Britain's Nuclear Bomb: The Inside Story

In November 1957,

Britain exploded its first megaton hydrogen bomb...

..over 100 times more powerful than the one dropped over Hiroshima.

This is the story of an extraordinary scientific project,

which, against almost insuperable odds,

made Britain a nuclear superpower.

It is told through unprecedented access

to Britain's top-secret nuclear research facility at Aldermaston...

..including the only interview ever by the man who was, for decades,

this country's bomb-maker-in-chief.

Here we have the first hydrogen bomb

that went into service with the RAF for the United Kingdom.

With archive footage and photographs

especially released for this programme...

This is the very, very early stages of the weapon going off,

running at about 125,000 frames a second.

..including interviews with scientists and veterans,

many speaking for the first time.

A bomb came loose whilst the aircraft was flying over Dorking.

He said, "Well, the government's just announced that

"we're going to make a hydrogen bomb.

"We don't actually know how to do it. Have you got any ideas?"

This is the inside story of how Britain's bomb was built.

-OVER RADIO:

-'Copy. Receiving you loud and clear, over.

'Minus 25 seconds. 203.'

On November 8th, 1957,

an RAF bomber was flying to Malden Island

in the middle of the Pacific.

It was carrying a bomb that would transform

Britain's place in the world.

'Telemetric to Internal. Minus 20 seconds.'

It was a mission fraught with danger.

We were flying between 40,000ft and 50,000ft

and we were given the clearance to go ahead.

'Bomb doors open.'

The actual point that the bomb had to explode at

was at 8,000ft and several miles off the island

over the sea.

'Minus 10 seconds. 202. Steady.

'Steady. Steady, steady, steady. Bombs away.'

At 17.47 Greenwich Mean Time,

the Valiant bomber dropped its payload -

a massive hydrogen bomb.

The crew then had just one minute to escape the blast

with a sharp 140-degree turn.

When we did release the bomb, we had to do a quick getaway -

we called it an escape manoeuvre - away from the danger zone,

so that the bomb didn't explode immediately underneath us.

My job, as a co-pilot, was to monitor an accelerometer

which told the captain how much

G-force he could pull without the aircraft stalling.

In the event,

as we rolled into this tight turn,

a wire broke off at the back of the instrument

and so I wasn't able to tell the captain

he was getting near the limits of how tight a turn he could do.

And at that instant,

the aircraft started to bounce around

as though we were coming to the stall,

and the engines also started to have a little bit of a burble,

which meant that things were not quite right.

The bomb aimer was thrown back into the nose of the aircraft

by the extra G-force placed upon it.

It was dangerous. We didn't have time to think of,

"How have we got to get out of it?"

It was just pure flying skills to correct the stalling

and we just turned as hard as we could go

and head away from the explosion.

It was a close run thing,

but the Valiant escaped from the blast zone.

EXPLOSION

The implications of this explosion continue to reverberate to this day.

For better or worse, by developing its own hydrogen bomb,

Britain had forced its way into the elite group of nuclear superpowers.

It was the culmination of an extraordinary story

of British scientific endeavour...

..which began 40 years earlier with this man, Ernest Rutherford.

In our laboratories today, we live in an atmosphere

dim with the flying fragments of exploding atoms.

And on this occasion...

In 1911, he discovered the atom,

the fundamental building block of every element in the universe.

It soon became clear that if scientists could split the atom,

it had the potential to release huge amounts of energy

in a nuclear chain reaction.

So, American scientists began building huge machines

called cyclotrons to produce the several million volts

they thought would be necessary to split a single atom.

In Britain, one physicist, John Cockcroft,

had a different plan.

My father thought there was a probability

that it could be done at a much lower voltage

and he calculated

300,000 volts instead of the several million

and he then took those calculations to Lord Rutherford.

Rutherford said, "Team up with Ernest Walton

"and build the apparatus to prove that this is true."

And I think, when he saw the opportunity to split the atom,

he jumped at it.

The two men still had to create

their ambitious experimental apparatus from scratch.

It was very Heath Robinson-ish.

The box down at the bottom where the observations were made

was, I think, constructed out of old tea chests.

It must have been a bit cramped in there,

though my father never actually remarked on how cramped it was,

except when he mentioned that he had to try and squeeze Lord Rutherford

into a small box, and he was a big man!

This later version in the Science Museum

shows how the 300,000-volt electrical charge was created.

Well, this is known as the Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier

because what it does is it takes a low voltage,

steps it up to the high voltage

that we need if we're going to split an atom.

It's rather like a step of a staircase

with a number of steps.

Charge can flow up one step, then up the next step,

and so on, right up to the very top.

