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‘The monster’? The British popular press and nuclear culture, 1945–early 1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2013

ADRIAN BINGHAM
ADRIAN BINGHAM*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Sheffield, Jessop West, 1 Upper Hanover Street, Sheffield, S3 7RA. Email: adrian.bingham@sheffield.ac.uk.
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Abstract

British popular newspapers were fascinated by the terrible power of the nuclear bomb, and they devoted countless articles, editorials and cartoons to it. In so doing, they played a significant role in shaping the nuclear culture of the post-war period. Yet scholars have given little sustained attention to this rich seam of material. This article makes a contribution to remedying this major gap by offering an overview of the coverage of nuclear weaponry in the two most popular newspapers in Britain, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, in the period from 1945 to the early 1960s. Although both papers supported British possession of the bomb, claiming that it was essential for the maintenance of great-power status, their reporting was more complex and critical than the existing scholarship has tended to assume. This article argues that sceptical voices in the press often disrupted official narratives and that journalists emphasized the potential dangers involved in the nuclear arms race. Newspapers frequently highlighted, rather than downplayed, the horrors of the bomb: it was repeatedly portrayed as a ‘monster’ threatening the world.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 45 , Issue 4: Special Issue: British Nuclear Culture , December 2012, pp. 609 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2013

‘The bomb that has changed the world’, declared the front page of the Daily Express on 7 August 1945, the morning after the United States dropped ‘the most fearful device of war yet produced’ on the Japanese port of Hiroshima. The atomic explosion, argued the paper's editorial, had ‘blotted out a whole universe of ideas’. ‘Steeled as people have become to news of weapons of destruction, they can but gasp in wonder at this revelation of man's power over the forces of Nature’.Footnote 1 The combination of shock, awe, fear and exhilaration in the Daily Express's reporting was matched in hundreds of publications around the world.Footnote 2 The bomb had brought death and destruction on an unparalleled scale, and promised to alter profoundly both international diplomacy and everyday life: this was, as Paul Boyer has observed, ‘a psychic event of almost unprecedented proportions’, and it inevitably triggered an avalanche of media commentary and speculation.Footnote 3 This interest was sustained, with varying intensity, over the decades that followed. British popular newspapers were fascinated by the terrible power of nuclear technology, and they devoted countless articles, editorials and cartoons to it. In so doing, they played a significant role in shaping and reflecting public attitudes to the bomb.

This press coverage deserves an important place in any sustained exploration of the nuclear culture of mid-twentieth-century Britain. Newspapers were right at the heart of popular culture at this time: the national press reached its peak circulation in the early 1950s, with dailies achieving combined sales of 16.6 million copies per day, and Sundays selling just over 30 million copies per week. The market was close to saturation point, with some 85 per cent of the adult population regularly reading a paper; the British, furthermore, read more newspapers per head than any other people in the world, almost twice as many, for example, as Americans.Footnote 4 Newspapers played a significant role in setting the agenda for public and private discussion, and in providing interpretative frameworks through which readers made sense of the world.Footnote 5 From the mid-1950s the rise of television did start to alter the place of newspapers in the media landscape, but the popular press's offering remained distinctive and influential; its treatment of the news was far more partisan, brash and provocative than the restrained impartiality of broadcasting.Footnote 6 Relatively little has been done with this rich seam of newspaper material, however. With some notable exceptions, scholars of British nuclear culture have in recent years given more attention to film, television and fiction than they have to the press; we still lack a detailed study of British newspapers' responses to the bomb.Footnote 7

This article seeks to make a contribution to remedying this major gap by offering an overview of the coverage of nuclear weaponry in Britain's two most popular papers, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, in the period from 1945 to the early 1960s. With sales of more than four million copies per issue – and therefore a readership of some ten to twelve million adults every day – these two papers dominated the market and significantly outperformed their rivals. The Express was owned by the maverick Canadian millionaire Lord Beaverbrook, who had recently served during the Second World War as minister of aircraft production. Beaverbrook was a close friend and supporter of Winston Churchill, and his paper was conservative and imperialist in tone, although it was often critical of Conservative Party policies. The paper had a fairly broad social appeal, with readers across the class spectrum, but it was ultimately targeted at upwardly mobile lower middle classes.Footnote 8 The Daily Mirror, by contrast, was not at the mercy of an individual proprietor; its operations were overseen by the talented team of Harry Guy Bartholomew (until his departure in 1951), Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp. Since the mid-1930s it had been a left-of-centre paper aimed squarely at the working-class market. During the war it came to be seen as the ‘Forces’ Paper’, and in 1949 it overtook the Express to become the nation's most popular paper. After 1945 it was a fairly consistent supporter of Labour, although, like the Express, it was a ‘critical friend’ of its chosen party.Footnote 9

