Equinox. A Very British Bomb

this lorry is carrying the most valuable substance the British ever made we had to make it because the Americans betrayed us we were able to make it because a spy betrayed them now 50 years on the men responsible tell their secret story for the very first time I was in the middle of the Atlantic coming home and kept getting snippets from other passengers that some bomb had gone off I was well I was very very shaken and I couldn't talk to anyone for obvious reasons all of us at that time in discussion did no one believed that the bomb would be dropped on an inhabited area they thought it would be dropped on some naval base or something and it would be enough to demonstrate that it was bad in this moment of solemn triumph general macarthur speaks it is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past stampeding to the nearest pound box reporters spread the news while waiting world from the east coast to the west the medical millions that have been waiting the official word to go complete there while most people believe two atomic bombs had ended the Second World War and assumed they were totally American weapons the United States would not I think have worked on the atomic bomb during the Second World War if it had not been for British input and British encouragement they've agreed that that they would share the technology during the war it was part of the famous trunk load of secrets that was sent over here in the hopes of exchanging the information with us and encouraging us to use our vast industrial capacity to help fight the war British scientists had been the first to show that an atomic bomb was possible and many of them had played crucial roles in the top-secret Manhattan Project which built the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb when the war ended riki naturally expected to continue in the atomic partnership with america but the government was in for a rude awakening the Atomic Energy Act for example said that there would be no sharing of any information about nuclear technology with any other country this was a cruel thing to do and I think it says a great deal about how important nuclear weapons and a nuclear monopoly was to the United States at that time for Britney the price of winning the second world war had been high the country was on its knees after six years of suffering and privation the people had handed the task of reconstruction to a new Labour government headed by Clement Attlee we alone of all the nations went through two great Wars mister LaRon where their fight we put everything in that we had we sacrificed all our overseas we converted all our industry and then we drive where I left in this position today the only way out is by greater output the Royal things that we need and that means harder work even as the Prime Minister asked the country for yet more sacrifice he gathered senior members of his new government at London's shale mex house and made a decision so secret but not even the full cabinet was informed shaken by America's rejection nervous of the new Soviet presence in Europe Atlee argued that without atomic weapons Britain would be left isolated and powerless but if Atlee wanted a bomb he would have to secure the services of one very special man so William Pitt the only British scientist at the atom bombing of Nagasaki Britain's leading Atomic Scientists were then working in partnership with the Americans but after 1945 they had to work a LAN top security pass a cameraman and reporter John Parsons went out under sealed orders to airfield X to greet Britain's atomic expert dr. Penney the man with a load of Secrets dr. Penney is important I know don't worry what is your next move I saw all of it and where would it be going for that Oh crusher he was very young dear business whether he was going to do it on Mackenzie become taken off in a chair or not and we had a week's holiday when there in time we really have a talk trust whether he should do the job in Oxford which he would have blood well in duty-bound to your stomach bones would you lie think about a daughter I think supposedly there is not really nice thing to happen another atomic bomb dropped on you is it all around or a key figure in the making of America's bomb penny had been sent to Nagasaki to make measurements on the size of the blast he had been one of the first to see the grim reality of what atomic bombs could do but he also understood how the bombs had changed the world I think it was entirely a sense of duty it made him do it Betancourt dingdong fidelity so penny set up shop in an existing weapons research establishment at Fort Halstead on the downs south of London his first problem would be recruitment at the end of the war having done a spell in Washington came back and question arose what I was going to do which was answered by a call to go and see a doctor permeate thought holes that they taught me nothing at all they just said we transferred me to a job in London would you like to go and I said I'm quite happy to go I didn't run in the house but only it'd be something on electronics well that's what I was working on electronics and quite happy to move anywhere at that stage especially moving back to London recruiting was rather difficult and it took an awful lot of time I spent a lot of time on the interviewing boards at that time the real problem was you couldn't tell the candidate what you wanted him for a lot of people weren't prepared to take you on trust well secrecy