THE FIRST QUESTION REALLY, AND WE MIGHT AS WELL TAKE IT HISTORICALLY IN A SENSE, IS I WONDERED IF YOU COULD JUST DESCRIBE TO US THE EXTENT OF THE SECRECY THAT SURROUNDED ATTLEE'S DECISION TO PROCEED WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRITISH BOMB PROJECT?

If you ask about the secrecy which surrounded the atomic bomb... the secrets around Attlee... you've got to realize that until Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in fact, nobody at all knew about the weapons being done, or nuclear weaponry, and Attlee didn't know. Attlee, I understand, heard of the nuclear bomb project for the first time in the middle of the Potsdam Conference. Churchill had not taken him into his confidence, even though he was the Deputy Prime Minister; in the same way in the United States Roosevelt had not taken many of his closest buddies into his confidence. The secrecy was almost absolute. The... if one asked about Attlee's decision that this country should go ahead in developing its own nuclear bomb, then you've got to realize that the aura of secrecy was still there, because it... he did... the war had just come to an end, and the Truman, who had taken Roosevelt's place, had met Attlee for, I believe, the first time at Potsdam. And after the first bomb had dropped on Hiroshima, Attlee sent a message to Truman saying that it was an appalling development, and shouldn't the United Kingdom and the United States make a pact together to save humanity, et cetera, et cetera. Well, Truman turned that down. And it was then that Attlee decided that... and I don't know how many people he consulted. I knew nothing whatever about these things. But he took the decision then that we would go ahead and become an independent nuclear power. And there had been several factors in that decision. And there have been pressure on him from people who had been engaged in the project. Well then, to the best of my knowledge, not very much work was taking place in the United Kingdom at that time. We transferred our work and our teams to the United States. Where it... and we'd entered into a collaborative agreement with them early in 1943 I believe it was. And actually, naturally believed that the... that we knew about the nuclear bomb. Nuclear fission was a vital matter as far as power was concerned and the United Kingdom had to be aware of power, and the world power had to be a nuclear power in those days.

PEOPLE GENERALLY REFER TO AN INTERVENTION BY BABIN WHO WAS FOREIGN SECRETARY AT THE TIME, AFTER SOME OF THE NEGOTIATIONS HE WAS HAVING WITH THE UNITED STATES, AS BEING PERHAPS THE MAIN INTERVENTION THAT SWUNG THE DECISION ABOUT GOING AHEAD WITH A NUCLEAR WEAPON. DO YOU THINK THERE'S TOO MUCH EMPHASIS PLACED ON THAT OR DO YOU THINK THAT IN THE END THAT REALLY WAS ONE OF THE MAIN MOTIVATIONS?

There are very few people of course who are around today who took part in the actual... what the... what people now are inclined to call the decision making process leading to the decision that we were going to produce our own fissile material and go on towards the production of the bomb. A primary decision had been taken by Attlee. And very few... members of these cabinet knew — obviously the people who would have to know who would be the foreign secretary who was Babin, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Atlee actually knew nothing about nuclear weaponry or fission or what it was all about anyhow. And so he called in an assistant, Sir John Anderson who had been the minister responsible under Churchill in the war, and became Lord Waverley and was really... it was a... in effect you might say that a Labour administration was... took its advice from a Tory minister. I imagine that any other person there who would... I'm trying to remember, Dorkin certainly, new Chancellor of the Exchequer. And almost certainly Herbert Morrison who was Minister of Supply I think at the time. Ah, actually it was his own Minister of Defense. That I assume that he had brought in Alexander or — who was his sort of deputy. But what we know about... about the story comes essentially from Sir Michael Perrin who is Lord Portal, who was there of course. Portal being given charge of atomic energy, moved to the Ministry... when he ceased being Chief of Air Staff. And Perrin was his Secretary. And Perrin has left the record. Now the record that Perrin has left is that as the financial implications of going ahead in... in the construction of the nuclear reactor, it was called a pile then — after the Chicago pile, p-i-l-e, putting the blocks together, the rods and all this, on the...on the famous playing fields over Eaton. So he... some place associated with the University of Chicago. Well, the story that Perrin said... the... Attlee and the few who are in the know decided that this was going to be too costly and they couldn't go ahead. Devin was due to be at the meeting and had been delayed, and he then came in and they brought him up to date about what the decision — the discussion had been like, and the conclusion reached, of course we have to stop this. And Devin is then, according to Michael Perrin, Devin then said, "We can't do that. We've got to go ahead whatever it costs, because I don't want any future foreign secretary of this country to be spoken to as I've just been spoken to by that man Burns," who was Secretary of State. And that's the story as... as it has been reported, and as I know it. It... it sounds possible and plausible. Ah, it... at the very least it sounds dramatic and romantic.