Both papers accepted the American justifications for the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and both supported Britain's pursuit of a bomb of its own; to that extent, they supported the main thrust of the defence policies of the Labour and Conservative governments of the period. Their coverage of the bomb was, however, more complex and critical than the existing scholarship has tended to assume. Several writers have accused the British press of being overly deferential in their reporting of nuclear weapons, suggesting that journalists merely reproduced official narratives provided by the government and the military establishment, and did not properly investigate or challenge the formulation of policy in this area. Michael Cockerell, Peter Hennessy and David Walker argue, for example, that the ‘press was remarkably lacking in basic curiosity’ about the post-war Labour government's decision to build a British bomb. Although the government had issued two D notices to ward off press interest in the development of British weapons, journalists did not even seek to provide ‘context and background’ to the policy-making process; nor did they highlight or follow up the public announcement made by A.V. Alexander, the minister of defence, in 1948 that Britain was developing a bomb as a matter of the ‘highest priority’. This latter failure was nothing less than a ‘dereliction of duty’.Footnote 10 Paul Chilton, meanwhile, has contended that the press quickly came to use what he calls ‘nukespeak’ in a ‘controlled response directed by the state in conjunction with other interested parties … as a means of constraining possible thought on the nuclear phenomenon’.Footnote 11 In the aftermath of the Hiroshima explosion, for example, he points to the use of ‘religious vocabulary and phrasing’ to make the bomb ‘both conceivable and acceptable’; the press, he says, found language ‘to conceal from the many the horror that had been glimpsed by the few’. ‘Rarely’, he argues, was ‘the atomic bomb described in totally negative terms’; instead there emerged a ‘small set of evocative, positively valued words for describing the bomb and its effects’ which the press repeated ‘incessantly’; there was a ‘general presentation of the atomic bomb as something paradoxically good and evil but predominantly good, and as something outside human responsibility’.Footnote 12 These interpretations fit in with broader critiques of the press which emphasize its receptiveness to government propaganda during both hot and cold wars, and which highlight the ease with which newspapers were managed and penetrated by the security services and organizations such as the Information Research Department.Footnote 13

These arguments undoubtedly carry considerable force. Newspapers were often reluctant to challenge the veil of secrecy shrouding the activities of the British state, and it was frequently easier and cheaper to rely on government information than to delve more deeply into controversial matters. Particular linguistic styles were sometimes used to close down certain arguments about the bomb, and some journalists did employ euphemistic descriptions to distance the devastation caused by nuclear weaponry. Nevertheless, these accounts tend to exaggerate the extent to which the state was able to contain and control press discourse about the bomb, and conversely they underestimate the willingness of journalists to criticize the policies and question the competence of governments and the military. This article will identify four reasons to explain why popular papers were not as wedded to a carefully managed ‘nukespeak’ as has been claimed. First, they were not as reliant on state or approved sources as is sometimes suggested, and they frequently ran stories that dismayed and angered the authorities. Second, popular newspapers valued controversy, and gave space to opinionated writers, such as James Cameron at the Express and William Connor (‘Cassandra’) at the Mirror, who were sceptical of official narratives and sought to disrupt them. Third, the popular press's desire for ‘human interest’ meant that journalists were not content merely to rely on euphemistic phrases to describe the impact of nuclear weaponry, but rather sought ways of making it more concrete and specific: they produced striking diagrams emphasizing the scale of potential devastation in a British context, published spectacular photographs of mushroom clouds, and used memorable headlines (‘The monster’, ‘The horror bomb’) to underline the magnitude of the new invention. Fourth, the popular press's appetite for stories of disaster and conspiracy ensured that it both highlighted potential flaws in the nuclear safety regime and speculated about the dangers posed by the activities of spies. Journalists were not so deferential and credulous that they were prepared to minimize the threat of the bomb and placidly follow the government line; on the contrary, they often sought to whip up public anxieties about the dangers of nuclear technology and the inadequacies of the official policy. The main body of this article will examine each of these four pressures not to conform to ‘nukespeak’, before explaining briefly why both the Express and the Mirror nevertheless supported Britain's possession of the bomb. Although the two papers sometimes differed in their presentation and interpretation of the specific issues, this article will focus, in the limited space available, on the striking similarities in their general approach to many of the central questions of the new era.

Sources of information

The atomic attacks of August 1945 caught journalists unprepared, and inevitably they were initially forced to rely on statements released by the United States and British authorities. As Chilton observes, ‘The Press did not … in the first instance report Hiroshima and Nagasaki direct; it reported official utterances about them’.Footnote 14 Nevertheless, British newspapers did make efforts to find other sources of information to portray the effects and aftermath of the explosions. Both the Express and the Mirror, for example, used Japanese radio as a source of eyewitness accounts of the devastation. These accounts used language that tended to be starker and more immediate than the Allied press releases. A front-page story in the Mirror two days after Hiroshima quoted Japanese radio reporting that ‘practically all living things – human and animal – were literally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engendered by the blast’. The casualties, the story continued, ‘were burned beyond recognition’.Footnote 15 Similarly, the Express quoted both Japanese radio and a report from a Japanese air defence technician to make clear that the bomb had caused complete devastation in an area nineteen miles in diameter: ‘practically all houses were either blown up, knocked down or destroyed by fire’. These reports also explicitly identified the poorly understood but clearly deadly impact of radioactive fallout: ‘Many of those who received burns cannot survive their wounds because of the uncanny effects the Atom Bomb produces on the human body’.Footnote 16 The fear engendered by the bomb would be greatly intensified by rumours of these ‘uncanny effects’.

