Free Clouds of Deceit by Joan Smith Page A

nuclear weapons project by hiding it under innocuous headings like ‘other current expenditure’ and ‘extra-mural research’. Churchill’s government also decided that, although its decision in July 1954 to develop the hydrogen bomb would undoubtedly offend many British people, it was Attlee’s government which had set Britain on this rocky moral road in the first place: ‘insofar as any moral principle was involved, it had already been breached by the decision of the Labour Government to make the atomic bomb,’ Cabinet papers record.
    At the time Gen 163 was taking its historic decision in January1947, Britain was discovering how little help would be forthcoming from its wartime ally, the US. At the end of the war, Britain had rested hopes of cooperation on the Hyde Park Agreement, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1944. This said that full collaboration would continue after the defeat of Japan until ended by
joint
agreement.
    After Roosevelt’s death, the British discovered that no one else in America seemed to know about it. But when Attlee flew to the US in November 1945, the result of talks with President Truman and the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, seemed encouraging. An agreement was signed which said, ‘There shall be full and effective cooperation in the field of basic scientific research among the three countries.’
    In February 1946, Britain put the new agreement to the test by asking the Americans for information about building the piles needed to produce plutonium - the American government at this time knew far more about Britain’s atomic plans than the British people or even, for that matter, a sizeable chunk of the British Cabinet. The US wanted Britain to build its piles in Canada; Britain, the Americans said, was too vulnerable to enemy attack. The British government refused and found that the information it needed was not handed over. Three months later, Britain did manage to secure an agreement with the US which assured its access to uranium ore - less than twelve months later, movements of uranium became the subject of a D-notice in Britain.
    In August 1946, the possibility of cooperation with the US was abruptly extinguished. An act on the control of atomic energy in the US, named after its sponsor, Senator Brien McMahon, became law in that month. Clause 10(a) introduced restrictions on the sharing of a wide range of data about atomic energy. McMahon later said he had discovered the existence of secret agreements between the US and Britain only after the bill became law. Nevertheless, the effect of the act was, as Leonard Bertin wrote in 1955, to create ‘a fantastic situation in which the United States completely slammed the door on her British friends’.
    Bertin was writing at a time when British feelings about what seemed churlish and ungrateful behaviour on the part of theAmericans were close to the surface. It was certainly the case that Britain had to get on with its own bomb programme more or less unaided until the mid-1950s, when American admiration for the British project promoted renewed collaboration.
    But Margaret Gowing stresses that the British decision to make the atom bomb was not taken as a result of the McMahon Act. ‘The decision was’, she writes, ‘a symbol of independence.’ Even if relations with the US had been better, Attlee’s view was clear: ‘If we had decided not to have it, we would have put ourselves entirely in the hands of the Americans. That would have been a risk a British government should not take… For a power of our size and with our responsibilities to turn its back on the Bomb did not make sense.’
    The effect of the withdrawal of US cooperation did have important effects, however. It meant that Britain had to find out for itself, through trial and error, the answers to questions which the Americans already knew. It also led to the testing of British weapons in