Clouds of Deceit

by Joan Smith

  It was not until 23 October that journalists discovered that the bomb had been exploded on board a ship. The Prime Minister’s statement to MPs that day triggered off another round of ecstatic newspaper reports. The Daily Graphic’s report of the announcement, under the headline ‘AMAZING A-BOMB by Churchill’, was breathless with excitement.

  ‘Heat 100 times greater than on the sun’s surface…’ it gasped. ‘A 1,450-ton warship vanished in vapour… Thousands of tons of water and rock hurled a mile or more into the air… Then a tidal wave. This is the picture of Britain’s amazing first atom bomb explosion as drawn by Mr Churchill yesterday.’

  Seven years after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the destructive power of the atom bomb was hardly a revelation. In fact, Britain’s Monte Bello test was believed to be the thirty-fourth atom bomb exploded in the world. So the gloating tone of the press coverage of the event was more to do with glee at Britain’s joining the nuclear club than with the excitement of a new scientific discovery. Newspaper reports were one-sided and uncritical, but they obviously did have uneasy feelings that there might be another way of looking at the development.

  The Daily Graphic accompanied its enthusiastic news report with a leader uncompromisingly entitled ‘The big bang - for peace’. Its clear intention was to scotch the notion that Britain’s possession of the bomb was a dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons which might endanger world peace. ‘It is tragic that peaceful nations should be forced to seek continual progress in such terrible agents of destruction,’ it intoned solemnly, ‘but it is vital that they should maintain a commanding lead.’

  A lead, note, not the balance of weapons between West and East claimed by Penney. The editorial ended on a note of double dishonesty. ‘Both here and across the Atlantic’, it said, ‘each new atomic achievement brings greater security to the world.’ The clear implication was that attempts by Britain and the US to keep in front of Russia in the possession of nuclear weapons were somehow intended to keep the peace, while Russia’s striving to catch up was not. It also insinuated that the use of British and American weapons against Russia was unthinkable. But plenty of people did think about it.

  In a book published four years before, in 1948, just before Russia proved to the world that it had developed the bomb, Chapman Pincher wrote that there was a view, ‘widely held by US citizens and some senators’, that ‘Britain should help America to attack Russia now whilst the atom bomb monopoly remains. There are many people in Britain who believe that the day of attack is being delayed only until a sufficiency of atomic armaments is available.’ (My italics.) So much for the claim that the West’s bomb programme was ‘for peace’. (Mercifully, Pincher goes on in his book to say that this enthusiasm for a joint strike against Russia ‘ignores certain political and psychological features of a democracy which make such an unprovoked attack virtually impossible’.)

  Churchill’s revelations to parliament about the Monte Bello test inevitably reinforced the general air of congratulation that had already attached to it in the press. Reporters hunted around for additional scraps of information which would provide further proof of Britain’s status as a nuclear power. In November, the Daily Graphic ran a story showing that Britain was up ahead in defending itself from bombs as well as making them. It revealed that ‘after seven years of anxiety, the world now knows there is something that even an atom bomb cannot harm’.

  What can it be? Those ‘specially-built new British shelters’, perhaps? Far from it. It’s our old friend from Monte Bello, the British beer can. ‘It has at last been revealed that 18,000 cans of beer suffered the blast from the British atom bomb at Monte Bello Islands, but came through unscathed’, the paper trumpeted. ‘Scientists gingerly approached the potentially lethal stuff after the bomb went off. They found the tins barely marked.

  ‘They tested the beery contents of the tins for delta rays, gamma rays, epsilon rays, phi rays - and all the other rays in the Greek alphabet - and found none.’ (This is hardly surprising, because three of the rays mentioned do not exist.) ‘Good British beer in sound British tins had come through,’ the report continues patriotically.

