Operation Grapple X: How a plucky group of boffins made Britain a nuclear superpower
Guy Kelly
30 April 2017 • 7:00am
On the evening of November 8, 1957, over a tiny atoll in the Pacific Ocean, a scientific test changed the course of British history. At 17.47 GMT, whirring high above Christmas Island in Kiribati, an RAF Valiant – the Vulcan’s higher-altitude big brother – dropped a bomb a hundred times more powerful than that which had devastated Hiroshima a dozen years earlier.
It took 52 seconds to fall, and when it did, Britain’s first successful test of a megaton hydrogen bomb rendered the country
a nuclear superpower for the first time.
Six decades on, the remarkable story behind the test, codenamed Operation Grapple X, is to be told in
a new BBC documentary, Britain’s Nuclear Bomb: The Inside Story, featuring the first interviews with some of the scientists leading the project, as well as previously unseen footage.
“It’s a very British tale: of achieving extraordinary things under often very challenging circumstances,” says historian Brian Cathcart, who contributes to the documentary and once wrote a book about Britain’s struggle for the “the bomb”.
That quest began with the outbreak of the Second World War. For two decades, scientists had been experimenting with the potential of creating unprecedented amounts of energy from vast nuclear chain reactions, but when war broke out, that research became an imperative.
“All of a sudden, there was a concern that Hitler would successfully develop an atomic bomb somehow, so they started to think about how that would be possible and what would be needed. It was a race,” Cathcart says.
Across the Atlantic, the
US nuclear programme, the Manhattan Project, had been running in since 1939. Three years later, it subsumed the first British programme – a top-secret operation codenamed “Tube Alloys” which was led by two exiled German scientists – and won the race three years later, dropping atomic bombs on Japan.
While British scientists had been present during those bombs’ developments, however, it was made clear that information wasn’t going to be shared when the war was over.
“Clement Attlee [who became Prime Minister a month prior to the bombs dropping] was hugely paranoid about that,” Cathcart says. “The Americans just cut the ties, and Attlee felt he was left with no choice but to have Britain build their own bomb.”
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thin...-x-plucky-group-boffins-made-britain-nuclear/