Obtaining eyewitness accounts from journalists on the ground was difficult given the restrictions imposed by the United States military. The Daily Express nevertheless managed to secure a major scoop because of the ingenuity of the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who took a twenty-one-hour train journey from Tokyo and became the first Allied reporter to enter Hiroshima unaccompanied by military minders.Footnote 17 His famous report, published on 5 September 1946 and headlined ‘The atomic plague – “I write this as a warning to the world”’, infuriated the American authorities by drawing attention in dramatic terms to the radioactive fallout from the bomb:

people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured in the cataclysm – from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague … They developed an acute sickness. Their gums began to bleed. And then they vomited blood. And finally they died. All these phenomena … [Japanese scientists] told me, were due to the radioactivity released by the atomic bomb's explosion of the uranium atom …Footnote 18

The evocative language of the ‘plague’ raised the terrifying prospect that modern science had manufactured a weapon whose after-effects were reminiscent of the medieval ‘Black Death’. Burchett also emphasized the sheer extent of the physical destruction caused by the initial explosion. ‘Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city’, he wrote, ‘It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence … It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden.’Footnote 19 The American authorities reacted to this report both by targeting Burchett and by working to calm public fears about the fallout; as a result, there was little immediate follow-up to it. Nevertheless, Burchett's article, with its sensational imagery of deadly plagues and monstrous technology, was a significant influence on early understandings of the bomb in Britain and it demonstrated that the British press were not completely beholden to official narratives.

Scepticism and controversy

In the climate of developing Cold War tension after 1945, both the Express and the Mirror employed sceptical journalists who were willing to challenge and disrupt official interpretations of the place of the atomic bomb. At the Express, the most prominent of these was James Cameron, a London-born foreign correspondent who was then in his mid-thirties. Cameron was the only British journalist to observe the American atom bomb test at Bikini atoll in 1946, and this experience would profoundly shape his view of the weapons; he would later become a founding member of CND.Footnote 20 His suspicion of the bomb emerged clearly in a number of prominent articles he wrote in the Express in the late 1940s. He implored readers not to underestimate the likelihood of nuclear warfare: ‘The world is in a tragic mess, which grows rather worse every day … I hold that anyone who at this moment does not live in a perpetual state of anxiety and concern is either an archangel or an imbecile’. He explicitly challenged the euphemisms that distanced the threat: ‘Another war is “unthinkable.” I pray you, think about it. Another war will produce only “nameless horrors”. This report proposes to name them’. He went on to provide graphic descriptions of what an atomic explosion would entail, writing of ‘the spilling of blood and the laceration of flesh, unimagined pain and hurt, maiming and crushing, widowhood and despair, madness and misery and the impact of repellent and unforeseen disease’.Footnote 21 He strengthened his prose by using gruesome phrases from eyewitness accounts, telling of bomb victims ‘whose eyes had melted in their sockets and run down their cheeks’.Footnote 22 The self-declared aim of his writing was to rouse an apathetic public taking ‘refuge from the disagreeable prospect of the world today in trivial concerns’: ‘it is up to you’, he told his readers, ‘either to put a stop to this dangerous nonsense or to take the consequences of it’.Footnote 23 These were powerful words in a right-wing popular paper often accused of taking refuge in ‘trivial concerns’, and unsurprisingly they prompted a ‘heavy post’ from readers. This strain of oppositional writing faded somewhat after 1950, when Cameron stopped writing for Beaverbrook's papers, but other Express journalists – most notably Chapman Pincher, whose wartime background at the Military College of Science ensured that he was both knowledgeable and well connected on defence issues – intermittently questioned and exposed flaws in official policies on nuclear weapons.Footnote 24

At the Mirror, this sceptical role was played by William Connor, who had joined the paper in 1935 from a background in advertising, and wrote columns with a marked anti-establishment tone under the pen name Cassandra.Footnote 25 He was concerned as early as 1946 that ‘people are getting used to the idea of the atom bomb’ and to the logic that it would inevitably bring peace. He argued that the rhetoric used to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki could prove very elastic: in the future, Russia or the US ‘may easily justify their sudden use of the atomic bomb without notice, as a purely preventative and humanitarian action’.Footnote 26 He repeatedly exposed the fatuities of what he called ‘atomania’ – inappropriate celebrations, or commercial exploitations, of the bomb – and juxtaposed them with graphic accounts of the slaughter. Like Cameron, he quoted from John Hersey's moving description of the attack on Hiroshima, first published in the New Yorker magazine, to remind readers of the brutal realities of an atomic strike.Footnote 27 In one column, for example, he told the story of Dr Sasaki, a surgeon at Hiroshima's best hospital, being overwhelmed by the flood of casualties coming for treatment:

Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skilful surgeon and a sympathetic man; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.Footnote 28

Such personalized anecdotes were explicitly designed to counter modes of discussing atomic attacks that distanced the horror and the human consequences – what Chilton would later call ‘nukespeak’. Unlike Cameron, moreover, he was able to continue his critical commentaries into the 1950s and beyond. In April 1954, for example, shortly after the release of the first pictures of the United States' pioneering H-bomb test at the Pacific Marshall Islands in November 1952, Cassandra was prompted to write a savagely ironic piece, addressed to the younger generation, lamenting the way in which ‘grown-ups’ were ‘Saving the world through Death’ by engaging in a gruesome race to create bigger and bigger nuclear weapons. The device tested in 1952, he noted, ‘dug a watery grave capable of containing the bodies of all the people in the world’; at the same rate of growth, he calculated, the bomb of 1964 would be the equivalent of 7.8 trillion tons of TNT, ‘unless we run out of noughts’. ‘Who,’ he asked his ‘darling kids’, ‘will save us from ourselves?’Footnote 29 Cassandra's column was, as Dennis Griffiths notes, ‘the most widely read and discussed in the British popular press’, and provided a powerful and influential counterpoint to official narratives about nuclear policy.Footnote 30

