The untold story of Britain’s first nuclear bomb
Tested 60 years ago in the Pacific, the H-bomb turned the UK into the world’s third superpower, says Guy Kelly
On the evening of November 8 1957, over a tiny atoll in the Pacific, a scientific test changed the course of British history. At 17.47 GMT, whirring high above Christmas Island in Kiribati, an RAF Valiant dropped a bomb a hundred times more powerful than that which had devastated Hiroshima a dozen years earlier.
It took 52 seconds to fall, and when it did, Britain’s first successful test of a megaton hydrogen bomb rendered the country a nuclear superpower for the first time.
Six decades on, the remarkable story behind the test, codenamed Operation Grapple X, is told in a new BBC documentary, featuring the first interviews with some of the scientists who led the project.
“It’s a very British tale: of achieving extraordinary things under often very challenging circumstances,” says historian Brian Cathcart, who contributed to the documentary and wrote a book about Britain’s struggle for “the bomb”.
That quest began with the outbreak of the Second World War. For two decades, scientists had been experimenting with the potential of creating unprecedented amounts of energy from vast nuclear chain reactions, but when war broke out, that research became an imperative.
“All of a sudden, there was a concern that Hitler would successfully develop an atomic bomb somehow, so they started to think about how that would be possible and what would be needed. It was a race,” Cathcart says. Across the Atlantic, the US nuclear programme, the Manhattan Project, had been running since 1939. Three years later, it subsumed the first British programme – a top-secret operation codenamed “Tube Alloys”, which was led by two exiled German scientists – and won the race three years later, dropping atomic bombs on Japan.
But while British scientists had been present during those bombs’ development, it was made clear that information wasn’t going to be shared when the war was over.
“Clement Attlee [who became prime minister a month prior to the bombs dropping] was hugely paranoid about that,” Cathcart says. “The Americans just cut the ties, and Attlee felt he was left with no choice but to have Britain build its own bomb.”
The idea that Britain needed an atomic weapon to secure a place at the top table was fixed in the minds of Attlee and particularly his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who declared it should be done at any cost. Attlee sanctioned a research programme, but the public – and Parliament – were kept in the dark for two years.
Then, when Klaus Fuchs, one of the exiled Germans at the head of Britain’s delegation on the Manhattan Project, was found to be a Soviet spy, American trust in the British plummeted. Britain was left alone, making the need for atomic weapons greater than ever.
A team of scientists set up in Aldermaston, Berks, and stepped up research. “They were quintessential, tweed-jacketed boffins but motivated by a wartime urgency,” Cathcart says.
Indeed, in an exceedingly British sense, not everything ran to plan. The documentary tells of one test bomb coming loose over Dorking, Surrey, while on another occasion, the core of Britain’s potential atom bomb was stuck in the boot of a broken-down car in south London.
By the early Fifties, Britain’s first atom bomb, which is shown being tested in the documentary for the first time, was ready. However, any hopes the re-elected Winston Churchill had of being back on a level with the United States were dashed three weeks later, when the Americans tested a hydrogen bomb – 400 times more powerful.
When the Soviets tested their own H-bomb shortly afterwards, the prime minister commanded that Britain build its own H-bomb within three years. Except it had to have an explosive yield of one megaton – more than double that of the Soviet weapon.
Britain’s H-bomb was ready in 1957, and prepared for testing that November. Eyewitnesses recall Britain’s bomb tests vividly. “I was able to see straight through my hands,” says Ken McGinley, then a 20-year-old combat engineer. “It was like looking into a white-hot diamond, a second sun.”
With the success of Operation Grapple X, scientists had overcome extreme odds to make Britain the world’s third nuclear power.
“The bomb became a kind of existential thing,” Cathcart says. “It was about rebuilding that relationship with the Americans and maintaining it. These were remarkable scientists who weren’t looking for any credit, but we certainly owe it to them.”