And at each stage, it is building up the voltage,

so at the very top of the machine,

you've got the high voltages that you really want

if you're going to try and split a nucleus.

The apparatus would fire high-energy particles

at lithium atoms

with the aim of splitting them into subatomic alpha particles.

On the 14th of April 1932, Walton switched it on.

And he saw these little sparkles of light.

These photographs captured the results.

We're looking at the paths that are left by the alpha particles

as they speed away from the splitting nucleus.

Now, we can't see the alpha particles themselves -

they're much too small -

but we can see the trails they leave behind.

The atom had been split.

It was a massive British scientific achievement.

Now scientists worked to see if splitting the atom could go on

to start a chain reaction,

which would unleash extraordinary forces.

When an atom is split, it produces smaller particles,

most notably neutrons.

In theory, it was possible these neutrons

would go on to split other atoms...

..so triggering more neutrons, leading to more splits,

creating a chain reaction.

This would release more energy than had ever been dreamt of.

It seemed to be a thrilling prospect.

PLANE ENGINE DRONES

Then, in 1939, war broke out with Germany and everything changed.

Now nuclear research became a matter of life and death

because the scientists knew that it could also be used

for a much darker purpose.

EXPLOSIONS

Scientists in Britain, both British-born scientists

and some of the refugees from Europe, were

very concerned about the threat that Hitler,

that the Nazis would develop, successfully, an atomic bomb.

They themselves started to think, "How was it possible?

"What would you have to do to make this happen?"

Scientists had worked out the major problem to overcome

in order to create an atomic bomb concerned the fuel.

The key material was uranium.

Initially, it was thought that so much would be needed

that a workable bomb was impossible.

But two German physicists who fled the Nazis

and came to Britain thought differently.

Rudi Peierls and Otto Frisch made a breakthrough

by working with a special type of uranium called separated uranium.

From the theory of the fission process,

we couldn't estimate how much you would need

to produce a chain reaction in the separated uranium,

and we were surprised to find how small it was - only a few pounds.

It wasn't the tonnes that one intuitively had guessed before.

This discovery was a major turning point.

It showed that, in theory, a bomb could be built.

And then we said, "It's frightening that the Germans

"might have realised that, too."

And the idea that Hitler would have this weapon

before anybody else got it was frightening.

The discovery meant it was now vital to beat the Germans to the bomb.

Rhydymwyn, in North Wales,

was one of the most secret places in wartime Britain.

These buildings are remnants of a project code-named Tube Alloys -

this country's attempt to build an atomic bomb.

Eileen Doxford was one of the first to work here as a chemist, aged 19.

I was calibrating an instrument every 20 minutes,

but I didn't really know what I was doing.

I was told that only two people knew what we were actually doing

and that we had to just accept

and do the job that we were given as well as we could.

And we had not to discuss it with anybody,

not even your dad!

Eileen didn't know it,

but the Rhydymwyn plant was designed to make uranium isotopes

for the atomic bomb.

The process was designed and supervised by Rudi Peierls.

His daughter Jo remembers the pressures her father was under

to force his technology to deliver.

It was the forefront of science, what they were doing here.

It had never been done before. It had never been tested.

And it was back-of-an-envelope job that they were designing

into something that became a huge industrial process.

I think they were getting quite close to succeeding,

but on the other hand, there was this feeling

they were encountering more and more difficulties

and more and more delays.

Britain's lack of resources,

combined with the continual threat of German bombing,

led to a momentous decision.

In 1943, the Prime Minister Winston Churchill

agreed with US President Franklin Roosevelt

that America should take over the project.

All atomic bomb research in Britain was transferred to the USA.

Britain sent 19 of its finest scientists

to the huge nuclear research facility

at Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert,

part of the so-called Manhattan Project.

One of them was Rudi Peierls,

who was so eminent that he was able to choose who would go with him.

One of the people that he asked to accompany him

was Klaus Fuchs who apparently had the most brilliant mind.

He was called a Calculator

cos he was able to do calculations much better than anyone else.

Fuchs and Peierls formed a very tight bond.

Klaus was one of the family.

My mother had a sort of maternalistic view towards him

and would cook for him and look after him.

Klaus Fuchs had a car.

He would take them off onto various excursions

so they could go further afield with him.

So, there are all these souvenirs from Los Alamos -

little things like this leaflet on hunting and fishing in New Mexico

and also a guidebook of Santa Fe.

I think being in Los Alamos

was possibly one of the most enjoyable things that he did,

because he was able to do all the physics he wanted to,

there were these brilliant physicists that he could talk to

and there was the countryside that they could go and explore,

so they had a marvellous time.

