Charles Snow - The New Men

‘If you’re not prepared for that,’ I said, hearing my voice sound remote, ‘I should be against any compromise. You’ve either got to show some faith now — or give the whole thing up in this country.’

‘Double or quits,’ said Rose, ‘If I haven’t misunderstood you, my dear chap?’

I nodded my head.

‘And again, if I haven’t misunderstood you, you’d have a shade of preference, but not a very decided shade, for doubling?’

I nodded my head once more.

Rose considered, assembling the threads of the problem, the scientific forecasts, the struggles on his committees, the Ministerial views.

‘This is rather an awkward one,’ he said. He stood up and gave his polite youthful bow.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m most indebted to you and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your valuable time. I must think this one out, but I’m extremely grateful for your suggestions.’

Though Hector Rose had left me in suspense about his intention, I did not worry much. Despite our mutual dislike I trusted his mind, and for a strong mind there was only one way open.

Thus Luke, in the midst of disapproval, got all he asked for, and went back to playing his piano. There were months to get through before the pile was refitted. He and Martin had to set themselves for another wait.

It was during that wait that I had my first intimation of a different kind of secret. One of the security branches had begun asking questions. They had some evidence (so it seemed, through the muffled hints) that there might have been a leakage.

As men spoke of it, their voices took on that hushed staccato in which all of us, even on the right side of the law, seemed like conspirators. None of us knew what the evidence was, and the only hints we received were not dramatic, merely that a Barford paper had ‘got loose’. We were not told where and the paper itself was unimportant. It was nothing but a 1943 estimate of the destructive power of the nuclear bomb. I looked it up in our secret files; it was signed by a refugee called Pavia, by Nora Luke and other mathematicians, and was called Appreciation of the Effects of Fission Weapons .

The typescript was faded, in the margin were some corrections in a high, thin, Italian hand. Much of the argument was in mathematical symbols, but, after twenty pages of calculation, some conclusions were set out in double spacing, in the military jargon of the day, with phrases like ‘casualization’, ‘ground zero’, ‘severe destruction’.

These conclusions meant that, in one explosion over the centre of a town, about 300,000 people would be killed instantly, and a similar number would later die of injuries. This was the standard Barford calculation at that time, and it was the figure that we had in mind when Mounteney, Martin, and I talked by the river at Stratford.

Anyone who worked on the inside of scientific war saw such documents. And most men took it as part of the day-by-day routine, without emotion; it had to be done, if you were living in society, if you were one ant in the anthill. In fact most men did not need to justify themselves, but just performed their duty to society, made the calculations they were asked to make, and passed the paper on.

Once, alone in my office in the middle of the war, it occurred to me: there must exist memoranda about concentration camps: people must be writing their views on the effects of a reduction in rations, comparing the death rate this year with last.

I heard of the leakage, I re-read the appreciation, I heard the name of Captain Smith. He was high up, as I already knew, in one of the intelligence services. I also knew that he was a naval officer on the retired list, several times decorated in the first war, the son of a bishop. But when he came to visit me, I did not know what to expect.

He was a man in the fifties, with fairish hair and a lean, athletic figure. His face was stiff and strained, both in the cheeks and mouth. His eyes seemed to protrude, but more exactly had a fixed, light-irised stare. He was dressed with the elegance of an actor. His whole hearing was still and soon after he came in, when a flying bomb grunted and vibrated outside, cut off, and then jarred the floor beneath us (it was by now the July of 1944), all the notice he took was a slight stiff inclination sideways, arms straight by his side.

That impression might have been both putting off and appropriate when one knew in advance his berserk record; but it did not last. It was destroyed, very oddly, by a smile which was so sudden, so artificial, that it might have been switched on. I had never seen a smile so false, and yet somehow it sweetened him.

He had come, he said, for a ‘little confab’ about some of our ‘mutual friends’ at Barford.

‘I’ve been told,’ I said, ‘that you’ve been having a bit of trouble.’

‘We don’t want to blot our copy book,’ said Captain Smith mysteriously, in a creaking and yet ingratiating voice.

‘Nothing very serious has got out, has it?’

‘I wish I knew: do you?’ he said with his formidable stare, then switched on his smile.

‘If one thing gets out, another can. That’s why we get all hot and bothered,’ he added.

Suddenly he asked: ‘Know anything of a young man called Sawbridge?’

I had imagined that he might bring out other names. I felt relief because this one meant little to me. I explained that I had been present at Sawbridge’s interview, and since then I had talked to him alone just once at Warwick, the night before the failure of the pile.

‘I didn’t get much out of him,’ I said.

‘I just thought you might have known him at home,’ said Smith.

He had found out — it was one up to his method — that Sawbridge’s family had lived close to mine, I said that, when I left the town for London in 1927, he could only have been eight or nine. My brother Martin was more likely to know him.

‘I haven’t forgotten M F Eliot,’ said Smith, with his false, endearing smile.

I had spent enough time with security officers to leave the talking to him: but he was too shrewd to do what some did, and bank on the mystery of his job. He stared at me.

‘I suspect you’re wondering what all this is in aid of,’ he said.

I said yes.

‘There are one or two straws in the wind, and we’ve got an idea that the young man may not have been altogether wise.’

He gave me two facts, maybe in order to conceal others. Sawbridge had attended anti-war meetings, organized by the Communist Party, in 1940–1: at the University he had been a member of a pro-Communist group.

‘He’s certainly gone off the rails a bit,’ said Smith.

At Barford they thought that Smith was a fool. They were quite wrong; he was highly intelligent, and very far, much further than many of the scientists, from being a commonplace man. The trouble was, he did not speak their language.

His axioms of behaviour were simple, though his character was not. Duty: obedience: if you were told to make a weapon you did so, and kept it secret. There was nothing more to it than that.

To him, the race in nuclear bombs was as natural as a race in building battleships. Your enemies were in it: so were you, so was Russia. You told no one anything, certainly not the Russians. Good fighters, yes, but almost a different species.

Intellectually, he knew something of communism; but he could no more imagine becoming a communist himself, or his friends or relations doing so, than I could imagine becoming a professional burglar.

He had not lived among scientists, their habits of feeling were foreign to him and his to them. As for his axioms of behaviour, most of the scientists, even those not far to the left, could not feel them so; what to him was instinct, to them meant a moral uneasiness at each single point.