  The beer was deemed fit for human consumption - ‘so NAAFI took it back into store and sold it - not gave it away - to the sailors. They smacked their lips, drank it and said it was less lethal than much they had come across in their time.’ Could this be the reason, one wonders, why Rear-Admiral Torlesse reported that two per cent of the cans contained flat beer?

  British beer was not the only toast of the Daily Graphic. Penney, as the scientist in charge of the test, became the object of a degree of adulation which is hard to imagine thirty years later. His name became a household word. Newsreels showed him coming down the steps of the plane when he arrived back in Britain. Reporters asked him the kind of questions - ‘What does your wife think, Dr Penney?’ - now reserved for winners of newspaper bingo games.

  The Daily Graphic printed an open letter, entitled, ‘Thanks, Penney, for the bomb’. ‘Dear Dr Penney,’ it began, ‘Any moment now you will be walking through the door of your modest home at West Norwood, London SE, into the arms of your family, safely back from the successful test of Britain’s first atom weapon. (In fact you might be there this morning to read this because your life is so important to Britain that the greatest secrecy is kept about your movements.)

  ‘Britain and the Commonwealth owe a debt - almost impossible to repay - to you, described as “easily the best mind in the world on atom and hydrogen bomb research”.’

  The next sentence is the key to this fawning piece of journalism. ‘The fact that you and your team have made it possible for Britain to make and store atom bombs has made the country a world-power once again.’ (My italics.)

  After all the humiliations of post-war history - scraping to make ends meet, huge loans from the US, learning to live in the shadow of the two superpowers - the bomb had made Britain great again. ‘Some people’, the Graphic conceded, ‘doubt whether this is a good thing. Some people, including men eminent in your own form of science, have wondered whether it is the duty of a trained brain like yours to go ahead investigating the mysteries of the universe well knowing that their discoveries could be used for ill as well as good. You had no doubt. You were right.’

  The letter then takes up the theme of ‘atoms for peace’ - the campaign to persuade the world of the beneficial side of nuclear energy which would be formally launched by President Eisenhower at the United Nations at the end of 1953. American scientists who had worked with Penney, the letter said, ‘believe that a world of wealth, luxury and leisure beyond human dreams will be possible when atom power is properly harnessed for our welfare. One told me: “Atom plants must be kept cool. Great quantities of water are needed. If sea-water is used then the result is all the priceless salts of the sea are made radioactive. These could be used to grow food in water, so that famine need never be seen in the world again.“’

  The letter continues in this vein, concluding that the atom era will be ‘as though we were stepping out of the Ice Age into a world of permanent sunshine’. To a world accustomed to reports of increased rates of cancer near nuclear power stations, and to the memory of Three-Mile Island, these beliefs seem dangerously naïve. In 1952, the Daily Graphic ended by expressing Britain’s reliance on Penney ‘to keep her in the forefront of progress and of peace’.

  The press had been kept well away from the Monte Bello test. The nearest anyone got was the top of a hill on the mainland, ninety miles away. But by the time Britain was ready to test its first H-bombs, nearly five years later, the government had become much more sophisticated in its handling of the press. It even offered facility trips to the trials to journalists, a tactic which brought with it three major benefits. First, the sense of excitement engendered in reporters who were privileged to act as witnesses to an exciting event was not conducive to critical or investigative journalism. This was especially important since the tests were taking place against a b
ackground of growing criticism of H-bomb testing. Second, it ensured pages of newspaper coverage of a scientific development in which Britain was once again well behind the two superpowers. And third, it offered reporters plenty of human-interest angles to report on - interviews with servicemen whose families were waiting breathlessly at home were good for newspaper sales.

  There is no doubt that the government realized the value of ‘human interest’ stories in ensuring favourable coverage of the H-bomb tests. The Ministry of Supply’s own handbook on the tests describes with satisfaction the good publicity created by a scheme linking up men in Christmas Island with children’s hospitals in London:

  ‘Towards the end of 1956 [the first H-bomb test took place in May 1957], the various welfare committees in the Operation Area put forward a scheme whereby, at Christmas-time, the men on the island should each give a small Christmas present to a child back home in Great Britain, between the ages of 3 and 8, who was either sick or in some way needy,’ it records.

