by Andrew Brown
In Sage’s mind, there seemed to be no doubt that human society and behaviour could be cast into a scientific framework provided by Marx so that confident predictions were possible about the way events would turn out. He wrote a short book, Marx and Science, in which he reflected on how well ‘the actual builders of socialism, Lenin and Stalin, have carried out’ the programme laid down by Marx, ‘while all their “socialist” detractors, who have done nothing themselves to emancipate their own countries from capitalism, clamour that the Soviet rulers have abandoned true Marxism’.76 The pseudo-science of Marxism did indeed provide Sage with a sense of comfortable exhilaration that allowed him to overlook its contradictions and horrors. It was a dogma that could not be refuted because it was allencompassing, convoluted and vague. As we have seen at the time of Stalin’s death, Sage poured scorn on the base notion that the dictator was driven by a lust for power. As Alexander Pope said, ‘The most positive men are the most credulous.’
16
Peace at Any Price?
The hunger for peace is most ravenous in the aftermath of war. The British public, many of whom could remember the First World War – the war to end all war – emerged from the Second World War weary from privations but thankful to have survived. Their suffering did not compare with that of the Poles or the Soviets or indeed the citizens of the two countries subjected to the most ferocious bombing campaigns – Germany and Japan. Modern warfare was no longer confined to the armed forces, and as one of the Chiefs of Staff remarked to Bernal, by the end of WW2, weapons determined strategy: strategy no longer dictated weapons.1 The new spectre of the atom bomb, as Bernal said at the time, ‘implicitly changed the whole existence of man in this universe’.2 While conceding that ‘the immediate effects, however horrible, have been decisive in ending the war’ Bernal suggested that ‘the possibilities of further destructive use are in every man’s mind’.3 Bernal had more reason than most to worry about such a catastrophe from his involvement in the revision of the Tizard report, with its analysis of a nuclear exchange between the UK and the USSR.
Prime Minister Attlee was as alert as any statesman to the danger of nuclear proliferation: in the autumn of 1945, he suggested in a thoughtful letter to President Truman that they should meet to discuss the pressing need for international regulation.4 A summit was held in November between the US and its two wartime allies most involved with the Manhattan Project: Britain and Canada. The three leaders called for ‘effective enforceable safeguards’ against the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes and recommended that a commission should be set up by the United Nations. In the meantime, Truman moved to wrest control of the US nuclear programme from the military and place it with an Atomic Energy Commission that would be answerable to Congress. During this process, the American relationship with the British and Canadians became estranged to suit two opposing factions: the US military (personified by General Groves) who did not want to share their apparent monopoly with any third party, and liberal politicians who thought that any preference shown now might prejudice subsequent international negotiations with the USSR in particular. Sir James Chadwick, the chief British scientist on the Manhattan Project, sensed as early as December 1945 in Washington ‘the cohesive forces which held men of diverse opinions together during the war are rapidly dissolving: any thought of common effort or even of common purpose with us or with other peoples is becoming both weaker in strength and rarer to meet.’5
Broadcasting on the BBC in March 1946, Sage made a plea for men of faith in the future to take up the new challenge that confronted the world.
We are afraid of another war which can only occur if we deliberately sabotage the effective international collaboration of which the United Nations Organisation is the first embodiment. The real danger does not come from the Soviet Union or the atom bomb, or from the inherent wickedness of man, or from our intrinsic inability to cooperate in building a new world based on common effort for the common good. It comes from those who do not want this kind of world: those who talk of wars and rumours of wars: those who have discovered the special values of ‘western civilization’, the defence of which we can now take up from the defeated Germans. These are the enemies of promise: these are the real heirs to the Nazis. Unless we can stop them splitting the world into two camps in men’s minds, the fatal division will grow and war will be inevitable.6
A UN conference on international atomic energy policy was scheduled for June. The Americans assembled an impressive team of politicians, administrators and scientists (with J. Robert Oppenheimer making the most influential contribution). The British approach was low-key: they were to be represented by Chadwick and two senior diplomats, Sir Alexander Cadogan and Lord Inverchapel (previously Ambassador in Moscow now the Ambassador to the US). Bernal was in New York just before the UN conference started and wrote an impression of ‘The American Scene’7 as an unnamed correspondent for the New Statesman. He was uncomplimentary about President Truman, who attempted ‘at intervals to re-create the old enthusiasm for the policies of Roosevelt, but it is clear that he neither understands them nor really believes in them’. Nor was it just the president who was drifting – there was a ‘lack of any real government’, the country had lost its purpose and the economy was suffering through the lack of effective central planning. Sage also detected the appearance of a native form of fascism, ‘it shows itself in violent “Red” baiting and fomenting racial antagonisms – anti-Semitic and anti-Negro. The Rankin Committee… is pursuing un-American activities with Star Chamber methods … Everywhere the Catholic Church and the national minorities that it controls are working up feeling scarcely distinguishable from incitation to war against the Soviet Union.’ But what really struck him was a recent Gallup Poll showing a large growth in the fear of war.