On July 16th, 1945,

Peierls, the man who had first calculated

that a bomb could be built,

witnessed the first ever nuclear explosion

in the American desert.

I think there was a mixture of feelings.

There was a vindication of his science -

that these calculations that he and Frisch had done

on the back of an envelope all those years ago had been right.

It was the first time anyone had seen this mushroom cloud.

There was a feeling of awe as this cloud built up

and they could see the size of the explosion

from a bomb that wasn't really that big.

Within a month, atomic bombs were dropped on Japan,

which ended the war.

The atomic bomb had been the culmination

of a joint effort between the British and American scientists.

But that didn't mean the British knew how to build a bomb.

British scientists came back from Los Alamos

with a lot of knowledge about the nuclear weapon,

but not with a complete picture or anything remotely like it.

They had had a very close look at the detail of the weapon itself,

but they had been excluded almost entirely

from the production processes

that went to making up the elements of the weapon.

So, they were ignorant about,

for example, creating nuclear reactors.

The significance of these gaps in the British scientists' knowledge

soon became painfully apparent.

In 1946, the US Congress passed the McMahon Act,

which prohibited any sharing of atomic information

between Britain and America.

To the British, who'd given so much to the Manhattan Project,

it felt like betrayal.

But in the United States,

many felt enough had already been done

to support Britain during the war.

Senator Vandenberg said, "Well, look,

"we bailed these fellas out to the tune of billions of dollars.

"Why do we have to do any more for them in this very special field?"

There was a lot of congressional opposition

to dealing any further with the British.

So, in 1946,

the new Labour government faced a critical decision.

The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, chaired a top-secret meeting

to decide whether Britain should go it alone and build a bomb.

The need for post-war reconstruction

had to be weighed against the controversial idea

that, to be a superpower, Britain needed a nuclear bomb.

Michael Perrin was at the meeting.

The Prime Minister summed up very much on the lines of

our country couldn't stand the money to do it,

we haven't got the materials,

with the present crisis in the country and all the rest of it.

And at that stage,

the Foreign Secretary, Mr Bevin came in

and said, "No, Prime Minister, that won't do at all.

"We've GOT to have this."

And, quite bluntly, he said,

"I don't want any other Foreign Secretary of this country

"to be talked at

"by a Secretary of State in the United States

"as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Burns.

"We've got to have this thing over here,

"whatever it costs,

"and we've got to have a bloody Union Jack flying on top of it."

And that swung the meeting right round.

If Britain was going to be a top power,

it was imperative, so far as the British Government saw it,

that Britain should have an atomic weapon.

It was an expensive commitment, but it was all done in secret.

Clement Attlee told neither Parliament

nor the people of Britain about it for two years.

The scientist chosen to lead the British atomic bomb research effort

was William Penney.

He had just returned from working at Los Alamos

and was famously sparing with his words.

Well, I think it's got to be done.

What does your wife think about it all?

Oh, I think she agrees with me.

And in your spare time, in your free time, what do you do,

as a complete contrast to the work that you're doing now?

-I usually play golf.

-You're a keen golfer?

-Yes, a keen golfer.

From his work at Los Alamos, Penney believed that plutonium,

which could be manufactured from uranium,

was the material for the core of the bomb.

The first problem he faced

was creating the temperatures and pressures necessary

to initiate a fission chain reaction.

For the first time, Britain's chief atomic bomb-maker, Ken Johnston,

explains the principles of the design the scientists settled on.

Penney and his designers decided to go for an implosion system

which would compress a central plutonium ball.

And they did it by surrounding it with high explosives.

And the high explosives had to be set off simultaneously

so that there was a symmetrical implosion...

..which converged on the plutonium wall

absolutely symmetrically...

..and compressed it to many times its original density.

The fission chain reaction built up

and finally the whole thing exploded with enormous force.

That's the principle of the implosion system.

But as Ken Johnston demonstrates,

designing an explosive which could compress the core

was a tremendous challenge.

What we have here is about half a kilogram

of ordinary explosive - the flat end -

and it's powerful enough to blow in the front of a house.

What we're going to do is we're going to place it

on this piece of steel and detonate it,

and then we'll see what happens.

This solid, three-inch-thick lump of steel

stands in for the plutonium core of the bomb.

The aim is to create an explosive charge so focused

that it punches a hole through the steel.

Under fire.

-Fire.

-EXPLOSION

Hmm.

What we can see here is a very shallow depression

when the flat detonation wave has struck the plate

and it's made a small depression in the steel.

Now, to compress a ball of plutonium,

you need to focus the energy to the centre of the device.

And this sort of thing - a flat explosion, slap -

is not going to do the job for you.

For five years, the British scientists worked

with a wide variety of explosives,

experimenting with the materials and the shape needed

for the explosive charge.

