“Stalking Horses”: The American Influence on British Civil Nuclear Identity, 1946-1956

ABSTRACT

This analysis charts the emergence of a distinct British nuclear culture during the early post-war years and investigates the various forms of influence that the United States exercised on its development. Beginning with a disastrous breakdown of transatlantic nuclear co-operation in 1946, it establishes the true degree of sovereignty enjoyed by Britain’s nuclear engineers as they navigated a new relationship with a senior partner that acted simultaneously as a vital knowledge donor and commercial competitor. The analysis next highlights how competition with Washington’s vast atomic project only magnified the pre-existing appreciation of thrift engrained in British physicists, in turn causing them to develop an institutional self-image that prized nuclear capabilities more for their technical integrity than their political convenience. In this way, Britain’s atomic specialists identified a role for themselves as the spiritual guardians of a technology that was just beginning to embark upon a global journey.

In his 1982 work The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, David Reynolds observed that British attitudes towards the United States during the interwar years could best be summarised as a blend of doubt, hope, and fear. For the sceptics, he noted, indiscretions such as Washington’s failure to join the League of Nations or its passage of numerous Neutrality Acts only proved its immaturity as a burgeoning Power. Faced with a former ally who would not take its responsible place in world affairs, therefore, Britain’s policy became “predicated on the experience of American unreliability and the assumption of American isolationism”. More hopeful were those observers who clung to ethnic identity as a binding tie. Despite its cultural inferiority and unsophisticated image, they contended, the United States was still fundamentally an Anglo-Saxon province that they could coax into co-operation. But what about the risks? American assistance, even framed as an alliance, might come at a price too great for a fragile Imperial Power to bear. The conflict of 1914–1918 had humiliated Britain by indebting it to a nation that was eclipsing it commercially and militarily; what the recent world war had started, another might complete.¹

In the wider world, meanwhile, a collapse of the multilateral economy cautiously reconstructed after 1918 marred the interwar years. Nationalist tendencies inspired during the Great Depression brought with them monetary blocs that encouraged states to buy from their own customers to suppress payment imbalances.² Although the late 1930s witnessed a brief attempt to re-establish liberal trading regimes, the return of war soon threw Britain into a dependence on American imports. As Reynolds has argued, it was only in this extreme situation, “when the European equilibrium tilted suddenly and dramatically” against the two surviving democracies, that notions of finding an influential role for Britain within a new United States-led global system made sense.³ As such, Washington’s support for an open world economy, fortified by the 1941 Lend-Lease agreement, gradually won over British policy-makers who had previously believed that only a large Sterling Area protected by financial controls could guarantee Britain’s post-war stability. With London thus assured of a viable new economic and security system, and a strong British role within it, the argument progressively evolved into one of who should lead the new arrangement, rather than if it should occur at all.⁴ As Reynolds put it:

Britain and the United States were both developed Western powers, with similar cultural traditions and a shared interest in upholding the international status quo, of which they were the major beneficiaries, against the developing industrial nations …. They were thus in one sense “have” states, fending off the assaults of the “have nots”.⁵

Nowhere was this notion of “haves and have-nots” more pertinent than in the insular nuclear world, where squabbles over ownership abounded from the outset. By 1945, having collaborated on a scientific venture unprecedented in its complexity and political importance, the two allies found themselves sharing the keys to a potent new industry. Civil nuclear technology offered post-war Britain the economic electricity it needed to power reconstruction. Looking overseas, it could also create a lucrative new export trade and lift under-developed regions from the poverty that made them susceptible to communism. Across both cases, early engagement by a nuclear state could mould a client into becoming a permanent technological – and economic – dependent. Civil reactors therefore promised power, both physical and political.

Current literature on Anglo-American nuclear relations focuses predominantly on the military aspects of the technology that more greatly influenced contemporary affairs, for instance, that Britain’s self-esteem as a Great Power hinged on a symbolic ability to produce atomic armaments independently.⁶ Nuclear weapons also enhanced London’s partnership potential, something characterised as Britain and United States as two policemen with the former acting as “the sentinel for the New World in the Old”.⁷ Developing this concept further, there is an argument about how the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement came at the price of making London’s bomb dependent on American planning and technology; another questions the operational independence of Britain’s V-Bomber fleet.⁸ Indeed, such notions have recently acquired renewed pertinence given the uncertainty surrounding the Royal Navy’s ability to maintain a nuclear deterrent in the event of Scottish independence.⁹

With existing scholarship framing nuclear independence largely in terms of a nation’s ability to produce and deploy atomic weapons, this analysis considers how the concept evolved during the earliest civil nuclear relationships. Notions of British “nuclear culture” have received renewed interest of late; whilst a seminal study defined the term as the “knowledge, imagery, and artefacts of applied nuclear physics”, a more recent analysis has widened this viewpoint to incorporate “the sum of all experiences with regard to civilian and military uses of atomic energy”.¹⁰ Turning to transatlantic relations, the latter has also contributed the crucial motif of the United States as a “nuclear reference culture”, whose grand atomic projects only re-enforced its superiority over a British scientific corpus that was increasingly being defined by its modest resources.¹¹

In adopting the perspective of independence to reappraise Britain’s nuclear self-image, this examination will also utilise existing studies of international atomic diplomacy. Here, there are several motivations identified that propel nuclear co-operation, including the need to strengthen allies, enforce non-proliferation, or cultivate export markets.¹² A useful metric for analysing atomic partnerships also exists for placing nuclear relationships onto a spectrum between dependency and self-reliance, with degrees of sensitivity in between. Accordingly, “self-reliance implies the ability to fulfil a state’s needs by utilising its indigenous resources; dependence means that these needs can only met through the use of resources controlled by other states”.¹³ Sensitivity, therefore, denotes the ease with which a state can find alternate means of fulfiling its needs when a partner withholds a resource, whilst interdependence concerns a state’s ability to retaliate should this occur. Finally, there is the identification of “positive interdependence” as a state in which both participants can benefit simultaneously, as opposed to the “negative interdependence” under which only one nation may profit at a time.¹⁴

Building on Reynolds’ assessment of Anglo-American relations in 1940, this analysis demonstrates how London’s early post-war civil nuclear relations with Washington quickly evolved from a position of tenuous co-operation to one of outright competition. It expands the prevalent notion of “independence” based on sovereignty over infrastructure and capabilities, showing how Britain’s nuclear assets and its institutional atomic identity were continuously influenced by its unreliable ally. Importantly, it also utilises the viewpoints of leading scientists to show how transatlantic comparisons first re-enforced the existing appreciation of thrift that underpinned Britain’s nuclear research culture and then inspired a new self-image that portrayed London as an “honest broker” of nuclear wares. By inserting the technical perspective beside the preponderant political narrative, this study demonstrates how Anglo-American competition became central to Britain’s understanding of its civil nuclear capabilities.