Making the bomb meaningful

The potency of columns such as those by Cameron and Cassandra was often increased by their juxtaposition with unsettling images and descriptions elsewhere in the paper. One of the most fundamental impulses of popular journalism is to make issues and events meaningful to ordinary readers by simplifying them and translating them into concrete and specific terms; where possible they need to be related to everyday life.Footnote 31 This remained throughout the period an important countervailing tendency to any inclination to abstract ‘nukespeak’. A major challenge for popular newspapers reporting the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the absence of usable photographs of the explosion or the subsequent destruction; they had to illustrate their coverage with pictures of the atomic scientists and line drawings uncertainly demonstrating ‘The possible principle behind the bomb’.Footnote 32 Over time, however, the press found ways of evoking the awesome magnitude of the bomb. It soon became clear that one of the most effective means of conveying the scale of destruction was by superimposing circles onto maps of Britain. The Express placed a circle equivalent to nineteen miles in diameter over a map of Greater London to portray the damage caused by a Hiroshima-type bomb; readers from Edgware, Woodford, Bromley and Kingston would have had the disturbing realization that their homes were in the blast zone.Footnote 33 Such diagrams became all the more troubling as the power of nuclear weaponry increased. Announcing in September 1952 that the United States was to set off ‘The biggest bang in all history’, for example, the front page of the Express showed how an H-bomb or super H-bomb could devastate the London area. The H-bomb would flatten around a hundred square miles; the mooted super H-bomb, meanwhile, would obliterate no less an area than a thousand square miles, reaching out almost to Windsor and Reigate from central London.Footnote 34 As Cassandra pointed out in a column in January 1955, the concentration of population in urban England made it a particularly vulnerable target in the nuclear era. He tried to express in prose the same message as the diagrams of destruction:

The glaze of a visitation on London at night would bring daylight to the streets of Birmingham and a red dawn to towns as far away as Liverpool and Hull. No reliable estimate can be made of the deaths and injuries that would occur as a result of a hydrogen bomb raid on a large modern industrial city. But the casualties would certainly have to be reckoned in MILLIONS. Gigantic fires would be instantly ignited by heat and flash. The heart of towns would be completely torn out and the radius of destruction by gamma rays … [could be] anything within up to 400 miles of the centre burst …Footnote 35

Far from hiding the likely consequences of a nuclear strike on Britain, therefore, the popular press's desire for clarity and human interest ensured that it produced some graphic descriptions of the potential fallout.

Nothing better demonstrated the remarkable power of nuclear weapons, however, than the dramatic photographs of mushroom clouds that became regular features of newspapers in the 1950s. When pictures of the United States' 1952 H-bomb tests were finally released in 1954, they were splashed across the front pages accompanied by apocalyptic prose. The Express marvelled at the size of what it called the ‘umbrella of death’ and once again transposed the ‘H-bomb havoc’ onto a London skyline.Footnote 36 For the Mirror, the device was portrayed as having almost demonic capabilities, and a series of headlines and photographs emphasized the unprecedented dangers it posed to humanity. The front page was dominated by the words ‘The monster’ above a striking picture of a ‘monstrous mushroom cloud … nearly eight miles high’. Inside, a double-page spread entitled ‘Horror-bomb’ was illustrated by a shot of the ‘giant fiery cloud of death taken from a plane 12,000 feet in the air; a further picture on the back page portrayed it as a ‘crouching, obscene beast … with nightmare powers’ that threatened the world.Footnote 37 Captions and headlines do much to shape the ways in which readers interpret photographs, and the language in these instances portrayed the nuclear bomb as a uniquely grotesque and deadly weapon – almost outside the realm of human understanding.

Conspiracy and catastrophe

As Cold War tension intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the Berlin blockade, the Communist victory in China, and the outbreak of the Korean War, the only reassurances that it seemed possible to offer the British public were that the Western powers, assembled together in NATO from 1949, had an unassailable lead in nuclear science and technology, and that nuclear warfare with the Soviet Union was unlikely because of the strategic recognition of the inevitability of ‘massive retaliation’.Footnote 38 Yet the popular press's penchant for speculation about conspiracy and catastrophe frequently served to undermine such reassurances. For one thing, it seemed that the West was unable to preserve its military and scientific secrets. Within six months of Hiroshima, the front page of the Express featured stories about the suspicious activities of ‘atom spies’ after a series of arrests in Canada; a few weeks later the detention of Dr Alan Nunn May, a member of a British team of atom scientists working in Canada, created further headlines.Footnote 39 The prosecution and imprisonment in 1950 of Dr Klaus Fuchs, a physicist caught passing sensitive information to the Soviet Union, and the apparent defection of Professor Bruno Pontecorvo, both received huge publicity in the press and seemed to expose the vulnerability of the British security regime.Footnote 40 ‘Fuchs gave bomb to Russia’, screamed the Express's front page when he was convicted: for Chapman Pincher, the paper's defence correspondent, the revelations provided a simple answer to the question ‘How did Russia make the atomic bomb so quickly?’.Footnote 41 (Recent evidence, as Peter Hennessy has noted, has lent credibility to this claim.Footnote 42)

