M R-D-Foot

Our deadliest secret

M. R. D. Foot on Peter Hennessy's latest work

This book shows how successive cabinets have handled the deadliest secret of modern times, what to do about nuclear bombs, since the first ones went off in 1945. As the subject was so secret, not much has ever been allowed out into the public domain; but Hennessy’s scholarly skills have been such that he has unearthed all of that, and here lays it out in scores of documents in facsimile. This gives the reader an engaging sense of being himself involved in actual research; and his commentaries illuminate each paper.

He begins with the now famous memorandum by Frisch and Peierls, of March 1940, from which the whole ghastly project derived. ‘Tube Alloys’, the code name for atomic research, was so secret that Churchill never brought it before his war cabinet at all (half that cabinet, after all, had never been cleared for ultra secret intelligence). Only he, Anderson and Cherwell knew about it, at that stratospheric level; even Attlee, even Eden, even the chiefs of staff were left in ignorance. The whole (by this time Conservative) cabinet had the subject mentioned to them, once, to get their agreement before the first bombs were used; which they gave, off the cuff, on the understanding that there would be a huge saving in lives, as there was.

Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed in 1943 that the British and the Americans would continue to share atomic construction secrets after the war; an agreement broken by the Americans after Roosevelt’s death. Attlee’s innermost cabinet agreed all the same that there would have to be a British atomic bomb: a decision taken, Hennessy proves, on Ernest Bevin’s advice, against that of Dalton and Cripps who said we could not afford it. Hennessy is able through his BBC contacts to add Bevin’s comment, unrecorded in the austere cabinet committee minutes, ‘We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it’.

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