Understanding the prodigious esteem for thrift embedded within Britain’s nuclear self-image derives from the austere atmosphere its interwar academia. As early as 1879, Lord Rayleigh, a theoretical and experimental physicist, had lamented the lack of a steam engine or acoustic apparatus at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, whilst students in the 1920s – amongst them several future nuclear luminaries – were expected to blow glass vacuum containers for themselves.¹⁵ Born of necessity, this “string and sealing wax” approach quickly became synonymous with British ingenuity: an attitude later treasured as a source of pride against more profligate American methods. Take, for example, the mathematician Jacob Bronowski, who reported the excitement that followed John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton’s first “splitting” of the atom in 1932. Cockcroft, he recalled, was “slapping everybody on the shoulders and declaring that it had been done with an old tobacco tin and some neutrons – ‘and the Americans have been spending millions’”.¹⁶ Even though taking important strides to improve Britain’s post-war educational frameworks, academic research continued to suffer from inadequate support. In 1952, for instance, the national University Grants Committee complained, “much scientific work of importance and distinction is being carried on in conditions which could not fail to create a highly unfavourable impression upon the minds of visitors from abroad”.¹⁷ Government bodies also bemoaned their straitened circumstances, with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research warning that growing demands for funding “made it impossible to restore basic scientific work to the level necessary for the efficiency of the Department’s work and for the scientific health of the staff”.¹⁸

Similar struggles beset Britain’s earliest nuclear weapons ventures, established in 1940 under the codename “Tube Alloys”. The effort eventually merged into a shared undertaking with the Canadian government but, by 1943, it had become obvious that the only nation immediately capable of building the atomic bomb was the United States. With little choice but to collaborate before their knowledge became obsolete, British negotiators therefore signed the secret 1943 Quebec agreement that granted Washington leadership of a new joint enterprise. Crucially, the agreement prioritised immediate military needs above other considerations; during the research and development stage, therefore, there was to be “full and effective interchange of information” amongst Allied scientists, but ad hoc arrangements would govern exchanges on the design and operation of installed plant to guarantee the swift achievement of the objective. Acknowledging, too, the disproportionate material contributions expected of the United States, a Combined Policy Committee [CPC] emerged with three American representatives, two British, and one Canadian, whilst the agreement’s fourth clause expressly prohibited London from developing civil atomic technology unless so authorised by the American president.¹⁹ By defining strict safeguards that prevented Washington from donating commercially valuable research to potential competitors, Quebec thus codified perfectly the concept of competitive co-operation.

Although an Anglo-American meeting at Hyde Park, New York in 1944 produced a promise to continue the Allied venture after the war, President Franklin Roosevelt’s death the following year essentially terminated the close political bond that had sustained the wartime nuclear relationship. In 1946, an unknowing Congress passed the McMahon Act, at a stroke preventing the transmission of “Restricted Data” to any foreign state. With British scientists forced to return home, London’s diplomats began efforts to acquire whatever additional cost-saving information they could glean, whilst the Cabinet’s “GEN-75 committee” charged with determining British nuclear policy simultaneously demanded a full industrial-military nuclear programme designed to re-assert Britain’s prestige and prove its martial credentials to Washington.²⁰ Early proposals prioritised continued co-operation with Canada, but Whitehall soon dismissed an overseas plutonium pile for fear that it could “lend colour to the American suggestion that an atomic energy plant in the United Kingdom might be vulnerable”.²¹ Instead, the British built three new domestic nuclear hubs; Cockcroft’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment [AERE] at Harwell, an Industrial Group under engineer Christopher Hinton at Risley, and a weapons establishment headed by William Penney at Aldermaston.

The McMahon schism left the United States as the only true “have” nuclear state at war’s end, possessing as it did both an enormous atomic infrastructure and the technical cadre to serve it. In the second tier sat Britain, with its sizeable scientific corpus, and Canada, by virtue of its laboratory at Chalk River. Third came states including Belgium, France, and Norway, whose material or intellectual contributions had won them limited formal rights to Allied nuclear knowledge. Finally, the involvement of Commonwealth manpower in the wartime effort left Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa with a moral claim for post-war nuclear assistance, albeit one that London was forced to sacrifice in its campaign to appease nervous American legislators. By 1946, therefore, Britain had been locked into a position that it charitably considered special; too unreliable to enjoy American approval, but too poor to abandon trying to earn it.

The challenge of constructing sovereign nuclear assets in a period of severe austerity quickly forced Britain’s nuclear designers to prize economy above almost all other considerations. Despite its official refusal to communicate nuclear information, meanwhile, Washington nonetheless continued to conduct limited atomic exchanges when such instances advanced its national goals. With Britain’s relative poverty thus encouraging it to accommodate these new demands wherever possible, American influence would continue to shape key elements of Britain’s nuclear organisation, including its fuel, plant, and manpower.

The first relaxation of Washington’s information blackout came from its growing hunger for the uranium then distributed equally amongst the CPC states through their joint procurement body, the Combined Development Trust – later Agency [CDA]. Strategic considerations were also at play; Congress began hearings on the European Recovery Programme in late 1947, raising the need for a new nuclear agreement to stymie questions into why uranium was not amongst the strategic materials supplied to the United States by participant nations.²² The challenge confronting Secretary of State George Marshall would therefore be to establish a fresh baseline for co-operation that avoided the pitfall of Article 102 in the United Nations Charter requiring the public registration of formal treaties.²³ Importantly, the arrangement itself would need to dissolve the Quebec agreement and, with it, Britain’s veto over any future American nuclear strike. American planners also wished for the atomic allies to expand global uranium production aggressively and change ore allocation protocols from an equal split to a needs-driven principle, with Britain storing its share in Canada.²⁴ To incentivise these major concessions, the Americans offered to resume “regular friendly and informal contact” via the CPC and convened a technical committee to discuss fields where information exchanges would be appropriate.²⁵

Desperate for nuclear data, the British delegation acquiesced in the proposal and the new “Modus Vivendi” came into effect in January 1948. In exchange for cancelling the Quebec and Hyde Park agreements, and for satisfying Washington’s voracious demands for ore, Britain gained information in nine key fields negotiated by Cockcroft with American scientists Vannevar Bush and James Fisk; at the same time, the CPC reactivated as a permanent forum for technical discussions. In this way, the Modus Vivendi marked an important change in the Anglo-American atomic relationship; instead of the high-political actors who had traditionally steered proceedings, now the scientific specialists would grind out the substance of association on a more granular level.

