• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1261 0

after the war. Second, it reassured Churchill, stating: ‘Full collaboration between the United States and the British Government in developing tube alloys [the British codename for the a-bomb] for military and commercial purposes should continue after the defeat of Japan unless and until terminated by joint agreement.’ Third, the note, with seeming casualness, suggested that ‘when a bomb [not “tube alloys”] is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.’ ‘Well done indeed,’ a Churchill adviser in London cabled his boss, when word of the Hyde Park Agreement was received. There was no similar reaction from Roosevelt’s advisers because the President neglected to inform anyone else about the agreement. (Two months after Roosevelt’s death, a British member of the tripartite nuclear Combined Policy Committee, created at Quebec and including the Canadians, ‘reminded’ the Americans about it. The Americans had not heard of the agreement and asked the British for a copy. Some years later, Roosevelt’s copy turned up in a file folder kept by the President’s naval aide, evidently because the title, ‘Tube Alloys’, sounded like something to do with torpedoes.)

American casualness or inconsistency concerning postwar collaboration rightly told the British that the issue would not be easily managed after Roosevelt’s death. Like his predecessor, Harry Truman dangled before the British the prospect of nuclear cooperation, in November 1945. He acknowledged the substantial British contribution to the Manhattan Project, in its earliest days and especially at Los Alamos. But in early 1945 Marcus Oliphant, again visiting Berkeley, concluded that British entreaties concerning collaboration gave ‘only the impression that we are trying to muscle in on a racket we have been too dumb to develop ourselves’. Oliphant recommended that Britain start work on its own racket when the war was over. ‘I am quite sure help from the US is not necessary to enable us to carry out this project in England,’ said Sir James Chadwick. ‘We can stand on our own feet.’ The experience in America and with the Canadians and French at a parallel nuclear project in Montreal during the war—on which more later—had already helped. British engineers understood gaseous diffusion and had worked with irradiated fuel rods from Oak Ridge. William Penney, who was to lead the British nuclear project, rode in the B-29 that served as the observer plane for the Nagasaki mission and gathered from that torn city samples of bent poles and crushed fuel cans just ten days after the bombing. Like other nations, Britain learned from the Smyth Report. And the British had uranium, or access to it, from Canada and Africa, by way of the Belgians and the Portuguese.

US policy was moving, by early 1946, toward greater restriction on the sharing of nuclear knowledge. Truman became fixated on the felt need for greater security, interpreted earlier agreements on collaboration with the British very narrowly, and moved away from the Acheson-Lilienthal plan for international oversight to the Baruch version that sought protection for the American monopoly. The McMahon Bill, which passed the Senate on 1 June and the House on 20 July and was signed by Truman on 1 August, would, as Gregg Herken has written, ‘so restrict the interpretation of scientific interchange as to make it meaningless, and would outlaw sharing US technology on atomic energy’s “industrial uses” with foreign nations by 1947’. Anyone helping another nation gain nuclear information would thereafter be subject to a large fine, up to twenty years in prison, or both. During debate on the Bill, lawmakers revealed ignorance of previous agreements on American-British-Canadian cooperation and showed no inclination to want to know more. Such behavior indicated to British observers, and everyone else, that the United States was no longer interested in participating in a republic of nuclear science and engineering.

In the