Our deadliest secret

This book shows how successive cabinets have handled the deadliest secret of modern times, what to do about nuclear bombs, since the first ones went off in 1945. As the subject was so secret, not much has ever been allowed out into the public domain; but Hennessy’s scholarly skills have been such that he has unearthed all of that, and here lays it out in scores of documents in facsimile. This gives the reader an engaging sense of being himself involved in actual research; and his commentaries illuminate each paper.

He begins with the now famous memorandum by Frisch and Peierls, of March 1940, from which the whole ghastly project derived. ‘Tube Alloys’, the code name for atomic research, was so secret that Churchill never brought it before his war cabinet at all (half that cabinet, after all, had never been cleared for ultra secret intelligence). Only he, Anderson and Cherwell knew about it, at that stratospheric level; even Attlee, even Eden, even the chiefs of staff were left in ignorance.