A second, small, revival of Allied collaboration occurred in 1951. Motivated by a desire to use Canadian plants to produce fuel for its reactors and submarines, Washington revised the McMahon Act to permit the transfer of “Restricted Data” on uranium purification and reactor development to its allies when this benefited the common defence.²⁶ The proposals failed to excite London’s diplomats; in a letter to Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Roger Makins, the Foreign Office deputy under-secretary who served in Washington from 1945 to 1947, noted that the amendments still required a favourable interpretation by American officials of their own legislation, a venture in which Britain’s experience had historically been “uniformly unhappy”.²⁷ Citing the fate of previous agreements, he highlighted that the gap between the intent and execution of legislation like the Modus Vivendi served only to “demonstrate how American lawyers completely frustrate the purpose of an agreement”. Churchill’s paymaster-general – and close personal advisor – Lord Cherwell, went further, thundering that the amendment in fact proved the futility of trying to mollify Washington any further.²⁸ “To achieve this meagre result”, he protested, “we have delayed our own programme, abandoned the third pile with its foundations already in, and are now postponing our new pile programme”. Cherwell continued: “the Combined Development Agency has continued to function for American benefit and its operations may now become seriously embarrassing to us”. Harwell echoed these views; British scientists there complained that American security limitations engendered a “very frigid and unpromising” atmosphere that nullified co-operation at international conferences.²⁹

The deliberations over uranium reflected the broader trend in which the United States had exited the war in a wealthier and more productive state than any nation on earth.³⁰ The consequences of such growth were deeply concerning, prompting the Australian physicist, Mark Oliphant, to warn Cockcroft, “there simply is not enough material – especially some metals – in the world to provide for an overall economy at the level of the USA”.³¹ His anxiety was soon justified as American prospectors began to hunt for non-CDA ore sources in the British Dominions, an action that forced London to employ spoiling tactics to defend its interests. Following one attempt by Washington to offer technical information to Canberra in exchange for uranium in June 1953, for example, the Official Committee on Atomic Energy [OCAE], Whitehall’s primary forum for nuclear policy, undertook to leave the Australian government in the “proper frame of mind” regarding the American tendency to make fallacious promises.³²

Taken at face value, the first interactions of the post-McMahon era appeared to benefit London enormously by allowing it to trade surplus uranium for desperately needed information. Looking more closely, however, the decision to liquidate its wartime privileges to satisfy short-term needs underlined Britain’s on-going struggle with its limited means. In reducing its sensitivity to American knowledge at the cost of increasing its exposure to centrally procured uranium, Britain had in fact sacrificed its near-autonomy in nuclear fuel. The importance of this loss cannot be overstated: at a Select Committee hearing in 1952, Cockcroft openly supported United States Atomic Energy Commission [AEC] Chairman Gordon Dean’s assertion that Washington’s uranium stockpile now constituted the greatest source of wealth ever gathered in human history.³³ By forfeiting so precious a commodity just to keep nuclear relations alive, London not only allowed itself to be squeezed out of its existing rights to a resource intimately associated with a nation’s war-making ability, but it also actively increased its sensitivity to a procurement agency dominated by American influence.

Britain’s plant construction phase further exposed its inability to escape international dependencies. Ministry of Supply officials bemoaned the difficulty of installing “a number of buildings and plants of types hitherto unknown”, the scarcity of construction manpower and supplies, and the struggles of persuading industry to produce specialist equipment with limited market value.³⁴ Nationalistic biases in Whitehall’s procurement process exacerbated these challenges, with Ministry of Works’ officials blaming construction delays at Harwell on the requirement to “build a British research station with British goods”. Revealingly, the establishment’s MP addressed these concerns by suggesting that the Ministry relax its protectionist attitude and import foreign equipment – including Belgian mining ventilation apparatus – to hasten the laboratory’s launch.³⁵ In the end, the task of constructing an authentically sovereign nuclear project would prove too great for British planners, and Harwell’s staff remained dependent on Canadian facilities at Chalk River for several years. This decision in turn fostered considerable rancour in Ottawa. As Canada’s minister responsible for atomic policy, C.D. Howe, complained, London “insists on a UK programme, but can only carry out that programme with a great deal of help from this Continent”, before adding that Canada’s atomic assets were “to all intents and purposes an experimental laboratory and designing establishment for the UK plant”.³⁶

Subtler forces arising from the wartime experience of British technicians complemented these “hard” foreign influences. Most obvious amongst these was that the expectations of returning scientists, who demanded modern facilities scaled to match those they had enjoyed in the United States, magnified the challenge of constructing Britain’s new laboratories. Harwell’s blueprints for a hot chemistry facility, for instance, were judged against Glenn Seaborg’s Berkeley laboratory, whilst ventilation specifications were informed by American experience at Oak Ridge and Chicago.³⁷ Indeed, so ambitious were London’s plans that some leading scientists even demanded a fundamental re-appraisal of Britain’s nuclear objectives. Writing to his superior at Harwell, the chemist, Robert Spence, noted with alarm the “enormous amount of chemical and chemical engineering work which the Americans did even as early as 1942 and which we have not even begun”.³⁸ For Britain, he argued, “it would be much wiser if we dropped all our production schemes for five years and pushed on with research. This would mean that we should make fewer costly mistakes”.

The terms of the Modus Vivendi also sustained Washington’s on-going influence, encouraging resource-starved British designers to pursue development patterns incentivised by the agreement. Lacking, for example, the vast spaces that isolated American water-cooled reactors in case of explosions resulting from a failure in their pumping systems, the engineers of Windscale’s plutonium pile selected instead a gas-cooled system that greatly reduced the risk of an accident at the cost of small increases to air-disseminated activity. They eventually revised their design to use fuel elements housed in finned cans – as opposed to the smooth American equivalent – enabling a reactor cooled with normal air at a considerable saving of time and cost.³⁹ Yet, in 1948, despite this departure from American models, Cockcroft nonetheless undertook extensive discussions with the American physicist, Edward Teller, to compare views on site location risks. For his part, Teller advised Harwell’s director on how to calculate the distance required to separate reactors from population centres, and the two also debated safety systems and fire response measures.⁴⁰ Such exchanges highlighted the natural bias embedded by the Modus Vivendi; with Britain heavily incentivised for financial and engineering reasons to cherish every scrap of information it could gain, its scientists quickly acquired a vested interest in consulting their American peers wherever the agreement allowed. For this reason alone, existing American practices would continue to have a significant impact, albeit diminishing, on the British atomic project.

The Modus Vivendi also held long-term implications for Britain’s plant options by limiting its access to fuel. Encouraged to stretch their now-limited supplies of uranium, British engineers elected to build an enrichment factory that could increase plutonium output by re-invigorating spent fuel rods with fortified material. However, although the scheme would overcome Washington’s embargo on sharing information regarding plutonium production, the provision of such plant also set in train a line of research that would not blossom for many years.⁴¹ Second-generation “fast reactors” required enriched fuel to release unmoderated neutrons for capture in a uranium blanket, in turn producing more plutonium-239 for fuel or bombs. By commissioning a gaseous diffusion enrichment plant at such an early stage – a design choice that itself mimicked Washington’s decision to abandon centrifuge technology – British ministers therefore knowingly began a development cycle for a reactor that would not exist, even in prototype, until 1959.⁴²

As a final point, there is the consideration of how Britain’s limited manpower provision was further depleted by the international demand for talent. At home, Harwell was already battling with government departments for scientific staff in the face of onerous security procedures that disadvantaged its recruitment drives.⁴³ Civil Service pay scales were choking nuclear personnel streams, with junior scientific officers often earning 30% less than their privately-employed counterparts. Young scientists working at remote atomic establishments also relied on the quality of provided housing and could not publish reputation-building papers due to security restrictions on their research.⁴⁴ This gluttony of industry exacerbated the AERE’s struggle to find new workers, with Cockcroft complaining that Imperial Chemical Industries [ICI] in particular were bookmarking large portions of entire university cohorts.⁴⁵ Nor was the process of decamping the British contingent back from Canada unproblematic. Writing to Canada’s National Research Council President C.J. Mackenzie in 1946, Canadian physicist J.A. Gray lauded the British staff, noting that “some of the men are very good and an effort should be made to retain as many as is possible”.⁴⁶ Having lived at Chalk River for some years, several British staff members chose to relocate permanently rather than return to domestic austerity. With American overtures to British staff also monitored closely, Cherwell rated Britain’s brainpower as the last of its nuclear assets that could still raise interest in Washington; “what they really would like”, he argued, “would be some of our best men whom they will no doubt try to lure away”.⁴⁷ Indeed, Britain continued to lend some of its key staff to the United States in the hope that they might glean valuable information through their activities.⁴⁸

