The First War of Physics (58 page)

On 15 February, the day of the arrests in Canada, Nunn May was interviewed at the Tube Alloys office at Shell-Mex House in the Strand by Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Burt and Major Reginald Spooner of the Intelligence Corps, attached to the War Office General Staff. The evidence against May was still insufficient to justify his arrest, so Burt needed nothing less than a full confession.

May was told that he was being interviewed in connection with the Canadian Royal Commission investigation. He blanched, but remained composed. Burt mentioned the names Zabotin and Angelov, but May denied having ever heard of them. He denied passing any secret information to unauthorised persons. When Burt asked him directly if he would be prepared to give the authorities all the help he could, May explained that he had heard about the leakage of information in connection with atomic energy for the first time that afternoon, and stated: ‘If it means getting any of my late colleagues in Canada into trouble over this, I should feel some reluctance.’

Burt may have sensed an opening: May was holding back information that might implicate his former colleagues. May was released but his home and office at King’s College were searched and he remained under close surveillance for the next five days. Burt interviewed him again on 20 February in Savile Row. This time Burt confronted him with information about his dealings with the Soviets in Canada and with the failed meeting with his Soviet contact near the British Museum in London. May probably did not realise that even with this information, the police still had no grounds to arrest him. Instead he broke down and confessed. ‘The whole affair was extremely painful to me,’ he told Burt, ‘and I only embarked on it because I felt this was a contribution I could make to the safety of mankind. I certainly did not do it for gain.’

May was arrested on 4 March by Special Branch Detective Inspector William Whitehead. He was met by Whitehead just as he finished delivering an afternoon lecture at King’s College. Not wanting to arrest May in the college grounds, Whitehead informed him that he had a warrant for his arrest and asked him to accompany him to a waiting police car. Whitehead read the warrant in the car. May remained silent.

Half an hour later, at Bow Street police station, May was formally remanded and charged with communicating information contrary to Section 1 of the UK Official Secrets Act, 1911.

The revelation that a member of the Manhattan Project was a Soviet spy sent Shockwaves through the community of physicists at Los Alamos. Discussing these events shortly after Nunn May’s arrest, Else Placzek remarked that her former husband Hans von Halban had worked at the Montreal laboratory, and she had therefore met May. When pressed to describe him, she remarked that: ‘He was just a nice quiet bachelor, very helpful at parties. Just like Klaus here.’ Fuchs was visibly discomfited.

One of the suspected GRU spies identified in Gouzenko’s documents and arrested by the RCMP was Israel Halperin, professor of mathematics at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Halperin had provided Fuchs with reading material during his incarceration at Sherbrooke in 1940.

Fuchs’ name was in Halperin’s address book.

¹
Gouzenko had in fact fallen into disfavour with a Moscow-based GRU colonel who had inspected the GRU residencies in North America and had identified examples of lax security and rule-breaking.

²
In his biography, Gouzenko claimed that he had marked documents implicating key Soviet spies by turning down their edges and replacing them in the files. When the time came for him to defect, he took the documents he had marked, hid them beneath his shirt and so smuggled them out of the embassy unnoticed. As there were in total some 250 pages of documents, this is somewhat difficult to believe. It is, perhaps, more likely that Gouzenko had been copying the documents and taking them home for some time beforehand.

³
Also known by his codename ‘Intrepid’, one of many possible inspirations for Ian Fleming’s most famous creation, James Bond. See Ben Macintyre,
For Your Eyes Only
, Bloomsbury, London, 2008.

⁴
In other words, the UN.

⁵
A series of television dips featuring Gouzenko can be viewed on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s digital archives website:
http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/national_ security

Chapter 20

CROSSROADS

November 1945–January 1948

T
he cordial arrangement on the exchange of atomic secrets between Britain and America embodied in the Quebec agreement and Hyde Park aide-mémoire had been founded on the close relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt. Churchill had told Bohr in May 1944: ‘And as for any post-war problems there are none that cannot be amicably settled between me and my friend, President Roosevelt.’ But the future is another country. The war was won, but Churchill was no longer Prime Minister, Roosevelt was dead and the Soviet Union was fast transforming from ally into enemy.

It seems that the question of whether or not post-war Britain should strive to become an independent atomic power was never really debated. Britain demanded a seat at the table of the world’s most powerful nations, and that meant developing an atomic capability. Within days of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Attlee formed a small cabinet committee to consider Britain’s atomic policy. He continued his predecessor’s obsession with secrecy on atomic matters by not informing the rest of his cabinet. The committee was known by its ‘Gen’ number, an identification number assigned to all such ad hoc government bodies whose existence and functions are not publicly reported.

The main focus of Gen 75 was Britain’s own peaceful atomic energy programme, the question of international controls and collaboration with the Americans. Although no decision had yet been taken on the need or otherwise for Britain to possess its own atomic weapons, Attlee’s informal name for Gen 75 – the ‘Atom Bomb Committee’ – perhaps belied a decision already made.