I'M GOING TO ASK YOU, THERE WAS SOME OPPOSITION — YOU'VE WRITTEN FROM TWO PEOPLE, I THINK TIZARD AND BLACKARD WROTE MEMORANDUMS OPPOSING THE...THE... BRITAIN'S PROGRAM BECAUSE THEY FORESAW CERTAIN PROBLEMS. I MEAN WHY DO YOU THINK THEY WERE IGNORED AND DO YOU THINK THEY WERE RIGHT AT THE TIME OR WHAT?

The... politicians of course were involved in the decision were taking their technical advice or advice on technical matters from a limited number of individuals who were concerned in the work. Now you might well say that those politicians were no more competent to make a judgment on what technical advice to accept, than they were as professional politicians competent to say whether the subsequent Bishop A is more suitable than subsequent Bishop B to take over the diocese of C. I mean they knew nothing about it. Now there were some scientists who... who knew what was going on, but who... could not make judgments both about the technical side of it and also the political side. Among them were... Blackard who must have known, he was a Professor of Physics, who ended up as being President of the Royal Society... appear. And Sir Henry Tizard. And Henry Tizard, who had been the government's scientific adviser before the war... when I say the government's scientific adviser there was a committee, the Committee of the Imperial Defense which dealt with technical matters. And that Committee was presided over... it's a small body, it was... by Tizard. And that... that was where Tizard came into conflict with Churchill's own special scientific adviser, Lindemann, who later became Lord Cherwell. Blackard had been a member of that committee. Blackard certainly was I think through his contacts with... with Cockcroft, among other people, probably — and because he was a nuclear physicist under... understood more about what was happening than did Tizard. But Tizard is a man of very, very broad sweep, and very good judgment. And he was kept out of the picture deliberately by Churchill for some time. When he sort of came back into... into the picture really the government changed, although I think it took some time, some six months or so after the change of the government. In other words it might have been only at the end of '45, the beginning of 1946 that he himself decided he would leave Oxford and come back to London. And when... when he was put into the picture that he then decided... and also. Oliphant for example. Another Cambridge nuclear physicist who had moved over to Birmingham. And Tizard is... believed that on straight strategic grounds it was then I felt that this country should proceed on the nuclear path. Blackard took the same view. Blackard took the view... took the view which was being openly debated in the United States, then. Blackard was in touch with many of the top nuclear physicists of America. And there the debate was in the open. Everybody seemed to be involved.

YOU'VE SAID THAT TIZARD AND BLACKARD'S OPPOSITION TO SOME EXTENT WAS BASED ON STRATEGIC GROUNDS. DO YOU THINK THAT THERE WAS A SERIOUS DEBATE ABOUT THE STRATEGY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AT THAT PARTICULAR TIME? I SUPPOSE WHAT I'M TRYING TO GET AT IS DO YOU THINK THAT DECISIONS WERE TAKEN TO PROCEED WITH AN ATOMIC BOMB PROGRAM WITHOUT ANY CLEAR IDEA OF WHAT STRATEGICALLY THEY WERE CAPABLE OF DOING OR WHAT EFFECT THEY COULD HAVE?

Yes. I think one asks oneself the question, was there any serious discussion about what the consequences of going the... the nuclear were likely to be for this country, I think the answer is no, there was not a discussion of the kind one assumed would take place today if we were to start at this moment. Certainly we were not a nuclear power and someone suggested we ought to become a nuclear power. We would... we would go through a very, very lengthy period of discussion and debate before undertaking any such step. Whereas in 1945, or '46 the situation was quite different. First of all nobody had really... as Attlee himself said, Attlee knew nothing about fallout, he knew nothing about genetic effects of radiation. And he even went so far to say that he did not believe that Churchill knew or Sir John Anderson knew or Roosevelt knew. And he said... and I seem to recall that in the sentence in his own... autobiography he also said, "and if the scientists knew they said nothing about it." Now it's possible of course that some of the scientists knew nothing about it. They were just doing their job. There was no discussion therefore in... and if Attlee they had known the facts and the other people had known the facts about radiation, about the very the destructive nature of... nuclear weapons, about the fact that while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were being rebuilt... ground burst nuclear weapons in the megaton range, would just leave radioactive rubble, on which you could never rebuild London, or Birmingham or any other city that had been destroyed that way. I think had there been that kind of discussion it's conceivable that... the debate would have gone not necessarily in favor of proceeding in a nuclear way. Attlee had another reason of course. I mean he believed the nuclear weapon was a very powerful piece of armament. And if America withdrew from Europe we might be left to face the USSR if the USSR decided to take over a broken destroyed Europe as it then was.

