon as the president got home? I should be grateful for some news about this, as at present the American War Department is asking us to keep them informed of our experiments while refusing altogether any information about theirs.5
Roosevelt and Churchill met in Washington in May 1943. Now Churchill was armed with studies on the feasibility of an independent British atomic bomb project. He reprised his protests over American failure to share atomic information. Roosevelt’s advisors opposed revealing atomic secrets to the British, despite early promises and the initial benefits.
Hopkins told British Ambassador Lord Halifax that many U.S. officials would return to private business after the war. Thus they were eager to control commercial uses of atomic energy. Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research & Development (OSRD), informed Hopkins of his “adopted policy.” This was to provide information to all “who need it and can use it now in the furtherance of the war effort”—but not to those “who wish it either because of general interest or because of its application to non-war or postwar matters.” That, he said, would “decrease security without advancing the war effort.”6
Roosevelt agrees—perhaps
In July, after nothing had changed, Churchill renewed his complaints to the President.7 Confronted directly, Roosevelt agreed, with obvious reluctance, to live up to earlier promises. Yet, by the time of their next meeting, at the first Quebec Conference in August, that commitment was unfulfilled. On 12-14 August 1943, before Quebec, the two got together at Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate. Once again, Daisy Suckley described the scene:
Mr. C. ate 1 & 1/2 [hot dogs] and had a special little ice pail for his Scotch. He is a strange looking man. Fat & round, his clothes bunched up on him. Practically no hair on his head, he wore a huge 10-gallon hat….[At the swimming pool,] Mrs. R came & made a dive and a splash or two. The P.M. decided to go in, too. In a pair of shorts, he looked exactly like a kewpie. He made a good dive in, soon came out, wrapped a large wool blanket around himself & sat down to talk to FDR.8
Amidst the hot dogs and swimming, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed, for the third time, that the United States would share its atomic research with Great Britain—and no one else. That agreement, confirmed at Quebec, required “mutual consent” to use an atomic bomb or to pass on “any information about tube alloys to third parties.” Britain and the United States would have “full and effective collaboration.”
Whether or not Stalin knew of the agreement is uncertain. The U.S. Congress did not learn of it until 1947. Roosevelt did not know that Stalin had actually found out about the British MAUD project in September 1941. But no later than September 1943, the President knew that Soviet espionage had penetrated the Manhattan Project.9
“Much fog on all sides”
In the words of British historian-diplomat Robin Edmond, “there was much fog on all sides.” But the essence of the transatlantic difference was this: The Americans perceived the British as seeking to cash in cheaply on an immense American enterprise. The British perceived the Americans as seeking to establish military and industrial monopoly in the atomic field.
But the atomic bomb was more than economics. Churchill’s science advisor, Lord Cherwell, had told the Americans that Britain viewed the bomb primarily as a means of restraining the Soviet Union after the war. Vannevar Bush told Roosevelt of Cherwell’s remarks. Bush interpreted FDR’s anodyne comments and nods to mean Roosevelt was “amazed,” and found Cherwell’s attitude “astounding.”10 Perhaps. But as Eleanor Roosevelt always warned, FDR often left visitors thinking he agreed with them—and that was frequently a mistake.
“We cannot get better terms”
The 1943 Hyde Park/Quebec agreement ended the quarreling over Anglo-American collaboration for the remainder of the war. (It included the Canadians in a pro forma way, since they had uranium.) But some Americans continued to drag their feet and, moreover, other issues cropped up. Perhaps most revealing of all is Churchill’s minute to Lord Cherwell of 27 May 1944 about the Hyde Park agreement:
I am absolutely sure we cannot get any better terms by ourselves than are set forth in my secret agreement with the President. It may be that in after years this may be judged to have been too confiding on our part. Only those who know the circumstances and moods prevailing beneath the presidential level will be able to understand why I have made this agreement. There is nothing more to do now but to carry on with it, and give the utmost possible aid. Our association with the United States must be permanent, and I have no fear that they will maltreat us or cheat us.11
Again on 18-19 September 1944, before meeting at the second Quebec Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt spent two days at Hyde Park. In that comfortable, casual surrounding, the two again agreed to maintain the Anglo-American monopoly over TUBE ALLOYS. The meeting followed an appeal from Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist and atomic scientist, who had pleaded with them to disclose the atomic secret to the world, lest it poison postwar relationships.
Bohr’s proposal fell afoul of now discredited suspicions that he had leaked information to the Soviet Union.12 Advisors in both the British and American governments (Henry Stimson and Lord Cherwell for example) found merit in some sort of internationalization of the bomb. But FDR and Churchill were having none of it.
Concluded in Part 2.
Endnotes
1 Robin Edmonds, The Big Three (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 396. Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 1939-1945, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). FDR to WSC, 11 October 1941, I R-62x, and WSC to FDR, December 1941, I: C-136x.
2 In 1939 Albert Einstein, now an American citizen, and European scientists wrote to suggest that atomic bombs were feasible. They warned that Nazi Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from German-controlled Czech mines. FDR took it under advisement, but little came of it. In the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Japan, Einstein called that advice a mistake, noting that “there was some justification” that the Germans would make them. See Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Knopf, 1975), 27. Whether or not the atom bombs dropped on Japan shortened that war, and the motives for dropping them are, of course, the subjects of ongoing, endless debates. For extensive references, see Robert Beisner, ed., American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC Clio, 2003), I: 1068-78. More recently, see the discussion of alternatives to using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Alex Wellerstein, “What Options Were There For The United States Regarding the Atomic Bomb in 1945?” in Aeon Ideas, 31 July 2015).
3 Daisy Suckley, entry for 21 June 1942, in Geoffrey Ward, ed., Closest Companion (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 163.
4 Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War (New York: Morrow, 1997), 146-47; Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 377.
5 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC) to Harry Hopkins, 16 and 27 February 1943, Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, A-Bomb Folder (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York).
6 Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (revised edition, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), 704.
7 Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt, WSC to FDR, 9 July 1943, II: C-354.
8 Suckley, entry for 14 August 1943, in Closest Companion, 228-30.
9 Kimball, Forged in War, 220-21.
10 Edmonds, Big Three, 399-400; U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS] (Washington: USGPO, 1862 – ), Quebec, 1943, 631-32.
11 Edmonds, The Big Three, 401.
12 Hans A. Bethe, “Atomic Slurs” in the Washington Post, 27 May 2015.
The author
Professor Kimball is editor of the three-volume Roosevelt-Churchill Correspondence and is the author of several works on the FDR-WSC relationship. The first draft of this paper was presentation at a symposium, “The Legacy of Two Statesmen,” at the Roosevelt Institute, Hyde Park, New York in June 2007.