WINDSCALE: CRISIS IN NUCLEAR BRITAIN
REV. JOHN GROSER
1966
Ten years ago, in May 1956, the British Commonwealth hitched its wagon to the spectre of mass destruction and joined the exclusive ranks of global nuclear powers. The detonation of “White Flash”, the first British A-bomb, on the colonial outpost of Christmas Island far off in the Pacific, fulfilled Chairman Mosley’s wish that the Commonwealth should play a key role in this dark chapter of the Cold War. Britain, after the United States and the Soviet Union, became the third possessor of nuclear weapons, and in so doing secured for itself all accompanying prestige and global influence. It also embarked upon a path towards closing the ‘nuclear gap’: the disparity in nuclear capabilities between even the three nuclear powers. Two years prior to the detonation of White Flash, the United States had proven the obsolescence of atomic weapons through the successful test of warhead of even greater destructive capability: the H-bomb. As a new and terrible age of thermonuclear warfare commenced, Mosley set the sights of British science, technology and industry on keeping up with the cutting edge of nuclear advances. To this end, before White Flash had even faded from the public consciousness, Mosley committed the Commonwealth to the production of a successful thermonuclear weapon as soon as possible. With this commitment, he put Britain on a direct course to the worst crisis in its brief nuclear history: Windscale.
While the story of Britain as a nuclear power begins in 1956, the history of Britain’s involvement with nuclear weaponry goes back further into the years after the Anti-Fascist Wars. Ever since James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron in 1932, British science had been intimately involved with the development of human knowledge about the nuclear domain. By the late 1940s, research by chemists and physicists at the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge had validated the theory that radioactive substances, particularly uranium, could be used to produce power through the process of nuclear fission. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, research into nuclear science became more and more secretive. While British scientists continued their theoretical research, there was little indication that the potential of nuclear fission to power the country would be realised – nor was there any hint that nuclear power had been realised in any other countries.
In November 1950, at the lowest point of the Korean War, the United States Army shocked the world by deploying experimental ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons during their bloody advance against the Chinese. British ministers had little idea that scientists in the United States knew of the potential of nuclear fission, thus to discover in such violent fashion that the advances of their own scientists had been outstripped was a devastating blow to Britain’s perceived prestige. To Mosley, the lesson to be learnt from the Korean War was clear: Britain could no longer afford to be complacent in the application of its scientific knowledge. While General Ridgway privately vowed never again to make use of the terrible power of nuclear weaponry, his resolution went unanswered. With a great and horrifying flash, the nuclear era had dawned on the world.
Chairman Mosley responded to the news that the United States had acquired nuclear capability with the formation of the British Nuclear Research Council in January 1951. The first meeting of the BNRC was convened at Bletchley Park under the direction of Edwin Plowden, a senior civil servant at the Office for Economic Planning. Bletchley was chosen as a site owing to its incredibly fortuitous location, situated along the railway line between Cambridge, the home of the Cavendish Institute for Experimental Physics, and Oxford, as well as being conveniently connected by rail to London, Birmingham and Manchester. The ‘Defence’ division of the BNRC was chaired by William Penney, a mathematician formerly of the the London College of Science[1] who had worked on the British nuclear programme since the early 1940s. Penney was the man charged by Mosley with producing a British nuclear arsenal. He was given a strict timetable on which the deliver the goods; Mosley wanted a bomb before the end of 1954, and Penney was in full agreement as to the urgency of the matter. As he put it, “the discriminative test for a first-class power is whether it has made an atomic bomb, and we have either got to pass the test or suffer a serious loss of prestige both inside this country and internationally.”
William Penney, the man charged with delivering the British nuclear deterrent.
Over the next four years, the weapons programme at the BNRC tested a range of nuclear devices with limited success. By 1954, it was evident that the Commonwealth was going to struggle to hit its target of producing an independent bomb by the end of the year. The BNRC secured a significant victory in the nuclear battle when it oversaw the opening of the world’s first commercial nuclear power station at Windscale in Cumbria in August 1954, but this already had been overshadowed by the detonation of the world’s first hydrogen bomb – “Castle Bravo” – by the United States that March. Castle Bravo was several orders of magnitude more devastating than the nuclear devices deployed in Korea, and signalled to the world that Korea was not an aberration. The nuclear age was well and truly established, and the struggle for supremacy in the Cold War would now demand investment into the production of devices of staggering destructive capacity.
