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and the Congo, or the British and Mau Mau, or the French in Algeria. As the Americans joined the fray post World War II (after Nazi Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jews, and after the US dropped two atomic bombs on civilians without warning), we can fast-forward to the use of nerve agents in Vietnam, the mass bombing of civilians in Cambodia, the giving of a green light to the government in East Pakistan to commit genocide in what is now Bangladesh or the political support the US gave to Pinochet and the Khmer Rouge. We can go back to the
A history of the US nuclear presence in Britain from its origins in 1946 through to the run-down of strategic forces following the Cuba crisis and the coming of the missile age. The book deals with the initial negotiations over base rights, giving a detailed treatment of the informal and secret arrangements to establish an atomic strike capability on British soil. The subsequent build-up is described, with the development of an extensive base network and the introduction of new and more advanced types of bomber aircraft. Relations with the British during these developments are a central focus but tensions within the USAF are also dealt with. The book recounts the emergence of the UK as a nuclear power through prolonged negotiations with the US authorities. It deals in detail with the arrangements for RAF aircraft to carry US nuclear weapons, and the development of joint strike planning. A concluding chapter provides a critical assessment of the UK role in the Anglo-American nuclear alliance.
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 09/04/2013, SPi 18 ‘Tube Alloys’: the British atomic bomb project While British plans to produce an atomic bomb first flourished as part of Britain’s war effort, the feasibility of creating such a weapon had been discussed in scientific circles from the early 1930s. The discovery of uranium fission was made by two German scientists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, in Berlin; its announcement in December 1938 rocked the world of physics; its significance was not lost on the politicians. In both Britain and America, work was begun to
This volume takes the metaphorical character of the Cold War seriously and charts how the bomb was used as a symbol for nuclear war at the very heart of this conflict. The contributions consider the historical relevance of the political, cultural and artistic ramifications of nuclear weapons as signifiers for a new type of conflict. Tis understanding of the metaphorical qualities of the Cold War is encapsulated in the notion of an imaginary war, or, more precisely, a war against the imagination. As an attack against the imagination, the nuclear threat forced politicians and ordinary people to accept the notion that preparations for nuclear annihilation would contribute towards peace, and that the existence of these weapons, and the anticipation of large-scale destruction that came with them, were an inescapable corollary of security, freedom and future prosperity on both sides of the Cold war divide.
v 8 v Hiroshima/Nagasaki, civil rights and anti-war protest in Japan’s Cold War Ann Sherif Twenty years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the rest of the world had come to regard nuclear destruction as a function of the imagination, visually and rhetorically preparing for apocalypse, defining the looming threat as a permanent feature of modern life. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that global imagination co-existed uncomfortably with the living memories, the social challenges, and visible and hidden scars of the hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombings
scientific conferences before the war, to join his research team in Birmingham working on the secret British atomic bomb project. Fuchs later stated that when he joined Peierls’s laboratory, he was not aware of the true nature of the work he would be involved in. There was 23_Charmian_Ch-19.indd 197 9/3/2013 1:15:28 PM MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 09/03/2013, SPi 198 Preparing for the Cold War indeed some delay before Fuchs could be fully briefed about the project because of MI5’s reluctance to give him security clearance. MI5 made somewhat routine inquiries, noting
at all costs they will not send Broda overseas. They have given the latter a sufficient excuse for not doing so’.26 Thanks to KGB records as divulged by Vassiliev in 2009, we now know not only that Broda was indeed in possession of a considerable amount of information about the most secret aspects of the atomic bomb project but that, as feared by MI5, he was passing this information on to the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vassiliev had been given access to KGB files in order to write an official history; however he had left for the West
4 Theatres of catastrophe after Auschwitz and Hiroshima The two place names featured in this chapter’s title call to mind atrocities of the Second World War, specifically the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan – catastrophic events that are distinguished even within the twentieth century’s catalogue of horrors involving mass death.1 The genocide of up to six million European and Soviet Jews, along with the murder of other groups (e.g., Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, gay people, and political prisoners), by the Nazis between 1939
-American alliance. Fears of war abounded, and while few thought it imminent, the darkest 36 The American bomb in Britain suspicions of the Soviet Union’s continued military strength were harboured.10 Western policy makers were reconciled to an expansionist Soviet Union acquiring the atomic bomb before long, although that event was closer than they expected, and arrived the following year. Soviet forces had a matchless superiority in the European theatre and, despite a tone of caution in the US intelligence reports, Soviet capabilities were presented as implying an aggressive
campaigning on issues of social justice and peace. During these activities, Merton did not create a systematic theology, but ‘employed a language that was creative, inclusive’.29 And while many of Merton’s writings and technical terms were not in line with the Catholic tradition of just war, he used non-Catholic argumentations of non-violence and expressed his fear in powerful metaphors In his book Breakthrough to Peace of 1962, for instance, he called the atomic bombing of Hiroshima ‘a calculated project of terror and annihilation’.30 Nevertheless, compared to the imagery