never worried me because I went straight from college straight to working on radar and took the visual supersets of that stage and after that everything I did was secret my wife when I when I first met my wife to be any question I asked was whether her father's remember the communist party she said ah and so after I was 11 I don't know you they frightfully even transistors haven't been invented yet but challon's and house were being asked for complex electronic circuits it was time they found out why we were upstairs you've heard someone come up the stairs and we saw this tubby chap with a sports coat on which had patches on the elbow I was at her and general workers arrived and he didn't say anything only diskens me one start one was would want to do and he started talking asking us questions and he asked what we were doing and we told him when he turned out this was built any so we started asking him questions and he said well what worth directly doing draw and developing the firing circuit for detonators and so through either 5.6 kv aversive that was the and voltage that the Americans use realizing that rhythms like a coffee the American design atomic weapons but the Americans have been careful they had made sure that penny took away only a tiny fraction of the secrets of the bombs design the task of working out the rest would come to plague him but he had seen the first test at Trinity and he was well aware of the most basic principles to make a nuclear explosion go all you have to do is assemble a sufficient amount of fissionable metal uranium or plutonium there was a joke at Cambridge did the early years of the war that the war could be ended easily by taking individual bricks of uranium-235 putting them in little packages and mailing them to Hitler and as they slowly were assembled on his desk eventually you would have a critical mass it would blow up and that would be the end of Hitler it's not quite that simple but that's the basic idea it's not quite that simple because the material penny would have to assemble was plutonium and plutonium doesn't exist in nature you have to make it atom by atom by putting ordinary uranium into a nuclear reactor as the Americans had found out the size of that job was almost unimaginable in 1945 the Manhattan Project was comparable in industrial investment in scale of operations in number of people employed to the u.s. automobile industry in 1945 it was a vast effort it cost two billion dollars which in modern dollars would certainly be equivalent to the cost of sending the first man to the moon during the war Britain had very nearly run out of ammunition a crisis that could have been fatal disaster had been averted by the inspired leadership of an icy eye engineer Christopher Hinton you would take on the job of turning uranium ore into plutonium the reason that Hinton part of this job was partly because he was a very public spirited men who had been doing war work for so long and this was almost like a continuation of his service to the country and also I think because he didn't really much want to go back to I CI he though he had a brilliant career that I CI he wasn't altogether happy there there was a very a rather snobby culture and I CI in those days in which for some reason or another engineers were rated rather lower than managers and sales people he always felt that the engineers around a value there was a face drawn class division Hinton's success during the war drew on his extraordinary ability to spot and nurture talent whatever the background now he called on his most trusted protégées my old boss were in the war rang up and said have you been back to the old firm to fix it where you're going to sit when you get back nothing no but I have told them that I'm going to see them in middle of February comes after my holiday he says well don't go down there anymore don't speak to anybody else oh what's all this about he said well I can't tell you it's Oh shush just don't just don't bother and just don't do anything until loving again Hinton was used to driving at a speed and so and he got his lieutenants there so he hadn't got to learn he build a totally new organisation he got his key figures there and they were all people who were used to going out and getting and getting done and getting things to time for Hinton a far from glamorous base was chosen but Risley in Lancashire in the heart of the heavy industries Hinton knew he would need but a week later he fell so it's all been fixed up also what's been fixed up well I said meet us all at Jerusalem next Monday morning also what's it all about top secret don't ask any question just turned up on Monday and you'll find out interns got an interesting proposition to talk about a very fourteen or fifteen hours I and that day and Hinton told them that the project was to build planets he then introduced us to jinns we explained was the only one amongst us into anything about reactors so we sat and listened to the most exciting off-the-cuff lecture by jinns about problems we've never heard of before armed with only the scan test information gleaned in America jinns gave the 14 men of the British program the most basic lecture you have a material called uranium which you've all heard about which has 92 electrons it's a bit difficult to imagine but they go round in a series of rings in an orderly fashion around the nucleus but instead of having 92 protons in the middle if it has a total of 238 neutrons and protons and the mystery to me as an