  ‘At the “Grapple” [the code name for the H-bomb tests] headquarters in London, arrangements were made for a large toy firm to supply the toys. Special “Christmas” labels were then sent out to the area, and the soldiers, sailors and airmen wrote out their own individual labels. The toys were sent to the various hospitals and the labels attached. Altogether, 1,967 gifts were distributed.

  ‘Newsreel shots of the toys being distributed at St Mary’s Hospital for Women and Children, Plaistow, London, were shown in cinemas throughout the country and photographs were included in the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror and Daily Sketch. Further, on Christmas Day, BBC sound and BBC television visited St Stephen’s Hospital in Fulham Road and items appeared on “Television News” and on sound “Radio Newsreel” on that day.’

  Journalists who were invited to attend one or other of the H-bomb tests were made to feel they were part of a select few who had been chosen to take part in a top secret exercise. The cloak-and-dagger aspect was emphasized in the official invitations sent by the Ministry of Supply. This letter went to William Connor, the Daily Mirror’s Cassandra: ‘Necessarily this offer is made on the understanding that no indication will be published of when the representatives concerned left this country for this purpose, of when they are due elsewhere to join the necessary transport that will be provided for them, nor of when they leave for the test area.

  ‘For the confidential information of yourself and editors, those who wish to accept this invitation will be required to get themselves to Honolulu by a date which will be given to them. Every effort will be made to make the margin of time between their arrival and departure thence as brief as possible.’ The Ministry thoughtfully attached ‘some advice on clothing’, which suggested the whole affair was going to be like a rather smart party. ‘No special protective clothing is required,’ it explained, but ‘it is suggested that observers should take with them a change of clothing for evening wear.’ The tone of the invitation was much more James Bond than anything remotely connected to the dreadful suffering of Hiroshima.

  For the most part, it paid off. ‘Make no mistake, Britain’s H-bomb was a success,’ the Daily Mail reported on 3 June 1957. Its journalist, John Starr, had been seized by ‘the sort of feeling you got in the war after a great victory’. Scientists had assured him that all the fallout had gone to ‘ultra-high levels of the atmosphere’. Reassured by what the scientists said, Starr and his colleagues allowed ‘raindrops to settle on our exposed skin’.

  Another paper printed a letter home from National Serviceman Dave Neyland, an RAF senior aircraftman, which reveals an extraordinary mixture of awe and braggadocio. ‘Dear Mum and Dad,’ it begins. ‘Well, I suppose it’s old stuff to you now that they’ve dropped the rotten thing. Last Monday at approximately 10.15 I saw my first (and I hope it’s my last) H-bomb. We worked from 6 o’clock Sunday morning through till 1.30 p.m. Monday without a wink. I nearly slept right through the whole affair.’

  The text reads suspiciously like a London sub-editor’s idea of what a letter home from a working-class lad - Neyland was from Tottenham - would sound like. ‘“Here is an important announcement” were the words that roused me from dreams of Paris in August. .,’ it carries on unconvincingly. After the explosion, an officer ‘asked me what I thought about the bomb. He said: “You’ve seen one - you’ve seen them all!”’ The phlegm of the British serviceman always makes good copy.

  There were one or two cautious notes. Cassandra called Britain’s second H-bomb test ‘a dress rehearsal for the death of the world’. The roar of the hydrogen bomb was, he wrote, ‘a source of wonderment and, indeed, of pride to some people’, including Churchill’s top scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell. ‘But, when released over cities where it would obliterate millions of men, women and children in a trice, it is a wicked, an evil thing.’

