Clouds of Deceit by Joan Smith Page B

followed, from the University of Wisconsin, from Cambridge, and from London. At Imperial, Penney had been working on the nature of matter and had published numerous papers on the structure of various elements and compounds.
    From 1940, he was on loan from the college to the Admiralty and the Ministry of Home Security to do war work; he was asked to look at the effects of an underwater explosion, particularlythe effect known as the pressure wave. This work later influenced the setting up of Britain’s first atom bomb test, since Penney was anxious to discover the effect of an atom bomb explosion on board ship in a harbour.
    Penney went on from this work to examine the effects of explosions in air on ships, houses and other vulnerable structures. Next, he advised the Admiralty on the kind of pressures to which the temporary harbour to be used for the Normandy landings would be exposed. In 1944, he went to Los Alamos.
    Penney was asked to go to the US, well after the first wave of scientists from Britain arrived, because the project needed someone expert in calculating the effects of explosions. He worked on areas of the project which gave him extensive knowledge of atom bombs - not just the effects of blast but also the planning of the first bomb test, and the flights over Japan when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Chapman Pincher, speculating in a book published in 1948 about whether Britain would make its own bomb, wrote that Penney ‘is said to know more about the atom bomb than any other British scientist’, making him the most likely candidate to head the project.
    When the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Penney was in the observer plane with a specially adapted camera to take photographs, in the hope of estimating the size of the bomb, but cloud over the city prevented him. Penney and the other British observer, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, had wanted to fly in the observer plane over Hiroshima but had been prevented by the local US commander.
    So keen were the Americans on Penney that they invited him to attend their first post-war atom bomb tests, an operation called Crossroads, at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in 1946. At these tests, in July that year, he was given the title Coordinator of Blast Measurement.
    With all this useful experience, Penney was the natural choice to run Britain’s post-war bomb project. He was given the task of designing, building and testing the bomb in May 1947, more than two years before the USSR startled the world by testing the first Russian bomb. Leonard Bertin, who interviewed Penney for his book on the early years of the British nuclearprogramme, published in 1955, was troubled by an incongruity between Penney’s personal charm and the work he was doing: ‘With his boyish face, blue eyes, tousled, sandy hair and ingenuous smile, he looks the last person in the world to develop a fearful weapon of destruction.’
    But it was a job Penney fulfilled single-mindedly and apparently without hesitation. He gave his reason in a brief and rather testy answer to a question at the Australian Royal Commission hearings in London in 1985. ‘I thought we were going to have nuclear war,’ he said. ‘The only hope I saw was [that] there should be a balance between the East and the West. That was why I did this job, not to make money. What I wanted was to be a professor.’
    Demonstrating the power of the bomb by testing it unannounced, by devastating two Japanese cities, and by testing it again at Bikini had, of course, more to do with showing off the West’s superiority than keeping a non-existent balance. Many scientists realized fully the dangers of this course - Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist in charge of Los Alamos, devoted himself at the end of the war to the problem of how to set up a regulatory agency for the post-war period.
    Unlike Penney, some of the British contingent at Los Alamos did have doubts. Joseph Rotblat left the Manhattan