The attempt to decouple Britain from its Canadian foothold revealed much about the growing international market for nuclear talent. In a conversation with the British scientific advisor, Alexander King, during spring 1947, Mackenzie voiced his fear that London’s domestic nuclear project would starve Chalk River of fresh British talent.⁴⁹ Keenly sensitive to Canadian opinion, the British high commissioner in Ottawa, Alexander Clutterbuck, promptly requested the head of Britain’s Scientific Mission in North America, physicist James Chadwick, to demonstrate that the newly-separated British and Canadian projects would still “dovetail together” by pooling information and personnel, with London attaching equal importance to both.⁵⁰ In response, Chadwick retorted, “we maintain a considerable team … at Chalk River, and we do this in spite of our great need of these men in this country”. Concluding sharply, he added, “our object in this is to help the Canadians, not make use of them”.⁵¹

Mackenzie’s anxieties about failing to attract senior UK staff complemented British concerns that young scientists sent abroad might never return. However, such worries unfailingly appeared in optimistic terms; Cockcroft for instance, attempted to explain away Harwell’s high staff turnover and the steady drip of talent to Australia and Canada as the unavoidable product of wanderlust amongst Britain’s ambitious young minds, a factor that he claimed actually stimulated new talent and enlivened his laboratory.⁵² Ministry of Supply officials also made a virtue out of the AERE’s poor retention rates, contending that the novel nature of atomic energy made it an attractive field for young scientists to explore before they inevitably graduated from Britain’s “Atomic University”.⁵³ Couched heavily in the “make-do-and-mend” ethos of post-war British science, such notions represented a convenient fiction around which scientists, departmental officials, and Select Committee interrogators could coalesce. Britain’s atomic programme was a serious enterprise with serious objectives; to depict its core laboratory as merely a greenhouse for talent that would eventually progress to more worthwhile fields defies credibility, given Harwell’s position in the world’s most important scientific race.

The transatlantic brain drain would remain problematic for British science in general throughout this period. Ministry of Labour officials estimated that around 50 highly talented British science graduates were leaving for American institutions each year and, when the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy published its influential investigation into technical manpower in 1961, it chose the United States as Britain’s natural comparator, rather than any European nation.⁵⁴ So intense had the national hypochondria become that in that same year one journalist felt prompted to note “the belief that Britain is desperately short of skilled technical manpower has become, in the last decade, almost as essential a part of the national ethos as the loyal toast and the Test matches”.⁵⁵ But in the nuclear world, these debates indicated something more significant; despite the outward imagery of security fences and classification regimes, Britain was competing in a slowly-globalising pool of nuclear talent. Just as the Dominions saw their best technicians snatched up by Britain without hope of recompense, so, too, did London’s planners fear that British physicists might dream of Californian shores.

What emerges from this survey is the fact that the years after 1946 represented a period of pushback against decisions that, as Reynolds put it, “made sense” during the war. Attempting to stand on its own feet, Britain had to navigate counter-intuitive legacy entanglements that left some states selling the world’s most promising mineral extremely cheaply, others in charge of critical nuclear infrastructure inconveniently sited overseas, and still others despatching their desperately needed technicians abroad. The influence of foreign Powers, especially the United States, would thus remain an inescapable and significant reality of Britain’s earliest nuclear years.

The challenge of building a native project under straitened circumstances led a positive association with poverty to become a defining characteristic of Britain’s institutional nuclear identity. Already extant in its own right, this trait magnified when held up against the lavish resources available to American nuclear scientists, and through this comparison, it also acquired a new dimension. Instead of working purely to expand mankind’s knowledge, British scientists now gained gratification from what they could achieve on a budget a fraction that of their major competitor. Commenting on American methods in 1952, for example, Cherwell noted acidly that the virtue of doing things better had apparently been lost on Britain’s wealthier cousins. “Quite frankly we have very little to offer the Americans”, he wrote. “We believe that some of our processes are rather more economical than theirs, but they care little for this”.⁵⁶ But the shift in focus from what was being done to how it had been achieved was not just significant for highlighting how American superiority had compelled Britain to choose alternative metrics of self-worth. In making its own nuclear advances on a shoestring, London had provided a template for other budget-conscious nations that sought basic nuclear capabilities. British plants were simple but functional, and its processes cost-effective. In short, they were everything a potential customer looking for an entry point into the nuclear game would wish to buy.

The definitive step-change in Anglo-American relations occurred with President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” project. In late 1953, seeking a propaganda victory to offset his expansion of Washington’s atomic arsenal, Eisenhower proposed an international agency through which nuclear states would donate uranium for use by novice nations. Conceived initially as a way of denuding Soviet uranium stocks – which were smaller than American stores – the plan came with an offer to sell subsidised research reactors to willing partners, thereby embedding Washington into their early development patterns. The scheme excited Churchill, now prime minister again, who generously viewed the plan as both a vindication of his decision at Quebec to entrust “the future of commercial atomics” to forthcoming presidents, and as a springboard for one last personal attempt at achieving détente with Moscow.⁵⁷ Importantly, however, this desire to associate with grand initiatives may actually have blinded Churchill to the subtler motivations propelling his ally’s new policy: Eisenhower was keenly aware of Britain’s growing ability to export power reactors and now felt compelled to allow American firms to compete.⁵⁸

Another key aspect of the president’s initiative was that it permitted industrial firms to have access to the “Restricted Data” needed to commercialise nuclear technology. This feature delighted conservative voices on the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, where Chairman Sterling Cole applauded Atoms for Peace for advancing Washington’s “moral duty” to support foreign states whilst simultaneously encouraging domestic industry to share the burden of developing reactor technology.⁵⁹ Cole’s approval was prescient; Eisenhower’s legislative liberalisation quickly enabled domestic industry to produce several reactor designs, in turn providing the president with a flexible asset base from which to direct nuclear policy.⁶⁰

In London, meanwhile, Whitehall’s diplomats took a cynical view of Atoms for Peace, with Harold Caccia, the Foreign Office’s OCAE representative, asserting that the American planners were merely seeking to expend surplus fissile material now having reached their armament targets.⁶¹ Importantly, he also remarked on Washington’s naivety in failing to separate its military and civil nuclear aims. The proposal to release for industrial activities uranium that had originally been procured to fuel bombs “betrays the United States failure to appreciate that the uranium-producing countries have accepted a lower price … in the belief that they were making a contribution to the defence of the Western world”. In Caccia’s view, if Washington opted to convert Congolese uranium acquired under wartime agreements into fuel for foreign civil reactors, then Brussels – the Congo was a Belgian colony – would be entitled to protest. Taken in sum, however, he lauded Atoms for Peace as a chance to overhaul American legislation long rendered obsolete by Moscow’s acquisition of atomic weapons, even if certain amendments threatened to work “to the disadvantage of the United Kingdom”.⁶²