From the fourteen per cent who a year ago thought there would be another war in the next twenty-five years, the proportion is now seventy-five per cent… and of course there is no doubt whom the next war will be against. The presence of the atomic bomb has had the paradoxical effect, in the one country that possesses it, of increasing the feeling of insecurity. The majority of the Americans do not think of themselves as using the atomic bomb but of what will happen if it is used against them: hence the hysteria about secrecy and spy scares.
Bernal took encouragement from the recent formation of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), organized by those who had worked on the Manhattan Project and were now dedicated to using their special knowledge of the effects of nuclear weapons to inform the world of the unprecedented danger it faced. The FAS announced themselves to be ‘overwhelmingly in favor’8 of their government’s plan for the international control of atomic energy when it was first announced in April, although like Chadwick, they were uneasy about the choice of the elderly financier, Bernard Baruch, to present the plan to the UN. The central tenet of the original US plan was to place all dangerous activities that could result in the manufacture of atomic weapons under the control of an international agency. The agency would control the world supplies of uranium, construct and operate all plutonium separation plants and nuclear reactors, and have powers to license and inspect nuclear operations in individual countries. In his presentation to the UN, Baruch modified the original American plan to include a provision for unspecified punishment of transgressor nations that could not be avoided by the use of a Security Council veto. The Soviet delegation, led by Andrei Gromyko, countered with their own proposals for an international ban on the production, stockpiling and use of atomic weapons. Any existing bombs were to be destroyed within three months of the end of the convention.
As the talks were getting underway, there was a sense of idealistic optimism in many quarters that the establishment of an international Atomic Development Authority would assist countries to reap the energy benefit of atomic power, while keeping the world safe from the proliferation of atomic weapons. The New Statesman saw the Baruch plan as another step towards a World Government; while there
were two rival forms of government – liberal democracy and communism – each of which seemed to demand the eclipse of the other, the ‘A[tomic] d[evelopment] a[gency] is the crux on which turns the issue of whether these two worlds can come together into One World.’9 After six months of fruitless debate, the UN conference, for which there were so many hopes at the outset, ended in stalemate. For this, many blamed Baruch’s intransigence, but each side distrusted the other to the extent failure seems to have been inevitable.10 As the convention was sitting, the Soviets were pushing ahead as fast as they could on the secret development of their own weapon. Their plan called for the US to destroy its stock of weapons and made no provision for international inspections – the Americans and the rest of the world were expected to put their trust in Uncle Joe. The Baruch plan, on the other hand, would have subjected the Soviets to international inspection and control before the US had to cede its own nuclear monopoly (which Stalin could not imagine them giving up).
While the idea of world government continued to gain support among the American public (a Gallup poll in August 1946 showed a majority in favour of a proposition to turn the UN into a world government ‘with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States’11), the atmosphere in the White House was cooling. The commander-in-chief was not going to allow a communist tyrant to gobble up countries that had so recently been freed from a Nazi tyranny, at the cost of so many American lives. Earlier in the year, Truman sent a blunt message to the Kremlin after the Soviet Union had failed to withdraw troops from Iran, despite the Iranians protest to the UN. This was one of a litany of complaints in his diary for September 1946: ‘Reds, phonies and… parlor pinks can see no wrong in Russia’s four and one half million armed forces, in Russia’s loot of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Manchuria… But when we help our friends in China who fought on our side it is terrible… When Russia occupies Persia for oil that is heavenly.’12 His mood was not improved by reading the Clifford–Elsey intelligence report on Soviet foreign policy. The one-hundred-page document identified ‘a direct threat to American security’ resulting from the Soviet Union’s apparent preparations for ‘war with the leading capitalistic nations of the world’.13 The report was so forceful and provocative that Truman confiscated all twenty extant copies, telling Clifford that ‘if it leaked it would blow the roof off the White House, it would blow the roof off the Kremlin’.14 Resolved to take a tough line with the Soviets, Truman was more convinced than ever of the importance of atomic weapons to balance the growing deficit in US conventional forces in Europe. Appeals from the FAS to keep atomic energy negotiations going at the UN, and ‘to pursue every avenue toward one world’15 fell on deaf ears in Washington. The Truman administration would be more influenced by Edward Teller than by Albert Einstein.
