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00:00:02Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met President Eisenhower
00:00:05to sign an agreement that would change Britain's relationship with America forever.
00:00:13But just days before, a fire had broken out at Windscale,
00:00:17the country's first nuclear reactor.
00:00:20I haven't gone on to a blazing inferno.
00:00:24Britain was on the brink of an unprecedented disaster.
00:00:30If it goes up, we will all go with it.
00:00:33The fire threatened to destroy the special relationship before it began.
00:00:38You can imagine the bottom dropping out of Macmillan's stomach.
00:00:43Facing humiliation, Macmillan decided to keep the truth about Britain's worst nuclear disaster secret.
00:00:50He covered it up, plain and simple.
00:00:53Now, secret tape recordings reveal the reasons behind Macmillan's cover-up.
00:00:57At first they said it went over 1,200. God help us.
00:01:02And why the men and women who fought the fire felt he betrayed them.
00:01:07This is a story of political spin before the phrase was invented,
00:01:11and how Britain's nuclear hopes turned into a nuclear nightmare.
00:01:15I have never been so frightened in my whole life.
00:01:28Mankind had not faced anything like this ever before.
00:01:47For a country that had suffered six years of war,
00:01:50Winscale was a symbol of the new Britain.
00:01:52A symbol of hope.
00:01:57It was a massive engineering project employing thousands of people at the frontiers of science.
00:02:05It was the first big construction site that I'd ever been on.
00:02:10It was like Meccano on a very large scale.
00:02:19Oh, it was a terrific achievement, really.
00:02:22Yes.
00:02:25There was a lot of people who worked on that.
00:02:27And these were huge projects.
00:02:29I mean, they wouldn't be considered huge today, but then they were.
00:02:33From 1947, the building of Britain's first nuclear reactor at Winscale took on epic proportions.
00:02:424,000 tonnes of graphite were used to build the two reactors.
00:02:47The walls were seven feet thick.
00:02:49The chimney, 400 feet high.
00:02:55Occasionally, they let me drive their cranes.
00:02:58And it was fun.
00:03:00It was like sort of model railways on a larger scale.
00:03:10The Winscale reactor was a marvellous way of cutting our teeth.
00:03:15This sounds very egocentric, but this is, to some extent, the way that science goes.
00:03:20You do it because it's fun.
00:03:26Suddenly, science was sexy.
00:03:29Morning.
00:03:30Morning.
00:03:31More VIPs?
00:03:32No boffins.
00:03:35Everybody loves a lover.
00:03:39I'm a lover.
00:03:40Everybody loves me.
00:03:44Anyhow.
00:03:45That's how I feel.
00:03:48Wow.
00:03:49I feel.
00:03:51Just like a polly.
00:03:53It was just part of this feeling that science has done great things, can do great things and will do
00:04:00great things, and we were just part of it.
00:04:02If one of us went to a conference, there might be newspaper headline, atom man will be there.
00:04:10It was very, very heady.
00:04:12More than 5,000 atom men and women landed in a small part of the north-west of England.
00:04:22The locals came up with their own names for the invaders.
00:04:25Probably the favourite was the atomics to describe the new people in the village.
00:04:32I can remember all laughing one morning because of the headline, Britain's Atom Age Heroes.
00:04:39And you did feel that we were in the vanguard of bringing something really new.
00:04:45Men dressed like visitors from Mars and a slightly sinister touch to the hospital atmosphere of the laboratory.
00:04:52The local town of Seascale, just a few hundred yards from the site, was becoming Britain's first atomic town.
00:05:00Seascale was an absolutely marvellous place to grow up, it really was.
00:05:04There were golf classes, a ride in school, ballroom dancing classes, ballet classes, tea dances even, in the Windscale Club.
00:05:21And all the physicists and their wives who came in were new from university, so it was a very young,
00:05:27vibrant population.
00:05:33All the people were young and ambitious and keen, alive.
00:05:40There was chemists, there was teachers, there was physicists, there was all kinds of people.