DURING THE WAR PERIOD THERE HAD BEEN QUITE A LOT OF COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND MANY BRITISH SCIENTISTS HAD ACTUALLY BEEN WORKING IN THE UNITED STATES ON THE MANHATTAN PROJECT. AND THEN QUITE SHORTLY AFTER THE END OF HOSTILITIES THERE WAS WHAT WAS GENERALLY KNOWN AS THE MCMAHON ACT WAS INTRODUCED, WHICH EFFECTIVELY TRIED TO PREVENT A CONTINUATION OF THAT COLLABORATION. COULD YOU TELL US FIRST OF ALL, WAS IT A SERIOUS SHOCK TO PEOPLE IN BRITAIN AND DID IT SERIOUSLY HAMPER THE RESEARCH EFFORT GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY?

Well, immediately after the war of course in the same way as everybody was trying to appreciate what happened, in this country, and of course its effects in Japan which had been the target country were absolutely phenomenal. And... I imagine that it was... barely a corner in the world where you didn't have a... strong reaction. Or the reaction was mixed, one side was here's a... here's a marvelous piece of new armament, we've got to have it. And certainly with the USSR in... in a hostile relationship with the USA or immediately after the war, the fact that it would proceed... the Americans therefore, they wanted it. There were some of course that thought the whole thing was too horrible. The others who thought that this is so wonderful we must keep the secret to ourselves, And very soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki Brien McMahon, the Senator from Connecticut, he...

DID THE MCMAHON ACT SERIOUSLY AFFECT THE LEVEL OF RESEARCH IN THIS COUNTRY? WAS IT A HINDRANCE TO THE SCIENTIFIC EFFORT IN THIS COUNTRY, IN THE INITIAL STAGES?

Well, I imagine very few people in this country knew about the McMahon Act or the news leading up to it. Because in there was a move to put the future of nuclear energy both civil and military under the United Nations sponsorship. I don't think, in other words, that the McMahon Act as such did more than cut us off from exchange of knowledge with Americans at a particular stage at which that knowledge had reached. We did... we would not have been able to start on the building of power which was where the... our nuclear efforts started in this country after the war, during the war. Almost everyone engaged, even Cockcroft... Cockcroft was far more engaged the way he went up to Chalk River, but Cockcroft had in the earlier parts of the war been immensely important in the radar field. And the scientists were... were not two-a-penny in those days. Particularly the scientists who had the... the knowledge. And knowledge at the very limits of their fields to apply them in various ways which were regarded as relevant to the war effort. Though I wouldn't think that the...the McMahon Act impended our...our work here. But I think the question I would like to put and I'd like an answer to is what would have happened to this country if the McMahon Act had not been passed, what would the nature of our collaboration with America have been? What would that have done to the development of the scientific and technological expertise of this country. And then on the other hand one's got to remember that in building up our nuclear effort after the war, in increasing the output of scientists and engineers in the universities, our.. main consideration had nothing whatever to do with the nuclear effort. They were small. They were trivial compared to the wide scale of tasks for which scientific people were required in the reconstruction of this country after the war. Though I would... I would like to know as I say, what would have happened had we gone on with the Americans?

WHY DO — YOU SAID TO ME WHEN WE WERE SPEAKING EARLIER, I MEAN A FEW WEEKS AGO THAT IN FACT THE WAY THAT... THE CONDITIONS THAT WERE IMPOSED ON THE MCMAHON ACT AND WHEN IT WAS REPEALED, PREVENTED ANY SERIOUS COLLABORATION WITH ANY OTHER EUROPEAN POWERS PARTICULARLY THE FRENCH AS FAR AS THE BRITISH WERE CONCERNED. CAN YOU JUST DESCRIBE HOW THAT HAPPENED AND WHETHER IT WAS IMPORTANT?