A lot of people came to assist

with the high explosive end of the business,

casting and machining and forming the explosives

into the correct shapes to produce the implosion system.

They came up with a design that produced

the necessary temperature and compression.

This is a small-scale version of that explosive charge.

What we have here is a fast detonating explosive

and a slower one.

This is the slow explosive

and it is shaped to mate up with the hollow curve

of the fast detonating explosive here.

The two fit together,

and the combination of the two makes an explosive lens.

This is now going to focus the energy

right on the centre point of the detonation.

-Fire.

-EXPLOSION

Well, you see, the whole thing has bounced and flipped right over.

But if we look at the face exposed to the explosive,

you'll see that it's a very sharp hole indeed

which shows you how well the explosive charge

has focused its energy to produce

this very deep hole in this piece of steel.

And you can see it goes in quite a long way

and it's heavily focused now on the very central area.

So, the scientists now knew how to create the explosive lenses

to detonate the bomb's plutonium core.

It was just a case of scaling up the design.

It required half a kilogram of high explosive to produce this effect,

but the first atomic bomb that we built

had two tonnes of high explosive in it

to produce the convergent shock and compress the central plutonium.

While scientists worked to build the bomb,

a group of engineers confronted a very different set of problems.

This is Orford Ness,

a desolate stretch of shingle and stone on the East Suffolk coast.

It's here that bomb engineers like Reg Milne

tested the bomb's release and targeting systems.

He was part of the top-secret Royal Aircraft Establishment

and has come to meet a colleague, Professor John Allen.

-Hi, Reg.

-Hello!

It's the first time they've met for more than 50 years.

-Yes, many, many years.

-I think it was '61.

-Yes.

-We were in the same building, weren't we?

-But we were...

-In different worlds.

-Yes.

-And we were not able to talk...

-No.

-..about what we were doing.

Yes, that's right.

-It was this need-to-know, top-secret world.

-Absolutely.

This footage of Reg with the bomb has never been seen before.

He had to address a serious problem with the release mechanism.

One flight to Orford Ness, a bomb came loose

over Dorking. It fell off its hook.

Luckily, the bomb doors were strong enough to hold it,

and the pilot took the aircraft over the Thames Estuary,

opened the bomb doors, the bomb fell out,

and the splash nearly drowned a couple of sailors

who happened to be nearby. They never found it.

It's still under the Thames somewhere.

Fortunately, the bomb was a dummy,

with no explosive or radioactive material.

But there was another issue that was harder to solve -

the atom bomb weighed less than a conventional device,

which meant that, when it was released from the bomb bay,

it could be lifted by an updraught of air

flowing under the aircraft fuselage.

If you didn't watch it,

the bomb could climb back up into the bomb bay

because of the forces on it

and that, of course, was the last thing you wanted to happen.

You know, they had various fuses on them,

and if they hit something, it would have gone bang.

I mean, it was a really critical...

We used to have the phrase...

You're doing a job and you get a stopper.

And this was a stopper that could have stopped it dead in its tracks,

and we had to make it work.

But John Allen came up with an ingenious solution

to ensure the bombs dropped down and not up.

We fixed these dragon's teeth.

They were a series of flaps underneath,

and when the bomb bay doors opened,

these were then able to be pushed out

and this changed the airflow

and diverted the flow not upwards but outwards,

and that sucked the bomb nose down.

And that really killed the problem at source,

and it killed it very effectively.

People who can handle this chaotic process

of sucking it and seeing it,

not knowing whether you've got a solution -

that is real engineering.

By 1949, Britain's bomb scientists were making good progress,

but then came a devastating double blow.

President Truman has announced the perfection

of an atomic explosive by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had exploded an atom bomb

named Joe-1 after its leader Joseph Stalin.

The British government, like the American government,

was simply astonished

when the Russians successfully tested a nuclear weapon.

There was shock and there was terror.

The threat was at the door

and Britain had to have a bomb of its own as soon as possible.

But the second blow was even more catastrophic.

The Americans had uncovered a series of telegrams

which revealed that a British scientist,

who'd worked at Los Alamos

and was now at the centre of the British atomic establishment,

was a Soviet spy.

Klaus Fuchs.

Fuchs had been absolutely at the heart of planning the wartime bombs.

He'd also been a key adviser to Bill Penney

on making the British bombs.

He had given the Soviet Union lots and lots of information

to help them develop a bomb,

and they must have owed a lot to Klaus Fuchs.

Fuchs was arrested, but the damage was done.

Politically, it was a disaster.

There was a human cost, too.

Fuchs had been the protege of Rudi Peierls

and they'd worked together at Los Alamos.