00:05:47People from all over the world.
00:05:49We all got on wonderfully well and it really was quite exciting.
00:05:56Seascale was called the brainiest town in Britain.
00:05:59It was the biggest concentration of honours degrees and PhDs of anywhere in the country.
00:06:06Well, it was quite hilarious at school.
00:06:09We couldn't have a physics teacher because they couldn't get anyone to come and teach us.
00:06:12And apparently it was because all the homework that came in, all the physics homework,
00:06:17the standard of it was far in advance of anything the physics teachers had ever heard of.
00:06:22The class my daughter was in, every child in the class passed the 11 plus, which had been unknown before.
00:06:34In a Britain still emerging from war, Windscale gave people hope.
00:06:39From a point of view of someone just leading the universities and starting a new job, it was great.
00:06:44Because I was thrown in immediately with 20 or 30, perhaps more, other mainly men, all in the same boat.
00:06:52And we were all staying at the hostel together, so we all went rock climbing together and we all played
00:06:56rugby together.
00:06:58And got drunk together and went to the dance every Friday night in the hostel itself, which was quite the
00:07:04local scene.
00:07:12But Windscale wasn't built to fulfil the dreams of Britain's young atomic heroes.
00:07:19It was built to make bombs.
00:07:26At 8.15 in the morning of August 6th, Japanese time, the first atomic bomb struck an enemy target.
00:07:45The bomb which had ended the war was now seen as the means of keeping the peace.
00:07:52Britain believed its status as a world power was guaranteed by its relationship with America and their joint stewardship of
00:07:59the atom bomb.
00:08:00Neither the sure prevention of war nor the continuous rise of world organisations will be gained without a special relationship
00:08:11between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States of America.
00:08:17Churchill believed Britain and America had formed a lasting nuclear partnership when British scientists helped build the atom bomb.
00:08:26Although the Americans had financed the bomb project at Los Alamos, a crucial contribution had been made by some of
00:08:32Britain's most brilliant scientists.
00:08:36But not everyone believed in a nuclear partnership between Britain and America.
00:08:41They created this war-winning weapon.
00:08:45The American taxpayer created it.
00:08:47Two billion dollars were spent on it.
00:08:49Unimaginable sum of money.
00:08:50And they felt in 1945 that the best way of ensuring that America stayed on top and secondly that there
00:09:01weren't nuclear wars with rival nuclear powers was to keep this thing to ourselves.
00:09:09It's ours. We paid for it. We're gonna keep it to ourselves.
00:09:11The idea that the United States was the ideal caretaker for this profound and dangerous knowledge.
00:09:18You can smell the smoke of superiority, of arrogance.
00:09:25We did it. You helped a little, but you know, really we did it.
00:09:29In 1946, the Americans ended the nuclear partnership with Britain.
00:09:35Senator Brian McMahon's legislation made it a capital offence to reveal nuclear secrets, even to their former allies.
00:09:43It was a devastating rebuff for the new government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
00:09:48Well, it was a terrific blow and Attlee did everything he could to try and get the thing back on
00:09:53track.
00:09:54That October, in a secret cabinet committee, Attlee listened to his colleagues argue over Britain's bomb.
00:10:01There is an enormous anxiety, I think, in the political class in Britain at this particular time,
00:10:07that in order to retain our position for as long as we possibly can, then we have to develop these
00:10:14weapons ourselves.
00:10:16Two ministers, Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton, were close to persuading Attlee that Britain could not compete with the Americans.
00:10:24But then the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevan, arrived, still bristling over a conversation he'd had with the American Secretary of
00:10:31State.
00:10:33Bevan turned up and said, No, Prime Minister, that won't do at all. We've got to have this.
00:10:39And one of the reasons he gave was a very striking one, quite bluntly. He said, I don't mind for
00:10:46myself, but I don't want any other foreign secretary of this country to be talked at by a Secretary of
00:10:54State in the United States, as I have just had.
00:10:56He said, We've got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs, and we've got to have a bloody
00:11:01Union Jack flying on top of it.