Well, the McMahon Act of course was an act passed by Congress to prevent any exchange of... of information on nuclear matters with any second party. They were barred from discussing nuclear matters or anything which was even remotely connected with nuclear matters with another nation. The McMahon Act was first... was repealed in two stages. In 1958 there was a repeal which permitted the American Atomic Energy Commission to let this country know about nuclear propulsion parts. They had nothing to tell us about nuclear reactors in general, but this was telling us about nuclear reactors for submarines or for surface vessels. And in the early days, people thought that nuclear reactors were going to be marvelously important in ordinary commercial shipping. So there were secrets there. So when... the first repeal took place in the civil sphere or... although we were concerned then with nuclear propulsion parts for submarines, a condition, a necessary condition was that any information which the Americans gave us under the... the repealed McMahon Act should not be passed by us to a third party. And needless to say when in the following year, 1959, the second repeal took place which allowed us to discuss with each other warhead design... that condition was... even more stringently imposed. There was no question about talking to any third party. But I suppose one could ask, did those conditions... restrictive conditions hold us back from discussing these matters with either scientists in other countries... scientists of other countries, also had ideas and knew about nuclear matters, or impede us politically? And there I'm afraid one has to say yes. Becoming tied to the United States through the repealed McMahon Act in the nuclear field did become an impediment. So far as our European relations are concerned and so far as our efforts to become members of the community, the Common Market were... were concerned in the negotiations, which were oddly enough, of course, taking place at the same time.

WHY DO YOU THINK THE MCMAHON ACT WAS REPEALED IN THAT WAY? WHAT WAS...WHAT WAS THE MOTIVE FORCE BEHIND...?

The... McMahon Act, I suppose was...in its nature was known to Congressmen, and in particular to the Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. They were really a powerful lot. I forget how long McMahon himself was a member. They were a really powerful lot, because the nuclear thing itself is dominating international relations. It's extremely difficult to know why they... felt it necessary or wanted to repeal the act. NATO had been formed in 1949. In '52 there was the Lisbon Conference as we all know when the participating countries in the western Alliance said that it was highly unlikely that we could raise the conventional forces which would be adequate to face... forces. And then came the belief that nuclear weapons could compensate for conventional weakness. Well, as President Reagan has recently said, we've been relying too long on the nuclear prop to hide our real weakness. The Americans might have felt that political pressures inside the alliance as such demanded some loosening of the... of the McMahon Act and its restrictions on the passage of information. Because everywhere, ever since 1953, '54, nuclear weapons started being stockpiled in Europe as we all know. And there... so you're stockpiling nuclear weapons in an alliance only two members of which were actually engaged in making nuclear weapons.

NOW I WANT TO GO ON TO THAT, BECAUSE IN A SENSE YOU STARTED WORK — WHEN YOU BECAME SCIENTIFIC ADVISER TO THE GOVERNMENT AND WHEN YOU WERE ALSO ENGAGED IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR THE MINISTRY OF THE DEFENSE, YOU STARTED WORK ON WAR GAMES, STARTED LOOKING AT WAR GAMES AND SETTING UP WAR GAMES THAT LED YOU TO SOME QUITE IMPORTANT CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN A WAR IN EUROPE. AND WHAT I'D LIKE YOU TO DO IS COULD YOU JUST BRIEFLY DESCRIBE THE WAR GAMES AND TELL US WHAT CONCLUSIONS THEY ACTUALLY LED YOU TO?