The Peierls family were devastated.

I think they were hurt

in the same way that if anyone in your family betrayed you,

you would be hurt.

My mother wrote to him a letter, and she said to him,

"Do you realise what will be the effect of your trial

"on scientists here and in America?

"Do you realise that they will be suspected

"not only by officials but by their own friends

"because if you could, why not they?

"Oh, Klaus, my tears are washing away the ink.

"I was so very fond of you.

"This letter is just a sea of ink."

His protege's spying had dreadful ramifications for Rudi Peierls.

For my father, there was a whole stigma associated with it

and it affected quite a lot in his work.

But after he died, somebody published an article

that said that my parents were spies.

I had probably a millisecond of time when I thought to myself,

"Well, maybe he was guilty."

And that millisecond of that,

I will never forgive the authors of those article for,

because he was such a truly great man,

he was such an honest man,

that it was wrong that I doubted him and I shouldn't have done that.

And for the British government,

the timing of the Fuchs expose could not have been worse.

The British never stopped trying to persuade the Americans

to resume cooperation,

and after the news that the Russians had the atomic bomb,

they felt they were making progress.

There was a certain softening going on.

As soon as it was revealed that Klaus Fuchs had been spying,

and the scale on which he'd been spying,

the Americans simply pulled up the drawbridge.

That was the end of it.

The door slammed because they were certain now

that Britain could not be trusted with nuclear secrets.

The need for Britain to create her own atomic bomb

had never been more urgent.

So, in 1950, work began at Aldermaston in Berkshire

to create an advanced centre for Britain's nuclear weapon research,

known by some as the bomb factory.

It had new laboratories

and many of the country's brightest scientists came to work here.

Each department had its own speciality,

but it didn't know what the others were doing.

There was a need-to-know principle,

so there was a great deal of rumour-mongering went on

about what they were doing over there.

So, it was a very strange but exciting environment to be in.

Now in the secure Aldermaston site,

the science team were wrestling with the dangerous task

of shaping the plutonium core of the atomic bomb.

Plutonium doesn't occur in nature. It has to be made in a reactor.

It's an extremely dangerous metal. It's radioactive.

It is very toxic, so, if you ingested it,

it will go into various parts of your body and irradiate it.

You really don't want more than a microgram ever to escape.

A millionth of a gram is bad news, so it is that toxic.

And if you assemble too much of it in one place,

you will have a chain reaction which will throw it apart

and produce a flash of radiation

which will kill most of the people within a fair distance of it.

Not immediately, but over a few days.

So, it's extremely dangerous stuff

and has to be treated with extreme care.

William Penney played a key role

in solving the problems of shaping the core.

But there were those who suspected he had help

from an unexpected source.

The Aldermaston team struggled for a while

with the moulding of plutonium, how you get it into a stable state.

But then Penney told them the answer was

to alloy the plutonium with another metal.

This metal was gallium.

They were all convinced that Penney had got this information

because he was maintaining contacts with American scientists,

he was going out to dinner with them,

he was in correspondence with them.

They were convinced he got this under the table

from American friends.

-A kind of spying.

-HE CHUCKLES

But in order to process enough uranium

to make the plutonium core of the bomb,

they had to build a massive reactor on the Cumbrian coast at Windscale.

It was going to be a very close-run thing,

even if everything worked perfectly.

And, of course, not everything did.

And so there had to be some pretty extraordinary actions taken.

Any problems were dealt with very expeditiously,

maybe in ways that one would find a bit odd today.

Vic Goodwin would experience first-hand

some of the unusual working practices

which built up during this period.

They were about to discharge some fuel from reactor one, I think,

and the fuel would fall out of the back of the reactor

into railway trucks.

But some of it ricocheted along the huge corridor

towards the bottom of that big chimney that you can see.

And the people had worked out the best thing to do

was to send a man in with a shovel.

And since I had just arrived and I was fit and young and a trainee,

I was clearly that man.

The fuel elements were intensely radioactive,

so my job was to get as many of these operations done

until I reached a set radiation value,

which is considered rather high nowadays.

But, then, it was approximately five old-fashioned chest X-rays

and one's minder made sure that one didn't receive more.

So, I think people of a nervous disposition

or who were not well-informed

would not be the right people to send in on that job.

Unconventional methods were also used

when it came to transporting the plutonium.

They had to take the plutonium core to Woolwich to be tested for flaws.

Now, that was done by placing them in canisters -

lead canisters - and putting them in the back of a Vauxhall car

and driving them around the outskirts of South London

to Woolwich. Unfortunately, the car broke down

and there is this moment when the car is stopped outside a pub,

somebody knocks on the door of the pub in the middle of the night

and gets the publican to phone somebody and a back-up is brought.

