Churchill's Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race

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His swansong was sure to have a nuclear theme. In February 1955, when Churchill was eighty years old and inching reluctantly towards his resignation as Prime Minister, he set his heart on making one last great speech in the Commons. The hydrogen bomb, his obsession, supplied the perfect theme – it made all the other business of the day look trifling. As he had told his doctor a few months before: ‘I am more worried by [the H-bomb] than by all the rest of my problems put together.’2

The H-bomb was, Churchill believed, the greatest threat to civilisation since the Mongols began their conquests three-quarters of a millennium before.3 This threat had become a monomania for him, driving his final great diplomatic initiative: to bring the Soviet Union and the United States together to ease the tensions of the Cold War and so minimise the risk that H-bombs would be used.4 He was certainly going to mention that campaign in his speech, but his main task was to argue that the UK must acquire the weapon he feared so much, as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. This argument was almost certain to win the day in the Commons – his main challenge was to give his country a sense of hope at a time when the world seemed to be careering towards a nuclear holocaust.

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