Clouds of Deceit (14 page)

Pincher is a journalist who writes for the
Daily Express.
In his
writings about the bomb in the 1940s and 1950s, he got key things wrong. On one occasion, as he later admitted, his story was based on guess work rather than fact. Linus Pauling is an American chemist. He is the only scientist, apart from Marie Curie, to win the Nobel Prize twice. By 1957, when Britain was about to test its first H-bomb, he was a dedicated campaigner against weapons tests because of their effect on the atmosphere. He predicted that 1,000 people would die if Britain went ahead with its first H-bomb test in the Pacific Ocean.

On 1 May, 1957, Chapman Pincher went on the attack in the
Daily Express.
‘Here it comes again,' he began wearily. ‘Read it above - this monstrous charge by a top-ranking scientist that the British are about to murder 1,000 people by testing an H-bomb.

‘Fortunately, this charge can be ignored, for though brilliant in the laboratory, Dr Linus Pauling is fatuous in politics. (The US Government had to refuse him permission to leave the country for many months.)'

Note the masterly use of the damning parenthesis. Why would the US government have to forbid Pauling to leave the country? Because he is a suspected traitor? Pincher doesn't even need to say it. But Pincher does produce a reason for the opposition of Pauling and a growing number of other scientists and politicians to the British tests to divert attention away from the dangerous territory of scientific argument.

‘Why has Britain's proposal to explode an H-bomb in an entirely uninhabited part of the Pacific provoked such hysterical and sustained opposition throughout the world?' he goes on. ‘I will tell you. Because through a peculiar set of circumstances, the test provides those who hate or envy the British with an extraordinary opportunity to injure them.'

Who are these horrid people? Pincher has the answer to hand in the form of a crudely racist and anti-communist litany. There are ‘Jap business tycoons' who are ‘already using underhand methods to beat Britain in the export markets'. There is the Indian Prime Minister, Mr Nehru - ‘pretending that Asia is seriously threatened by radioactive fallout from a British bomb is an effective way of fomenting nationalism among ignorant people.'

Nor is there any need to wonder why ‘the Socialist supporters of Mr Aneurin Bevan are manipulating the H-test issue to weaken Mr Hugh Gaitskell's hold on the party leadership.

‘Of course, not all the opposition is deliberately political. There are always a few highly vocal individuals who seize on such an opportunity to give publicity to their own fanciful fears and fads.

‘Thus making common cause with the Communists on this issue, there is Bertrand Russell, who opposes the test on moral grounds. There is Dr Albert Schweitzer, who, having deliberately sealed himself off from the realities of politics, sends up a cry from the African swamps that the H-test must be banned on medical grounds.'

So far, the opposition is made up of out-and-out communists and those naïve enough to play into their hands. What about the scientists? They are just as bad. ‘Some, like Dr Pauling and Polish-born Professor Joseph Rotblat' - he must be suspect if he's Polish, even though he left before the outbreak of the Second World War - ‘of St Bartholomew's Hospital, warn of radioactive dangers to a degree not supported by eminent experts advising the Government.

‘Others, like Professor Christopher Powell, of Bristol, and Professor Joliot Curie, of Paris, speak on behalf of the World Federation of Scientific Workers, an organization so riddled with Communists that it has been forbidden to meet in Britain.

‘Finally, there are the pacifists, opposed to weapons of every kind and dedicated to the principle that it is always better to live on your knees than die on your feet.' What these people are doing, says Pincher, is chanting, ‘Woe, woe, with a harmony which is marvellously melodious to the Kremlin's ears.'

This article is ostensibly about a specific claim by an eminent scientist about the medical effects of an H-bomb test. What is lacking in it is any discussion of that claim other than one throw away phrase - the allegation that Pauling and Rotblat warn of ‘radioactive dangers to a degree not supported by eminent experts advising the Government'.

Who are these advisers? How would they answer Pauling's very specific claim about the effect of the test? The whole point
of the piece is to divert attention away from this scientific controversy, in which the opponents of the test can muster just as impressive a set of experts as can the government, to unsubstantiated innuendoes about anyone who doesn't support the British government's line.