00:11:05Attlee was persuaded. Britain must have its own bomb. Not just for deterrence, but, he believed, to persuade America that
00:11:14Britain was its natural nuclear ally.
00:11:18If you're in a nuclear relationship with them, it's a bond. It sets you apart from all the other countries
00:11:25in the world. You're the family member. And that's terribly important to Britain as a world power in decline.
00:11:38Attlee turned to the one man he knew was capable of building a bomb. He'd worked closely with the Americans
00:11:45at Los Alamos and helped design the bombs that would be dropped on Japan. His name was William Penny.
00:11:53Look out in the background. The thing we particularly would like to know is how you personally feel about the
00:11:58work that you do.
00:12:00Well, I think it's got to be done.
00:12:03Penny was the most interesting guy. He'd come from very ordinary beginnings. He was self-made. And he had a
00:12:10funny little drawl. And he looked and spoke as though he was a bit simple, quite honestly, because he had
00:12:16a brain like a razor. A brilliant mathematician. And we were so lucky to have him.
00:12:22And what are your plans now, sir?
00:12:24Well, I have to send in my report to the government. When I've done that, I shall have a short
00:12:31holiday and I hope to play some gold.
00:12:33You're a king golfer? Yes, king golfer.
00:12:35And thank you very much for talking to us.
00:12:37Penny faced a choice. Return to quiet academia or agree to Attlee's request to build Britain's first atom bomb.
00:12:45He had a wonderful offer of being principal, I think, of an Oxford college. But I think the politicians persuaded
00:12:55my father that Britain should have a nuclear deterrent. And he was persuaded that it was his duty to take
00:13:05on this awful job, really.
00:13:10Penny. Penny's nuclear achievements had been made in collaboration with American scientists. But now he was on his own.
00:13:19If we were going to do it, we had to repeat work which they had already done, because not published,
00:13:26at enormous cost. And, of course, it cost us a lot in time. We were way behind the Americans in
00:13:33producing atomic weapons.
00:13:41But Attlee had faith in his scientists.
00:13:51Bridge science is extraordinary. We'd invented radar. We'd split the atom. We'd invented the jet engine. We had an extraordinary
00:14:00impact.
00:14:04I mean, considering the size of the British scientific community compared to the American scientific community, the flourishing that had
00:14:15taken us in World War II and subsequently was remarkable.
00:14:21Penny could at least rely on John Cockcroft, one of the pioneers of nuclear science.
00:14:27We have all the same problems.
00:14:30Cockcroft was appointed to run Harwell, the new atomic research establishment charged with reproducing the nuclear science the Americans already
00:14:38had.
00:14:40With Cockcroft at Harwell, Penny could set up Aldermaston, where the bomb would be made.
00:14:46That left the most difficult task, creating the vital ingredient for the bomb, plutonium.
00:14:53It meant building Britain's first nuclear reactor.
00:14:58It was a huge task.
00:15:00And it went to Britain's best engineer, Christopher Hinton.
00:15:06Hinton was enormously impressive.
00:15:09Hinton was enormously impressive.
00:15:09You were aware when he came into the room that here was a very, very imposing person.
00:15:15He was well over six feet, six foot two or three.
00:15:19A very keen face and piercing blue eyes.
00:15:25And he was very much the leader, the boss, the planner, the chap who knew what to do.
00:15:32They were nicknamed the Bold Bad Barons.
00:15:37Penny, Cockcroft and Hinton would mastermind Britain's atomic project.
00:15:42They were arch meritocrats.
00:15:45They certainly had no element of privilege in their background.
00:15:50And there was a lot of that about in the post-war years.
00:15:53I think they would have conformed to what C.P. Snow called the new men.
00:16:00This ideal of people who make their own way and contribute on the basis of their talents without class paying
00:16:09a part.
00:16:11And so it was that Windscale, a small peninsula of land next door to the town of Seascale,
00:16:17became the home to Britain's first nuclear reactor.
