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Abstract
Most historical accounts of the atomic bombings of Japan show little interest in Britain's explicit authorization for the attacks. Meanwhile, the few historians who have attempted to explain it rely on a unitary, rational actor model of the British state that is misleading. This article demonstrates that high-ranking British officials became anxious early on about the strategic consequences of a peremptory use of the new weapon. Therefore, especially over the course of 1944 they sought to engage Washington on the linked questions of the bomb's wartime use and its postwar control. However, these officials' initiatives were rebuffed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who paved the way to the bombings based on a fervent desire for Anglo-American integration, and on a dim understanding of the bomb's revolutionary potential.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kanji Akagi, Astrid Forland, Rustin Gates, Mark Haas, Jim Hershberg, Tim Hoyt, Gerry Hughes, Atsushi Ishida, Rieko Kage, Joe Maiolo, Tosh Minohara, Patrick Morgan, Eduardo Ortiz, Gilles Pécout, Steve Rosen, Len Scott, John Simpson, Kristan Stoddart, David Welch, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier version of this article. Thanks also to Yuen Foong Khong and several British archives for their hospitality. The Abe Fellows Program, the Harvard University Center for European Studies, Smith College, and the University of Southern California helped to underwrite this work. Any errors or omissions are of course the author's alone.
Notes
1[Kew, United Kingdom, The National Archives], PREM [Records of the Prime Minister's Office] 3/139/10, ‘Articles of Agreement Governing Collaboration between the Authorities of the United States of America and the United Kingdom in the Matter of Tube Alloys’, 19 Aug. 1943.
2PREM 3/139/10, ‘Tube Alloys: Aide-Memoire of Conversation between the President and Prime Minister at Hyde Park’, 18 Sep. 1944. (Also at CAB[inet Papers] 127/201.)
3CAB 126/146, ‘Use of the Weapon against Third Parties’ (Extract from Minutes of the Combined Policy Committee Meeting, the Pentagon), 4 July 1945. Note that the UK here was offering blanket consent to the use of atomic weapons against Japan, so it covered the attacks on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and indeed on further targets if the Americans had so desired.
4Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 6 Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1953), Ch. 19.
5A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford UP 1965), 601. Thanks to Gerry Hughes for bringing this quote to my attention.
6Ferenc Morton Szasz, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project: The Los Alamos Years (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan 1992). Cf. Sabine Lee, ‘In No Sense Vital and Actually Not Important: Reality and Perception of Britain's Contribution to the Development of Nuclear Weapons’, Contemporary British History 20/2 (June 2006), 159–85.
7Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press at Harvard Univ. 2005); Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (ed.), The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals (Stanford: Stanford UP 2007). See also Ward Wilson, ‘The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima’, International Security 31/4 (Spring 2007), 162–79.
8CAB 126/146, ‘Use of the Weapon against Third Parties’, 4 July 1945.
9John Ehrman, History of the Second World War: Grand Strategy, Vol. 6 October 1944–August 1945 (London: HMSO 1956), 299.
10Ibid. and CAB 101/45, John Ehrman, The Atomic Bomb: An Account of British Policy in the Second World War (London: published in secret for the use of the Cabinet Office 1953); Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945 (London: Macmillan 1964).
11For instance, Andrew J. Pierre, Nuclear Politics: The British Experience with an Independent Strategic Force, 1939–1970 (London: Oxford UP 1972); John Baylis, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1984: The Special Relationship (London: Macmillan 1984); Roger Ruston, A Say in the End of the World: Morals and British Nuclear Weapons Policy, 1941–1987 (Oxford: Oxford UP 1990).
12Ehrman, Grand Strategy, 298.
13Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 370.
14Note that authors whom I am labeling ‘revisionist’ about Churchill may or may not also be ‘revisionist’ about Truman, and vice versa. The key revisionist text on Churchill and the bomb is Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies, 3rd ed. (Stanford UP 2003). See also Barton J. Bernstein, ‘The Uneasy Alliance: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Atomic Bomb, 1940–1945’, Western Political Quarterly 29/2 (June 1976), 202–30; Sean L. Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb against Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2008).
