POLICIES AND PRINCIPLES: Crackdown

For the first time since The Bomb burst, a great government cracked down on its talkative, uneasy atomic scientists. The government was Britain’s; the crack-downers were Ernest Bevin and his temporary collaborator, Winston Churchill.

Cried Churchill, angered by reports that some scientists threatened to publish everything they knew about the atom: “… I hope the law will be used against these men [scientists] with utmost vigor. . . . On many occasions in the past we have seen attempts to rule the world by experts of one kind or another. There have been theocratic governments. It is now suggested that we should have scientistic —not scientific—governments.”

Echoed Bevin: “His Majesty’s Government cannot surrender either their power or their duty in the field of government to any section of the community. . . . When you select people to enter into the study and research of these things, and they know of and have, indeed, entered into an understanding to observe not only the Official Secrets Act but the honor of their own country, then that ought to be observed and respected in carrying out their duty.”

British scientists had brought this storm upon themselves by insisting that something be done and done soon about internationalizing The Bomb. A prominent spokesman for them had been Physicist Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant. Others, following Oliphant’s lead, had secretly circulated a round robin declaring that they would rebel against enforced secrecy if the Government ignored them, Official Secrets Act or no.

U.S. scientists had been noisier than their British brothers. But all had one characteristic in common: evangelically sure that something must be done, they were lost when they faced the political questions of what to do and how to do it. The atom, as Churchill and Bevin said, had not relieved statesmen of the responsibility for doing statesmen’s work.