by Andrew Brown
At no conference before or since have I seen so exalted and so assorted a galaxy of celebrities, in so appropriate a setting. The city was a heap of ruins. Rising above the rubble, approached precariously by planks over mud, was the germ of an art gallery; blazing posters vied with brilliant ceramics. At a café table in the open, Picasso sketched Polish citizens and the Pole Feliks Topolski sketched Picasso. Within the hall, poets, sculptors, musicians, architects, scientists and theologians, historians and political journalists, priests and film directors, parliamentarians and former prime ministers jostled to speak.26
Had Montagu cared to know, the desperate citizens of Wroclow, who had emerged from their cellars to face the looting and rapes of the Soviet army, were now experiencing the coercion, mass arrests and political executions needed to bring about monolithic Stalinist rule. The Polish organizers found that they were searched ‘no less than seven times, and the headquarters of the Congress was packed with secret servicemen’.27 Joliot-Curie was unable to attend, but his wife, Irène, chaired the first day of the meeting, when she had to listen to lengthy reports from each nation represented. She could not understand the Russian contribution by a writer named Alexander Fadeyev because there was no translation available. After repudiating American imperialism, he seemed to be carried away on a wave of professional envy, denouncing not only American writers like T.S. Eliot and Eugene O’Neill, but Jean Paul Sartre and André Malraux – the darlings of Parisian intelligentsia. ‘If hyenas could type and jackals could use a fountain pen they would write such things’, he said.
About one quarter of the British party of forty were scientists, with Bernal and Haldane being described as ‘the big guns’.28 Haldane remained silent, while Bernal ‘harped on a favourite theme: the obstacles a new arms race would present to humanity’s chance to benefit from scientific cooperation’.29 The Oxford historian, A.J.P. Taylor likened the seemingly endless speeches to ‘an exhausting process of mass hypnosis… reaching a climax in a unanimous resolution against American Fascism’.30 It was Taylor, who endeared himself to the Poles and infuriated Soviet and British communists alike with his own scintillating, extempore, speech that culminated with this memorable passage:
All peoples ask for freedom from oppression – freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom from a secret police, freedom to speak their opinion of their own government as well as of others. If we defend this, we defend also the peace of the world and we offer the people of the world what they want. But even if I spoke only for myself, I would still say without intellectual freedom, without love, without tolerance, the intellectual cannot serve humanity.31
Taylor and Julian Huxley, who thought that half the speeches made were more likely to promote war than peace, were among the eleven who voted against the long, final resolution that included reference to ‘a handful of selfinterested men in America and Europe who have inherited fascist ideas of solving all problems by force of arms’. Sage was one of four hundred and twenty-six voting in favour. After returning to London, Bernal wrote praising the Congress and its final manifesto, warning that the US was preparing ‘a war for complete world domination’, in which ‘nothing of the panoply of Fascism is lacking’.32 Taylor and seven other members of the British group at the Congress published a letter in the New Statesman, explaining why they were unable to accept the conclusions reached at Wroclow.
Two ways of life are in conflict throughout the world and it should be the task of intellectuals to resolve the conflict by peaceful means. We feel the implication of the resolution that one side alone is to blame to be a waste of a great opportunity. We believe that, though we were in a minority at the Congress, we represent the majority of men and women throughout the world.33
Taylor actually believed that the Soviets were sincere in their expectation of immediate attack by the US and were entitled to defend their convictions. In return, he thought it was essential for Western intellectuals to stand up for their values, and ‘try to restore a culture which is neither Soviet nor American but the heritage of all humanity’.34 At the time of the Congress, less than two hundred miles to the north-west of Wroclaw, the Berlin airlift had been in operation for about two months, giving a real edge to the opinions expressed.
Bernal thought that the real importance of the Congress could be gauged from the distortion and suppression it received in the British press. He defended Fadeyev’s forcible and harsh speech as the authentic voice of the Soviet Union, reminding the Congress that Hitler had been defeated only by the heroic efforts of the Red Army and Soviet people. Now the world was having to face the danger of another war because of ‘the avowed imperialists of the United States of America, who could not tolerate the liberation that had already occurred in Eastern and to some degree in Western Europe, and who wished to make a world again safe for capitalism, even if it meant rebuilding the whole edifice of fascism which the war had overthrown’.35 The value of Fadeyev’s speech was to prevent the Congress wasting time ‘with generalities about the desirability of peace’ and to emphasize that ‘the fight for peace could only be carried out effectively by those who accepted along general lines the analysis that he had given’. Speakers like A.J.P. Taylor, who were, in Bernal’s opinion, oblivious to the harsher realities of the present world, ‘confused the beliefs and desires of the people of the United States and Britain with the plans and actions of the most powerful groups that controlled their governments. The Marshall Plan appeared to Taylor as a great gesture of generosity from the American people. This is certainly what the American people have been taught to believe and for the most part honestly do believe. Nevertheless, the intention of the Marshall Plan is revealing itself more and more as an economic annexe of the Truman policy of countering Communism and imposing reactionary governments by bribes and threats.’36
Bernal’s one-sided views caused some long-standing allies to lose patience. Nevill Mott, a professor of physics in Bristol who was an implacable opponent of atomic weapon research and an active member of AScW, insisted on taking the chair when Sage came to speak in November. He did not think anyone ought to get away with the ‘impudent assumption of peace as a communist specialty’.37 Writing about the occasion to his mother, he said:
My remarks from the chair were listened to in stony silence but provoked Bernal into a passionate defence of Soviet policy which is just what I wanted. Loud applause for B. But all the same – with some of my young physicists there, it must be made clear that Bernal’s conclusions (organise a will to peace among the peoples of the west) only follows from his premises (the sole danger to peace comes from the U.S.).