Before Britain’s own successful detonation of a nuclear device, the Soviet Union shocked the world again with the detonation of their own thermonuclear weapon in February 1955. This development was the result of a doctrine of “asymmetrical parity” devised and prosecuted by Nikita Khrushchev and Soviet premier Georgi Malenkov. Having been altered to the dangers of the American monopoly on nuclear weapons technology, the Soviets pursued a strategy that would allow them to compete with the United States in terms of damage potential without needing to match the size of their arsenal. Thus Soviet scientists had worked towards the production of a device far greater than that used in Korea from the start of the decade, and were rewarded in devastating fashion after only four years of development. Their nuclear programme had greatly benefited from the collection of scientific intelligence from the United States, and the race to detonate ever bigger and more terrible bombs was accompanied by an increase in suspicions of technological espionage. Scientific enquiry, where it could feasibly lead to an advantage in the technological theatre of the Cold War, was jealously protected by the height of the 1950s. Still today, the promise of a world where free, joint enquiry might be put to use in the service of constructive ends remains a distant and poignant dream.
"Castle Bravo" detonated off the Bikini Atoll in March 1954, signalling the dawn of the thermonuclear age.
Having been upstaged by both the Americans and the Soviets, Mosley was already dreaming of a British H-bomb by the time his efforts were gratified with the success of White Flash. Production of an H-bomb, however, was a far greater challenge than that posed by the construction of an A-bomb. The exact processes remain unknown and hidden behind state classifications, although intelligence leaked by members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1960 suggests that the H-bomb operates by a “two-stage” process, in which energy from a primary fission reaction is used to fuel a secondary, far more powerful fusion reaction. This requires considerable quantities of the radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium, produced by the bombardment of lithium-magnesium with neutrons. In normal circumstances, the production of tritium would have called for the construction of a new, specialised reactor; none of the existing British nuclear reactors were equipped to generate tritium safely. Nevertheless, according to the tight schedule demanded by Chairman Mosley, there was no time to build such a reactor. As a result, the existing facilities at Windscale – where commercial electricity generation was a cover for the production of weapons-grade plutonium – were modified to allow for the production of the necessary materials.
From Autumn 1956, Windscale began the production of large quantities of tritium at an alarming pace. The materials needed for this task were all highly flammable, and required great care in their use. At several points this care was not given, and following a government decision in March 1957 to override a number of previously implemented safety measures in order to boost production, site director and chief engineer Christopher Hinton resigned in protest. Hinton attempted to publish a warning about the perilous course taken by the British nuclear programme that June, but he was subject to censorship by Mosley’s government. Of chief concern was the decision taken by Ray Gunter, Secretary of the Office of Fuel and Power, to accelerate tritium production by reducing the size of the cooling fins on the fuel cartridges. This allowed for increased yields while removing a vital safety barrier against the chance of the fuel material overheating. Gunter’s decision was signed off by his ministerial superior, Director of the Office for Economic Planning Harold Macmillan, who was a firm ally of Mosley in his commitment to producing a British H-bomb. After the Windscale Crisis, it would be Macmillan who led the effort to cover up the government’s culpability, infamously dismissing the disaster as “an error of judgement”.
Harold Macmillan, Director of the OEP (1957–61)
In Summer 1957, the Commonwealth tested an H-bomb codenamed “Orange Sky” without success off the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Frustrated by this setback, Mosley announced that a second test would be conducted before the end of the year. He directed the staff at Windscale to maintain tritium production at its current high level. Britain would have its bomb, whatever the cost.
With predictable speed, this “at any cost” strategy took a disastrous turn. During a routine safety check on October 7, operators noticed unusual temperature readings that suggested a problem with the reactor core. Following standard procedure, involving a controlled release of energy, indicators suggested that the anomaly had been addressed and the reactor once again began behaving normally. Three days later, however, temperature readings once again gave cause for concern. Rather than cooling gradually after the energy release, the core was heating up and eventually hit a temperature of 400 degrees Celsius. Monitoring equipment relayed that this temperature rise was centred around one cartridge. Taken with an indication from detectors in the plant chimneys that a small amount of radiation had been released, evidence seemed to suggest that a cartridge had burst. This was a relatively routine problem, and the operators decided to control the rising temperature in the core by increasing the speed of the cooling fans in the reactor.