The notion of British nuclear exports had only just crested by the time of Atoms for Peace. Charged with conducting research and development of atomic energy, the Ministry of Supply enjoyed neither the capacity nor mandate to pursue a new export business and continually deferred such prospects for future consideration. Inspired by the enormous post-war pressure to reduce public expenditure, however, ministers wasted no time in pressing Cockcroft and Hinton to estimate when atomic expenditure might reap profits for the taxpayer.⁶³ The issue resurfaced at a 1952 Select Committee hearing when MPs asked Cockcroft to announce when Harwell would open atomic work to private capital in line with American practice.⁶⁴ Assessing the potential for private-public nuclear partnerships in Britain, Cockcroft responded that British industry had historically been reluctant to meet the challenge; ICI had demanded “a very pressing government directive” before it would abandon its export activities to assist Harwell, an attitude mirrored by other firms. “If they felt that they wanted to get into the business they would tell us”, Cockcroft concluded, “but they say that at present they are so busy with rearmament work that they would rather wait”.⁶⁵

As Britain’s atomic enterprise grew in stature so, too, did the calls for reform from politicians and scientists who cited the American example as a beacon of good sense. In a 1951 House of Lords debate, for example, Cherwell decried the humiliation of watching a “great and vital project” fester in its civil service shackles.⁶⁶ Yet having formerly been as critical of Britain’s slavish devotion to American foreign policy, he nonetheless regarded Washington’s nuclear organisation as a critical archetype. Motivated by a belief that the private sector could better perform research, he therefore lobbied for a new kind of public body that could deploy its resources with greater autonomy whilst working more closely with private industry, an arrangement that would itself ease co-operation with the similarly designed AEC. The connexion with industry was especially pertinent, and Cherwell lauded Washington’s early adoption of public-private enterprise models. “It will not be long before the sheer size of the undertaking will probably force us to entrust some part of the development and management of nuclear plants to industry”, he argued; “in doing so we shall of course only be doing what the Americans have done for the greater part of their programme from the outset”.⁶⁷

Naturally, there were opponents to reform. Fearing the removal of atomic energy from their portfolio, Ministry of Supply officials argued that the attraction of opening a new field and the security of civil service work compensated the mediocre salaries for government scientists.⁶⁸ At the Foreign Office, meanwhile, diplomats also warned against transferring atomic energy to a new corporation, stressing that the nuclear relationship with Washington simply constituted one of many vital political considerations those technical actors could not necessarily comprehend.⁶⁹ This antagonism was merely the latest scuffle in a debate that had accompanied atomic energy almost since birth. A project of this magnitude required resources that only the state could provide, but it also demanded expertise possessed by but a few eminent scientists. With Britain’s nuclear programme growing apace, the stage was now set for a review of whether Harwell and Risley had outgrown their government cradle.

The matter fell to a committee headed by Sir John Anderson, the one-time Tube Alloys minister recently anointed Viscount Waverley. Issued in July 1953, his report acknowledged that “the case for a form of control of the project which is more akin to the structure of a big industrial organisation” had grown considerably, as had the need for Britain’s nuclear establishments to co-operate more closely with industry. Importantly, Waverley noted also that every other country presently engaged with nuclear work had removed the endeavour from direct ministerial control, and so he recommended the establishment of a new corporation to be independent of, but still supervised by, government.⁷⁰ The Atomic Energy Authority [AEA] would employ a chairman and board comprising the three establishment directors and additional members as required. To facilitate speed, the report outlined special arrangements that would enable the corporation to compete more effectively for high-level talent, whilst financial controls were also relaxed to grant it greater delegated authority over spending on capital works. Finally, the report also recommended the AEA adopt the American practice of producing a total expenditure report that obscured its investment in weapons research.⁷¹

The debates preceding the AEA’s creation were vital for harmonising political and technical thinking, as scientists wishing to streamline their organisation joined forces with political actors who long demanded that private capital share the burden of atomic development. The solution was to establish a new body that would behave like a private concern and engage more extensively with industry, a notion that inevitably evoked comparison with the existing archetype across the Atlantic. Both Cherwell and Waverley openly cited the AEC as a model of good practice that enabled industry to share the capacity – and now the financial – burden of atomic research. To reform Britain’s effort along such lines – the hope – would release similar benefits whilst maximising compatibility with Washington’s Commission. In this way, then, American preferences found themselves bred into the DNA of the AEA from its very inception.

Amongst the first challenges that confronted the new body was steering Britain through the frothing nuclear marketplace. Stoked by the musings of Teller and Cockcroft that the peaceful atom could launch fanciful mega-projects to excavate Alaskan harbours or irrigate the Namibian desert, the 1950s witnessed a surge in excitement surrounding nuclear power.⁷² The first real vent for this optimism came at the International Conference on Atomic Energy that took place in Geneva during August 1955, just weeks after a four-Power summit there to thaw the Cold War. The conference acted as a trade fair for nuclear wares, and the briefing note supplied to the British representatives by AEA Chairman Edwin Plowden reveals much about Britain’s contemporary self-image. The world was desperate to believe “not merely that atomic energy can quickly be applied to peaceful uses, but that the “atomic powers” really do intend that it shall be so applied”, Plowden argued. “Every effort should therefore be made to give patient and reasoned answers even to questions which may be hopelessly unrealistic”. Addressing the looming spectre of Anglo-American commercial competition, Plowden reasoned carefully that Britain must not “meet competition elsewhere by promising what we cannot perform. What we have to offer in the reactor field is for some years to come necessarily less in quantity and less varied than our most obvious competitors’ wares”.⁷³ The exhibition floor itself soon demonstrated the disparity in resources. Writing to his mother from Geneva, Cockcroft reported “the most crowded week” he had ever experienced, noting that “the Americans are here in strength and have taken half a hotel and set up a fullscale organization including security and dozens of typists. We have a small office of about 5 staff at the Beau-Rivage Hotel and my Secretary”.⁷⁴

Yet despite its modest surroundings, the British exhibition performed strongly, with the AEA soon inundated with messages from both foreign states and domestic firms asking what support it could lend to an export drive. Indeed, so intense were the demands that Plowden hastily arranged meetings with Britain’s Pressurised Pile Producing Power and Plutonium [PIPPA] firms – those building Britain’s first full-size PIPPA reactor in Cumbria – to establish their views. At one of the first such exchanges that November, Plowden underlined British strengths in three key areas; “with luck”, he argued, “we would be the first to have designed and built commercial reactors for an electrical supply system”. Additionally, he noted that European countries experiencing energy shortages similar to Britain’s might disdain American enriched-uranium reactors that required an on-going supply of American-produced fuel.⁷⁵ Further discussions with the PIPPA firms a week later defined the situation more accurately; with Britain currently producing no spare enriched material, Hinton argued, its brightest export window looked to be around 1963 when surplus plutonium might fortify sales of second-generation fast reactors. Until then, the only power reactor available for immediate export would be the PIPPA that Britain had developed for itself. Small reactors were unlikely ever to compete with conventional power plants, the group contended; an economical large-scale model might however intercept some sales for Britain in countries that had cut their teeth on American training reactors provided under Atoms for Peace.⁷⁶