engineer is what holds them together because positive charges ought to burst apart but the physicists tell me and I have to accept this there is what they call the strong force which somehow when they get close together instead of flying apart they bond together now this nucleus gets a bit uncomfortable and I will think of it as having indigestion and occasionally does a burp and shoots out a couple of particles if you as the lecture went on the engineers realized they were being asked to use chain reactions to release the huge of energy stored in the nucleus according to Einstein's famous equation e equals mc-squared you have a tremendous and as Jin's explained that energy could be released in two ways here you might be able to hold this reaction exactly in control so you have the potential here for an enormous release of energy and this the scientists realized firstly here was a possible source of energy of the future and here unfortunately was a possible source of the most devastating wall in the world would have an air by the time this time came there was does 'old with all the new science in science fiction of the way whatever this they were all I think pretty dumbfounded an awestruck because it was such different they were used to chemical plans but this obviously wasn't a chemical planned and there was so mysterious Hinton drew up a punishing schedule for his men then looked for an isolated site for his plutonium Factory he settled for Windscale on the Cumbrian coast well Hinton on his first modei told us that he promised to supply enough plutonium for the first bomb by the early nineteen fifty-two and he said that they would be nearly impossible Hinton said we haven't time to build a pilot plant we must build a full-scale plant straightaway so this vast building was built from from scratch from the dis lab scale model and the thing that was particularly brave about that was that once the once the process began and the radioactive material was beginning to go through the process it would be impossible for anybody ever to go into the building inside it to make any alterations it had to be right first Wednes girl was far away the most difficult factory to build it was huge the piles were about 70 feet high it was in a building that was about 120 feet high had a chimney that was 400 feet high the chemical plant building was 200 feet high and it had a 200 foot chimney on the top of it this was the scale of things I had never seen plants of this size in my life before Hinton was going to cool his immensely hot reactors with air a decision that provoked a furious Rao one thing that was known about the secret American reactors was that they were cooled by water Henson had rejected that he didn't have access to the vast water supplies needed and anyway he didn't believe the design was safe he was in conflict with his bosses in the ministry of supply who were very angry with him because they said we have got to have this material for the bombs we know this is the way it can be done and they were practically prepared to discipline him for you know I'm really behavior for mutiny or something because he would not do as he had been directed to do what Hinton's theoretical people hadn't realized was that as cooling air flowed through the reactor and out of the chimneys dangerously radioactive fission products might be dispersed across the countryside anton decided there would have to be filters but the chimneys were already half built and with no room in the schedule for any delay the huge filter galleries had to be hastily designed then built 400 feet up in the air the wind scaled paths were the bottleneck they were the bottleneck to the whole of the British nuclear program and therefore all the pressure all the interest all the urgency was focused on these two huge Pyles Hinton was racing against the clock starved of men resources and vital technical information aptly decided on the last desperate attempt to persuade the Americans to help but his trip would open a can of worms the Americans were horrified to discover that Britain was even considering making her own bomb they threatened to withhold financial aid if Britain persisted well aware that his country would starve without American loans aptly found that behind the smiles he was suddenly being blackmailed we were saying we're going to confiscate your entire supply of uranium or cut you out of any possible decision about using these weapons and really not share any important information because in fact the Atomic Energy Act in the United States forbade sharing any crucial nuclear weapons information with any other country so at every level we were simply saying like it or lump it or we won't share any money with you at a time when you are in very serious the near bankruptcy conditions aptly returned empty-handed more convinced than ever that he must have an atomic bomb with a Union Jack on top of it density of a solid ball of metal by squeezing it hard enough with explosives and that's what this device did it was a ball of metal and a ball of explosives that squeezed the metal to criticality the hard bit is to make a huge ordinary explosion go inwards with incredible precision it's called implosion the key figure who'd solved many of the problems of this technique in America was one of the British contingent Klaus Fuchs a German emigres he had fled the Nazis and worked in Britain before the war now penny had him rushed back from America in an raf bomber to take his place at the