Mott felt about the AScW the way that many scientists did about the new WFSW – that it was a communist-dominated organization, and he decided to resign his membership. Bernal does not seem to have been a card-carrying member of the CPGB at this stage, but continued to wear his party loyalty on his sleeve. He wrote frequently for Modern Quarterly, the journal so despised by Orwell, and started to take an interest in a new editorial assistant there, Margot Heinemann. She was in her mid-thirties, petite, with a strong handsome face and curly hair. She knew more about Sage than he realized at first, because she had been an undergraduate at Newnham College during the early 1930s. She once had him pointed out to her in the street by a friend, ‘There’s Bernal, he’s the cleverest man of his generation.’ Her reply, ‘What that man with the green face?’ caught his appearance when ‘he had been pushing life too hard’.38 Margot converted to communism after seeing the hunger marchers pass through Cambridge in 1934 and because she felt convinced by the popular front case against the rise of fascism. At Cambridge, she read English and fell in love with John Cornford, the romantic revolutionary and history scholar of Trinity College. Cornford went to fight with the International Brigade and was killed in Spain in 1937, but not before he had written some remarkable poetry and letters to Margot. In her grief, she immersed herself in political activity and worked in the labour research department of the TUC for the next twelve yea
rs. She became closely involved in the setting up of the National Union of Mineworkers and even wrote a book called Britain’s Coal towards the end of the war.
Sage invited her to Torrington Square for a drink, before going out to dinner and, if all went according to plan, to bed. When he came down to meet her at the front door, he found her standing in a pool of blood – she had stepped on a broken milk bottle and cut her heel. So their first date started with him fetching the first aid kit from the lab and cleaning her wound. Within a few months, he had moved into her flat just off Haverstock Hill, almost within sight of Margaret Gardiner’s house. Margot was the daughter of German Jewish immigrants and liked to say that she came ‘from a long line of married people’.39 Like Cornford, she preferred to be a monopoly capitalist in love if not in politics, but decided that she would rather have part shares in Bernal than the whole of a lesser man. Her parents were understandably worried about her choice, but Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of CPGB, who had taken a protective stance towards Margot since Cornford’s death, promised her father that if Sage did not treat her right, ‘He would knock his bloody block off.’40
In February 1949, Bernal was one of a host of leading British intellectuals invited to a world peace conference at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. He accepted but was concerned that Blackett, whose presence he felt was necessary to give the British delegation weight, had refused. Bernal wrote to Harlow Shapley, the Harvard astronomer who was organizing the conference, regretting that he had been unable to persuade Blackett to change his mind; he explained that Blackett ‘has an antipathy to large meetings, publicity, journalists, etc.’41 Sage was planning to take Anita Rimel with him and the Fankuchens were going to sponsor their visas. Anita was especially looking forward to the trip; she had struck up a long-distance friendship with Dina Fankuchen and the two formed a Society of ‘Women who had never been to bed with Sage’, with Dina as president and Anita as treasurer. It may have been around this time that Anita sent her a telegram saying ‘You are now president AND treasurer of the society.’