Through winter 1955–1956, the Authority’s technicians consulted with industry to determine the potential markets for British wares. The Working Group tasked with the question quickly asserted an over-estimation of Washington’s strength existed, with one member contending that the Americans had depressed the costs of their testing reactors by including second-hand components unavailable to foreign buyers. Additionally, the group’s industrial representatives reckoned that “it was unlikely that many, if indeed any, overseas countries would be willing to commit themselves to building nuclear power stations that had not been proved on home ground”, a notion soon validated by a request for a nuclear reactor at Mount Isa, a remote mining town in northern Queensland.⁷⁷ “Mount Isa is clearly not the place for anything experimental”, the Authority was told, “and absolute reliability over a considerable period of time would be regarded as outweighing quite a considerable reduction in power costs”.⁷⁸

Issued in March 1956, the Group’s report was upbeat about Britain’s export prospects. “The fact that we are limited to the PIPPA is not necessarily a disadvantage”, it argued. “In the first place the Americans … do not yet appear to have one that can compete with it”. Once again, with Washington’s integrity questioned, the report’s authors noted that buyers would be unlikely to make a large portion of their power-generating capacity dependent on supplies of enriched American fuel that might come with political conditions attached. Because the PIPPAs could operate even if access to British reprocessing plants were suspended, the Group inferred that customers would naturally prefer them to American systems that would break down if links to United States facilities failed.⁷⁹ With the energy-hungry plant required to enrich uranium laying beyond the means of power-strapped nations, an agreement to purchase an American reactor would leave the client permanently dependent on what amounted to exports of United States power. As Cockcroft summarised: “the U.S. diffusion plant can be thought of as bottling cheap Kentucky coal”.⁸⁰

With these views in mind, British atomic administrators gathered quickly around the concept of honesty as a distinguishing feature of their engagement offer. Washington’s insistence that small-scale reactors could compete with conventional power plants became a particular target for scorn, with the AEA’s economic advisor, J.A. Jukes, contending that only prestige concerns could motivate purchases of unviable American models in that range. The competitive dynamic did not linger far beneath the surface, however, and Jukes concluded wryly that it was “probably best for us not to give our views on the realism of the American figures but to let people find this out for themselves”.⁸¹ Authority officials also regarded with scepticism the advances of British firms towards American partners claiming to bear gifts. Reviewing one such approach in late 1956, J.C. Walker of the AEA’s Collaboration Branch dismissed a claim by Humphreys & Glasgow that they had secured the marketing rights for an operable American pressurised water reactor of the type only recently installed in Virginia. “Nobody can prevent a U.K. firm from buying, with its eyes open, a U.S. pup”, Walker noted.⁸² He then sniped, “the ease with which U.S. industry appears to confer worldwide marketing rights upon U.K. firms who have no nuclear experience whatever must be due, in part at least, to a desire use the U.K. innocent as a convenient stalking horse and whipping boy if anything goes wrong”. In essence, therefore, British officials considered the Americans to be naïve at best and dishonest at worst about their export capabilities and intentions. This in turn re-enforced their own self-regard as an honest actor; buying British, they argued, would involve the simple purchase of a product that would function without political subtext or infrastructural dependence.

What emerges from these discussions is a fundamental misalignment between London and Washington regarding the purpose of civil nuclear energy. As Plowden warned in his pre-Geneva briefing, “however anxious the ‘atomic powers’ may be to assist underdeveloped countries it is in practice only the countries already highly developed industrially who … are likely in these early stages to be able to exploit this new source of power”.⁸³ Indeed, Plowden actively counselled against assisting developing nations with atomic work at all, lest they fritter their meagre resources on unattainable goals. These attitudes contrasted starkly with opinion on Capitol Hill, where senior officials viewed atomic diplomacy as just one component of a broader strategy. Atoms for Peace promised to improve Washington’s image and instal it as a permanent stakeholder in foreign energy industries. Compared to the British focus on industrialised markets in Europe and Japan, the United States therefore cast its net more widely in a bid to prevent newly independent states from swapping their uranium for Soviet nuclear information. In the mind of Secretary of State John Dulles, therefore, Eisenhower’s plan would serve three purposes; strengthen alliances, secure nuclear materials, and “maintain world leadership in atomic energy – leadership which today is such a large element of our national prestige”.⁸⁴

At this juncture, it is useful to revisit another of Reynolds’ concepts, namely “the notion of a ‘world interest’, transcending yet encompassing the interests of individual nation states, of which the international leader is effectively the guardian”.⁸⁵ London and Washington shared a strategic interest in globalising civil nuclear energy; the technology might underpin developing economies and nurture new democracies. It might also fortify scientists to oppose authoritarian rule in partner states.⁸⁶ However, the precise mechanism for translating the wartime developmental advantage into an on-going benefit was disputed. The British preferred the established commercial methods that would facilitate exports without appending any complicating political factors. For the United States, however, the priority had become to create a new atomic order with themselves at the head. Britain would need to determine whether it could make itself a beneficiary of Eisenhower’s nuclear bazaar.

To summarise, this analysis has reconsidered the extent to which Britain’s early civil atomic project remained truly “independent”. Traditional histories contend that London’s desire to restore Anglo-American exchanges came second only to its desperation for native infrastructure, and that leading British engineers in fact welcomed the chance to improve on hastily-designed American plant.⁸⁷ Whilst there can be no doubt that the British endeavour was sovereign, however, several of its key components nonetheless remained sensitive to American influence for many years. Fuel allocations, for instance, had to be continually renegotiated with a gluttonous partner, whilst Britain’s plant and manpower cadre were also shaped by external forces. Perhaps most notable was the profile of Britain’s nuclear organisation itself, remodelled to both heighten compatibility with the AEC and mimic it as a state research body capable of harnessing private capital.

The chain connecting these factors was a diplomatic environment that lay permanently under American control, and Britain’s atomic administrators were forced to accommodate volatile United States initiatives that sought initially to suffocate, and then abruptly to dominate, the global nuclear market. The parallels with Reynolds’ reading of 1940 are clear, and British nuclear planners who desired “benevolent neutrality” from Washington in its atomic diplomacy repeated Chamberlain’s fear of 13 years before that American entry into the war would marginalise Britain’s role in the post-war settlement.⁸⁸ Harwell needed time to refine its reactors before contemplating an export drive, and the emergence of an affluent competitor thus rushed ill-prepared British minds into considering not what they might eventually offer but what they could currently sell.

In reviewing the above trend, this exegesis has aimed not to consider “independence” merely in terms of freedom from foreign assets, but to acknowledge also the softer influences exerted by “have” states on those further down the nuclear hierarchy. To vivify this definition, it has therefore assessed how Britain’s self-image was shaped by its engagement with the American “nuclear reference culture”.⁸⁹ British scientists who had trained in interwar university faculties were well versed in thrift by the time they reached Harwell and Risley, these facilities, too, dogged by critical shortages of resources. No American president ever forbade London from pursuing a civil nuclear programme – indeed, Truman’s negotiators deliberately traded away their veto – but they certainly conspired to create a fuel-poor environment that greatly limited Britain’s technical options. Forced by circumstance to operate with little margin for error, British scientists therefore developed a confidence grounded in their decision-making skills. This attitude, and the celebration of it, helped the British nuclear corpus compensate for its diminished status by altering the definition of success. Now, the question was no longer of doing things first, or even on the largest scale. Instead, the conversation became about doing things more efficiently.

