own. Which meant there was very little time left to convince them that a secret arms race had not already begun. He carried that urgency with him when he was called with Cherwell, finally, on May 16, to 10 Downing Street.
“We came to London full of hopes and expectations,” Aage Bohr remembers. “It was, of course, a rather novel situation that a scientist should thus try to intervene in world politics, but it was hoped that Churchill, who possessed such imagination and who had often shown such great vision, would be inspired by the new prospects.” Niels Bohr cherished that hope. His British friends had not prepared him.
“One of the blackest comedies of the war,” C. P. Snow characterizes the disastrous confrontation. The definitive account is from R. V. Jones, Cherwell's protdge, who had helped make arrangements and who was surprised to find Bohr wandering a few hours later in Old Queen Street outside the Tube Alloys office:
When I asked him how the meeting had gone he said: “It was terrible. He scolded us like two schoolboys!” From what he told me at that time and afterwards, it appeared that the meeting misfired from the start. Churchill was in a bad mood, and he berated Cherwell for not having arranged the interview in a more regular manner. He then said he knew why Cherwell had done it — it was to reproach him about the Quebec Agreement. This, of course, was quite untrue, but it meant that Bohr's “set piece” talk was thrown right out of gear. Bohr, who used to say that accuracy and clarity were complementary (and so a short statement could never be precise), was not easy to hear, and all that Churchill seemed to gather was that he was worried about the likely state of the post-war world and that he wanted to tell the Russians about the progress towards the bomb. As regards the post-war world Churchill told him: “I cannot see what you are talking about. After all this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our present bombs. It involves no difference in the principles of war. And as for any post-war problems there are none that cannot be amicably settled between me and my friend, President Roosevelt.”
Bohr got only the bare thirty minutes of his scheduled appointment, most of which Churchill had monopolized. “As he was leaving,” Aage Bohr concludes, “my father asked for permission to write Churchill, whereupon the latter answered, ‘It will be an honour for me to receive a letter from you,’ adding, ‘but not about politics!’”
“We did not speak the same language,” Bohr said afterward. His son found him “somewhat downcast.” He was angrier than that; in his seventy-second year, still stinging, he told an old friend: “It was terrible that no one over there” — England and America both — “had worked on the solution of the problems that would arise when it became possible to release nuclear energy; they were completely unprepared.” And further, “It was perfectly absurd to believe that the Russians cannot do what others can… There never was any secret about nuclear energy.”
Churchill's obduracy was compound but straightforward. He was up to his neck in preparations for the Normandy invasion; he sniffed conspirators encroaching back-channel and instinctively swatted them down; he resented the awe his colleagues accorded this certified great man (“I did not like the man when you showed him to me, with his hair all over his head, at Downing Street,” he gnawed at Cherwell afterward); he could not listen carefully enough, or was too certain of his own opinions, to be convinced that the bomb would change the rules. A year later the seventy-year-old Prime Minister had budged no further. “In all the circumstances,” he wrote Anthony Eden in 1945, “our policy should be to keep the matter so far as we can control it in American and British hands and leave the French and Russians to do what they can. You can be quite sure that any power that gets hold of the secret will try to make the article and this touches the existence of human society. This matter is out of all relation to anything else that exists in the world, and I could not think of participating in any disclosure to third or fourth parties at the present time.”
“He had always had a naive faith in ‘secrets,’” concludes C. P. Snow. “He had been told by the best authorities that this ‘secret’ wasn't keepable and that the Soviets would soon have the bomb themselves. Perhaps, with one of his surges of romantic optimism, he deluded himself into not believing it. He was only too conscious that British power, and his own, was now just a vestige. So long as the Americans and British had the bomb in sole possession, he could feel that that power hadn't altogether slipped away. It is a sad story.”
Bohr wrote Churchill on May 22; the letter was circumspect but political after all and conveyed what he had not been allowed to convey at the meeting: “that the President is deeply concerned in his own mind with the stupendous consequences of the project, in which he sees grave dangers, but also unique opportunities.” Bohr did not spell out these opportunities. He even seemed to step back from offering advice: “The responsibility for handling the situation rests, of course, with the statesmen alone. The scientists who are brought into confidence can only offer the statesmen all such information about technical matters as may be of importance for their decisions.” Those technical matters, however, Bohr made sure to note, included the probability of proliferation and of bigger bombs — he had learned of the Super at Los Alamos.
Apparently Churchill did not trouble himself to respond.
Bohr stayed on in London for several more weeks. He was thus on hand for D-Day, Tuesday, June 6, 1944. “The greatest amphibious assault ever attempted,” Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, called that invasion of Europe across the English Channel with an initial force of 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers supported by 1,200 warships, 1,500 tanks and 12,000 aircraft. By the time Bohr and his son left England at the end of the week to return to the United States the Allies had secured the invasion beaches and begun advancing inland with a force bolstered now to 326,000 men. “The way home,” Eisenhower instructed his armies, “is via Berlin.”
For Bohr the way home was via Washington. He reported his dismal experience with Churchill to Felix Frankfurter on June 18. Frankfurter immediately carried the news to Roosevelt, who was amused to hear another tale of Churchillian pugnacity:
About a week later F told B that this information had been heartily welcomed by the President who had said that he regarded the steps taken as a favourable development. During the talk the President had expressed the wish to see B, and as a preliminary step F advised B to give an account of his views in a brief memorandum.
The Bohrs turned to the task as Washington steamed, the last days of June and the first days of July dawning in the high eighties and sweltering above 100° by afternoon. Aage Bohr recalls the document's preparation:
It was worked out in the tropical heat of Washington and, like all my father's work, underwent many stages before it was ready for delivery. In the morning, my father would usually bring up new ideas for alterations that he had thought out during the night. There was no secretary to whom we could entrust such documents, and therefore I typed them; meanwhile my father darned socks and sewed buttons on for us, a job which he carried out with his usual thoroughness and manual skill.
Sewing on buttons, darning socks, suffering in the heat that seemed equatorial to a Dane of the cold North Sea, Bohr worked and reworked his memorandum to maximum generality of expression, a political analysis as reserved as any scientific paper. It says all that he had seen up to that time, which was almost everything essential.
Late in life Bohr explained the starting point of his revelation in a single phrase.
The weapon devised as an instrument of major war would end major war. It was hardly a weapon at all, the memorandum Bohr was writing in sweltering Washington emphasized; it was “a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever before attempted” and it would “completely change all future conditions of warfare.” When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they certainly would, no one would be able any longer to
That was new ground, ground the nations had never walked before. It was new as Rutherford's nucleus had been new and unexplored. Bohr had searched the forbidding territory of the atom when he was young and
