But Brogan also saw socialism as a force for disorder and disintegration, a kind of poison threatening to corrupt the whole body politic, and the Labour Party as ‘a feeble and querulous thing, equally unfit to govern because of the intemperance of its mind and the childish unreality of its view of life’. They were sentiments which many of us felt, but which it generally seemed imprudent to express with quite such vigour.
The tension between these two possible approaches to resisting collectivism — gradualist and radical — would be played out throughout my time in active Conservative politics. But the specific issues which meant most to me in these early post-war years concerned foreign rather than domestic affairs.
I was in Blackpool visiting my sister (who had gone there from the Birmingham Orthopaedic Hospital) when I learned from the radio news on that fateful 6 August 1945 that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. It had been known for some time that we were on the eve of a breakthrough in the technology of weapons of mass destruction. My own academic study and the fascination exerted on me by issues relating to the practical application of science probably meant that I was better informed than most about the developments lying behind the manufacture of the atomic bomb. The following year I was able to read (and largely understand) the very full account contained in Atomic Energy for Military Purposes published by the United States. Yet — cliché as it may be — I was immediately aware on hearing the preliminary reports of Hiroshima that with the advent of the A-bomb ‘somehow the world had changed’. Or as Churchill himself would put it in his majestic memoirs The Second World War: ‘Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.’
The full scientific, strategic and political implications of the nuclear weapon would take some years to assess; moreover, like the science involved, they would continue to change and develop. But the direct human and environmental consequences of the use of atomic weapons were more quickly grasped. In the winter of 1946 I read the American journalist John Hersey’s report on Hiroshima, first submitted to the New Yorker and subsequently published as a Penguin Special. Oddly enough, even more affecting than the accounts of the hideous injuries, the fire, the fall-out and the radiation sickness was the bitter-sweet image of weeds and wild flowers sprouting through the ashes — their growth unnaturally stimulated by radiation from the bomb.
Yet neither on that first evening reflecting on the matter in the train home from Blackpool, nor later when I read accounts and saw the pictures of the overwhelming devastation, did I have any doubt about the rightness of the decision to use the bomb. I considered it justified primarily because it would avoid the losses inevitable if Allied forces were to take by assault the main islands of Japan. The Japanese still had 2½ million men under arms. We had already seen the fanatical resistance which they had put up during the Battle of Okinawa. Only the scale of the Allies’ technological military superiority, demonstrated first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki, could persuade the Japanese leadership that resistance was hopeless. And so one week after Hiroshima, and after a second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered.
Britain had, of course, been closely involved in the development of the bomb, though because of the breakdown of Anglo-American nuclear co-operation after the war it was not till 1952 that we ourselves were able to explode one. Churchill and Truman, as we now know, were duped by Stalin at Potsdam when the American President ‘broke the news’ of the bomb to the Soviet leader, who knew about it already and promptly returned to Moscow to urge his own scientists to speed up their atomic programme. But the fact remains, as I used to remind the Soviets when I became Prime Minister, that the most persuasive proof of the essential benevolence of the United States was that in those few crucial years when it alone possessed the military means to enforce its will upon the world, it refrained from doing so.
If the atomic bomb raised one set of questions about Britain’s role in the post-war world, the situation in India raised another. The subject retained its fascination for me. I knew that Churchill, for whom my admiration by now knew no bounds, had fought ferociously against the moves to appease nationalist opinion in India, which had been implemented in the Government of India Act of 1935. The situation in India had deteriorated sharply in the war years and it seemed highly unlikely that even the earlier prospect of Dominion status would seriously lessen the pressure for independence. This was, moreover, against the background, which we did not yet all fully understand, of a much less significant world role for Britain after the war. The two material circumstances which had allowed us to fight Hitler all but alone — the existence of huge accumulated overseas investments and the most successful and extensive empire the world had seen — had been lost or greatly diminished as the price of victory in that great struggle.
For all that, people of my age — even those committed to the links with Empire developing into a Commonwealth — took a more positive view of what was happening in India than did many of our elders. I myself read at about this time two books which emphasized the role of Britain, not just as guarantor of sound administration and humane justice in our Imperial territories, but rather as a kind of midwife for their birth, growth and maturity as responsible members of the international community. Leo Amery’s Thoughts on the Constitution (lectures delivered at Oxford) emphasized the crucial need to ensure Imperial ‘unity of thought and purpose’ through free co-operation: such thinking also, for a time at least, attracted me towards ideas of Imperial Preference as a means of sustaining our community of interest. I also read Lord Elton’s Imperial Commonwealth which saw our evolving Empire as an example of unity and co-operation:
To have spread organized political freedom across the world; three times to have saved Europe, and twice the world as well, from a tyrant; to have ended slavery, and taught other nations to end it too; to have been so reluctant to acquire territory, and so often to have acquired it in the interests of others; to have learned wisdom from adversity and to have held a giant’s power without using it like a giant… all this has richly earned the Empire survival hitherto, and has given it abundant titles to the gratitude of mankind… And it may well be that the island from which the world learned the art of freedom will yet teach it the art of unity. It may well be that her present sufferings have finally fitted Britain for that role.
In retrospect, much of this was self-deception. We could not both give independence to the colonies and continue to determine their future afterwards. At that time, however, such ideas seemed to promise a continued world role for Britain, without either the burden or the guilt of empire.
Between the spring 1946 mission of Stafford Cripps to India to seek agreement among Indians on the future of their country and the summer of 1947, when the Government finally endorsed a settlement based on partition, I followed events closely. I felt that there was much to criticize in the means, but that the ends of our policy were right and in the direction of progress for Britain, India and the wider Commonwealth. But the Labour Government and Mountbatten as Viceroy undoubtedly tried to move too fast. In a tragic sense the civil war which now broke out, in which a million people died, showed the degree to which British rule had been the guarantee of Indian unity and peace.