Realism and idealism competed at this time in British nuclear planning. As scholar Susanna Schrafstetter put it, ‘Britain was assembling a military nuclear programme while, at the same time, politicians were drafting lofty schemes to avoid nuclear war’. They wanted to head off a nuclear arms race and even considered sharing nuclear secrets with the USSR. But the reality of postwar geopolitics, and a desire to halt the country’s international decline into irrelevance, focused minds instead on the challenging problem of how to simultaneously join the race and decry it.
The official decision to create a British bomb was taken in January 1947. An earlier passionate discussion within the tight circle of GEN.75 on 25 October 1946 that had essentially, though informally, set it on this fateful path could have gone either way. Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin arrived late to find fellow committee members about to decide against a British bomb and tipped the discussion in the opposite direction. By the end of the meeting, fired up by Bevin’s rhetoric, they were all agreed. Britain would build its own bomb. In a foretaste of decisions about testing the bomb in Australia, the six GEN.75 ministers did not take the matter to Cabinet for discussion. Clement Attlee, the postwar prime minister, set up the short-lived GEN.163 committee on 8 January 1947 with the specific, though secret, task of building a British A-bomb. At a planning meeting held in June 1947 in the library at the Woolwich Arsenal, the practical matters associated with building Blue Danube, the first operational British nuclear bomb, began.
A grim atomic era calculus led the UK to determine that containing the USSR would require 1000 British nuclear weapons, a huge undertaking. The more enthusiastic among the backers of the British bomb believed it was possible. But building the British bomb was not a fast process. The committee drew on the expertise developed through the Maud Committee and Tube Alloys, and on the knowledge brought back to the country from the Manhattan Project. Ernest Bevin was particularly adamant that the snub by the Americans would not leave Britain out in the cold
While Alan Nunn May’s arrest and imprisonment had significant consequences, they did not end the nuclear spy scandal. In 1950, another – much more important – physicist, Klaus Fuchs, faced the same fate. Fuchs, also a communist, was a brilliant scientist who was central to the Manhattan Project and a close colleague of Penney. He was arrested and served nine years in jail (Penney visited him there). In his confession he said that he had committed espionage ‘in the name of historical determinism’. Fuchs had been attracted to communist ideology in his home country, Germany, during the early days of the Nazi regime. He escaped to the UK in 1933 and studied at various British universities during the 1930s. For a brief time in 1940, he was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man, and was moved to Canada before returning to Britain after the physicist Max Born petitioned for his release. He resumed his physics research, and his gifts as a physicist were quickly appreciated through his work, from May 1941, at the University of Birmingham. He supplied information to the Soviet Union from the time he joined Birmingham and worked under Rudolf Peierls, co-author of the Frisch–Peierls Memorandum. He went to the US in 1943 with the British mission, after the Maud Report had shown the way to a nuclear bomb. Around the same time he became a naturalised British citizen.
Fuchs worked initially in New York and later at Los Alamos as a theoretical physicist. He handed over a large amount of information to the Soviets about the forthcoming Trinity test. This essentially meant the bombs dropped on Japan were no surprise to Moscow. At the end of the war, Fuchs returned to Britain and was centrally involved in both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons development. He operated separately to Alan Nunn May and was not part of the same espionage ring, although they did share the same Soviet contact at one time.
When Nunn May was arrested, Fuchs was concerned enough to avoid using the London-based contact who was involved with Nunn May. He continued his espionage, though, passing secrets to a new contact during meetings at the Nagshead pub in London. Only then did he take payment. He accepted about £100 to help defray the costs involved in the extra security precautions he required in the light of the Nunn May exposure. He also believed that accepting some money would assure his new contact of this loyalty.
The first Soviet atomic weapon tested, in 1949, was similar in concept to the Fat Man weapon dropped on Nagasaki. It was made possible in large part by the hundreds of documents Fuchs had passed to his Soviet handlers. In recent years, more evidence has come to light that Fuchs also passed information about the much more powerful fusion weapons that followed. Many of those documents originated from William Penney, although there is no suggestion that Penney knew about Fuchs’ espionage activities. Fuchs was probably the most damaging of all the nuclear spies. Unlike Nunn May, Fuchs was part of an elite group within the Manhattan Project centrally involved in the bomb project. He also spied for longer and passed crucial information about fusion weapons.
The American spy Theodore (Ted) Hall was a scientific prodigy who graduated from Harvard at 18 and was only 19 when he joined the Manhattan Project. He also supplied technical information to the Soviets about the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. According to Hall’s 1999 obituary, ‘Of all the scientists, diplomats and others who passed atomic secrets to Moscow – Fuchs, Maclean, Nunn May… and the rest – it is likely that only Fuchs was more valuable [than Hall] to the Soviet bomb programme’. Like Nunn May and Fuchs, Hall did not like scientific secrecy. He believed that the world would be a better place if nuclear knowledge was shared. His contribution was more significant than that of the Cambridge spies.
The Cambridge set are the best known spies, but in a sense the least damaging. They were not scientists and so were unable to share physics like Nunn May, Fuchs and Hall. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt passed a variety of non-technical nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, as well as political and tactical information that kept the USSR informed about the strength of the US atomic arsenal. In his 1980s book Spycatcher, Peter Wright, a former agent of the British spy service MI5, alleged that Roger Hollis, who headed MI5 between 1956 and 1965, was a ‘fifth man’ Soviet agent. (Hollis visited Australia in the late 1940s to investigate the allegations of espionage that became the impetus for creating ASIO.) British journalist Chapman Pincher had earlier made the same allegations. The first Cambridge spy was uncovered just after Fuchs, in 1951, although it took many years for them all to be outed. To this day, doubt remains about whether or not Hollis was a spy too.
As the spies were uncovered, the US retreated behind the McMahon Act. But in the UK, work on the bomb proceeded. The GEN.163 committee set up a new organisation called Basic High Explosive Research and appointed the Manhattan veteran Penney to head it. Penney had recently had a stint at Bikini Atoll, working with the Americans on their postwar bomb (as had Klaus Fuchs), just before the McMahon Act became law. His name is synonymous with the British nuclear tests in Australia, and his role will be examined in more detail later. He was the best and most logical person to take the British nuclear weapons development campaign forwards. GEN.163 clearly set his pathway to Maralinga.