Spy scandals received considerable attention because they fitted the news values of the popular press very well: human stories of intrigue and deception were far more appealing to the public than the generalities of international diplomatic rivalry, and these cases enabled journalists to expose, in classic tabloid fashion, the private secrets lying behind an individual's respectable public facade.Footnote 43 Scandals, in the tabloid genre, also inevitably generate blame and a demand for solutions; in this instance the target was the security services. ‘MI5 duped for 6 years – why?’ asked the Daily Mirror on its front page.Footnote 44 A few months later, after further investigations, Pincher produced his definitive judgement that the ‘key defect in Britain's security organisation’ was ‘the danger of breakdown in liaison due to the fact that there is no single over-riding security authority’.Footnote 45 As Simone Turchetti has noted, Pincher's criticisms encouraged a shift to ‘positive vetting’ in research establishments.Footnote 46 These were only the opening salvos in a long campaign against the incompetence of the British security apparatus in the 1950s and 1960s, fed by a series of spy scandals featuring Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Vassall and John Profumo.Footnote 47 As Pincher recognized, though, anxieties about spying and treachery were ‘the price of a civilisation in which machines are so powerful that the technical facts one man can cram into his head may imperil a nation's security’.Footnote 48 Until the authorities could reliably detect and detain individuals such as Fuchs, the nuclear regime remained fundamentally unstable.

These anxieties would likely have been exacerbated by the steady flow of stories about more advanced atomic bombs that would make striking opposing nations ever easier or would bring even greater destruction. Mesmerized by the seemingly limitless possibilities of modern science, journalists generated new angles on the nuclear story by speculating about new inventions. One threat that came to loom large in the public imagination was posed by small atomic weapons that could potentially evade detection. ‘Baby atom bomb is here’, announced the Express in May 1950; less than two weeks later, the paper declared that ‘American scientists have discovered how to make atom bombs which can be carried by pilotless planes no bigger than a V.1 “doodlebug”’.Footnote 49 Most worrying of all was the scenario in which weapons were successfully smuggled into Britain by enemy agents. In December 1950 Chapman Pincher claimed to have devised a feasible means by which such an attack could be carried out. ‘Enough atom bombs to cripple Britain's defences could be brought into the country without the knowledge of police, Customs or the Secret Services’, he wrote on the front page of the Express, by using the diplomatic post.Footnote 50 He repeated the warning five years later, observing this time that a ‘hydrogen bomb powerful enough to destroy London’ could be smuggled in under diplomatic seal. An accompanying editorial chastised the security services for their passivity in the face of this threat:

An H-bomb in the diplomatic bag. That is the disturbing possibility opened up by Chapman Pincher. But even more disturbing is the revelation that the authorities are aware of it and doing nothing about it … the right of inspection of diplomatic baggage should be declared and insisted on – even at the cost of injuring diplomatic dignity.Footnote 51

By the mid-1950s, as the consequences of nuclear fallout were increasingly understood and debate intensified on banning nuclear testing, fears focused less on undetectable devices and more on the dangers of radioactivity.Footnote 52 With reliable information about Soviet technology hard to come by, journalists pounced on any plausible conjectures about the new weaponry being developed behind the Iron Curtain. In November 1955 the Express reported claims that the latest Soviet ‘super-bomb’ produced ‘enough radioactive death-dust to contaminate the whole of Britain’; ‘if such a super-bomb were exploded in mid-air over Birmingham’, suggested Chapman Pincher, ‘probably the whole of Britain would be dangerous for a few days’.Footnote 53 The bombs even seemed to pose a threat when they were being tested, rather than fired in anger. ‘Do scientists yet know how much the atmosphere is being poisoned by H-tests, and whether this is harmful to mankind?’ asked the Mirror a few weeks later.Footnote 54 Given that the science of radioactivity remained opaque to the general public, papers had considerable latitude to play on popular anxieties about hidden killers; Burchett's ‘atomic plague’ was reworked into ‘death-dust’ and atmospheric ‘poison’.

A potent variant on this narrative of ‘dangerous science’ focused on the possible calamities caused by technical malfunction and human error at nuclear facilities or with nuclear weapons.Footnote 55 This was given credibility in October 1957 when a fire at the nuclear reactor in Windscale, Cumbria, led to the release of radioactive material; although the full extent of the incident was not initially made clear to the public, it was soon evident that nuclear plants potentially posed a major risk. In December 1958, for example, Chapman Pincher revealed in ‘irresistible detail’ the story about ‘The night the atoms ran wild’ and ‘brought a peril to Britain that man had never faced’. Although his account focused on the heroism of the individuals who worked to extinguish the fire, he emphasized that this had been a moment of ‘possible catastrophe’.Footnote 56 In March 1958, meanwhile, an American B47 jet plane accidentally dropped an atomic bomb over South Carolina, after a malfunction with the bomb-lock system. While the resulting blast was modest (the bomb's thermonuclear component did not detonate), the ‘political reverberations’ were, as the Express observed, ‘world-wide’, and ‘will inevitably reinforce the public suspicion that whatever foolproof systems are devised, a major atomic explosion by accident is not impossible’.Footnote 57 Further crashes or collisions involving nuclear-armed bombers kept these fears alive during the 1960s, and each time newspapers highlighted the risks of nuclear technology in stark terms.Footnote 58 By covering spy scandals and technological malfunctions in such sensational detail, the press inevitably brought into question the competence of the state to manage the new world of nuclear science.