15Bernstein, ‘The Uneasy Alliance’, 202.
16Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 83.
17Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told[1962] (New York: Da Capo 1983), 408.
18Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, War Diaries (1939–1945) of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (London: Weidenfeld 2001), 709. This quote was considerably sanitized in earlier published versions of the diaries.
19The internal discussions that eventually led Ehrman to downplay the Blackett angle can be traced in CAB 103/353.
20Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 370.
21[Oxford, Oxford University Bodleian Library Special Collections], [Rudolf] Peierls Papers, misc b197, Sir Henry Dale, ‘Memorandum on Mrs Gowing's Draft’, 20 June 1963.
22Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 371. Gowing more clearly recognizes Churchill's resistance to such discussion in Margaret Gowing and Lorna Arnold, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, Vol. 1 [1974] (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan 1988), 5.
23Peter Hennessy notes that a single briefing given in February 1945 to King George VI's Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, resulted in his knowing ‘far more about the bomb than any member of the War Cabinet, Churchill and Anderson apart’. Peter Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb, British Academy Occasional Papers No. 11 (Oxford: Oxford UP 2007), 3.
24PREM 3/139/2, Anderson to Churchill, with Churchill's annotations, 21 March 1944. See also PREM 3/139/11A, Churchill to Ismay, 19 April 1945. Churchill did permit the Chiefs to be informed of the progress of the German atomic weapons program, notably in a Nov. 1944 briefing which is referred to in Brooke's diaries (Danchev and Todman, War Diaries, 626). On this point see also F.H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, Vol. 3, Part 2 (London: HMSO 1988), 583–92 and Appendix 29.
25Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb, 4. See also Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London: Weidenfeld 1982), 267–8.
26Mountbatten expressed his distress at having been kept in the dark directly to President Truman at Potsdam on 25 July. See Philip Ziegler (ed.), Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten: Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia, 1943–1946 (London: Collins 1988), 231–2.
27Gowing also notes the objections lodged by the scientists Sir Henry Dale and Sir Charles Darwin. Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 370–1. See also Len Scott and Stephen Twigge, Planning Armageddon: Britain, the United States and the Command of Nuclear Forces, 1945–1964 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic 2000).
28PREM 3/139/6, Cherwell to Prime Minister, 27 March 1945.
29Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton 1978), 533–4.
30Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1995).
31PREM 3/139/10, ‘Tube Alloys’, 18 Sept. 1944. Italics added.
32Dale, ‘Memorandum on Mrs Gowing's Draft’.
33See, e.g., Peter Boyle, ‘Reversion to Isolationism? The British Foreign Office View of American Attitudes to Isolationism and Internationalism during World War II’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 8/1 (March 1997), 168–83.
34John Ikenberry, ‘A World Economy Restored: Expert Consensus and the Anglo-American Postwar Settlement’, International Organization 46/1 (Winter 1992), 289–321.
35See especially Barton J. Bernstein, ‘The Quest for Security: American Foreign Policy and International Control of Atomic Energy, 1942–1946’, Journal of American History 60/4 (March 1974), 1003–44. Other accounts include Joseph I. Lieberman, The Scorpion and the Tarantula: The Struggle to Control Atomic Weapons 1945–1949 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1970); Joseph Manzione, ‘“Amusing and Amazing and Practical and Military”: The Legacy of Scientific Internationalism in American Foreign Policy, 1945–1963’, Diplomatic History 24/1 (Winter 2000), 21–56.
36Gowing clearly recognizes that Bohr had company and devotes a good deal of attention to the close interactions between Bohr and British officials. But even she maintains the ‘solitary crusade’ trope by insisting that the international control debate ‘had been instigated by, and centred round’ the scientist (Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 346).
