Free Clouds of Deceit by Joan Smith

Defence), Lord Addison (Secretary of State for the Dominions) and John Wilmot (Minister of Supply).
    One of the curiosities of the whole affair is that the
ad hoc
committee which gave the go-ahead for the bomb project, Gen 163, was not even the same committee which had been meeting to discuss atomic affairs since August 1945. This committee, which met as Gen 75, had been referred to by Attlee as his Atom Bomb Committee and yet three ministers from Gen 75 did not even attend the Gen 163 meeting.
    Gen 163 decided Britain should go ahead with a bomb programme. Penney was told some four months later, in May, and given control of the work, which was to take place under the innocuous title of High Explosives Research. (It was a euphemism which persisted for some years. The Australian Royal Commission was given in 1985 a formerly confidential report which dealt with the meteorological conditions in which the first bomb in the Totem test series in South Australia could be fired: its title was High Explosives Research Report No A32, and its date May 1953.)
    If the Attlee government’s decision involved moral principles, it does not seem to have given the ministers who took it much pause for thought. Ernest Bevin, for one, did not want to hear any arguments against Britain’s acquiring the bomb. When the distinguished scientist, Patrick Blackett, who sat on the government’s own Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy, suggested Britain should refrain from developing her own deterrent, Bevin gave the idea short shrift. ‘He ought to stick to science’ was the reply he scribbled to Blackett’s suggestion. Clearly, this was not the sort of advice the Advisory Committee was supposed to be giving.
    On 12 May 1948, an MP called George Jeger asked a question of the Minister of Defence, A. V. Alexander, in the House of Commons. The question was a plant: its object was to allow the Labour government to admit it was making atom bombs with as little fuss as possible. Was the minister satisfied, Jeger asked, that ‘adequate progress’ was being made in ‘the development of the most modern types of weapon’?
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ Alexander replied. ‘As was made clear in the Statement relating to Defence 1948, research and development continue to receive the highest priority in the defence field, and alltypes of weapons,
including atomic weapons,
are being developed.’ (My italics.)
    The spirit in which the Labour government made this admission can be judged by the event which accompanied it. This was the gagging of the press by the issuing of a D-notice which forbade reference to the type of atomic weapons being developed, where the work was being done, who was doing it, and where the weapons were to be stored.
    Margaret Gowing has said that the Prime Minister, Clem Attlee, and the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, became ‘paranoic’ about the release of information on the atom bomb programme. It was also the case, she said in a film on the nuclear industry,
Unstable Elements,
that ‘the press really probed very little and the public suffered as a result’.
    How far journalists would have got, if they had had the inclination to do a bit of investigating, is doubtful. The decision that Britain would build the atom bomb was taken in conditions of such secrecy that many members of Attlee’s cabinet were not privy to it. Even after the public announcement, if A. V. Alexander’s throwaway line deserves to be counted as such, ministers managed to conceal from parliament what they were spending on the project: when Churchill returned to power as Prime Minister in October 1951, he was astonished to discover that the Labour government had covertly spent nearly £100 million in this way, unbeknown to the House of Commons.
    After a brief pause, Churchill decided to honour this useful tradition. On 4 March 1954, a Cabinet committee chaired by Churchill agreed to conceal the extent of the