The need to ‘sit at the top table’

The Daily Express and the Daily Mirror did, therefore, portray something at least of the horror of nuclear weapons; they did not conceal the consequences of a strike on Britain or downplay its likelihood, nor were they complacent about the state's ability to prevent disastrous accidents. Ultimately, though, constructing a vision of a strong and united national community had been central to the editorial appeal of the Mirror and the Express for several decades, and both papers were deeply committed – as were many in the upper echelons of the Conservative and Labour parties – to Britain's role as a great power with international responsibilities.Footnote 59 The atomic bomb was desired as a symbol of national virility; Britain was also regarded as having a special claim on it due to the significant contribution of British scientists to the Manhattan Project. The popular press was determined that the United States should not monopolize the glory of this invention. After the destruction of Nagasaki, an Express editorial portrayed the bomb as a product of British genius: ‘let us British take pride in our achievement. Let us now praise the famous British, a race incomparable in ingenuity, unparalleled in swiftness of hand and brain’.Footnote 60 And when the Hollywood film The House on 92nd Street, released in late September 1945 and the first production to make reference to the bomb, failed to give Britain due prominence for its part in the atomic research, it was the subject of three consecutive front-page stories from an outraged Daily Mirror: ‘US A-bomb film robs Britain of credit’, read one indignant headline.Footnote 61

For both the Express and the Mirror, possession of the bomb was, as Churchill would famously observe, ‘the price we pay to sit at the top table’.Footnote 62 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Express, in particular, repeatedly criticized the Labour government for its failure to produce an atomic bomb, observing in August 1950 that Britain had as a result been ‘dwarfed and dwindled’ by the United States and the Soviet Union. Without a nuclear capability, Britain could not operate independently on the world stage, and it was left in the humiliating position of relying on the might of the United States: ‘Britain's aim should not be to lean on American strength. But to be able to buttress that strength with sure and adequate striking power of her own.’Footnote 63 When a British bomb was successfully tested in October 1952, the Express rejoiced, ‘Overnight it has restored Britain to the status of a major Power’, and no longer was Britain ‘a weakling standing naked between American and Russian atomic might’.Footnote 64 The Mirror was similarly celebratory. ‘Today Britain is Great Britain again’, wrote correspondent Bill Greig. The successful test

signalled the undisputed return of Britain to her historic position as one of the great world Powers … Now the nations of Western Europe have lost any illusions they may have had that they can survive without Britain … To the Commonwealth it means that the Mother Country is once more able to deter the enemies of her sister nations in any part of the world.Footnote 65

In the period from the successful atomic test in October 1952 to the national humiliation in the Suez crisis at the end of 1956, the popular press portrayed Britain as a resurgent great power confidently bestriding the international stage. ‘With a fleet of … planes stationed at strategic points about the Empire, and with a good stock of Sir William Penney's bombs ready to load into them, Britain could keep the peace of the world’, declared the Express in October 1953, while in August 1956, even before Britain's first H-bomb test, the paper was speculating that Britain might soon take the lead in H-bomb technology.Footnote 66 In October 1956, meanwhile, the Express proudly announced that British scientists ‘have beaten the Russians and the Americans in the race to produce commercial atomic power’. ‘We've got this atom business licked now’, the paper proclaimed.Footnote 67 British ingenuity and creativity, it seemed, enabled the nation to punch above its weight and match its bigger rivals.

Such euphoria did not long survive the Suez fiasco. By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, pride in Britain's nuclear capability was increasingly tempered by the growing recognition of how dependent Britain was upon the United States for the production and maintenance of its deterrent.Footnote 68 When the Mirror clarified its position on the nuclear deterrent in a major editorial piece in March 1958, there was none of the bombast of its 1952 article about ‘Great Britain’, merely the contention ‘Britain cannot cringe under the umbrella of American preparedness and at the same time sidestep the perils involved’.Footnote 69 And when the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear conflict over Cuba in October 1962, the marginality of Britain in diplomatic calculations was painfully clear: British politicians and the British public watched helplessly from the sidelines. The Express celebrated President Kennedy's ‘immense diplomatic victory’ and called on Britain to learn from his example: ‘American policy in Cuba has been determined and successful just because it sprang from an acute sense of national interest and national danger. Britain has interests affecting her alone. She must be ready, even at great sacrifice, to safeguard them’.Footnote 70 Within weeks of the Cuban crisis, however, the United States cancelled the Skybolt system that the British government had been relying upon, and it was starkly apparent that the transatlantic relationship was a very one-sided one: a Cummings cartoon showed the US repeatedly pulling the chair from under Britain.Footnote 71 In 1964, the press gave great publicity to Harold Wilson's admission that Britain relied on the United States for crucial aspects of the Polaris system: as the Mirror's front page put it, ‘Premier shatters independent H-bomb myth’.Footnote 72 The British were gradually facing up to their decline from great-power status. After the mid-1960s, in the wake of the Partial Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 and the growing détente, the nuclear issue faded somewhat from the front pages, but few commentators had any illusions any longer that Britain could compete with the United States or the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race.