Now, that meant that, for some hours,

the core of the British bomb was sat in a broken-down Vauxhall

outside a pub somewhere south of London.

# Atomic baby

# Atomic baby

# I'm the atomic baby

# Better handle me with care. #

By 1951, Britain's atomic bomb was nearing completion.

And this is what it was all about.

At the heart of the top-secret atomic research establishment

at Aldermaston, Ken Johnston, for the first time,

introduces the bomb they created.

This is our first nuclear weapon that went into service.

Here is the physics package,

which detonates the central core of plutonium.

It's operated by a series of detonators,

attached, each one, to an explosive lens,

which focus the detonation wave onto the central plutonium core.

And the plutonium core is inserted, at the last practicable moment,

in the top of the device.

And here it is. This is a scale model.

And you insert it right into the core

and click it into place

and then your warhead is armed and ready to be used.

And now it had to be tested.

In February 1952, Operation Hurricane was launched.

The aircraft carrier HMS Campania escorted an old destroyer,

HMS Plym, on her last voyage.

On board the Plym was the atomic bomb,

which was to be exploded in her hold just off the Australian coast.

Ted Baker, then a 19-year-old new recruit,

was one of the photographers on the mission.

It was exciting cos it was so different

to what I'd done beforehand - you know,

attending weddings, christenings,

portrait photography and so forth.

So, totally different. Totally different.

The explosion was scheduled for October 3rd, 1952.

The Plym was abandoned with the atomic bomb on board.

Ted Baker was watching from HMS Campania, 15 miles away.

I was on deck at the time.

There was an air of quietness

and there was this feeling, wondering what's going to happen.

One or two of the sailors, you could see them sort of with

a strained look on their face, listening to the countdown.

Five, four, three, two, one, now.

EXPLOSION

And then, when the bomb went off, a flash of light appears.

I mean, we'd had our backs to it,

and then, when you could sort of turn round,

it didn't look like I thought it would look.

It developed into this zigzag as the wind took it.

In scientific terms, the explosion was a massive success

with a yield of 25 kilotonnes -

more powerful than the bomb dropped over Nagasaki.

The first few seconds of the explosion

were filmed on a specially built camera,

which could capture more frames per second

than any other camera in existence at the time.

This is the cine-camera. It ran at 150,000 frames a second.

It was designed specifically for the very early stages

of when the bomb went off.

Now, for the first time,

Aldermaston has released the images taken by the camera.

It's a bit sort of thin there,

but it is the very, very early stages

of the weapon going off.

These are taken every 8 millionths of a second

and they show the fireball developing.

And there's a great interest in the rate of growth of the fireball

cos it gives a good idea of what the overall yield is.

William Penney and his scientists

measured the size of the historic test,

but not all his instruments were hi-tech.

William Penney would use all sorts

of sophisticated methods to do it, but also anything that came to hand,

like bent jerry cans, and in this case,

Penney was able to deduce

exactly what pressure struck these paint tubes.

And since he knew the distance,

he could tell what the device had produced in the way of a yield.

And it was a very simple and cheap

and maybe rather British way of doing things.

Since this test and the others that followed,

thousands of veterans have claimed

they've suffered health problems as a result,

claims which have not been accepted by successive governments.

But the political significance of the test was clearer.

For Winston Churchill, who had just been re-elected as Prime Minister,

it marked Britain's entry into the nuclear club.

Once we had fired an atom bomb,

the feeling was that we were now in the same nuclear league

as America and Russia, and that, therefore,

it would be reasonable to seek a reopening of the exchanges

that we'd had with the Americans during the war.

But the feeling of triumph was short-lived.

EXPLOSION

Just three weeks later, the Americans exploded Ivy Mike.

This was an entirely new type of nuclear bomb,

400 times more powerful

than the atomic bomb the British had just tested.

It was the first hydrogen bomb.

So, the hopes that the British had had -

that by showing they could make an atomic bomb,

they would put themselves level with the Americans - were lost.

Suddenly, they were miles behind again.

As one congressman put it, when it was suggested

that they should resume contacts with the British, he said,

"Why would we trade a horse for a rabbit?"

And that horse was a bomb which had breached a new frontier

in nuclear physics.

It was so powerful because, instead of using fission -

the splitting of atoms -

it had succeeded in harnessing the power of nuclear fusion.

This required massive pressure and temperature

to fuse atoms together and create exponential amounts of energy.

A year later, the Soviet Union exploded Joe 4,

their own hydrogen bomb.

The Prime Minister Winston Churchill

responded by making the controversial decision

that Britain should build its own hydrogen bomb...

