Churchill’s idea to nukescotlanddidn’t go down a bomb
Ifind it hard to believe, but a guy I work with swears that Prime Ministerwinston Churchill once wanted to test a nuclear bomb – on Scotland!
Was this to see if we had the capability to drop a nuke before the Americans eventually did use the weapon on Hiroshima? – T.
It did happen, but was during Churchill’s second term as PM.
Churchill, of course, had led Britain to victory over Nazi Germany when he was leader from 1940-45.
However, the General Election of July 1945 saw Churchill lose in a landslide to Labour’s Clement Attlee.
At the next election, in 1951, Churchill was voted back into 10 Downing Street, but Britain now faced a different adversary, namely Russia and her Warsaw Pact allies, in the Cold War. Britain was already a nuclear power, having acquired the bomb in 1952.
The first British atomic device was detonated off the coast of Australia.
It had an explosive yield of about 25 kilotons, almost twice the destructive power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, causing the death of around 80,000 people.
By 1955, Britain had begun to develop a hydrogen bomb, with much greater power, and it was this device that led Churchill to contemplate testing it on British soil.
It isn’t known if his suggestion that it be detonated somewhere near Wick – with everyone north of the Black Isle being evacuated first – was entirely serious.
However, the idea was quietly dropped after Norway’s Government complained about the risk of radiation from fallout reaching their country.