Gen 75 needed a body to advise it. The trouble was, there was nobody within the new Labour government with any experience of atomic matters who could chair an Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy. In order to maintain some semblance of continuity, Attlee proposed that John Anderson be appointed. Anderson, who was now an Independent Member of Parliament sitting on the opposition front bench, accepted the appointment. It was an awkward arrangement. Anderson had the status of a minister and access to the Cabinet Office support structures, but felt he was excluded from attending key ministerial meetings.

Attlee and Anderson set off for Washington in November 1945 with at least three missions. The first was to set Britain’s stamp on international atomic policy through the Truman–Attlee–King declaration. The second was to perpetuate the cordial arrangement forged in wartime by Churchill and Roosevelt and set post-war Anglo-American atomic collaboration in stone.

The third mission was to resolve an issue with the Quebec agreement, in which Britain had expressly disclaimed ‘any interest in these industrial and commercial aspects beyond what may be considered by the President of the United States to be fair and just and in harmony with the economic welfare of the world’. This article, the British wanted to argue, had been superseded by the Hyde Park aide-mémoire of 18 September 1944, which stated: ‘Full collaboration between the United States and the British Government in developing tube alloys for military and commercial purposes should continue after the defeat of Japan unless and until terminated by joint agreement’.

But Attlee and Anderson’s efforts were not helped by the fact that nobody on the American side seemed to have heard of the Hyde Park aide-mémoire. British representatives of the Combined Policy Committee
insisted that the document did exist, but it had been signed in secret and nobody could find it in Roosevelt’s files. In the end, the British had to furnish the Americans with a copy.
¹

While Attlee concerned himself with the matter of international policy, Anderson and Groves wrestled with the future of Anglo-American collaboration. Groves was placed in the rather difficult position of drafting a memorandum with Anderson relating to decisions already taken at the White House; decisions of which he was ignorant, taken by people he didn’t know. The resulting Groves–Anderson memorandum perpetuated ‘full and effective collaboration’ in the area of basic scientific research, mirroring the ‘full and effective interchange of information and ideas’ in the Quebec agreement.

However, as before, co-operation on the more technical aspects of atomic energy development and plant design, construction and operation was to be more closely regulated by the post-war Combined Policy Committee. The Combined Development Trust, which had been established in February 1944, was to secure control and possession of all uranium and thorium deposits in the territories of the USA, Canada, Britain and the British Commonwealth.
²
At the time, nobody seemed to think this three-way carve-up in any way contradictory to the call for international controls.

Agreements between Allied heads of state that are kept secret even from Allied governments are arguably necessary in a time of war. However, formal agreements between heads of state signed by the US President in peacetime had to be ratified by the Senate. Attlee was keen to push for an agreement on collaboration quickly without having to endure the delay and loss of predictability that submission to the Senate would entail. At the end of the November meeting, a hastily prepared memorandum was drafted for Truman and Attlee’s signatures. It said:

We desire that there should be full and effective co-operation in the field of atomic energy between the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. We agree that the Combined Policy Committee and the Combined Development Trust should be continued in a suitable form. We request the Combined Policy Committee to consider and recommend to us appropriate arrangements for this purpose.

With ‘full and effective co-operation’ thus assured, in December 1945 Attlee appointed Lord Portal as Controller of Production, Atomic Energy, ICI’s Christopher Hinton as leader of the effort to produce fissile materials, and John Cockcroft as director of Britain’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE). Cockcroft had served as scientific head of the Montreal project, having taken over the role from Halban in April 1944 in an attempt to raise the profile of the project and to lift the morale of the scientists involved. The AERE, formed on 1 January 1946, was to be located on the site of an RAF airfield at Harwell, about sixteen miles south of Oxford. An independent British atomic energy programme was under way.

Despite these outward expressions of mutual support, Chadwick sensed that the gap between Britain and America was widening. He told Anderson that: ‘the cohesive forces which held men of diverse opinions together during the war are rapidly dissolving: any thought of common effort or even common purpose with us or with other peoples is becoming both weaker in strength and rarer to meet.’

Chadwick’s senses were to prove finely tuned as, one by one, barriers to ‘full and effective co-operation’ were erected. At a subsequent meeting of the Combined Policy Committee, Groves pointed out that the secret Truman–Attlee agreement was in violation of Article 102 of the UN Charter, which called for any new international agreement to be reported to the UN Secretariat and openly published. Reporting and publication would mean laying bare the contradictions inherent in the drive for
international control of atomic energy through the UN while simultaneously entering into secret agreements behind the back of the fledgling organisation.

As Britain pressed the Americans for full details of atomic energy development, design and production, the precise meaning of ‘full and effective’ was debated. On 20 April 1946 Truman advised Attlee that he ‘considered it inadvisable for the United States to assist the United Kingdom in the construction of atomic energy plants, in view of our stated intentions to press for international control of atomic energy through the United Nations’.