The Professor and the Prime Minister
In February 1952, Winston Churchill, recently returned as British Prime Minister, was becoming anxious about operation Hurricane, his country’s first atomic bomb test scheduled for the autumn. As often in the past when matters of science or technology perplexed him, Churchill turned to Frederick Lindemann, Lee’s Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Oxford University. The “Prof,” as he was almost universally known, had been Churchill’s chief scientific adviser during the Second World War and was presently Paymaster General. Pop or flop? Churchill asked. “Pop,” Lindemann replied.1 His confidence was warranted. On 3 October 1952, the British test device exploded at Montebello with a force greater than either of the atomic weapons used against Japan in 1945.
As Martin Gilbert has shown, Lindemann was “as close to Churchill in thought, proximity and ideas as any other individual.”2 The two first met in 1921 and formed a professional-political relationship, and in due course a friendship, which endured for more than three decades. Although no scientist himself, Churchill was a consistent champion of technological innovation and the application of science to warfare. In the view of physicist R. V. Jones, Churchill, “[a]lone among politicians, valued science and technology at something approaching their true worth.”3 He also esteemed scientists, but in the case of Lindemann, and what he called his “beautiful brain,” he exhibited near veneration.4
Patrician Physicist
Lindemann was born in April 1886 to a wealthy engineer-businessman of French-Alsatian lineage who settled in England and (like Churchill) an American mother. Later, Lindemann came to resent his birthplace; his mother had been visiting Baden-Baden when she went into premature labour, and Lindemann suspected (with justification) that despite his early naturalization as a British citizen, his German origins meant that he was never accepted as a genuine patriot by some within the British ruling establishment and social elite. After a childhood spent in Devon, Lindemann attended schools in Scotland and Darmstadt, studied at Berlin University, and obtained a doctorate in physics from Berlin’s Physikalisch-Chemisches Institut. Soon after the end of the