..for national prestige,

to impress the Americans and to deter Soviet aggression.

I would like to make quite sure

that the Russians would not press matters to a point

where we should all be led to a situation

which baffles the human imagination in its terror...

..but which I am quite sure...

..would leave us victorious,

-but victorious on a heap of ruin.

-APPLAUSE

In 1954, he set a target -

Britain's H-bomb had to be ready within three years.

And what's more, if it was going to fulfil its political role,

the government wanted the scientists at Aldermaston

to ensure it had an explosive yield of one megaton -

two and a half times as powerful as the Soviet bomb.

At around this time,

the man they call the father of the British hydrogen bomb,

Bryan Taylor, arrived to start work at Aldermaston.

My first introduction to it was

I was shown this office in a wooden shed

which I shared with someone else.

But I met my friend and colleague Keith Roberts,

and just sort of said, "Well, what are you doing?"

And he said, "Well, the government's just announced

"that we're going to make a hydrogen bomb.

"We don't actually know how to do it.

"Have you got any ideas?" But once I'd got settled in,

it was really very stimulating and very exciting,

something, you know, at the forefront of theoretical physics,

which is my speciality.

And yet, unlike so much of theoretical physics,

it was something which might even have an influence

on what happened on earth.

The scientists faced two problems -

what material to use to fuel the fusion reaction

at the heart of the bomb...

..and second, how to trigger that reaction.

The British knew from the atmospheric readings

of the American H-bombs

that they'd used deuterium as a fusion fuel,

but the Aldermaston scientists thought they could do better.

Instead of using deuterium,

which is difficult to handle and store,

we decided to use lithium deuteride.

This both provides the deuterium which is needed...

..but also the lithium component is easier to ignite

than deuterium alone.

But it soon became clear that igniting a fusion reaction

in lithium deuteride required such high temperatures and pressure

that only an atomic explosion would start the process.

So, we end up with something like this.

There's an outer case...

..in which there is a primary - a fission weapon -

generally known as Tom...

..and a secondary - the thermonuclear material -

generally known as Dick.

And the object is to get the radiation

from the primary Tom to surround...

..Dick rather uniformly

so that it's compressed to a tight focus at the centre

where the temperature will rise

and the thermonuclear reaction will start.

But this design posed a huge problem.

Would the atomic bomb blow the whole device up

before the fusion process had even begun?

The question was is it possible

to get the radiation from the trigger, Tom,

to completely surround the secondary, Dick,

in a more or less uniform fashion

before the radiation or the mechanical pressure

has blown the whole thing apart?

And to do this, the idea was

we'd fill the space between Tom and Dick

with a very low density material,

through which the radiation would pass rather rapidly.

And to stop it all escaping and blowing everything apart,

one makes the case of material of high electron density

through which the radiation goes much more slowly.

And the key to everything is

are these two speeds sufficiently different

that it will do what one wants it to do?

Professor Taylor and his colleagues were not deterred

by their great scientific challenge.

Look, I was 27, and at that age, you can do anything.

And, remember, this was not so long after the war

when people much younger than me had done amazing things.

So, one thought that, you know,

"If the Americans have done it, surely we can do it."

But there were some challenging points, yes.

But there was another problem looming on the horizon -

Soviet and American nuclear bomb tests

were provoking a furious public reaction.

# Just a plain bomb is bad but that A-bomb is worse

# They done named that H-bomb well

# Thousand times stronger than that A-bomb is

# It's going to blow us all to kingdom come... #

The anti-bomb movement started to grow rapidly.

By the mid-'50s, there was worldwide public alarm

at the risk to humanity and to the planet

of these great explosions...

..that so much radioactive dust

was being pumped up into the upper atmosphere

that the whole planet was being poisoned,

and that led to suggestions there should be a moratorium,

there should be a halt, a ban,

on atmospheric testing or all testing, indeed.

EXPLOSION

Under huge pressure from around the world,

the two nuclear powers, America and the Soviet Union,

planned to declare a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing.

The British government feared it would be imposed

before their hydrogen bomb was tested.

The moratorium on testing

was to kick in in late 1958,

and so it was a race against time

to conduct those tests

and achieve the scientific success that we needed.

So, the government announced Operation Grapple.

The testing of Britain's H-bomb

would take place as soon as possible,

but first huge support and test sites had to be built

on the other side of the world.

The difficulty of achieving this massive task

was only too clear to the man who helped oversee the operation.

It was an enormous project.

They were asking us to build a major airbase

on a very large desert island in the middle of the Pacific,

and erect two camps, one as big as a small city.

And when we had done all that,

we then had to go and prepare Malden Island,

which was going to be the target.

But it was quite obvious that what we were being asked to do

by the War Office was not possible.