37The diplomatic wrangling of the 1941–43 period has been well covered in the literature. In addition to the previously cited works on Anglo-American atomic diplomacy, see also Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr, The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Vol. 1 1939–1946[1962] (Berkeley and Los Angeles : Univ. of California Press 1990); James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Stanford: Stanford UP 1993).
38CAB 126/150, ‘Tube Alloys: Note on Existing Obligations Regarding Exchange of Information Etc’, 8 March 1944.
39Oxford, Oxford University Bodleian Library Special Collections, Anderson Papers, ms Eng 7218, Norman Brook interview notes by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, 11–12 July 1959.
40Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King could also be named here, though he played a less active role in Anderson's lobbying effort. On King's stance see PREM 3/139/11A, Cherwell to Churchill, 10 May 1944.
41Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, John Anderson, Viscount Waverley (London: Macmillan 1962), 296–7.
42CAB 126/39, Bohr to Anderson, 16 Feb. 1944.
43CAB 126/332, Akers to Perrin, 27 Jan. 1944.
44CAB 126/39, Halifax to Anderson, 18 Feb. 1944.
45PREM 3/139/2, Anderson to Churchill, with Churchill's annotations, 21 March 1944.
46PREM 3/139/2, Anderson to Churchill, with Churchill's annotations, 27 April 1944.
47Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 352.
48London, Royal Society, Henry Dale Papers, 93 HD 54.5.6, Dale to Cherwell, 11 May 1944.
49Szasz, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project, 78.
50PREM 3/139/11A, Anderson to Churchill, 15 June 1944, and Churchill to Anderson, 16 June 1944.
51See e.g. CAB 126/39, Bohr to Gorell Barnes, 6 July 1944.
52CAB 126/39, Campbell to Anderson, 15 July 1944.
53CAB 126/39, Campbell to Anderson, 25 Aug. 1944.
54CAB 126/40, Frankfurter to Halifax, 18 April 1945 (passed along to Anderson on 20 April 1945).
55Hershberg, James B. Conant, 205–207 contends that Bohr's initiative might have received a much warmer hearing if he had first briefed Conant on the matter. Hershberg's judgment is probably right, but as this article demonstrates, Churchill was adamant about keeping the matter between him and Roosevelt. Therefore Bohr's British handlers needed to go straight for the head.
56PREM 3/139/10, ‘Tube Alloys’, 18 Sept. 1944.
57Septimus H. Paul, Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations, 1941–1952 (Columbus: Ohio State UP 2000), 66.
58CAB 127/201, Churchill to Cherwell via Halifax, 20 Sept. 1944.
59CAB 126/39, Cherwell to Churchill, 23 Sept. 1944. Halifax and Campbell participated in the drafting of Cherwell's note, with Anderson overseeing the effort.
60Though Halifax did lend a hand in April 1945; Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 362.
61CAB 126/45, Makins to Rickett, 23 June 1945 (first memo).
62CAB 126/45, Makins to Rickett, 23 June 1945 (second memo).
63CAB 126/40, Rickett to Anderson, 9 July 1945.
64CAB 126/45, Anderson to Halifax, 25 July 1945.
65PREM 3/139/5, Anderson to Churchill, with Churchill's annotations, 26 Jan. 1945.
66Bertrand Goldschmidt, Atomic Rivals, trans. Georges M. Temmer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP 1990).
67PREM 3/139/6, Eden to Churchill, 20 March 1945. It is hard to know how comprehending Eden was about the bomb as of mid-1945. But at least as of mid-1944, it is clear that he knew little and understood less. See PREM 3/139/2, Gorell Barnes to J. M. Martin, 20 June 1944.
68PREM 3/139/6, Churchill to Eden, 8 Apr. 1945.
69Though note that in May 1945 Churchill did at long last agree to let Anderson form a long-term atomic planning committee. The committee's draft report of 11 June 1945, with self-admitted ‘sketchy and vague’ recommendations, is at CAB 126/218.
