Atomic Thunder

by Elizabeth Tynan

  The catalyst for this sudden and brutal excision of British science from the US atomic weapons program went by the name of the atomic spy Alan Nunn May. His name is inextricably linked with the events that later unfolded in Australia because in a sense he caused them to happen. British physics contributed most of the important atomic spies, although the US had its own too, including the prodigy Ted Hall, and the husband and wife Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were both executed for espionage. Nunn May was the first atomic spy to be revealed. His exposure further hurt an already fractious UK–US partnership on weapons development and set it back many years.

  Alan Nunn May was a physicist, one of the young intellectuals at Cambridge in the 1930s tempted then seduced by the communists. He was briefly a contemporary of Donald Maclean, one of the renowned Cambridge spies and part of the Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt circle, possibly Britain’s most famous and romanticised spies. Nunn May graduated from Cambridge with an honours degree in physics then went to King’s College in London to study for his doctorate and teach. While lecturing at King’s, he joined a Communist Party group.

  The balding, moustachioed and rather nondescript-looking Nunn May was not a particularly rabid or passionate party member. In fact, he had allowed his party membership to lapse by the time World War II began, when he was working on a secret British project to develop radar (incidentally, one of the other great technological feats achieved in the heat of war). In 1942, soon after the possibilities of splitting the uranium atom became known, Nunn May joined a team of Cambridge scientists who, as part of the Manhattan Project, were examining the technicalities of building an atomic reactor.

  At that stage, Canada was becoming an important partner in the secret project to build an atom bomb. Canada mined some of the uranium ore (the rest came mostly from the Congo) and also extracted the uranium-235 and manufactured the plutonium needed to build the bombs. A vast technological effort was required to deliver the materials required. A fateful decision was made to transfer Nunn May to Montreal, where a Soviet spy ring was becoming active. The British physicist, already sympathetic to the communist cause, was recruited there by Soviet military intelligence.

  As the Manhattan Project approached its final goal of a workable bomb, aspects of the massive scientific and technological push were being wound back. In July 1945, just weeks before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Nunn May told his Soviet handler that he was about to go home. Moscow wanted to maximise its return on an asset. What could Nunn May give them that would make a lasting contribution? On 9 July 1945, the British physicist passed small amounts of enriched uranium (that is, uranium with a high proportion of the isotope uranium-235) to his handler. He later provided technical details of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In return, he received US$200 and a bottle of whiskey. He was never in it for the money, as he made clear at the end of his long life (he died in 2003 aged 91). He was a physicist who believed that knowledge should be shared, and that the secrecy around atomic weapons development was anathema to science.

  Shortly after the war ended, Igor Gouzenko, a lieutenant in the Soviet military intelligence agency and cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, defected with documents that contained extensive details about Soviet agents, including Dr Nunn May. By then, Nunn May had returned to Britain, where he was arrested and put on trial. The day before his 35th birthday, in May 1946, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was released in 1952, after serving just over six years. When Nunn May died in 2003, the New York Times quoted him as saying in old age, ‘The whole affair was extremely painful to me, and I only embarked on it because I felt this was a contribution I could make to the safety of mankind. I certainly did not do it for gain’. The idea of the greater good was a common thread through much atomic espionage.

  The arrest of Alan Nunn May confirmed American suspicions that the British were not to be trusted in the secret development of nuclear weapons. This, no doubt, was only worsened by the revelations that Nunn May had been investigated and cleared by MI5, the British security service. The Americans were, and remain, skittish regarding security issues. They didn’t need much encouragement to form the view that other nations were lax in their security. They felt the same way about the Australians.

  At the end of World War II, Britain was severely depleted in every way: emotionally, physically, militarily, socially and economically. The country had used all its resources fighting a desperate campaign against Nazi Germany. Rationing stayed in place well into the 1950s. Britain was broke. Yet she chose to go down the atomic weaponry path, to create a hugely expensive nuclear arsenal. Despite the Hyde Park Agreement, the McMahon Act forced Britain to do this without the valuable assistance of the US. Inevitably, this decision to become a nuclear power diverted economic resources away from postwar reconstruction and from a civilian population desperate for relief from the austerity of the war years. This was a significant choice.