Well... as the '50s drew on, as nuclear weapons were introduced into Europe, as they became part of NATO tactical doctrine, one had to ask oneself whether or not battles could actually be fought with weapons whose destructive power was such that if what was then called a small nuclear weapon were to explode in a zone of contact between enemy forces fighting our own. And it didn't take much reflection, and I had had a fair amount of experience in the war, what actually did happen, on analyzing what happened in the battles with conventional explosives, it didn't take very... me very long to realize that a nuclear battle would get out of hand straightaway. And what had happened was that in the... shortly after nuclear weapons had been introduced into Europe there... it was a... do they call them war games? I've forgotten... between the... forces with an actual sort of play-out to what would happen in Europe. And this was done with troops, moving troops and the troops were allowed to use nuclear weapons. And then knowing what... something about the destructive power of... of radius of action of a nuclear weapon the... it became apparent that in addition to... to the Military casualties which you said would be hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. And there was naturally a political reaction in Western Germany, because western Germany was going to be destroyed in the effort to save it. Well knowing from the second World War something about military planning, I decided ah to have a... to look at the plans or... they have generalized plans for what... war in Europe in which nuclear weapons were used, and it became apparent very quickly by just playing out... we... start off by firing six artillery... nuclear artillery shells or drop so many nuclear bombs, and the Russians just reply in kind. And it didn't take any great genius to realize that one was going to devastate totally the whole region in which the fighting was taking place and it... the region would be useless for anything, and the whole... the operation would grind to a halt or escalate. And that was the real danger, the escalation. And that was what... why and has been the continuing thing about the European fear that America would leave Europe, coupling to Europe... the Americans to Europe means we believe that there would be escalation. That the United States would be as vulnerable to Russian attack as we are here. And nowadays of course you can say that the war games have shown and this is recognized on all sides that if there were a conflict in Western Europe, which became a conflagration and a mutual suicide pact between the NATO European powers and Russia that we want the USA to join in a mutual pact as well. That's what it would add up to. It's perfectly apparent to... and we've only realized this lately, that at the time artillery shells and...and the like were being introduced... nuclear artillery shells I'm talking about, into Europe. No one had ever seen a nuclear artillery shell fired in the proper case. Or rather no one who take... took the decision. And one of the men who was involved in... the only trial that he believes ever did take place of a shell, exploded under...underground or as a test device up top, but fired as an artillery shell, a man called Bennett O'Keefe, who was one of a party of about 30 men, most of them are dead now. But O'Keefe has given a description of what happened. And as he put it, I think the shell was fired about... in placement. And the shell was made to burst about ten miles away. And as he said, anybody who'd been looking towards it would have been blinded. That the...the shock was... the moral shock was incredible. That anybody... anyhow within the zone unprotected would have been killed. But there you've got to add it up. It wouldn't be one artillery shell that would be going. It would be tens of artillery shells. There would be bombers... and in the same way we've got to recognize the... our own... it wouldn't matter who started the use of of these shells. Nobody would have the experience of knowing what it's like. They would have had the experience of knowing what a conventional artillery shell did. And so you would have had chaos of a fantastic kind. And then there's some other thing. You don't have teams of physicists rushing on the battlefield to decide whether or not what was fired was a 10-kiloton, a 5-kiloton device or a 100-kiloton. You report back that nuclear shells are being used, that nuclear bombs are being dropped and you reply not with a... not with an equivalent one, you reply with a bigger one. Kilotons become megatons, and then of course there's... just following the conventional strategy, you talk about having to interdict the movements of reinforcements. So while you're battling in this way as it were, over an area no bigger than greater London you are taking out Bristol, possibly even Edinburgh, and that is what the range is of... intermediate range nuclear missiles. And so the war games in which these things were being played out have been played out eve... it... it's just a business now of doing war games. They all come to the same conclusion. I don't know of any... war games which has shed... which has demonstrated that... there's war games in which the assumption is that nuclear weapons will be used. I do not know of any single one that says we can... you can win with their use.

YOU JUST WANTED TO ADD SOMETHING?

What...what the war games showed in effect, that the very possession of nuclear weapons by two sides similarly armed and the threat of their possible use was a deterrent to any aggressive action on either side. But that if they were used then you ended up in a kind of chaos of which no military commander previously had experienced. And with territory which was so radioactive that people would begin to ask themselves, if there were people to ask questions, did we really do this in order to capture radioactive ground on which we can do nothing?

JUST TO FOLLOW ON FROM THAT, IN SOME OF YOUR WORK YOU'VE ACTUALLY CRITICIZED QUITE STRONGLY THE ROLE OF WHAT I WOULD CALL IVORY TOWER RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENTS IN PROVIDING A CONTINUING DRIVE FOR THE ARMS RACE. COULD YOU JUST TELL US WHAT YOU THINK? WHO YOU WOULD NAME AS THE MOST GUILTY PEOPLE IF YOU FEEL LIKE THAT?