  The Japanese understandably shared Cassandra’s sense of horror. Nor were they convinced by British claims about the cleanness - or lack of fallout - from their bombs. The Daily Worker was one of the few papers to report complaints from Japan: ‘A Japanese scientist announced in Tokyo yesterday that he had detected radioactive fallout over Japan from Britain’s first hydrogen-bomb test at Christmas Island,’ it announced on 12 June 1957. Dr Yasuo Miyake, it said, had claimed that his findings disproved Britain’s claim about a ‘clean’ bomb.

  But British reporters on the spot were far from critical. ‘Scientists and soldiers of Britain’s hydrogen-bomb task force are already living and eating normally on Malden Island,’ the Daily Telegraph reported cheerfully on 3 June. ‘This tiny coral atoll was only a few miles in horizontal distance from the point where Friday’s multi-megaton bomb went off.’

  Where details were lacking, pictures came into their own. As well as mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud, newspapers printed photographs of the men out there, and their wives and families back home. The grinning face of Lieutenant-Commander Jerry Bricker appeared in the Daily Mail under the headline, ‘The First Man In’, explaining how he took off in a helicopter for Malden Island - over which the bomb had exploded - only thirty minutes after one of the tests. ‘Security forbade 35-year-old Bricker from describing what the atoll looked like, and what happened to the animals on the island,’ the story ran. To make up for this disappointment, the Mail printed ‘Yesterday’s picture of Mrs Bricker with their son and daughter at home at Cranwilliam Road, Lee-on-Solent.’

  To judge from the propaganda, in fact, bomb tests seem to have been one jolly family occasion. ‘The Misses Billie and Mary Burgess of the Women’s Voluntary Services have brought a touch of home to the camp,’ the Ministry of Supply booklet on the Grapple Operation reported. ‘They are to be found in the main camp NAAFI organizing games, dancing, Highland dancing and concerts, and generally helping to make off-duty hours in the recreation room pleasant and free from boredom.’

  The Mid-Pacific News SPECIAL SOUVENIR EDITION, printed rather tattily for the servicemen at Christmas Island, contains a curious blend of militaristic boasting with homely details of the men running the test. ‘BOMB GONE!’ screams its front-page headline. ‘H-BOMB PUTS BRITAIN ON LEVEL TERMS.’

  ‘A flash, stark and blinding, high in the Pacific sky, signalled to the world today Britain’s emergence as a top-ranking power in this nuclear age,’ it declared. ‘No one saw it! No human eye could survive the hellish glare of white-hot heat brought to incandescence by the fantastic heat. But those who were present on this historic occasion, backs turned to the explosion nearly thirty miles away, could sense the brilliant intensity of the flash through closed eyelids. Even through thick clothing, a flush of warmth penetrated to the body.’

  There is no need to be alarmed, however. The H-bomb test is being run by very English family chaps like Air Vice-Marshal W. E. Oulton, CBE, DSO, DFC, Task Force Commander, whose interests include ‘his family, music of all sorts, and sport “in a very middle-aged way”. He lives now at Rickmansworth with his family, and his eldest son is in the RAF - at Cranwell.’ And li
ke the Scientific Director, the apple-cheeked Mr W. R. J. Cook, MSc, whose face appears in a line drawing below that of Oulton, and who ‘lives with his wife and two children at Newbury. Interests? He has none - except his work!’

  Servicemen were provided with specially printed envelopes in which to write to the folks back home - the left-hand side is taken up with a stylized mushroom cloud rising over a small coral island. They were even given special cans of beer - the drink and its packaging seems to have occupied an inordinate amount of time in the planning of the British tests - which bore the legend ‘SPECIALLY CANNED FOR MEGATON TRIALS’ on the top.

  The success of Britain’s H-bomb tests gave journalists a chance to show off to the Americans, with more than a touch of getting their own back for the way the US had held back from cooperation after the war. ‘US defence chiefs were extremely curious to know how the British weapons work when I visited Washington last week,’ reported globe-trotting Daily Express science reporter, Chapman Pincher, in June 1957.