Art or article? The need for and nature of the British hydrogen bomb, 1954–58
This article examines the considerations which underpinned the British government's decision to produce hydrogen bombs. It is argued that the British hydrogen bomb programme was shaped by a number of factors: time constraints, the vagaries of the Anglo‐American relations, a desire to keep a check on the ambitions of both the US and USSR, and the need to maintain ‘great power’ status.
Dissenting Scientists in Early Cold War Britain: The “Fallout” Controversy and the Origins of Pugwash, 1954–1957
British nuclear policy faced a major challenge in 1954 when the radiological dangers of the new hydrogen bomb were highlighted by an accident resulting from a U.S. thermonuclear test in the Pacific that underscored how nuclear fallout could travel across national borders. Echoing the response from the United States, the British government downplayed the fallout problem and argued that weapons testing was safe. Some influential scientists rallied behind the government position on fallout and weapons tests, but others disagreed and were regarded within government circles as troublesome dissidents. This article focuses on two of the dissident scientists, Joseph Rotblat and Bertrand Russell, showing how they challenged government policy and sought to make public their view that fallout was dangerous and that weapons testing should stop. Their objections ensured that the fallout debate became a part of public life in Cold War Britain, imbuing the hydrogen bomb and the arms race with new meaning. The article casts new light on the process by which the fallout/testing issue came to be the most publicly controversial area of nuclear weapons policy, serving as a rallying point for scientists beyond the nation-state, at once a national and transnational problem.
Research Note: Soviet Thermonuclear Development
T h e development of thermonuclear weapons marked one of the major turning-points in the history of Soviet-American strategic arms competition. In his book The Advisors Herbert York enhances our understanding of this turning-point by showing that the first Soviet thermonuclear test device (commonly known as "Joe4"), which was exploded on 12 August 1953, was not a superbomb but had a different configuration and a substantially lower yield.' The first Soviet superbomb was tested in November 1955. York's analysis is important because it makes it possible to assess more accurately the progress of Soviet nuclear weapons development in the 1950s, and to understand more clearly the nature of Soviet-American strategic arms competition. The object of this note is to make public a document which gives more detailed information about Soviet nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s. The data given here support York's analysis, and indeed can be seen as a footnote to it; they also raise a question about Joe-4's place in Soviet nuclear weapons development. The document, which is available in the Joint Chiefs of Staff records in the National Archives, is quoted in its entirety at the end of this note.2 It was prepared by the Nuclear Weapons Working Group of the Joint Technical Intelligence Subcommittee of the JCS Joint Intelligence Committee in response to a request from the Chief of Staff, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project for intelligence data on the 1955 Soviet nuclear test series. The document, which was classified "Top Secret," is dated 10 February 1956; the version given below includes a correction made on 15 February. It was declassified on 16 November 1976. The first Soviet fission bomb test took place in August 1949, but Soviet work on thermonuclear weapons had already started in 1947-48. At that time the Soviet government asked Kurchatov, the scientific director of the nuclear