The positive association with poverty in turn fed a self-belief that Britain’s nuclear offerings were more authentic than those of its closest competitor. Early squabbles over fuel impelled Cockcroft to warn Australian authorities about the chimera of American technical support, whilst British diplomats viewed Washington’s ignorant – or uncaring – handling of its Congolese uranium contracts with dismay. Perhaps the clearest expression of this “honest broker” mentality, however, arose during the first discussions on British nuclear exports, in which Authority officials identified that buyers experiencing a genuine need for nuclear power might appreciate the fact that the PIPPA was being installed domestically and concealed no compromising dependence on enriched fuel. By contrast, they asserted, American firms had doctored their reactor performance metrics and would gladly exploit naïve foreign buyers and British licensees alike in a bid to spread their wares scattergun for political gain.

In this way, a constant comparison with the United States forced Britain’s atomic administrators to define their own nuclear identity. Their response depicted a nation whose material weakness and belief in its superior integrity were leading it to forge an institutional nuclear culture that was becoming independent from that of its former partner. At first glance, such notions mirror existing depictions of Anglo-American relations as a negotiation between a learned elder and a powerful young charge. As D.C. Watt has commented, “this fiction … satisfied British elitists’ conviction of their own superiority of sophistication, subtlety and values over the United States and American consciousness of their present and future greatness”.⁹⁰ Reynolds, too, has noted this trait, demonstrating that British politicians in 1940 wished to see Washington become a permanent fixture in world affairs, albeit one that would be “educated” via a “special association” with Britain.⁹¹ But whereas notions of extending London’s supremacy by harnessing American power enjoyed popularity in political corridors, the civil atomic world was quite different. British industrialists and nuclear engineers wished for the United States to remain isolated not only for commercial reasons, but also because of concerns about developing the global nuclear marketplace on a proper, technically sound basis. As such, it is clear that transatlantic comparison caused Britain’s nuclear practitioners, at least on an institutional level, to prioritise different values than did their American peers. It would be a worthwhile future study to investigate what, if any, attempts the atoms’ self-appointed spiritual guardians made to interest the United States in adopting their nuclear ideals.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Theaker

Martin Theaker is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham’s School of Engineering. He obtained his doctorate in 2016 from Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, for a project supervised by David Reynolds. Since this time, he has worked in the risk management of major infrastructure projects in Britain. He is the author of Britain, Europe and Civil Nuclear Energy, 1945–62: Power Politics (2018) and has published on topics including Anglo-European civil nuclear relations, Atoms for Peace, and the effect of Brexit on the British construction industry.

Notes

¹ David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937–41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), 10–15.

² Ibid., 269.

³ Ibid., 294.

⁴ Ibid., 269–82.

⁵ Ibid., 294.

⁶ Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, Volume 1: Policy Making (NY, 1974), 184.

⁷ Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (NY, 1975), 113.

⁸ Simon Ball, “Military Nuclear Relations between the United States and Great Britain under the Terms of the McMahon Act, 1946–1958,” Historical Journal 38, no. 2 (1995): 453; and Justin Bronk, “Britain’s ‘Independent’ V-Bomber Force and US Nuclear Weapons, 1957–1962,” Journal of Strategic Studies 37, no. 6–7 (2014): 974–97.

⁹ William Walker, “Trident’s Replacement and the Survival of the United Kingdom,” Survival 57, no. 5 (2015): 7–28.

¹⁰ Kirk Willis, “The Origins of British Nuclear Culture, 1895–1939,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 1 (1995): 60; and Christoph Laucht, Elemental Germans: Klaus Fuchs, Rudolf Peierls and the Making of British Nuclear Culture 1939–59 (Basingstoke, 2012), 5.

¹¹ Laucht, Elemental Germans, 9–10.

¹² Matthew Fuhrmann, Atomic Assistance: How “Atoms for Peace” Programs Cause Nuclear Insecurity (Ithaca, NY, 2012), 37–48.

¹³ John Simpson, The Independent Nuclear State: The United States, Britain and the Military Atom (London, 1983), 14–15.

¹⁴ John A. Kroll, “The Complexity of Interdependence,” International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1993): 335.

¹⁵ Egon Larsen, The Cavendish Laboratory, Nursery of Genius (London, 1962), 23; and Guy Hartcup and T.E. Allibone, Cockcroft and the Atom (Bristol, 1984), 24.

¹⁶ Anthony James, The Happy Passion: A Personal View of Jacob Bronowski (Exeter, 2011), 17.

¹⁷ Cmd. 8875, “University Development: Report on the Years 1947 to 1952, University Grants Committee,” Parliamentary Papers XVII, no. 931 (July 1953): 44–45.

¹⁸ Cmd. 8045, “Report for the Year 1948–49, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research,” Parliamentary Papers XIII, no. 541 (September 1950): 20.

¹⁹ “The Quebec Agreement, 19 August 1943” (Foreign Relations of the United States. [FRUS] Conferences at Washington and Quebec, 1943, Washington DC, 1970), 1117–19.

²⁰ “Meeting of Gen. 75 Committee,” October 25, 1946, FO [Foreign Office Records, The National Archives, Kew] 800/585, 1–2.

²¹ “Meeting of Official Committee on Atomic Energy,” September 25, 1946, CAB [Cabinet Records, The National Archives, Kew] 134/24, 3.

²² “Meeting of Ministerial Committee on Atomic Energy,” December 10, 1947, CAB 134/21, 1.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ “Memorandum of Conversation, by the Secretary of Defense [Forrestal], 16 November 1947,” in FRUS, 1947, General: The United Nations, vol. I (Washington DC, 1973), 864–66.

²⁵ “Minutes of CPC Meeting,” December 10, 1947, Howe [C.D. Howe Papers, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa] MG27 III B20, Volume 12, File 27, 3.

²⁶ Simpson, Independent Nuclear State, 84–85; United States Atomic Energy Act, amended 1951; and John Baylis, “Exchanging Nuclear Secrets: Laying the Foundations of the Anglo-American Nuclear Relationship,” Diplomatic History 25, no. 1 (2001): 34.

²⁷ Makins telegram, “United Kingdom Weapons Test”, to British ambassador, Washington, 13 October 1951, AB [United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and Predecessors Records, The National Archives, Kew] 16/570.

²⁸ Cherwell minute, “Atomic Energy: Post-War Anglo/American Negotiations”, to Churchill, 29 December 1952, PREM [Prime Ministers Office Records, The National Archives, Kew] 11/561, 6–7.

²⁹ Cockcroft to Macfarlane, 16 February 1953, AB 6/1255.

³⁰ Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London, 1988), 357–58.

³¹ Oliphant to Cockcroft, January 16, 1951, AB 27/8.