Conclusion

As Peter Salisbury has noted, polling evidence from the 1950s revealed the British public's ‘concern and confusion’ about the nuclear bomb. On the one hand, there was support for the construction of a British nuclear weapon, and little appetite for the policy of unilateral disarmament; on the other hand, there were also widespread calls for nuclear bombs to be banned, and for the holding of international talks to hasten the disarmament process.Footnote 73 While not seeking to exaggerate the power of the newspapers to mould public opinion, it is reasonable to conclude that the popular press, with its wealth of coverage on a daily and weekly basis, helped to shape these attitudes. Both the Mirror and the Express were, in the final analysis, consistently in favour of Britain's possession of the nuclear bomb, and it is plausible to conclude that this was significant in maintaining public backing for them. Even if the realities of Britain's declining world role were finally starting to hit home in the late 1950s and early 1960s, possession of the bomb was an integral part of both papers' vision of Britain as a ‘strong’ nation with a major international presence. At the same time, the papers were not unthinking champions of nuclear technology, and the concept of ‘nukespeak’ does not do justice to the range of responses to the bomb evident in these papers. Sceptical voices often disrupted official narratives – the popular press was, on the whole, less deferential to the security establishment than were broadcasters, and particularly the BBC – and journalistic speculation emphasized the potential dangers involved in the nuclear arms race.Footnote 74 Newspapers frequently highlighted, rather than downplayed, the horrors of the bomb: it was repeatedly portrayed as a ‘monster’ threatening the world. The Express observed in July 1952, ‘Nervous tension is keyed more highly than it would have been if the words uranium and plutonium were still familiar only to scientists’; it is important for scholars of nuclear culture to recognize that the popular press played a major part in feeding these tensions rather than merely soothing them away.Footnote 75

Footnotes

1 Daily Express, 7 August 1945, pp. 1, 4.

2 On the coverage in the United States and elsewhere see Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, New York: Pantheon Book, 1985, Chapter 1.

3 Boyer, op. cit. (2), p. 22.

4 Seymour-Ure, Colin, The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 16–20; Wadsworth, A.P., ‘Newspaper circulations 1800–1954’, Manchester Statistical Society Transactions, 4, Session 1954–55, pp. 24–30; Tunstall, Jeremy, Newspaper Power: The New National Press in Britain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, Chapter 3; Williams, Francis, Dangerous Estate: The Anatomy of Newspapers, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1958, pp. 1–2.

5 On the significance of the press in British culture see Bingham, Adrian, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918–78, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 15–28. For a useful summary of agenda-setting and interpretative frameworks see McCullagh, Ciaran, Media Power: A Sociological Introduction, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

6 For an overview of broadcasting in this period see Crisell, Andrew, An Introductory History of British Broadcasting, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2002, Chapters 4–6.

7 Notable exceptions to this include Aubrey, Crispin (ed.), Nukespeak: The Media and the Bomb, London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1982; Alan Foster, ‘The British press and the coming of the Cold War’, in Anne Deighton (ed.), Britain and the First Cold War, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 11–31; Shaw, Tony, ‘The British popular press and the early Cold War’, History (1998) 83, pp. 66–85; Jenks, John, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006; Salisbury, Peter, ‘Giles's Cold War: how Fleet Street's favourite cartoonist saw the conflict’, Media History (2006) 12, pp. 157–175.

8 On Beaverbrook and the Daily Express see Chisholm, Anne and Davie, Michael, Beaverbrook: A Life, London: Hutchinson, 1992; Taylor, A.J.P., Beaverbrook, London: Hamilton, 1972; Smith, A.C.H., with Immirizi, E. and Blackwell, T., Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change 1935–65, London: Chatto and Windus, 1975; Allen, Robert, Voice of Britain: The Inside Story of the Daily Express, Cambridge: Patrick Stephens Ltd, 1983; Greenslade, Roy, Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda, London: Macmillan, 2003.

9 On the Daily Mirror see Cudlipp, Hugh, Publish and Be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror, London: Andrew Dakers, 1953; Cudlipp, At Your Peril, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962; Cudlipp, Walking on Water, London: Bodley Head, 1976; Edelman, Maurice, The Mirror: A Political History, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966; Edwards, Ruth, Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth and the Glory Days of Fleet Street, London: Secker, 2003; Thomas, James, ‘“A cloak of apathy”: political disengagement, popular politics and the Daily Mirror 1940–1945’, Journalism Studies (2004) 5, pp. 469–482; Smith et al., op. cit. (8); Greenslade, op. cit. (8).

10 Cockerell, Michael, Hennessy, Peter and Walker, David, Sources Close to the Prime Minister: Inside the Hidden World of the News Manipulators, London: Macmillan, 1984, pp. 95–96.

11 Paul Chilton, ‘Nukespeak: nuclear language, culture and propaganda’, in Aubrey, op. cit. (7), p. 96. For a similar reading in an American context see Hilgartner, Stephen, Bell, Richard C. and O'Connor, Rory, Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Visions, and Mindset, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982.

12 Chilton, op. cit. (11), pp. 94–112, 96–101.

13 Knightley, Philip, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to the Falklands: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker, London: Pan Books, 1989; Taylor, Philip M., British Propaganda in the 20th Century: Selling Democracy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999; Jenks, op. cit. (7); Stephen Dorril, ‘The Secret Intelligence Service and journalists during the Cold War’, unpublished paper delivered to Journalism and History: Dialogues conference, University of Sheffield, 15 September 2010.

14 Chilton, op. cit. (11), p. 99.

15 Daily Mirror, 9 August 1945, p. 1.

16 Daily Express, 23 August 1945, p. 2.

17 Boyer, op. cit. (2), p. 187; Knightley, op. cit. (13), pp. 301–302.

18 Daily Express, 5 September 1945, p. 1.

19 Daily Express, 5 September 1945, p. 1.

20 On Cameron see Cameron, James, Points of Departure: An Experiment in Biography, London: Arthur Barker, 1967; Griffiths, Dennis (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the British Press 1422–1992, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, pp. 140–141.