Well, it always has... been the case, I suppose ever since the development of armaments for warfare that it is the... the metallurgists, even not in the days when there wasn't scientific metallurgy, who invents better steel. The man who first devised gunpowder. I mean it all begins in the whole field environment with somebody inventing something, either on the basis of existing knowledge or as sometimes happens in technology as a way of doing things. You think you know a better way to do things usually. In the case of the nuclear world, we've got to realize there were no politicians. There were no generals, no admirals, no air marshalls, who had anything whatever to do with the beginning of the development of nuclear weapons. The people who were involved were the physicists and the mathematical physicists in particular at the start. I mean in this country there is well-known two refugee scientists, Peierls and Frisch from... western Germany were responsible for... as it were writing a recipe, showing how you could devise a nuclear weapon from your knowledge of nuclear fission. The Manhattan Project which was the code name for the development of nuclear weapons in the United States was presided over by an engineer general called Groves, a one-star general. But practically everybody in the thing... at the working end was a scientist. Had the scientists not been at the... at the job, the generals and all the military appurtanances to the whole project would have had no work-through. In the USSR of course, the scientists gave up as the Russian forces fell back and they only restarted in the latter part of the war in the... In Western Germany we know what... what happened there. Eisenberg says they had to give it up. In this country we joined with the Americans because if we hadn't what would we have done? So the scientists are at the back, and the scientists continue to be at the back. And in the immediate post-war, Dean Acheson who is the Deputy Secretary of State in the United States, made a complaint that foreign policy in the United States seemed to be run by General Groves of the Manhattan Project and not by the State Department, not by the Administration. But all the way along, there have been refinements in the technical field which lead to some sort of political acceptance and then to the political problems. Today of course the major issue is President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. The idea of putting together by means of... artificial satellites a defensive screen over America, emitting death rays of one sort or another and shooting down an avalanche of Russian missiles. Well, if you go into the matter and ask yourself where did... where did President Reagan get that idea from? Well, the belief is he got it from Edward Teller. He would have got it somewhere because Edward Teller didn't start by going up to the President. He'd been talking at lower levels, and lower levels in the military will talk to the higher levels. And you can always promise the military that you've got a better weapon than the one they've already got. That's easy. But the... this... the force behind it all is with — where the technologist is. Is the same way as it was the technologists who devised the camera and the tape on which this interview is being conducted. It wasn't done by the producer, and it certainly wasn't done by... in your case I don't know who the originator. But it... but it would have been a miracle. In fact, very few... there are very few has a exceptions major technological development been put... put on the market and taken charge and then had major... political repercussions. What... all the way with the help of only technologists. But technologists at the beginning. In the... in the camera field of course, Dr. Land... in the United States with the Polaroid is responsible for the whole thing. I mean he proved... he not only invented the Polaroid camera, but he... invented the Polaroid Corporation. That is a reality.

DO YOU THINK FOR EXAMPLE THAT THE LAWRENCE LIVERMORE LABS IN THE UNITED STATES PLAY A PERNICIOUS ROLE IN A SENSE?

Without question the... the Livermore Laboratory in the United States is another illustration. It is said — I am here basing myself entirely on what is public record, that what stimulated the Livermore people was the belief that they could invent a laser beam of such intensity by pulsing it with nuclear power, and that was the x-ray laser, the nuclear pulsed laser. It required a nuclear bomb to provide the energy for this intense beam of gamma rays, x-rays, whatever rays they were, which would... could be aimed in split seconds and split... and split seconds at nuclear warheads. Now that came out of Livermore. And Livermore... that was what is said to have animated Edward Teller. And with Teller who with this wonderful new invention x-ray laser, excited Reagan to believe that it would be possible to have x-ray lasers operating in space, reacting to an immediate signal in this most fantastic picture of a space-based defense system, which practically nobody who's... who's working mainly from the outside and several now from the inside believes to be possible. But it begins in the laboratory. It does not begin on the hill or in the White House or in the Pentagon.

YOU DESCRIBED TO ME THE FACT THAT MACMILLAN WHEN HE WAS PRIME MINISTER WAS PLAYING — WAS HAVING TO RIDE TWO HORSES IN A SENSE. ON THE ONE HAND THERE WERE DOMESTIC POLITICAL REASONS FOR HIM HAVING TO DO A DEAL WITH KENNEDY OVER POLARIS AND ALL THAT, AND ALL THAT FOLLOWED FROM THAT MEETING. AND YET AT THE SAME TIME HE WAS DEEPLY COMMITTED TO A TEST BAN TREATY AND TO NON-PROLIFERATION AND TO ANY INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS TO CONTROL AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS. COULD YOU JUST DESCRIBE IN A SENSE WHAT DILEMMAS YOU THINK MACMILLAN HAD TO FACE AND HAD TO COPE WITH IN THOSE NEGOTIATIONS WITH KENNEDY?