centre of the British effort Fuchs his great strengths well that he was an extremely versatile physicist who had very strong abilities in theoretical physics and was a very fluent and able mathematician and who seemed able to generate new ideas in a great variety of different fields he was a very quiet man but perhaps if I could give a little flavor to him I always remember we used to have a Friday evening in the officers mess on the site here and I remember my wife coming and sitting down beside me and saying to me bearing in mind that I couldn't dance that Klaus was magnificent when he tangoed but Fuchs was about to demonstrate that his versatility went way beyond the dance floor there was some information coming out and there was a Soviet bomb program so we launched a program of airborne detection in early September of 1949 the planes turned up samples with indeed plutonium in the under filters and that made it clear that there had been a Soviet test and even made it clear what size the test had been what type of bomb it had been well that could be determined because of the debris from the fallout from the bomb but president Sherman was not a technically educated man and he had great contempt for the Soviet Union in general and he refused to believe that the Soviets could have tested about there was a great deal of discussion in his with his staff of whether this might not be a reactor that had blown up because it was badly designed and so on and when the Atomic Energy commissioners came to the president said it was indeed a Soviet bomb like our fat man bomb he insisted that they sign a paper they put their names on paper that they believed this to be true before Americas Congress President Truman makes the most momentous speech since the death of Franklin Roosevelt he declares political war on Soviet Russia in Americanize Britain is no longer the bulwark against communist expansion if we falter in our leadership we may endanger the Peace of the world and we shall surely and danger the welfare of this nation it soon became clear how the Russians had managed to catch up so quickly Klaus Fuchs was arrested for spying he admitted he had systematically given the Russians the detailed secrets of the implosion of all but the Russians weren't the only ones to benefit Fuchs is often castigated as having passed information to the Soviet Union it's overlooked that in the very nature of things he was working for the British and passed the information to Great Britain straighten up I gather most of my informations about the implosion systems and Klaus Fuchs he used to come and lecture here regularly on the implosion system until of course he was Restless Fuchs had spied for Britain the country that now jailed him but the arrest of such a key figure was a body blow to the British program and at Windscale a problem was looming by now they had worked out what was supposed to happen in a reactor in this lecture all the fundamentals of atomic energy are explained the core is a block of very pure graphite pierced with holes in which uranium rods are placed here enlarged when enough rubs are placed us close together a spontaneous nuclear fire begins the chain of atoms splitting or burning created by the neutrons will in time consume all the uranium-235 contained in the uranium fuel and will convert some of the remainder to the concentrated nuclear fuel plutonium that was the theory at the moment of truth was approaching I didn't have a day off for 12 months and when I say done talking about Saturdays and Sundays as well when uranium was loaded and the measurement was necessary didn't matter what time of the day or night I was in here with my second-in-command taking the necessary to grow up to criticality if the reactor was going to produce enough plutonium for a bomb the chain reaction would have to start when a very specific amount of uranium fuel had been loaded speculation about how much it would actually take was growing well the forecast was that the critical size should be around about 42 tons of fuel loading all the people in the know thought that the critical size would be around 40 tons and we had a sweepstake in the certainly in in the laboratories that I was working in I think probably in the whole of the site and all the people who thought they knew about it were around about 40 tons that the character who won was somebody who knew nothing about the reactor who just picked the figure out of the air of 100 tons and he won the Sweepstakes the fact that turned out to be 102 tons and this meant of course that the plutonium had put from the reactors was going to be very considerably reduced in fact it looked as though the reactor wasn't going to make any plutonium at all bill penny had assumed hinton would produce the plutonium and also handled a tricky business of forming it into a perfect sphere the core for the heart of the bomb but with Windscale in trouble penny realized he would have to set up an entirely new facility to make the core himself we looked all over the place for case the beautiful tells them that was rather fun because I used to be taken on these various trips to look at always of course old arrow dreams because of the hangings that could be used as workshops this was a nice little house we moved in with water streaming on the walls like that I thought I'd am preparing to handle plutonium penny again had to live with the frustrating knowledge that the information he so desperately needed existed across the Atlantic he shamelessly