21 Daily Express, 23 September 1946, p. 4.

22 Daily Express, 25 September 1946, p. 4.

23 Daily Express, 27 September 1946, p. 4.

24 Cameron resigned from the Beaverbrook press in 1950 when the Evening Standard (unjustifiably) accused John Strachey, the minister of defence, of having connections with the ‘atom spy’ Klaus Fuchs; see Greenslade, op. cit. (8), p. 49. On Pincher see Chapman Pincher, ‘Reflections on a lifetime of reporting on intelligence affairs’, in Robert Dover and Michael Goodman (eds.), Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence Needs the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 149–164.

25 On Cassandra see Connor, Robert, Cassandra: Reflections in a Mirror, London: Cassell, 1969.

26 Daily Mirror, 28 September 1946, p. 4.

27 John Hersey's account was published in the New Yorker on 31 August 1946, and subsequently published in the UK by Penguin Books: Hersey, John, Hiroshima, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946, pp. v–ix; see also Boyer, op. cit. (2), pp. 203–210; Daily Mirror, 5 October 1946, p. 4; 23 November 1946, p. 4; 18 January 1947, p. 4.

28 Daily Mirror, 18 January 1947, p. 4.

29 Daily Mirror, 6 April 1954, p. 9.

30 Griffiths, op. cit. (20), p. 167.

31 On this aspect of popular journalism see Bingham, Adrian, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-war Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, Chapter 1.

32 For example, Daily Express, 7 August 1945, p. 1; 8 August 1945, pp. 1–2.

33 Daily Express, 23 August 1945, p. 2.

34 Daily Express, 17 September 1952, p. 1.

35 Daily Mirror, 18 January 1955, p. 8.

36 Daily Express, 2 April 1954, pp. 1–2.

37 Daily Mirror, 2 April 1954, pp. 1, 8–9, 16.

38 Freedman, Lawrence, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd edn, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003, Section 2.

39 Daily Express, 18 February 1946, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 5 March 1946, p. 1.

40 For example, Daily Express, 2 March 1950, p. 1; 3 March 1950, p. 1; 21 October 1950, p. 1; 24 October 1950, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 2 March 1950, p. 1; 21 October 1950, p. 1. For details on these various spy scandals see Andrew, Christopher, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, London: Penguin, 2010, Section D; on Pontecorvo see Turchetti, Simone, ‘Atomic secrets and governmental lies: nuclear science, politics and security in the Pontecorvo case’, BJHS (2003) 36, pp. 389–415.

41 Daily Express, 2 March 1950, p. 1.

42 Hennessy, Peter, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 33.

43 On the news values of the popular press, and the fascination with human interest and private life, see Bingham, op. cit. (5).

44 Daily Mirror, 2 March 1950, p. 1.

45 Daily Express, 6 November 1950, p. 4.

46 Turchetti, op. cit. (40), pp. 409–411.

47 See Andrew, op. cit. (40).

48 Daily Express, 24 October 1950, p. 4.

49 Daily Express, 13 May 1950, p. 1; 25 May 1950, p. 4.

50 Daily Express, 1 December 1950, p. 1.

51 Daily Express, 14 March 1955, pp. 1, 4.

52 Divine, Robert, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

53 Daily Express, 25 November 1955, p. 1.

54 Daily Mirror, 9 January 1956, p. 2.

55 On these fears in American culture see Henriksen, Margot, Dr Strangelove's America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

56 Daily Express, 2 December 1958, p. 8.

57 Daily Express, 13 March 1958, p. 5.

58 Daily Express, 4 February 1966, p. 7; 23 January 1968, p. 1; 20 August 1968, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 23 January 1968, p. 1.

59 On this mindset see Hennessy, op. cit. (42), Chapter 2; on the popular press and the creation of a national community see Conboy, Martin, Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community through Language, London: Routledge, 2006.

60 Daily Express, 11 August 1945, p. 2.

61 Daily Mirror, 4 October 1945, p. 1; see also 5, 6 October 1945, p. 1; Boyer, op. cit. (2), p. 11.

62 Hennessy, op. cit. (42), p. 44.

63 Daily Express, 2 August 1950, p. 4; see also 26 September 1949, p. 4; 19 December 1949, p. 4.

64 Daily Express, 4 October 1952, p. 1.

65 Daily Mirror, 4 October 1952, p. 1.

66 Daily Express, 15 October 1953, p. 4; 27 August 1956, p. 4.

67 Daily Express, 8 October 1956, p. 1; 18 October 1956, p. 11.

68 For example, Daily Express, 25 March 1957, p. 6; 28 March 1957, p. 6.

69 Daily Mirror, 4 March 1958, p. 1.

70 Daily Express, 29 October 1962, p. 8.

71 Daily Express, 10 December 1962, p. 6.

72 Daily Mirror, 18 December 1964, p. 1.

73 Salisbury, op. cit. (7), pp. 166–167.

74 On the close relationship between the BBC and the security establishment see Michael Goodman, ‘British intelligence and British Broadcasting Corporation: portrait of a happy marriage’, in Dover and Goodman, op. cit. (24). Even under the supposedly liberal regime of Hugh Greene, the BBC was famously reluctant to broadcast The War Game, Peter Watkins's 1965 drama-documentary portraying the aftermath of an nuclear strike on Britain. Chapman, James, ‘The BBC and the censorship of The War Game (1965)’, Journal of Contemporary History (2006) 41, pp. 75–94.

75 Daily Express, 16 July 1952, p. 4.