Free Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography by Margaret Thatcher Page B

classes when it came to speaking bluntly about such things.
    I was in Blackpool visiting my sister (who had gone there from the Birmingham Orthopaedic Hospital) when I learned from the radio news on that fateful 6 August 1945 that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. My academic study and the fascination exerted on me by issues relating to the practical application of science probably meant that I was better informed than most about the developments lying behind the manufacture of the atomic bomb. The following year I was able to read (and largely understand) the very full account contained in
Atomic Energy for Military Purposes
published by the United States. Yet – cliché as it may be – I was immediately aware on hearing the preliminary reports of Hiroshima that with the advent of the A-bomb ‘somehow the world had changed’. Or as Churchill himself would put it in his majesticmemoirs
The Second World War:
‘Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.’
    The full scientific, strategic and political implications of the nuclear weapon would take some years to assess. But the direct human and environmental consequences of the use of atomic weapons were more quickly grasped. Yet neither on that first evening reflecting on the matter in the train home from Blackpool, nor later when I read accounts and saw the pictures of the overwhelming devastation, did I have any doubt about the rightness of the decision to use the bomb. I considered it justified primarily because it would avoid the losses inevitable if Allied forces were to take by assault the main islands of Japan. The Japanese still had 2½ million men under arms. We had already seen the fanatical resistance which they had put up during the Battle of Okinawa. Only the scale of the Allies’ technological military superiority, demonstrated first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki, could persuade the Japanese leadership that resistance was hopeless. And so one week after Hiroshima, and after a second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered.
    Britain had, of course, been closely involved in the development of the bomb, though because of the breakdown of Anglo-American nuclear cooperation after the war it was not till 1952 that we ourselves were able to explode one. Churchill and Truman, as we now know, were duped by Stalin at Potsdam when the American President ‘broke the news’ of the bomb to the Soviet leader, who knew about it already and promptly returned to Moscow to urge his own scientists to speed up their atomic programme. But the fact remains, as I used to remind the Soviets when I became Prime Minister, that the most persuasive proof of the essential benevolence of the United States was that in those few crucial years when it alone possessed the military means to enforce its will upon the world, it refrained from doing so.
    The greatest transformation affecting Britain at the time – and the one which would have a great impact on my political life – was the change of the Soviet Union from comrade in arms to deadly enemy. It is important to stress how little understanding most people in the West had at this time of conditions within the USSR. I was never tempted to sympathize with communism. But my opposition to it was at this time more visceral than intellectual. It was much later that I thought and read more deeply about the communist system and saw precisely where its weaknesses and wickednesses lay. And it is interesting to note that when Hayek came to write a new preface to
The Road to Serfdom
in 1976 he, too, felt that he had‘under-stressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russia’.
    By the time I left Oxford with a second-class degree in Chemistry under my belt, I knew a great deal more about the world and particularly about the world of politics. My character had not changed; nor had my beliefs. But I had a clearer idea of where I stood in relation to other