pumped visiting scientists for information we used to have an extraordinary dozen but as I had to do the cookie and the washing up you see they got home with the business when I got pointed the dishes rationally at that time the space tight how ready we got the car I can rush down to the butcher and you went in the back door of the butchers he still helped my husband's bringing home anything up to five people who do it can you do anything for me armed with some new information from Penny's dinner parties but still largely in the dark the older Mastan team struggled to work out safe ways of handling the most dangerous of metals lutonium is a silvery gray metal but it oxidizes very rapidly in air and particularly moist air and produces a very fine oxide if this is inhaled and it lodges in in the lung or is ingested in modules and parcels of other parts of body and gets into the bloodstream through a wound it can cause serious problems leading to cancers we knew that these materials were dangerous the only one thing that we didn't really know with any certainty was how much and over what period because you know you can take a reasonable amount of something like strychnine in the body almost you may feel pretty Dargo you won't necessarily do there was open doors which was were leading into a big area which was serviced by people in frogs whose airline suits they were called frog suits because they looked very much like problem this was a very highly active area the entry and exit by which could only be thorough controlled by ventilation systems and corridors oldham Aston was perfectly safe for the moment they hadn't yet seen an ounce of plutonium a vast rally filled liverpool sports stadium to give mr. Winston Churchill a tremendous welcome in 1951 Churchill was returned to power he was amazed and delighted to discover that at Lee had secretly spent a hundred million pounds on an atomic bomb program and he quickly set a test date for October 52 but the confident tone of the secret film he commissioned was misleading at Chatham in June 1952 the escort carrier campanilla prepares to sail for Western Australia's flagship of a special squadron and with campaign IRA's hms tracker a landing ship carrying some of the more precious apart like this gleaming caravan that houses one of the high-speed cameras there within sight of Nelson's victory campaigner takes on the rest of her cargo a brood of boffins physicists and mathematicians chemists and botanists doctors and engineers each with a positive role to play in this great experiment the tight deadlines meant the boffins had to load their equipment and start the long journey south but at this stage their cargo was far from dangerous with only three months to go the crucial nuclear components still didn't exist as the convoy prepared to set sail for the test site a hundred million pounds and Britain's military reputation were riding on an operation that seemed doomed to failure after months of diplomatic effort it was agreed that Britain's first atomic test codenamed operation hurricane could take place off the northwest coast of Australia the calm of the previously uninhabited montebello Islands was shattered by an advance party of sappers laying the foundations for a massive scientific effort this is their last chance to fish after the explosion all fishing over there because of the danger of the demolition but there would be no explosion unless Windscale could solve her problems the engineers now knew why the reactors weren't working too many neutrons were escaping but a redesign would take years to complete in desperation they asked Tom to e if he could find a way to get rid of some aluminium from the fuel elements to cut down Neutron absorption this meant unloading the 102 tons clipping 1/6 surveillant of an inch of aluminium of every fin of which there were 14 on each of 36,000 fuel elements which meant we had to do about a half a million fins and one of our engineers devised a little machine whereby you could place this on a rack and turn it round and you made a stroke like that took your fin turn it round clipped another turn it round clipped another and we managed to get the whole half-million fins off as I say and in three weeks and the fuel back into the reactor with the fins clipped the reactor finally went critical and produced plutonium but when it was extracted it didn't look right we should have been a lovely pink color and I was a disgusting looking greenish Brown so something had to be done about that but we had no recovery process so decision was taken at the time time to add some calcium to the chain feel I'd cook it up in a reaction vessel and see what happened and this was the last stage before getting plutonium metal I broke down the reaction vessel myself personally opened it up scrambled around amongst calcium fluoride see if I could find anything and there I found piece of plutonium about this size but the size of a 50 pence piece 132 grams and that was our very first piece so all this vast industrial complex and six years of activity came down to 132 grams of plutonium Hinton's team had met the impossible deadline just now the plutonium was transported down the highways and byways of Britain to its destination in the Thames Valley the most valuable substance ever produced in Britain was carried in a sealed drum latched to the back of an army lorry there was no police escort we received a message that windscar will be sending the first consignment of the plutonium