They had to give us more men.

So, we moved soldiers from Korea,

and it was very tough on some of them.

They didn't see their wives for about two years.

Throughout 1957,

the test ban moratorium talks gathered momentum.

For the scientists,

the pressure to get their one-megaton hydrogen bomb

ready for testing was intense.

For the first time, Britain's bomb-maker-in-chief

shows us the hydrogen bomb

which was to become the British nuclear deterrent.

Here we have the first hydrogen bomb

that went into service with the RAF for the United Kingdom.

It's codenamed Red Snow,

and it's contained in this aerodynamic dropping case,

which, however, departs from being truly aerodynamic

when you come to the front end.

Where we have chopped off the end, it's completely flat,

and the point of that is to slow the fall of the bomb,

so that the bomber, which has released it,

can turn away and make its escape,

because otherwise it could be seriously damaged

by the flash and the blast from the hydrogen bomb.

In November 1957, Operation Grapple X was ready to go.

The bomb was flown out to the Pacific in a Valiant bomber.

On board were the co-pilot, Alan Pringle,

and his navigator, Derek Tuthill.

The enormous bomb bay had been especially adapted

to carry the H-bomb.

This is the start of the bomb bay,

and it extends approximately 35-40 feet

with the bomb sitting inside,

filling at least three quarters of the space, I would say.

But they knew virtually nothing

about the bomb which they were carrying.

If you were a crew member...

-..you were taught just to fly the aircraft.

-Kept in the dark.

I mean, we weren't allowed to see the weapon in the bomb bay.

They had a screen rolled up

-round that part of the aircraft...

-Yes.

-..so we couldn't even peep.

We knew remarkably little about it.

Finally, on the 8th of November 1957,

the go-ahead for the test was given.

There was a delay of about an hour once we were airborne

because a ship was spotted in the critical part of the sea

where the bomb was about to burst,

and we had to wait while it sailed out of the area of immediate danger.

On Malden Island,

various observation huts were set up.

They've never been filmed before. Ted Baker was in one of them.

It was referred to as a cube because they are square on there,

which housed a lot of the recording equipment.

There was possibly about 20 people in there.

It was quite tense, actually, with everything sort of building up

to the point, you know, where the weapon is released,

you hear the countdown and everything on there.

You like to feel that

you're in control of your emotions and everything,

but you're just wondering what's going to happen. And you waited.

-OVER RADIO:

-'Steady. Steady. Steady, steady, steady. Now.'

At 17.47 Greenwich Mean Time,

Alan Pringle and the crew dropped the bomb

and made the sharp turn to escape its blast.

EXPLOSION

The thing I remember most of all is the flash.

We had very dark welder's glass over the windows,

and the light from that explosion was so bright,

it didn't damp out the flash at all.

We suddenly saw the outside as clear as daylight.

It was far brighter than I've ever seen a light in my life, I think.

When the weapon went off, you'd get some blast,

you'd hear it sort of thump on there.

When you went outside to view,

then you saw the mushroom cloud forming into like a tube.

It just appeared like a ballerina's skirt,

and it looked a lot bigger than anything I'd seen previously.

The H-bomb had a yield of 1.8 megatons.

For the scientists, it was a triumph,

although you wouldn't have known it from their reaction.

There wasn't any shouting and yelling and hullabaloo at all.

It was just scientific people looking at one another and saying,

"It looks as though we've got something good here."

I don't remember that I jumped up and down

and punched the air or anything like that.

I mean, it was just the feeling that, scientifically,

we'd demonstrated that this was the way to go.

I'm sorry to admit that I was rather more concerned

about the scientific aspects

than the political or the patriotic aspects.

The scientists had defied the odds

and realised the politicians' dreams.

I think, having independently developed a hydrogen bomb,

and pretty soon put one into service,

it achieved exactly what the Foreign Office wanted,

which was a place at the top table.

Shortly afterwards, the American and British governments

signed an agreement to share atomic information.

The British had only just got there in time.

Three months later, a nuclear test ban was announced,

ending atmospheric bomb tests.

Sir William Penney, the man behind the British bomb programme,

summed up the scientists' justification for their work.

-SIR WILLIAM PENNEY:

-The energy and enthusiasm

which have gone into the making of this new weapon stemmed essentially

from the sober hope that it would bring us nearer the day

when world war is universally seen to be unthinkable.

Did Bryan Taylor feel any qualms

about creating such a terrifying weapon?

Well, I'm afraid not, no. I viewed it as a scientific problem,

and the main aim was that we should not all fall over

with egg on our faces.

My government had announced that it was going to have a hydrogen bomb,

and so it better have one, else it would look very foolish.