What about Pincher's own credentials? He is the journalist who told us that the first British atom bomb ‘was almost certainly exploded on the top of a steel tower' when it was actually inside HMS
Plym.
He is the journalist who published a book called
Into the Atomic Age
by ‘Chapman Pincher, BSc' in 1948, in which he described how the uranium gun bomb was tested at Alamogordo. It was not. As we have seen, scientists were confident the uranium bomb, Little Boy, would work. What they tried out was the plutonium implosion bomb, Fat Man.

On 19 March 1957 Pincher said in a story in the
Daily Express
that Britain intended to run a further series of atom bomb tests at Maralinga that year; most would be exploded on top of towers, but one might be dropped from a plane.

When the British government started looking for the source of the leak, Pincher sent a letter explaining the origin of the story. It had come from Australia, he said, and his source said the series would finish work started at an earlier set of tests. That, he said, was why ‘I suggested most of the weapons would be tower bursts and that one might be dropped from an airplane. This I confess was
sheer guess-work
based on what happened in the previous series … The fact is that if my guess about what is going to happen in these new trials is correct,
it was something of a fluke.'
(My italics.)

Pincher, of course, was not alone in the practice of dismissing opposition to the tests.
The Times
of 18 May 1957 reported a student demonstration at the British embassy in Tokyo to protest against a British H-bomb tests. The students' federation was ‘a notoriously fellow-travelling organization, and today's protest march showed all the signs of careful planning and forethought,' the story said. Even the poor old Japanese were not allowed to have a legitimate interest in the effects of radiation.

That thoughtful journal, the
News of the World,
made its contribution to the debate by inviting Lord Cherwell, Churchill's
wartime scientific adviser, to make a statement on Britain's first H-bomb. ‘Until today he, as well as other top-flight scientists, has kept silent on the effects of Britain's H-bomb tests in the Pacific,' the paper reported on 19 May 1957. ‘Now for the first time Lord Cherwell answers some of the questions which are disturbing people all over the world today.

‘Lord Cherwell – he is known as “The Prof” to Sir Winston – sat back in his armchair as I read the statement. “I accept your paper's invitation because I think it vital the truth should be known,” said the tall, lean man in tweeds who knows all Britain's scientific secrets - and has done for years.'

Given what he goes on to say, it is hard to see why Cherwell's views had been kept a secret for so long. Under the heading ‘UNANSWERABLE FACTS', Cherwell begins uncompromisingly. ‘Many people in this country and abroad have been genuinely worried about the alleged danger to the health of the world caused by our nuclear tests in the Pacific. Their anxiety is completely unfounded.'

Their anxiety had been stirred up, in fact, by a curious group of people identified by Cherwell as ‘freelances' - the implication being that their opposition, far from being genuine, had been paid for by the highest bidder. These people, whom Cherwell goes on to traduce as ‘agitators', had claimed the bomb tests must be stopped in spite of a report from the Medical Research Council which ‘gave us facts and figures showing that these tests will not harm any of us'.

This assertion, impressive as it sounds, is merely Cherwell up to his old tricks again. During the Second World War, as Frederick Lindemann, Cherwell distorted scientific evidence to persuade Churchill to lift his embargo on area bombing. In 1957, he was simply misrepresenting a cautious report by the MRC which had admitted the possibility that even low doses of radiation could cause cancer. But were the readers of the
News of the World
in any position to argue with ‘The Prof'?

In the face of this stream of sustained and abusive propaganda, it is remarkable that the voice of dissent succeeded in being heard at all. It certainly found little outlet in the popular press, which was
besotted with the bomb as the restorer of the nation's virility.

It did surface in publications from scientific organizations. Linus Pauling based his claim that 1,000 people would die as a result of Britain's first H-bomb test on a report from the Atomic Scientists' Association in April 1957. The Association, based in Britain, had set up a committee to follow up problems raised in the MRC report the previous year. It was chaired by Joseph Rotblat.