to us here the lorry drove up outside the main entrance to the building I step forward suitably protected with my equipment and the task was to first of all to declare for instance that the surfaces that people would have to walk on were free from contamination and also the external surface of the drum was free from contamination I checked with a Geiger this time looking for gamma radiation the outside of the container I detected a certain amount of radiation not a lot but enough to suggest that it did in fact contain some radioactive material I then turn round to the chief and told him formally as it were that the material could be moved into the building which was known as I won a couple of chaps came forward lifted the container off ceremoniously took it into the building took it in I followed on behind it just in case for some reason or other that might have been at some Siddhant but nevertheless it was belt embraces if you like and it was taken in a place to one of the laboratories in a1 it was then opened up I actually hoped the lock lifted the lid up no contamination was measured which frankly was a little bit of surprise because it's a highly active material plutonium and of course there was always a problem in the back of all our minds about a phenomenon called criticality if one has two pieces of radioactive material and safe Newtonian be quite stable quite safe on their own but their their subcritical but the total mass when put together would be supercritical and we brought those together and they came close not together there had been a spontaneous fission takes place and a burst of neutrons would occur and that would be extremely hazardous to anybody it was in the immediate locality and could cause harm to those some different work so far the scientists had only been working with small amounts of plutonium now it was time to make the two hemispheres which together would form the actual core of the bomb the plutonium was loaded into a glovebox and the individual pieces were placed into a crucible to be melted the theory said that the amounts would still be safe or sub critical but theory and practice are two different things why noticed in one of the boxes where plutonium was being melted it was a nice blue halo something like a blue light the high softness oh my god criticality that was the first thing that came to my mind so I quickly whipped along the corridor spoke to one or two people there too late for anybody to do anything because if we're going to have a critical reaction those were there were there and that was it undoubtedly the man they thought faithful would have been killed and seven others Filipina bond the patty hurt but the flame died away and the costing proceeded and the first chord made first half court wood made at that stage I think most of us felt that well the job was done and I had to write home and see my wife they say the first time for a few days and I received a call that two operatives and the two cutonium hemispheres were trapped implied Dobby we had result of several years were trapped behind a still dome and attempted to move the dogs were absolutely and hopeful because couldn't move at all the worker with half a critical mass in each hand was eventually squeezed out and the team retired to the pub but with time running out penny now faced the nightmare of entrusting his precious plutonium to a 10,000 mile flight it was time to call on the our air and he was a very informal man and he wandered into my office one day and sat down and said look I'm anticipating to be an RAF bomb I think you should do the radioactive assembly at Montebello and I swallowed hard and said yes uh spying and he said this is one of the most important consignment ever to leave the United Kingdom and I'd like you to be responsible for making all the arrangements for getting it from the safes out here to Montebello Rowlands most important consignment was driven away from Oldham Aston in two staff cars as the impressive convoy navigated the backroads in the heart of the countryside enroute to London the lead car broke down the driver called all the Marston and was told he would have to press on regardless it's an interesting operation border because in the service have to allow for some contingencies one of the contingencies I looked at was a possibility of the aircraft crashing with material on board or having to ditch in the sea and so the Laconia within large containers and they'd been made so they would float and so one of the procedures if we were going to ditch or platinum was to jump out on parachutes clutching these materials and liberal ad in the sea we ignored the Sharks the Sharks were to be disappointed Roland's cargo arrived safely and the scientists at last took delivery of the simple wooden case containing a neutron initiator and lutonium core he felt ill of hazardous part of the experiment because the meta logic condition was such the wind was blowing essentially from South Africa and there were huge waves for safety penny had designed the bomb so that the core could be kept separate from the rest until the last possible moment these pictures top-secret until they were specially Declassified for this program show for the first time a plutonium core being lowered into the heart of an atomic bomb for Eddie House the loading was a heart-stopping affair from the night and we were told that we couldn't keep out of the young a hold because they were going to do the the loading and our cabins were in - alongside