Clouds of Deceit by Joan Smith Page A

restrictive conditionsfor collaboration at the beginning of 1943. Effectively, they were told that they would be expected to continue to supply full information on the parts of the bomb effort on which they were working. The information which the British would be given in return was severely limited. For instance, Britain was to receive no information at all on one of the main methods of separating out U235.
    According to Bertin, the excuse given to the protesting British was security. But, he writes, ‘subsequent events indicated quite clearly that the question mainly at stake was that of post-war development of atomic power.’ The British government certainly seems to have believed this to be the underlying cause of the rift, because the way found out of the impasse conceded to the Americans the final say on post-war developments in nuclear matters with commercial applications.
    The Quebec Agreement, signed on 19 August 1943 by Roosevelt and Churchill, agreed that, ‘in view of the heavy burden of production falling upon the United States as a result of a wise division of war effort, the British government recognise that any post-war advantages of an industrial or commercial character shall be dealt with as between the United States and Great Britain on terms to be specified by the President of the United States to the Prime Minister of Great Britain.’ Churchill disclaimed any interest in these possible commercial aspects ‘beyond what may be considered by the President of the United States to be fair and just and in harmony with the economic welfare of the world’.
    For this high price, collaboration was restored and, towards the end of 1943, teams of scientists from Britain got ready to go to the US, some to work at the nerve centre of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret laboratory set up at Los Alamos, in New Mexico, under the direction of the American physicist, Robert Oppenheimer. The British thought it was worth it because their own resources were severly stretched by the war effort, and sites in Britain would be vulnerable to enemy bombing. They were probably right: the knowledge gained at Los Alamos and elsewhere would prove invaluable after the war.
    The British scientist who knew most about the Los Alamos bomb project was William George Penney. Penney was thirty when the war broke out in 1939. Pictures of him in the 1950s, when he was a national hero, show a large, even shambling figure, straight hair brushed sideways across an unusually square head. The man who gave evidence at the Australian Royal Commission hearings in January 1985 was a smaller but equally solid figure. What seemed little affected by age - he was seventy-five at the time - was his curiously slow manner of speech, familiar from thirty-year-old newsreels when excited reporters hung on his every word.
    In 1952, Churchill’s telegram of congratulation on the success of the first British atom bomb test at the Monte Bello Islands made Penney a knight with the words, ‘Well done, Sir William.’ In 1967, he became a life peer, with the title Baron Penney of East Hendred. He now lives in the village of East Hendred, a stone’s throw from the atomic research establishment at Harwell.
    Penney’s statement to the Australian commission deals mainly with the period from 1947 to 1959. His involvement with the Manhattan Project is covered in two laconic sentences: ‘During the war, I was recruited to the US Manhattan District Atomic Weapon Project. I made measurements of the yields of some of the early US tests and visited Japan to report on the damage caused by the two weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’ But Penney’s role was a key one as far as the British were concerned.
    At the start of the Second World War, Penney was an assistant professor of mathematics at Imperial College in London. He went to school in Sheerness, Kent, and gained both a BSc and a PhD at London University. Other degrees