It recognized the problem that the effects of small amounts of radiation were simply not known. But it suggested that an H-bomb of the type tested by the US at Bikini in 1954 ‘may eventually produce bone cancers in 1,000 people for every million tons of TNT or equivalent explosive'. No wonder Chapman Pincher was reluctant to get involved in the turbulent scientific debate about the effects of the test; it was much safer to stick to unsubstantiated innuendo.

Dissent also appeared in journals with comparatively small circulations. Of these, the
New Statesman
played a key role. In 1952, its ‘London Diary' was one of the few voices to call attention to the outbreak of lunacy spreading through Fleet Street.

‘A great deal of nonsense is being written about the A-bomb explosion at Monte Bello,' it pointed out. ‘“Now Great Britain is really Great again,” exclaimed the
Evening Standard,
and other leader writers patted us on the back with much the same heartiness. Yet the fact is that no one in London or Washington can possibly know whether our bomb is more effective than the American bomb, since each has been produced secretly. What the leader writers mean, I suppose, is that it takes a Great Power to make A-bombs and that now we're making them we can hold up our heads alongside the Russians and Americans.'

In 1957, the
Statesman's
‘London Diary' reported incredulously that Lady Carew Pole, organizer of the WVS in Cornwall, had written to all her branches saying, ‘The hydrogen bomb could be a terrible weapon, but with your help the blow can be greatly eased.' She urged women to attend talks on how to protect their homes, how to care for the sick at home, and ‘how you would be cared for'. Kingsley Martin, the paper's editor, commented, ‘I have long suspected that the government's purpose in
keeping civil defence organizations going was more psychological than practical.'

On 2 November 1957, the
New Statesman
published an article by J. B. Priestley, ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bombs', which called for Britain to reject nuclear weapons. ‘Alone, we defied Hitler; and alone we can defy this nuclear madness into which the spirit of Hitler seems to have passed, to poison the world,' he wrote. ‘There may be other chain reactions besides those leading to destruction; and we might start one.' He urged ‘a declaration to the world that after a certain date one power able to engage in nuclear warfare will reject the evil thing forever.'

The article was published just after the Labour Party conference had rejected a motion that Britain should disarm unilaterally; it provoked a great debate and led to the setting up of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The first meeting was attended by Kingsley Martin, the paper's editor, and Patrick Blackett, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose advice against the bomb had been peremptorily rejected by Ernest Bevin.

The aims of CND have still not been realized; nevertheless, the tide was turning against the bomb tests. By 1963, opposition to them was so strong that Britain, Russia and the US signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty which outlawed tests in the atmosphere. The problems are not over: France and China have ignored the treaty, radiation has escaped from underground tests into the air, and radioactivity from the 1950s' tests is making its way back to earth to this day. But at least the days of large, uncontrolled emissions of radiation into the atmosphere, unless there is a nuclear war, are over.

Curiously, the attitudes that went with them still persist. They even find publishers who are willing to print them. Air Vice-Marshal Stewart Menaul, a high-ranking Royal Air Force officer during British tests at Maralinga and at the later tests at Monte Bello, is a case in point.

In 1980, Menaul published a book called
Countdown: Britain's Strategic Nuclear Forces.
The book jacket claims that, in it, Menaul tells for the first time the ‘whole story' of how Britain designed and tested nuclear weapons.

Menaul's style is one with which students of 1950s' propaganda have become familiar. ‘The Labour Government, elected in 1945, had among its members an assortment of Communist fellow-travellers, conscientious objectors and pacifists whom Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, distrusted implicitly, though Attlee tolerated them,' Menaul says. In the circumstances, he feels, it was quite right that decisions about the British bomb should have been taken without reference to the full Cabinet, or to Parliament. ‘In retrospect, to anyone who has been involved in nuclear affairs in the post-war era, the manner in which decisions were taken by Gen 163 was entirely correct and appropriate.'

He allows that ‘some government scientific advisers, like Professor P. M. Blackett, opposed Britain's nuclear programme, but his views carried little weight
except among his own kind.
Professor Lindemann (later Viscount Cherwell), who was Churchill's principal scientific adviser, had no doubts and fully supported the programme right up to the final test phases in Australia and at Christmas Island.' (My italics.)