Ministers took their decision knowing that Britain’s financial situation was desperate and the government could not afford the major financial commitment involved. It was not just a question of prestige or in hope of securing American cooperation. But he, like Bevin, was determined Britain should have its own bomb and insisted the decision to site a nuclear plant in the UK was for the British, not the US government to take. Soviet atomic spy Klaus Fuchs Īttlee did not give up on Anglo-American collaboration. Helping Britain to do so was not considered to be in US interests. This made the British the next most likely country to be able to develop an atomic weapon. But the Americans also knew that Britain would be able to draw on the expert knowledge of scientists (including Klaus Fuchs) who were now returning to the UK after working on the Manhattan Project. ![]() The military wanted exclusive control of any weapons, and many Americans remembered the Canadian spy scandal exposed in 1946, when a British atomic scientist was revealed as a Soviet agent. There was much political in-fighting, with some Republicans determined to discredit the late President Roosevelt and any ‘secret’ wartime agreements. Attlee rejected these arguments, but the US context was not simple either. The Americans argued that a nuclear plant in the UK would be ‘insecure’ and incompatible with proposals for international control under discussion in the UN Atomic Energy Commission. ![]() The Truman administration also hoped to use the nuclear monopoly as leverage with the Soviet Union. The McMahon Act passed by Congress in August 1946 prohibited sharing nuclear information, even with close allies. But hopes of postwar collaboration were dashed by US determination to control access to the ‘atomic secret’. The bomb had been developed through wartime cooperation between British, Canadian and US scientists. He received soothing responses but little more. Convinced that the atomic bomb changed the whole calculus of future warfare, he had been pressing President Truman since August 1945 for cooperation and international control. Īlthough Ernest Bevin’s comment about the Union Jack on Britain's own bomb catches the eye, Prime Minister Clement Attlee was the prime mover on nuclear issues in the postwar Labour government. We ought not to give the Americans the impression that we cannot get on without them for we can. Yet it was not until 8 January 1947 that the decision was taken, not by GEN 75 but by a specially convened ministerial committee GEN 163 at its sole meeting and the context was complex. As Peter Hennessy puts it, there was an ‘atomic bias’ in all the deliberations of GEN 75, the ministerial committee set up in August 1945 to deal with atomic matters. When Churchill, now Leader of the Opposition, said in Parliament in November 1945 ‘This I take it is already agreed, we should make atomic bombs’, no one challenged him. The decision in January 1947 formalised what many had assumed ever since the use of the first atomic weapons against Japan in August 1945. Such decisions are always controversial and difficult, but they are also impossible not to take. The same has been true of all subsequent decisions to replace or renew atomic weapons systems. It was essential because although no atomic weapon would be ready for 5 years, to ensure a future national capability for deterrence or retaliation the decision could not wait. Momentous because it was taken against the wishes of Britain’s closest ally the United States, and because it committed huge government resources that Britain could not afford. It was a decision both momentous and essential. Seventy-Five years ago a small group of government ministers agreed that research and development on atomic weapons should be undertaken in the UK, under conditions of special secrecy. Britain's Bomb - Operation Hurricane, the testing the UK's first atomic weapon at Montebello in 1952 This blog recalls the international and domestic factors that Clement Attlee's government had to weigh in the balance when coming to this historic decision. Bevin was quoted thus by Sir Michael Perrin, formerly deputy to Lord Portal who was Controller of Production, Atomic Energy, in a BBC Timewatch programme on 29 September 1982. “This thing” as British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin put it, was the Atomic Bomb. ![]() We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it. We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs.
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