Within weeks of the war ending, Attlee had formed a British ‘Atom Bomb Committee’ (disguised as ‘Gen 75’) on the largely unspoken assumption that in order to remain in the first rank of nations, an atomic weapon would need to be produced with its casing stamped ‘Made in Britain’. As the USA withdrew cooperation and disregarded promises given in wartime about the free exchange of ideas on atomic matters, the question of an independent British bomb became more acute. The decision to proceed was taken on 8th January 1947 by a committee of just six men, meeting in the greatest secrecy. The most influential opinion was that of Ernest Bevin, the turbulent Foreign Secretary, who had been a consistent supporter of a British weapon when other economic ministers had expressed doubt. His motivation was not to counter any potential threat from the Soviets, but a desire to be treated as equals by the USA. He told the other politicians at the meeting: ‘We could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly of this new development.’16 Patrick Blackett, a member of the Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy, sensing the course that his political masters were taking, circulated another document opposing the development of a British atomic weapon. He had presented a detailed, closely argued, memorandum a year earlier suggesting that Britain should publicly renounce such an effort, at least for a period of some years, in the interests of her own security and European stability, and to avoid the costly diversion of scientists and technicians from a civil nuclear programme. His 1945 memorandum was dismissed by Attlee as the work of a layman in political and military problems and was rejected out-of-hand by the Chiefs of Staff. His second attempt to steer Britain towards a non-nuclear defence policy in February 1947 did lead to two meetings with the Prime Minister, but no change of heart.17
In the winter of 1947, a prolonged period of freezing weather threatened to shut down the British economy. Bread rationing, which had not been necessary in either world war, had been imposed a few months earlier, and public misery was now compounded by transport strikes and fuel shortages. Unemployment quickly rose to fifteen per cent. On 10th March there was a major parliamentary debate on the crisis: the government proposed economic planning units for each of its departments and called for controls on wages, profits and dividends. The country needed to recognize that austerity ‘had to be accepted as a long-term condition of the peace’.18 Three days later, The Times published a letter from Bernal pointing out that the government ‘tacitly assumed that the industry and agriculture of our country must be carried out along existing lines’.19 He continued:
There is no mention of the possibility of using technical development and scientific research to raise our productivity without the use of additional materials and manpower. Yet this is a perfectly feasible method, as was amply demonstrated in the war, and a determined effort to use our scientific resources to the full might, in the next critical two or three years, provide just that margin which would make the difference between disaster and prosperity… During the course of the war, however, it was found that the value of the scientists was as great, if not greater, in examining and advising on many and varied problems of warfare and supply, and particularly the evolution of the methods of operational research. These methods could be applied immediately to our present industrial problems: to increasing, for example, coal production; to diminishing waste in the use of coal and power; to improving the effectiveness of the transport system, of building and generally increasing the admittedly low technical efficiency of our productive industry. The methods are known, the men who can use them and largely created them are still available. All that is required is the impulse to set them in action.
In May, Bernal succeeded Blackett as the president of the Association of Scientific Workers (AScW). He continued to make frequent speeches calling on the government to make greater use of science and technology in the service of British industry and agriculture. The government, however, was under the kind of unremitting strain that does not foster innovation. In July, when the international conversion of currencies was restarted, a disastrous run on sterling started. After it had continued for a month, Chancellor of the Exchequer Dalton wrote to Prime Minister Attlee:
We are running out of foreign exchange, and if this goes on much longer, we shall not be able to go on buying anything… We must reduce the armed forces… There is nothing more inflationary than having all these non-productive people absorbing supplies of all kinds.20
On the day that Attlee received this alarming letter, The Times published another letter from the president of the AScW, bemoaning the large share of the national scientific research budget (65 per cent) devoted to military purposes. Bernal took his figures from the government’s published statistics, and argued that the present allocation of resources to the services must be reduced in the light of ‘the absolute shortage of scientific and technical manpower’ in the UK. To cut spending on fundamental scientific research or teaching would be ‘suicidal’ given that ‘the fundamental reason for the crisis, the relatively low efficiency of British industry, is a long-term one’ and nothing must compromise ‘the supply of workers or ideas for 10 or 15 years ahead… In our present serious situation the urgency for an intense and welldirected scientific and technical
effort is undeniable.’21 In making his case, Sage had used a figure of £76.5 million for total government spending on scientific research. What was never disclosed by the Attlee administration was the expenditure of an additional £100 million over the next four years on the atomic weapon project.22
One country where government policy was strongly influenced by a nuclear physicist of the first rank was France. An avowed communist, like many of his countrymen, Joliot-Curie was appointed head of the new Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), and was instrumental in formulating the French declaration at the 1946 UN conference that France had no intention of making nuclear weapons. He soon became an outspoken critic of US atomic policy and in late 1946 condemned their bomb tests in the Pacific as ‘a miserable idea’.23 We have seen how he and Bernal were the prime movers behind the foundation of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW) with its stated aim ‘to work for the fullest utilization of science in promoting peace and the welfare of mankind’.24 The two men supported this proposition with great enthusiasm, but both recognized that they could not just rely on their scientific reputations to influence events; the campaign for peace would require mass political action on an international scale.
The first significant event came about partly as a result of Joliot-Curie’s connections through marriage. He was approached by some Polish intellectuals to set up a bilateral peace conference. The meeting was to be held in Poland and soon attracted such interest that it became the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace. Bernal found an invitation waiting for him at Birkbeck on his return from the first international congress of the International Union of Crystallography at Harvard in August 1948. He had been selected as a delegate to an international geology conference in London at the end of the month, but instead flew out to Poland. The peace congress was to be held in Wroclaw – previously Breslau, a Silesian city that the Soviets had largely flattened just three years earlier, in a siege lasting eighty days.25 Ivor Montagu, Sage’s comrade from Cambridge communist days, recalled the scene with an optimism sustained by the fact that he had to stay there only for three days:
