Top Secret: clandestine introduction of atomic weapons into the UK
Chilling archive report reveals Cold War threat posed by 'unidentified civil aircraft'
Much has been written about the dread experienced by J. Robert Oppenheimer following the detonation of Trinity in 1945, depicted in Christopher Nolan’s new movie biopic of ‘the father of the atomic bomb’
But one of the most chilling outcomes of the Cold War nuclear stand-off that followed was the fear that a nuclear device could be smuggled into the West by air or sea…and there was no effective method to detect its presence - until it was too late
This nightmare scenario was considered in 1950 by a Top Secret panel set up by the UK Government soon after the outbreak of the Korean War under the obscure cover-name ‘The Imports Research Committee’.
A report produced by the IRC for the Ministry of Defence, opened at The National Archives in 1994, is by far one of the scariest documents I have ever read during my archive research during the past 25 years.
It also affected historian Peter Hennessy who, in the forward to his book The Secret State (2002) said ‘few files I have read in the course of preparing this book have had such a dreadful resonance’
Peter was writing in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks when the air defences of the Western world were on high alert for any signs of unidentified aircraft that could be hijacked by terrorist organisations.
Hennessy noted a ‘chilling symmetry’ between the anxiety that followed 9/11 and Cold War fears that an enemy - the Soviet Union - could evade Britain’s air defences to launch a devastating nuclear attack on London or New York.
Serving on the IRC panel of 1950-54 was Graham Turney of the MoD’s Directorate of Scientific Intelligence. Turney, a wartime naval intelligence chief, also chaired the meetings of a secret Whitehall Working Party that had been created to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects (known as ‘flying saucers’ at that time).
This tiny detail might help explain why the US authorities have. comparatively recently, performed a U-turn in their UFO policy as a direct result of what has become a second Cold War.
For the first time since the 1960s, the Pentagon are treating what they call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAP, as a potential threat to national defence. A UAP is, of course, any intruder aircraft that has not been identified.
The reasons for this change of mind might be discerned from the minutes of the Ministry of Defence’s IRC that reported 70 years ago.
The committee considered two possible means by which a ‘clandestine attack on this country’ could be carried out.
Firstly concealing a bomb in the structure of a merchant ship and detonating it in British port and second, ‘carrying it in a civil aircraft and detonating it while flying low over a suitable key point’.
Commenting upon the second method, the IRC report says ‘…the crew of the aircraft in order to detonate the bomb at the right time would have to know what their cargo was and would therefore be a suicide squad’.
They added:
‘Short of firing on every strange civil aircraft that appears over our shores we know of no way of preventing an aircraft that sets out on such a mission from succeeding’.
In their direct conclusion the IRC add: ‘there are no practical and efficacious steps that can be taken in peace time to prepare against any of these threats’.
And when four years later the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) re-examined the threat they decided it was unlikely that ‘if the Russians decided to go to war, they would plan to introduce atomic weapons clandestinely into this country’.
But they could not exclude this possibility and ‘if they did, their most likely technique would be to conceal a complete in a ship bound for a UK port’.
It was this concern that led the US authorities to begin searching ships entering their ports from 1950 ‘but this was largely a gesture’.
The existential fear of a clandestine attack is traced backwards, in the file, to statement made by Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhatten Project, at a special US Senate committee set up in 1945 to investigate ‘problems relating to the development and control of atomic energy’.
A transcript of the proceedings, four months after atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, form an appendix to the report.
Republican Senator Eugene Millikin questioned the physicist as to whether there was any way ‘of detecting the presence of a bomb’ planted secretly by an enemy in the USA.
Oppenheimer said there was no device, at that time, that could detect the presence of what he called ‘a small diamond in an enormous wad of cotton wool’.
And he added:
‘If you hired us to walk through the cellars of Washington to see whether there were atomic bombs, I think my most important tool would be a screwdriver to open the crates and look.’