I have often asked myself, supposing Attlee had not taken the decision when he did, partly out of ignorance you might say, but nonetheless a decision which set us on the course of being an independent nuclear power, would... supposing it hadn't been taken. He was replaced in 1951 by Winston Churchill. I think Winston Churchill with... at his side, might well have then said I'm going to... going in for nuclear weaponry. We're only five years behind. It was 1952 that we exploded our first bomb. That was 1951. Let's say they would have taken the decision and the bomb would have been... would have been used in 19... or would have been exploded first let's say on the five year gap. After him, I do not believe, this is my... I'm speculating now. I doubt very much whether after a gap of ten years we would have gone ahead. But what happened was we were in it, though even at the time of Suez we were... we were developing nuclear weapons. We weren't proposing to use nuclear weapons. They were our deterrent and that was made quite clear in 1957 by Duncan Sands in his white paper on defense. But Harriman really knew full well that a nuclear arms race is a disastrous thing for the world. And he and General Eisenhower who was then President of the United States believed that the way to stop the nuclear arms race is to stop the testing of nuclear devices, nuclear warheads. Khrushchev too, believed it too up to a certain extent, but he was highly suspicious of the Americans. The man who really put the... the biggest pressure into this business of trying to achieve a nuclear test ban was Macmillan. When Eisenhower ceased being president the whole world was becoming concerned about nuclear testing, radioactive fallout was now in... radiation was now affecting the whole... food chain. And they... that attitude of Macmillan's feelings that we had to have a nuclear test ban. At the same time we were on... on course but with... with our nuclear developments of our own. And the missile age had begun with Sputnik in 1957. So in the belief that aircraft would be too vulnerable to use and... the time of the ballistic missiles had come we decided to go in for... the ballistic missiles. But we were our own independent nuclear power, that mattered. The first nuclear weapon we went into... ballistic missile, was a thing called Blue Streak, based upon a design, an American design which was a liquid fueled missile. And the difficulties started being expressed about its development and about its... the strategic validity of having such a thing in this country. It was cancelled in 1960. And we... that left us as it were, bare. A nuclear power losing its nuclear prop. So we tried to get another nuclear prop. And that's when we went to the Americans. And... Macmillan found himself in the position of having to seek American help to... so that we could continue as a political... with a political strength. Granted that's because we was... an assumed nuclear power at the same time as he wanted to stop the nuclear arms race. And he... he as you know ceased being Prime Minister in 1964, the partial test ban treaty for which he was very largely responsible because it became apparent that President Kennedy could not get the technical people... and each... those technical people had their constituencies in Congress or the American military to agree to a comprehensive test ban, and so we had to settle for the partial test ban. And those talks took place in... in mid-1963 in Moscow. And they were tripartite, Lord Hailsham was the leader of our delegation. I was with him as his scientific adviser. And Gromyko had a big Russian team with him, and Averell Harriman who recently died, led the Americans. But we failed to get... Macmillan failed to get what he wanted.

WHY WAS THAT? WHY DID HE FAIL? WHAT WAS THE REASON FOR THAT FAILURE?

The reason for the failure is that President Kennedy wasn't able to deliver the nuclear weapons laboratories. They wanted to go on. As Harold Macmillan said in his... autobiography, they wanted to go on forever improving the nuclear weapons, whether or not the... the people concerned, who were doing the improving asked themselves whether what they were doing had any strategic significance at all, when as we now know from 1960, certainly, East and West were mutually deterred from attacking each other for fear that nuclear weapons would be used by one side first and that if they were used retribution would follow and utter disaster with it.

SO FUNDAMENTALLY YOU SAY THAT IT WAS THE GROWING SUM OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND MILITARY COMMUNITIES THAT WERE VERY, VERY...?

As the Americans themselves have said, President Kennedy did not believe that if his emissary, Harriman had succeeded in getting the Russians to agree to a comprehensive test ban, which is what Harold Macmillan wanted, he would... it would never be ratified by the Senate because the military as I said had their constituencies in Congress in the same way as the weapons laboratories and the armaments industry in general had their constituents involved. Over here, the difference is that the Prime Ministerial authority is much more absolute than is Presidential authority in the United States. Our kind of parliamentary government makes it certain that the... that the majority party will follow its leader, follow the Cabinet. The Cabinet makes the government policy. In the United States, the Senate in these international treaties say, no, we will not ratify. And without... without their ratification nothing...nothing happens.