To the consternation of the reactor operators, the increased airflow did not lead to a cooling in the reactor. In fact, it produced the opposite effect; the reactor continued to heat up, and further still the radiation readings from the chimneys were rapidly increasing. A foreman arriving for work on the morning of October 10 noticed smoke coming out of the chimney, which usually spouted only steam. Temperatures continued to rise, and they operators began to suspect that the core was on fire. Attempts to examine the reactor remotely failed when a scanner jammed, thus it fell to the deputy reactor manager, a man called Tom Hughes, to inspect the core in person. Clad in full protective gear, he and a fellow operator removed an inspection plug from the reactor and looked inside. What they saw horrified them: “four channels of fuel glowing bright cherry red.”
Oswald Mosley presides over the official opening ceremony of the Windscale nuclear power station, 1954.
Without any assistance from site directors, and uncertain as to the severity of the incident, the operators attempted to fight the fire themselves using any methods available. Initial attempts to cool it with the fans proved counterproductive, and extinguishing it with liquid carbon dioxide proved similarly ineffective. By the morning of October 11, the core was burning at a temperature of 1,300 degrees Celsius. Reactor manager Tom Tuohy was faced with the prospect of the biological shield around the core collapsing, which would have exposed the site operators to extreme doses of radiation and severely complicated any further attempts at resolving the crisis. In desperation, he authorised an attempt to control the blaze using water – a highly risky strategy that laid open the possibility of oxidising the molten metal reactor fuel. This had the potential cause an explosion, which would have ripped open the weakened core shields. With no other option available, Tuohy watched as a dozen fire hoses were brought into the reactor, operators nervously inspecting for any signs of explosive hydrogen reactions. While no such reactions occurred, the water failed to bring the fire under control. The reactor operators were faced by the very real prospect of disaster on a massive scale, and an evacuation of the local area was being seriously considered. Tuohy ordered everyone out of the reactor building except himself and the fire chief and prepared for one final gamble, shutting off all cooling and ventilating air entering the reactor.
With the shutting off of air, the temperature in the reactor threatened to spike and leave the building inhospitable to firefighters. If this measure did not work, there would be little to be done to avert a major catastrophe. Tuohy climbed up to a high viewing platform to observe the effects of his final attempt to control the blaze. Mercifully, he was greeted by the sight of flames dying away before his own eyes. The fire began to draw in air from any and all possible sources in a desperate attempt to stay alight, but it was in vain, and after burning for almost four days straight, the blaze was extinguished. Its effects, however, would not be so easily controlled.
Reactor operators at Windscale continued to work after the fire, despite fears over contamination of the surrounding area.
While protective devices on the reactor chimneys helped to mitigate the worst of the effects, the fire at Windscale sent vast quantities of radiation shooting across the British Isles. Initially, the Commonwealth government began the work of covering up the disaster, reporting that a “local incident” at Windscale had been safely brought under control “with minimal negative effects”. Milk from dairy farms within a 200 square-mile radius around the reactor was quietly collected and dumped into the Irish Sea. No settlements were evacuated, and there were no recorded fatalities from acute radiation poisoning, but it is estimated that the effects of the fallout have contributed to a spike in radiation-related health issues in the surrounding area. Over the last decade, as many as 250 deaths may be attributable to the Windscale fire, and countless further non-fatal illnesses and injuries. A report commissioned by Ray Gunter and conducted by William Penney was heavily censored and suppressed on the orders of Harold Macmillan, who feared a public backlash against the British nuclear programme, as well as the loss of international prestige. Publicly, blame for the crisis was laid at the reactor operators themselves, who became scapegoats for the failures of the Mosleyite directorial system.
This, ultimately, was the lesson of Windscale. Long after the fire was extinguished and the reactor repaired, this shameful episode cast a dark shadow over the highest echelons of British society. Mosley’s government scrambled at all costs to shield itself from the consequences of the disaster. Meanwhile, it was more than happy to land the blame at the feet of blameless individual workers. Nearly three decades after Mosley first took power after the Revolution, Windscale suggested a ruling class in decline, and an economic system in desperate need of reform. In spite of government suppression attempts, in the years after the fire the nuclear issue burst into the public consciousness as a key plank of the anti-Mosleyite opposition. Less than four years on from Windscale, Mosley fell from power, and there can be little doubt that the catastrophe played a significant role in the decline of the Britain he had built.
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1: Previously Imperial College until 1929.
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