70The key document for the revisionists' case is a draft March 1945 memo (PREM 3/139/6, Churchill to Eden, 20 March 1945) flatly rejecting the idea of including France in the circle of atomic cooperation: ‘There is nothing that de Gaulle would like better than to have plenty of T. A. [Tube Alloys] to punish Britain … . I shall certainly continue to urge the President not to make or permit the slightest disclosure to France or Russia. Even six months will make a difference should it come to a show-down with Russia, or indeed with de Gaulle.’ But this is only a single statement whose passionate language can be ascribed to Churchill's loathing for his nemesis de Gaulle. And what is more, the final version of the memo that Churchill actually ended up sending to Eden no longer included the draft version's most important claims about the value of the bomb.
71Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, revised ed. (London: Pluto Press 1994).
72Ibid., 297. Italics in original.
73Ibid., 297.
74Ibid., 115. Note that apart from a few references to Churchill Alperovitz devotes essentially no attention to the British side of the story in this work; and in his The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, the focus on Washington is even more pronounced.
75Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy, 149.
76Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 249.
77‘Summarized Note of the Prime Minister's Conversation with President Truman at Luncheon on 18 July 1945 [PREM 3/430/8]’, Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series 1, Vol. 1 (London: HMSO 1984), 367–71.
78Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 377.
79Bernstein, ‘The Uneasy Alliance’, 207.
80The British Chiefs of Staff also did not believe that Britain was fated to be irrelevant in the Pacific, and indeed at Potsdam they pushed to extend the US-UK Combined Chiefs of Staff structure over the region. See Thomas Hall, ‘“Mere Drops in the Ocean”: The Politics and Planning of the Contribution of the British Commonwealth to the Final Defeat of Japan, 1944–45’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 16/1 (2005), esp. 101–3.
81Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War (New York: Knopf 1980).
82In 1941 Churchill approved Britain's original bomb project with the words, ‘Although personally I am quite content with the existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.’ PREM 3/139/8A, Churchill to Ismay, 30 Aug. 1941.
83Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (Princeton: Princeton UP 1966), 87–8.
84The only partial exception is the previously mentioned PREM 3/139/6, Churchill to Eden, 20 March 1945.
85Cited in Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 227.
86Ibid.
87See Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton: Princeton UP 2007).
88My argument here draws on neo-functionalist theories of supranational integration. See Ernst Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces 1950–- 57, new ed. (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP 2004).
89See, e.g., Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America (New York: The Free Press 2005); Henry Butterfield Ryan, The Vision of Anglo-America: The US-UK Alliance and the Emerging Cold War, 1943–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1987). See also David Reynolds, ‘Rethinking Anglo-American Relations’, International Affairs 65/1 (Winter 1988–89), 89–111.
90See Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 145 n.1.
92PREM 3/139/11A, Churchill to Cherwell, 27 May 1944.
91Roosevelt seems to have felt likewise. See Bernstein, ‘The Uneasy Alliance’.
93Cited in Saul Kelly, ‘No Ordinary Foreign Office Official: Sir Roger Makins and Anglo-American Atomic Relations, 1945–55’, Contemporary British History 14/4 (Winter 2000), 108. The documents establishing the trust are at PREM 3/139/10.
94Jonathan E. Helmreich, Gathering Rare Ores: The Diplomacy of Uranium Acquisition, 1943–54 (Princeton: Princeton UP 1986).
95Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 8, Never Despair, 1945–1965 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1988), 249.
96See Hall, ‘Mere Drops in the Ocean’; Mark Jacobsen, ‘Winston Churchill and the Third Front’, Journal of Strategic Studies 14/3 (Sept. 1991), 337–62; Christopher Baxter, ‘In Pursuit of a Pacific Strategy: British Planning for the Defeat of Japan, 1943–45’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 15/2 (June 2004), 253–77; Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, ‘One Last Crusade: The British Pacific Fleet and its Impact on the Anglo-American Alliance’, English Historical Review 121/491 (April 2006), 429–66.