Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War, Kevin Ruane's analysis of Winston Churchill's changing attitudes and strategies regarding nuclear weapons from the time of the “Tube Alloys” project in 1941 to his retirement in 1955, is a most worthy addition to the corpus of literature on the origins and development of the nuclear arms race. Of necessity, Ruane covers much the same ground as Graham Farmelo does in Churchill's Bomb (2013). The two works complement each other; Ruane emphasizes politics and strategy whereas Farmelo offers deeper explorations of the science of and scientists behind nuclear weapons.
Ruane has clearly done extensive research with both primary and secondary sources, and his style is engaging. He divides Churchill's nuclear career into three phases: As a bomb maker in collaboration with Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War (1941–1945), as an “atomic diplomatist” who rattled the American nuclear saber in an attempt to undo Soviet domination in eastern Europe (1945–1949), and, following the Soviets’ acquisition of their own nuclear weapons and his return to the prime ministership in 1951, as a peacemaker. Ruane proceeds largely chronologically: in the first chapter he gives an overview of Churchill's background, his rise through government, his relationship with Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, and developments in nuclear physics up to the outbreak of World War II. The story proper begins with the Tube Alloys project in chapter 2.
As a physicist whose interest in nuclear matters is more to the technical side of things, I find Ruane's discussions of nuclear politics and strategies to be especially informative. In particular, I came to appreciate more fully just how much influence Frederick Lindemann exerted over British nuclear policies; he had much easier access to Churchill than his American counterpart Vannevar Bush ever had to Franklin Roosevelt. Also, I had not previously realized the pivotal role Sir John Anderson played in the British atomic program; Ruane identifies him as its “glue” (30).
While reading this book, one cannot help but be struck by many curious parallels (and twists and turns) between the British and American wartime atomic programs. While Anderson had to push back against efforts by Imperial Chemical Industries to appropriate the British project for commercial gain, in America General Groves had to practically beg the DuPont Corporation to take on the development of plutonium-producing reactors. In August 1941, Lindemann argued to Churchill that Britain should pursue the bomb by itself, which Ruane describes as the cause of Churchill's very tepid response to Roosevelt's offer of a cooperative effort. By the summer of 1942 the situation was reversed, with Churchill overinterpreting Roosevelt's responses to pleas for greater cooperation just as the US Army was coming into the picture. While Churchill aimed to level the playing field with the Quebec and Hyde Park agreements, America was largely following its own atomic path by late 1943. In any event, these agreements, which for Churchill were representative of his “special relationship” with America, were arguably more concerned with closing off any approach to the Russians regarding the bomb project. The agreements never had force of law in either country and effectively died with Roosevelt, who had withheld them from many of his own atomic advisors. British scientists did make significant contributions to the Manhattan Project, particularly at Los Alamos, but the partnership never remotely approached equality.
Churchill apparently did not really appreciate the diplomatic power of the bomb until learning of the Trinity test at the Potsdam Conference, just as he was losing his bid for reelection. However, as Ruane chronicles, Churchill promptly pivoted to an opposition-era “showdown” phase, publicly and privately arguing that Russian dominance in Eastern Europe needed to be rolled back. Following the Soviets’ detonation of their own bomb in 1949 and the subsequent development of hydrogen bombs, Churchill, following his reelection in 1951, came to a thermonuclear epiphany where he regarded Eastern Europe as essentially lost and accepted a détente of “defence through deterrents” (292), a form of mutually assured destruction.
Ruane's analysis of the motivations behind Britain's decisions to develop its own fission and fusion weapons is particularly interesting. While a significant factor was the credibility that being a nuclear power conveyed in the international community, for Churchill an equally important issue was his growing alarm with American isolationism and hawkish policies as the Cold War hardened. Some American officials advocated for a preventative strike on Russia; seeing this along with the American doctrine of massive retaliation and heightening world tensions (the Berlin crisis, Korea, Indo-China), Churchill reasonably feared that the United Kingdom would become ground zero in the event of a hot war between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This led him to believe that Britain would have more influence in Washington if the United Kingdom possessed its own thermonuclear deterrent. The reality of such influence is questionable, but one comes away with the feeling that Washington was then more of a threat to peace than Moscow.
The legacy of the Cold War is still with us, and one wonders what Churchill would make of India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea now being members of the “nuclear club,” not to mention current events in Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria. Sadly, he might have felt just at home in the twenty-first century as in the twentieth.
This book is a superb complement to Farmelo's work and deserves a place on the shelf of any student of the nuclear era.