and we could hear what was going on but we couldn't see they were lowering slowly they caught into the bomb and as they were going down so they were recording what you Tron's are being produced and we could hear this voice saying down down no stop stop drop a bit up a bit down again and this went on for nearly gone for hours and obviously it wasn't as long as that it seemed like hours until it when quasi we assumed it been loaded successfully when you still alive so we are quite happy and HMS bloom comes to the end of her final voyage Churchill had insisted the bomb be tested in the hold of a ship to see what would happen if the Russians were to sail such a ship into a British port dr. penny gives the order for the weapon to be fired at eight o'clock next morning we were told this is a the d-day doing the weather was alright and the ship was Boris stripped of all its complement except one or two were going to power the belt in one officer and it came down to the ingestion challenge myself well firstly we had put the detonators in which was a unit about as big as a coconut from small Patna we put these in clips round the bottom there were 32 of them and then we had to connect up the cable we had two firing circuits the idea was that in the event of there being a designated fire on one system the detonation the other system would take its place sixty-four cables to connect up to quite a low in tedious business it was that moment when we're going to realize that you were playing about the nuclear bomb connect the batteries one two next the switches 1 2 3 now the key turning the circuit into position to fire inside headquarters the rest of the control party are waiting at their instruments there was a master safety plug which had to be put in at the control room I chose to carry this plug back to the control room and to hand it to the man in charge of firing as I handed it to he so well I'm glad you remember to bring that can we have the already signals please mr. abercrombie please thank you every man has to strip them change they put on fine woolen under bits I went into a bunker alongside the control room where I joined the others who were stationed at h1 and they finish their job when our waiting for the firing - one minute well of course I standing with my back to the explosion eyes code hands over eyes boom now so when the countdown went to three two one zero and then there was the flesh so we knew it'd gone off and the immediate thing was to run outside and we all rushed outside if you had a view what we could see and we stood out there and waited for the shockwave to reach us I turned round and looked at the explosion and it didn't look very impressive to me he didn't look like a mushroom we just looked like a smoke going up and then as the wind caught it change direction and went one way and it kept going up then it changed to rippling with the other way so I look like a giant head of smoke in the sky curiosity was that although on television yours here the bang immediate with the burst goes off in real life the 30 seconds or so dead silence it's all very area to see this event taking place in complete silence and I say the total impression on me was I don't think that's very good but what no one saw at the time were the first terrifying microseconds of the explosion dr. penny had succeeded in the job he never wanted to do it was as powerful as anything the Americans had achieved so far just three weeks later the Americans exploded the world's first thermonuclear weapon a thousand times more powerful but Britain was now fully committed to the nuclear club by 1957 she had tested her own hydrogen bomb and the Americans finally decided that the special relationship was worth reviving after all bill penny had returned from Montebello to face a new problem publicity I know don't be what is your next move well I have to send in my report to the government when I found that I should have a short holiday and I had the place and all can you say at this stage there was anything at all I want to be there now not at all whose book a moment yes but in the paragraph we went to London and everybody pointed at him you see to the end so he said come on the Const Anderson ruined her gentleman total heat up quickly they finished our food and we all went back him as fast as we had air before he died penny burned all his personal papers he had done his duty for his country but he couldn't bear to be remembered only as a bomb maker in a world apparently hell-bent on a nuclear arms race Oh

Channel: Imp5011

Views: 927,491

Rating: 4.5217714 out of 5

Keywords: Maralinga, Emu, Fields, Windscale, Aldermaston, William, Penney, Klaus, Fuchs, Monte, Bello, Operation, Hurricane, Stanley, Baldwin, Criticality, Plutonium, Uranium

Id: Qk_zpjK3cTo

Length: 49min 14sec (2954 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 01 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Fun fact. The first hydrogen bomb we detonated wasn't actually a hydrogen bomb, it was just a really really large fission bomb. A fission bomb so large that the Americans believed it had to have been a hydrogen bomb.

In response they shared designs for their hydrogen bombs allowing us to build our first real hydrogen bomb.

Honeydicked.

[u/aimsover]

A less positive documentary presenting windscale disaster

[u/PoweredByPenguins]

Worth watching. Lots of never before seen footage of the actual assembly of an atomic bomb. Well-done British documentary style, as you'd expect.