  The decision to become nuclear armed was not welcomed by all in the UK. One of the major critics was the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence Sir Henry Tizard, who famously said in 1949, after planning for the British bomb had begun:

  We persist in regarding ourselves as a Great Power, capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation. Let us take warning from the fate of the Great Powers of the past and not burst ourselves with pride.

  Tizard, a chemistry researcher by training, had been involved with the Tube Alloys Directorate and was well versed in what was required to develop nuclear weaponry. Indeed, Tizard was among those who set up the Maud Committee. His view was not ill informed; he well understood what nuclear weaponry would cost the nation.

  Nevertheless, Britain made a massive commitment at a time of great austerity. The secret decisions to build a nuclear arsenal were accompanied by related decisions to pursue nuclear energy; the two were intertwined. The country set up three new installations for the task: the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Har-well, near Oxford, which housed laboratories for research into both military and civilian uses of nuclear energy; the Windscale facility (later renamed Sellafield) in Cumbria, to manufacture the required radioactive material, including plutonium; and a research and development organisation that came to be called the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, to build the bombs and oversee weapons testing.

  The eminent physicist John (later Sir John) Cockcroft headed the research establishment at Harwell. Cockcroft was already well known in the world of science. In 1932 with Ernest Watson he had split an atom by artificial means for the first time, an achievement marked by a Nobel Prize in 1951. The pair split the nuclei of lithium atoms using a beam of protons, demonstrating that nuclear fission was possible. During 1940 and 1941 Cockcroft had been a member of the Maud Committee that had proved the feasibility of an atomic bomb, and at the end of 1943 he had taken over as director of the Anglo–Canadian–French atomic team at Montreal. The translation of scientific research into practical engineering projects was a feature of Cockcroft’s period as director of the Canadian project. Ernest Titterton went to work with Cockroft at Harwell after the war, as part of a physics research group, where he carried out fundamental studies of nuclear fission reactions. Titterton also acted as a consultant to the AWRE and established important contacts there. During this time Titterton published 28 papers. Then he packed his bags and headed to Australia in the early 1950s to begin an even more prominent phase of his career.

  The task of overseeing the creation of postwar plutonium fell to the brilliant engineer Christopher Hinton, who was responsible for the design, construction and operation of plants to produce fissile material. He created the plutonium at Windscale for the British bombs. William Penney was appointed to head up the atomic weaponry research and development effort. Before his work on the Manhattan P
roject, Penney was a veteran of the Tube Alloys Directorate. According to Margaret Gowing, ‘In 1946, as Cockcroft, Penney and Hinton took up their posts, it seemed that the special qualities and past experience of all three had combined to produce a very rare situation: the right men all arriving in the right jobs at the right moment’.

  As Britain saw the pivot of world power shift towards the US, where the doomsday weapon had been made real, its leaders had a decision to make. Would Britain cede technological supremacy to the US (and, all too soon, the USSR), or would it match the rising superpowers bomb for bomb? The answer was not long in coming, although the public did not know it for some time. The British Government made its first step on the path to its own ‘nuclear deterrent’ in August 1945, shortly after the full extent of the unleashed atom was felt around the world. On 29 August, a circle of six UK government ministers who met in secret and called themselves GEN.75 started to consider a nuclear future (this was standard nomenclature for Cabinet committees, which were prefaced either GEN or MISC). Among other things, GEN.75 led directly to the formation of the Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy. The committee was the successor of the wartime Tube Alloys Consultative Council, a group of ministers and scientists who had advised the government on issues relating to the work being done by the Tube Alloys Directorate. Tube Alloys lived on under a new name.

  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 Hig
h 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.

  Penney continued to work with his old Manhattan confreres, including Titterton and (fatefully) Fuchs. The project name was soon changed to High Explosive Research (HER), continuing the British tradition of choosing banal names to deter interest. The quest to build a British A-bomb was first announced to the public on 12 May 1948. HER researchers initially worked at various laboratories and test facilities in Kent, Essex and Suffolk, until they moved to a former airfield in Berkshire called Aldermaston. The atomic weapons development and testing activities in Australia were managed from Alder-maston. Some work was also carried out at Fort Halstead and at the Woolwich Arsenal, where Penney was based in those early days. HER was renamed the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) in 1950.