Bernal was invited to give lectures in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington,42 which would be helpful in paying for the trip, but the FBI had been taking an interest in his anti-American speeches. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s relentless anti-communist campaign had not yet taken off, but there were already widespread concerns about communists holding university posts.43 At the last minute, Sage was summoned to the American Embassy in London and asked his political views. ‘I said they were perfectly well known’44 he told reporters later, ‘The whole proceedings took half a minute’ and his visa was revoked. This represented a major turnaround from eighteen months earlier, when he had gone to the Embassy to receive the Medal of Freedom with bronze palm for his ‘very meritorious service in scientific research and development’ during the war. There were protests to Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State and speeches were made in the House of Commons about the incident. Shapley, who had decided to make Sage the guest of honour at the conference dinner, pointed out that the American government were excluding the man ‘who helped to plan the D-Day invasion of Normandy’.45
Bernal was allowed to travel to Paris in April 1949 for the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace. It was a hybrid communist peace event with Joliot-Curie as president, and Bernal, a prime organizer and vice-president. Stalin’s ministry of global propaganda, the Cominform, lent its support and predicted that ‘the Peace Congress will become an historic landmark’.46 The French government, made nervous by the communists’ ascension to power in China, refused entry visas for over three hundred delegates, mostly Chinese, who were then accommodated at a parallel meeting in Prague. There were still over two thousand people packed into the Salle Pleyel on 20th April, when Joliot-Curie took the stage to thunderous applause and launched into his peace offensive. He told the audience:
We are not here to ask for peace, but to impose it. This congress is the reply of the peoples to the signers of the Atlantic pact [NATO]. To the new war they are preparing, we will reply with a revolt of the peoples.47
In the opinion of The Economist, Joliot-Curie set the defiant, belligerent tone for the conference.48 Their editorial likened the atmosphere to the Nuremberg rallies held under the symbol of Picasso’s dove rather than Hitler’s swastika. In communist eyes, ‘the purpose of congress delegates is not to think but to listen, not to discuss but to agree; they assemble not to confront ideas but to demonstrate solidarity. So the Partisans of Peace were summoned not to seek ways of understanding between governments and conciliation between peoples but to organize resistance and hostility to the Atlantic Pact.’ Paul Robeson, the great American bass, apart from singing ‘Ole Man River’ gave an incendiary speech, which cost him his passport; he accused the US government of pursuing policy ‘similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels’.49
During the meeting, it was announced that Nanking had fallen to the communist forces of Mao Zedong, news that was received by the audience with ‘delirious enthusiasm’. When a British delegate, Harvey Moore KC, pointed out that to advocate peace meant opposing war including the most horrible form, civil war, he was received in silence. The audience hissed him when he suggested that delegates to a peace congress should oppose the civil war in China. They froze when he continued that ‘in countries where there was no liberty and no free access to independent courts the state of things was favourable to war and not to peace’.50 On balance, the French writer, Jean Genet, thought the Paris Peace Congress was ‘the most concentrated inflammatory anti-American propaganda effort in this part of Europe since the beginning of the cold war’.51 The Soviet reaction to the Partisans of Peace was one of immense satisfaction: Ilya Ehrenburg writing in Pravda saw the Paris meeting as a turning point when the imperialist ‘howling’ about the atomic bomb had ‘been drowned by human voices’.52
Soon after the Paris congress, Bernal returned to France for a holiday with his son Martin. They toured around taking bus rides and, when there were no buses, accepting lifts on the backs of lorries. They visited the Joliot-Curies at their home at Sceaux, south of Paris, where Sage and Frédéric spent some evenings swapping wartime stories in the local bar. What especially impressed the twelve-year-old Martin about Joliot-Curie was not that he was a Nobel Laureate and a Resistance hero, but his claim to be able to eat for nothing in any patisserie because his grandfather had been the pastry chef to Napoleon III.
In August, Sage flew to Moscow where he gave his infamous rant in the Hall of Columns. The geopolitical landscape was undergoing rapid seismic shifts, many due to events in the nuclear world, that would reshape not only the Cold War but also, for example, Anglo-American relations and American domestic politics. The detection of the first Soviet nuclear explosion in September caused dismay in Washington and ended any possibility of restraint in the nuclear arms race. In October, Truman learned of the concept of the hydrogen bomb from his National Security Council and he immediately instructed his Atomic Energy Commission ‘to go to it and fast’.53 The public announcement that the US would develop ‘the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb’ followed at the end of January 1950. Truman’s mundane language made it sound like a new highway construction project rather than a device with the potential for ending the human race. There were immediate protests from the world community of scientists, many of whom had realized that such a bomb was a possibility and were informed enough to admit that its effects were essentially incalculable. At that time, the weapon was still a mass of unsolved equations, but its dark threat was overpowering. Sage wrote to Linus Pauling, ‘we are all very glad to see the stand you have made against the criminal lunacy of the hydrogen bomb’.54
The American monopoly on the H-bomb was destined to be much shorter than their four-year term for fission weapons. On 22nd September 1949, the day before Truman broke the news of the first atomic test in the USSR, the FBI opened a file on the naturalized British scientist, Klaus Fuchs; they had deciphered a 1944 KGB message that indicated informa
tion on gaseous diffusion from Los Alamos had been transmitted through the British Mission in New York.55 So impressive was Fuchs’ work on the Manhattan Project that he was asked to stay on at Los Alamos after the war ended. Such was his strength as a theoretician that Edward Teller invited him to a secret conference in April 1946 to discuss the feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon that became known as the Super. At the end of May, Fuchs and von Neumann filed a joint patent for an implosion process to ignite the Super.56 After his arrest in London in February 1950, Fuchs ‘laughingly’ claimed that the idea was his and not von Neumann’s; from that point, the FBI suspected the Soviets might already be at work on a hydrogen bomb.
The decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb and concerns about the Soviet programme placed further barriers to true cooperation in nuclear weapon development between the Americans and the British. Washington was not amused when Attlee suggested his War Minister, Sage’s old friend John Strachey, who had been a CPGB member as recently as 1944, should head an inquiry into the Fuchs affair.57 Aside from worries about security, the threat posed by Soviet nuclear weapons now impelled the US to stockpile as many bombs as possible. The UK was seen as vulnerable to Soviet attack so that it made sense to accumulate raw material on the North American continent; it would be more efficient to concentrate production facilities there as well.58
