This was the ultimate kind of weapon. It could destroy whole cities, kill millions of people at a stroke and end civilisation. It was glumly recognised that the Soviets would not be far behind, and Britain would have to play ‘catch up’ all over again. The order went out from Downing Street that Britain had to build weapons to match the superpowers. Failure to do so would lead to an inevitable loss of prestige and influence in the world.
In a momentous speech in the House of Commons Winston Churchill said the H-bomb placed Britain and mankind in a situation “both measureless and laden with doom.” He went on: “I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind.” Safety, he said, had to be the “sturdy child of terror,” and Britain needed its own hydrogen bomb if it was to survive as a world power. Fine words by Churchill, but he knew he had to back it up with action and despite the risks and scarce resources everything was thrown into the project. To build and test the hydrogen bomb would be the biggest peacetime military operation Britain had ever undertaken. But there was no choice.
A chilling assessment of the likely fate awaiting the UK was contained in a 1955 report produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee whose function it was to bring together the intelligence flowing into the UK from overt and covert sources. Its chairman Sir Patrick Green set out the likely Soviet objectives which were: To knock out as quickly as possible those airfields from which nuclear attacks could be launched; to destroy the organization of government and control; and to render the UK useless as a base for any form of military operations. Sir Patrick warned the Russians would regard the UK as such a threat that, “they will aim to render it unusable for a long period, and will not hesitate to destroy great parts of the UK to achieve this aim.”
Other reports give spine-chilling accounts of what, for example, would happen to a major city after a hydrogen bomb explosion at 20,000 feet: “A megaton delivery on a city such as Birmingham would render ‘ineffective’ 50% of the population within a radius of about 20 miles, including e.g. Coventry, where people would see, hear and smell what happened to Birmingham, and would either take to their cellars or get into their cars and drive to where they think they might be safe.”
The intelligence assessors calculated it would take no more than 10 H-bombs to cause complete breakdown and destruction. And then, of course, there was the added agony of fallout. According to one Cabinet Office minute fallout presented: “New problems of an unprecedented kind… The effects of radioactive contamination create vast and novel problems for the medical services and for agriculture.”
Penney was in full “smiling killer” mode when he was summoned to the Cabinet Office to “put the willies up” an assembled company of treasury ministers and officials who were kicking up a fuss at the enormous costs of thermonuclear warfare. In unvarnished terms he told the bean counters just what would be the effect of a hydrogen bomb on London:-
A bomb dropped on London and bursting on impact would produce a crater a mile across and 150-feet deep and a fireball of two and a quarter miles diameter. The blast from it would crush the Admiralty Citadel (a stone-clad World War 2 signals centre across Horse Guards Parade next to the Mall) at a distance of one mile. Suburban houses would be wrecked at a distance of three miles from the explosion, and they would lose their roofs and be badly blasted at a distance of seven miles. All habitations would catch fire over a circle of three miles radius from the burst.
Faced with this apocalyptic scenario the fiscal objections vanished, although the government agreed that spending on civil defence measures would be a waste of time and money. Only the threat of immediate retaliation would give the Russian Bear pause for thought. The only way to ensure survival was for Britain to build a nuclear deterrent of its own.
Penney’s work load was prodigious. A stockpile of A-bombs for the RAF, based on the Monte Bello device, still had to be compiled as some kind of deterrent, and he had to make them small enough to be delivered by the new V-bomber strike force. But the top priority order Penney was given was: “put a union jack on a hydrogen bomb.”
Australia was again chosen as the site to test the A-bombs that would be the triggers for the massively bigger H-bombs. Penney sent mushroom clouds billowing into the skies over the Outback, exploding 12 atomic devices, as he refined and perfected the techniques necessary for the super-bomb. But this took time, and that was a commodity in short supply in that mad decade. The Soviets, who had successfully exploded a hydrogen bomb just nine months after the Americans, had soon achieved nuclear parity. With both sides rattling their sabers Britain was again in a critically exposed position.
Britain’s military planners were under enormous pressure as they tackled the logistical problems of preparing a remote Pacific atoll called Christmas Island for testing the H-bomb. The task was immense. And all the time America and the Soviet Union were forging ahead with bigger and better designs. With almost limitless resources they were constantly finding newer and more efficient bomb making techniques. The American’s bulky liquid hydrogen device had quickly been replaced by a much smaller bomb which used ‘dry’ lithium deuteride which produced massive explosions with yields equivalent of many millions of tons of TNT. More importantly they were small enough to be delivered by aircraft.
Britain’s beleaguered scientists at Aldermaston had to build and test a hydrogen bomb almost from scratch without the huge technical resources available to the superpowers. William Penney was in despair. He did not know how he was going to do it with what he had at his disposal. Denied access to the new super computers used by the Americans, the scientists had to make their calculations “on the back of fag packets” which sometimes took them weeks, rather than the seconds it would take using the new technology. Their task was likened by the great nuclear historian Lorna Arnold to blind men in a dark room looking for a black cat they knew was there, but unable to grasp.
Nevertheless at the Aldermaston bomb laboratory William Penney built up a small team of weaponeers willing to take on the enormous (and unfashionable) task of developing the weapon. Penney had been to America several times to pick the brains of former colleagues from Los Alamos who were now building the ‘super.’ But the Americans were still wary about giving up their secrets, and Penney was making little progress. With the few crumbs he did manage to get, he called his chief scientists to a meeting at Aldermaston in September 1955.
This occasion became known as the “Tom, Dick and Harry” meeting because Penney’s H-bomb plan was a three part process that could be fired in one container. The first (Tom) would be an atomic (fission bomb) that would boost a further fission component (Dick); added together the pair would force the hydrogen fusion reaction (Harry). Penney made no secret of the enormity of the task facing them; their immediate challenge was to calculate without the help of computers how the incredibly high temperatures of an atomic explosion could be harnessed to bring about the even greater energy release through the fusion of hydrogen atoms. Privately some of his staff believed they were being asked to do the impossible, but they got on with it as best they could.
The atom scientists were now required to work under such demanding deadlines that even illness wasn’t allowed to interfere with their mission. A flu epidemic laid much of the country low, and the Aldermaston scientists were not immune. However, many still found themselves roused from their sick beds by colleagues who wanted an answer to a particular problem. One scientist on coming out of the anaesthetic after an operation found a colleague waiting at the end of his bed with a problem he was unable to solve. Somehow they muddled through.