Clem’s Memo
Declassified document sourced from Cabinets and The Bomb by Peter Hennessy; reproduced verbatim.
TOP SECRET
GEN 75⁄1
28th August, 1945
THE ATOMIC BOMB
Memorandum by the Prime Minister[1]
A decision on major policy with regard to the atomic bomb is imperative. Until this is taken civil and military departments are unable to plan. It must be recognised that the emergence of this weapon has rendered much of our post-war planning out of date.
For instance a redistribution of industry planned on account of the experience of bombing attacks during the war is quite futile in the face of the atomic bomb. Nothing can alter the fact that the geographical situation of Britain offers to a Continental Power such targets as London and the other great cities. Dispersal of munition works and airfields cannot alter the facts of geography.
Again it would appear that the provision of bomb proof basements in factories and offices and the retention of A.R.P.[2] and Fire Services is just futile waste.
All considerations of strategic bases in the Mediterranean or the East Indies are obsolete. The vulnerability of the heart of the Empire is the one fact that matters. Unless its safety can be secured, it is no use bothering about things on the periphery. It is difficult for people to adjust their minds to an entirely new situation. I noticed at Potsdam that people still talked of the line of the Western Neisse although rivers as strategic frontiers have been obsolete since the advent of Air Power. It is infinitely harder for people to realise that even the modern conception of war to which in my lifetime we have become accustomed is now completely out of date.
We recognise or some of us did before this war that bombing could only be answered by counter bombing. We were right. Berlin and Magdeburg were the answer to London and Coventry. Both derive from Guernica. The answer to an atomic bomb on London is an atomic bomb on another great city.
Duelling with swords and inefficient pistols was bearable. Duelling had to go with the advent of weapons of precision. What is to be done about the atomic bomb? It has been suggested that by a Geneva Convention all nations might agree to abstain from its use. This method is bound to fail as it has failed in the past. Gas was forbidden but used in the first world war. It was not used in World War 2, but its belligerents were armed with it. We should have used it, if the Germans had landed on our beaches. It was not used, because military opinion considered it less effective than explosives and incendiaries.
Further the banning of the atomic bomb would leave us with the other weapons used in the late war which were quite destructive enough.
Scientists agree that we cannot stop the march of discovery. We can assume that any attempt to keep this as a secret in the hands of the U.S.A. and U.K. is useless. Scientists in other countries are certain in time to hit upon the secret.
The most we may have is a few years start. The question is what use we are to make of that few years start.
We might presumably on the strength of our knowledge and of the advanced stage reached in technical development in the U.S.A. seek to set up an Anglo-American Hegemony in the world using our power to enforce a world wide rigid inspection of all laboratories and plants.
I do not think this is desirable or practicable. We should not be able to penetrate the curtain that conceals the vast area of Russia. To attempt this would be to invite a world war leading the the destruction of civilization in a dozen years or so.
The only course which seems to me to be feasible and to offer a reasonable hope of staving off disaster for the world is joint action taken by the U.S.A., U.K. and Russia based on stark reality.
We should declare that this invention has made it essential to end wars. The new World Order must start now. The work of the San Francisco Conference must be carried much further.
While steps must be taken to prevent the development of this weapon in any country, this will be futile unless the whole conception of war is banished from people’s minds and from the calculations of governments. This means that every vexed question will have to be settled without the use of force, whether it is Palestine, Venezia Giulia, the Ruhr, India. Every nation must submit to the rule of law. The U.S.S.R. must abandon, if it still holds them, its dreams of revolution by force or intrigue. The U.K. and the U.S.A. must abandon, if they have them, any dreams of overturning Left Governments. All nations must give up their dreams of realizing some historic expansion at the expense of their neighbours. They must look to a peaceful future instead of a warlike past.
This sort of thing has been considered a Utopian dream. It has become today the essential condition of the survival of civilisation and possibly of life in[3] this planet.
No government has ever been placed in such a position as is ours today. The Governments of the U.K. and the U.S.A. are responsible as never before for the future of the human race.
I can see no other course than that I should on behalf of the Government put the whole of the case to President Truman and propose that he and I and Stalin should forthwith take counsel together.
The time is short.
We must come to a decision before the meeting of the United Nations Organization.
We cannot plan our future while this major factor is uncertain.
I believe that only a bold course can save civilization.
See also e.g. Stimson’s memo to Truman of April 25, 1945.
Wasn’t Attlee wrong?
In reality, rather than banishing the conception of war, the Cold War powers adopted a strategy of “If you want (nuclear) peace, prepare for (nuclear) war.” It did not render strategic bases around the world obsolete. It absolutely did not involve the US or the USSR giving up their geopolitical dreams.
It worked. There were close calls (e.g. Petrov), suggesting it had a significant chance of failure. Attlee doesn’t predict a significant chance of failure; he predicts a near-certainty.
We don’t get to see the counterfactual where we tried things Attlee’s way, but it’s not at all clear it would have worked. My lay understanding of history is that a vision of resolving all conflicts peacefully led to the Munich agreement and ultimately the very war it had aimed to prevent.
Small quibble: I note that there is a difference between it worked and it failed to fail catastrophically. The current consensus among people who study the subject is that the latter describes reality.
This does not change Attlee being wrong, though. It just means the direction we went instead was wrong for different reasons.
Wait, latter or former? It doesn’t seem like nuclear nonproliferation and deterrence failed catastrophically?
The latter: nuclear deterrence failed in the sense that our models of the world were completely wrong; but they did not fail catastrophically in the sense that we wound up in a nuclear war. A common description of this is “failed to fail,” which is sort of like the operational version of “not even wrong” in math.
This is different from the plan working, which means our models were good enough that our actions caused nuclear peace.
This conclusion arose based in increased access to records and memoranda of Soviet leadership after the Soviet Union fell; what we discovered is that their leaders did not think or feel at all like we thought they did across multiple events.
Edit for sources you might be interested in:
Book: The Great American Gamble, by Keith B. Payne. This is the best history I know of on the subject, and does a good job of distinguishing between things like why ideas that went into deterrence are wrong vs. how we commonly misinterpreted the ideas we were using even so.
Blog posts: Dominic Cummings, if you are interested in reading about a recent government official trying to shift beliefs within government based on this newer information. He’s a controversial personality, but the only personal perspective on this topic I am aware of.
How wrong is “completely wrong”? I’ve only read Cummings up to the paywall. His two examples are 1) that the USSR planned to use nuclear weapons quickly if war broke out and 2) that B-59 almost used a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Re: 1), this is significant, but AIUI NATO planners never had all that much hope of avoiding the conventional war → nuclear war escalation. The core of the strategy was avoiding the big conventional war in the first place, and this succeeded.
Re: 2), Cummings leaves out some very important context on B-59: the captain ordered a nuclear attack specifically because he did not know what was going on and thought war might have already broken out. It’s scary that it happened, but it’s a huge leap to claim this falsifies the ‘myth’ of Kennedy successfully negotiating with Khrushchev.
The call to world leaders to update their conceptions of the strategic landscape based on a game-changing new technology seems incredibly relevant to the impending development of AGI. And also, in a sadly retro way, relevant to the resurgence of nuclear world war risk from Russia’s recent aggression.
This is truly epic.
I don’t know where this conditioned response comes from, but I tear up a little when I read things like this.
I’m scared that when the next threat to our civilization comes, the masses are so enmeshed in bullshit and the leaders so focused on producing it, that nobody rises to take action like this.