³² “Note on the Visit of John Cockcroft to Canada and the United States,” July 3, 1953, CAB 134/748; and “Meeting of the Official Committee on Atomic Energy,” July 9, 1953, CAB, 134/747, 1–2.

³³ “Tenth Report from the Select Committee on Estimates, Session 1951–52: Rearmament,” Parliamentary Papers, VI, no. 457 (July 30, 1952): 73.

³⁴ “Fourth Report from the Select Committee on Estimates, Session 1947–48: Departmental Replies,” Parliamentary Papers VII, no. 521: 12–13.

³⁵ “Reports from the Select Committee on Estimates, Session 1946–47, 20 October 1947,” Parliamentary Papers VIII, no. 1: 61–63.

³⁶ Howe to Heeney, 8 September 1947, Howe MG27 III B20 Volume 12, File 25.

³⁷ Spence to Cockcroft, 25 November 1946, AB, 6/170.

³⁸ Spence to Bretscher, 28 May 1947, Ibid.

³⁹ R. F. Pocock, “Nuclear Power: Its Development in the United Kingdom” (Old Woking, 1977), 11–13.

⁴⁰ “Memorandum of Discussion with E. Teller and G. Failla on Plant Location Hazards,” October 15, 1948, AB 16/1789.

⁴¹ “Meeting of Gen. 75 Committee,” October 25, 1946, FO 800/585.

⁴² R. Scott Kemp, “Gas Centrifuge Theory and Development: A Review of U.S. Programs,” Science and Global Security 17, no. 1 (2009): 2; and Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, I, 176–78.

⁴³ Jackson to Tongue, 28 October 1946, AB 6/170.

⁴⁴ “Tenth Report from the Select Committee on Estimates,” 139.

⁴⁵ Cockcroft to Spence, 30 October 1946, AB 6/170.

⁴⁶ Gray to Mackenzie, 30 October 1946, Mackenzie [C.J. Mackenzie Papers, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa] RG77, Volume 283.

⁴⁷ Cherwell minute, “Atomic Energy: Future Anglo/American Relations”, to Churchill, December 29, 1952, PREM 11/561, 2.

⁴⁸ “Meeting of Gen. 75 Committee,” October 25, 1946, FO 800/585, 3.

⁴⁹ King to Chadwick, 8 April 1947, CHAD [Sir James Chadwick Papers, Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge] IV/2.

⁵⁰ Clutterbuck to Chadwick, 17 April 1947, Ibid.

⁵¹ Chadwick to Clutterbuck, 12 July 1947, Ibid.

⁵² “Tenth Report from the Select Committee on Estimates,” 74.

⁵³ Ibid., 140.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 20; Cmd. 1490, “Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, Statistics Committee: The Long-Term Demand for Scientific Manpower, October 1961,” Parliamentary Papers XX, no. 1003: 13.

⁵⁵ John Maddox, “Scientific Manpower,” Guardian, October 17, 1961.

⁵⁶ “Cherwell minute”, Atomic Energy: Future Anglo/American Relations”, to Churchill, December 29, 1952, PREM, 11/561, 2.

⁵⁷ Churchill to Eisenhower, April 1, 1954, FO 800/755; and Martin Theaker, “Being Nuclear on a Budget: Churchill, Britain and ‘Atoms for Peace,’ 1953–1955,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 274 (2016): 651–52.

⁵⁸ Mara Drogan, “The Nuclear Imperative: Atoms for Peace and the Development of U.S. Policy on Exporting Nuclear Power, 1953–1955,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 5 (2016): 965–70.

⁵⁹ “Remarks of Representative Sterling Cole before the Leadership Conference of the General Electric Corporation,” July 30, 1954, FO 115/4544.

⁶⁰ Steven L. Del Sesto, Science, Politics and Controversy: Civilian Nuclear Power in the United States, 1946–1974 (London, 2019), 60.

⁶¹ The rest of this paragraph is based on Caccia note, “Comments on President Eisenhower’s Message to Congress of February 17, 1954, proposing Amendments to the Atomic Energy Act of 1946,” n.d., CAB 134/750.

⁶² Caccia note, “Comments on President Eisenhower’s Message to Congress of February 17, 1954, proposing Amendments to the Atomic Energy Act of 1946,” n.d., CAB 134/750.

⁶³ “Third Report from the Select Committee on Estimates, Session 1946–47: Expenditure on Research and Development, 16 July 1947” Parliamentary Papers VI, no. 361: 56–7.

⁶⁴ “Tenth Report from the Select Committee on Estimates,” 69.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 69–70.

⁶⁶ House of Lords, Hansard, July 5, 1951, Volume 172, Columns 670–79.

⁶⁷ Paymaster General memorandum, “Atomic Energy Organisation: Transfer from Ministry of Supply to a National Corporation,” September 30, 1952, CAB 129/55.

⁶⁸ “Tenth Report from the Select Committee on Estimates”, 139.

⁶⁹ “Waverley Committee: Memorandum by the Foreign Office,” May 19, 1953, AB 16/1075.

⁷⁰ Cmd. 8986, “The Future Organisation of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Project,” Parliamentary Papers XXVI, no. 319 (November 1953): 5.

⁷¹ Ibid., 6.

⁷² Edward Teller, “Project Plowshare,” Alabama Purchaser (January 1960); and John Cockcroft, “Future of Atomic Energy,” Scientific Monthly 82, no. 3 (1956): 138.

⁷³ Plowden note, “Geneva Conference and Exhibition: Answering of ‘Export’ Inquiries, Proposed Briefing of UK Representatives,” August 2, 1955, AB 1719.

⁷⁴ Cockcroft to his mother, 14 August 1955, Cockcroft [Sir John Cockcroft Papers, Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge] Accession 1975.

⁷⁵ Strath, “Note for Record, 2 November 1955”, AB 1650.

⁷⁶ “Record of a Meeting held in Edwin Plowden’s Office,” November 9, 1955, AB 1650, 3.

⁷⁷ “Minutes of a Meeting of the Working Party,” December 8, 1955, Ibid., 4–5.

⁷⁸ Baxter to Watson-Munro, 27 August 1956, Ibid.

⁷⁹ “Report of the Working Party on Export Possibilities for Nuclear Reactors,” March 6, 1956, Ibid., 11.

⁸⁰ John Cockcroft, “The Further Development of the United Kingdom Nuclear Power Programme: James Forrest Lecture,” March 18, 1958, AB 27/13, 6.

⁸¹ Jukes to How, 7 June 1956, AB 16/1719.

⁸² Walker to Secretary, 14 December 1956, Ibid.

⁸³ “Geneva Conference and Exhibition,” Ibid., 3.

⁸⁴ “Statement by the Honorable John Foster Dulles, Secretary of States, before Joint Committee on Atomic Energy,” June 3, 1954, FO, 115/4544, 3.

⁸⁵ Reynolds, Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 281.

⁸⁶ Jacques E.C. Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation (Cambridge, 2012), 270–71.

⁸⁷ Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, I, 114, 123.

⁸⁸ Reynolds, Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 73–80.

⁸⁹ Laucht, Elemental Germans.

⁹⁰ D.C. Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place (Cambridge, 1984), 135.

⁹¹ Reynolds, Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 292.