00:16:21The area had enjoyed brief popularity as a Victorian seaside resort.
00:16:25But by the late 1940s, its main industry was in decline.
00:16:30Well, as with all mining areas, there's been a history of major accidents.
00:16:34And one of the major pit losses here was 104 people killed.
00:16:38It had also been a very depressed area before the war.
00:16:41It suffered massively during the Depression.
00:16:43And so it was an area where people, even though they may have had some questions in the back of
00:16:48their minds,
00:16:49certainly would have seen this as a bright new future and gone into a very clean and infinitely much safer
00:16:53industry.
00:16:54And so that's why so many people welcomed it.
00:16:57To build Windscale, Hinton needed the cutting edge nuclear science to come from Harwell.
00:17:05To Harwell come students from all parts of the Commonwealth and the British Isles to learn something of the power
00:17:11plants of the atomic age.
00:17:16The challenge the researchers at Harwell faced was to design a reactor at Windscale, which would produce enough plutonium for
00:17:23the bomb.
00:17:25When pieces of uranium are brought together, a chain reaction occurs.
00:17:30Neutrons released by the uranium collide with neutrons from its neighbors, releasing even more neutrons.
00:17:38This chain reaction converts some of the uranium into plutonium.
00:17:44But the chain reaction makes uranium ferociously hot.
00:17:49Left unchecked, the reaction could go out of control, like a bomb.
00:17:55The British scientists knew the Americans controlled the chain reaction by placing the uranium in hundreds of channels,
00:18:03drilled through a block of pure graphite, known as the core.
00:18:09The uranium becomes dangerously hot.
00:18:12So, to prevent it from catching fire, the uranium was placed in aluminium cartridges which sealed it off from the
00:18:19air.
00:18:21Once the plutonium had been produced, the hot cartridges were then pushed out of the back of the core into
00:18:27cooling ponds of water,
00:18:29so the precious plutonium could be extracted.
00:18:32But the most dangerous part of the process was while the cartridges were still inside the graphite core.
00:18:38Unless they were constantly cooled, they could melt the core or set it on fire.
00:18:44The British knew that the Americans had prevented this in their reactor at Hanford by pouring a constant stream of
00:18:50water through the channels.
00:18:52But this system had a serious weakness.
00:18:54If the water supply failed, the core itself could explode.
00:19:09The reactor would run very rapidly, and I mean very rapidly, within a second or so, out of control.
00:19:16At Hanford in North America, there was a special 30-mile long escape road built as part of the safety
00:19:23precautions.
00:19:25And we decided this country was far too small to have a reactor with such dangerous possibilities built anywhere, not
00:19:35even in Scotland.
00:19:35But the British scientists believed they'd found the answer.
00:19:40To cool the huge reactor, batteries of fans drive air through a ventilating system around it.
00:19:47Windscale's graphite core would be cooled not with water, but with air, blown through the core by huge fans, and
00:19:55taking the heat up and out through enormous chimneys.
00:20:00It convinced them that it would be safe to build a reactor next to C-scale.
00:20:06And work continued on Britain's most ambitious engineering project.
00:20:18But the reactor was not being built as Christopher Hinton wanted.
00:20:22He faced a deadline, imposed on him by politicians.
00:20:28They demanded that Britain should be a nuclear power by 1952, the same year the Soviet Union was expected to
00:20:35have the bomb.
00:20:37For such new and untried science, it was a horrendous deadline to meet.
00:20:43The development work that should have been done at Harwell was all cut short by the extreme political and military
00:20:54pressure on them.
00:20:55And the very, very tight deadlines that were given.
00:21:01With time so short, building had begun before the research work was complete.
00:21:08A year into construction, a scientist at Harwell made a devastating discovery.
00:21:15Construction was well on the way, and the air was going to be discharged up at chimneys, 400 feet high.
00:21:23I think in the early summer of 1948, I doodled on a piece of paper about asking myself what would
00:21:32happen if one uranium rod were to catch fire.
00:21:39And I didn't much like the answer.
00:21:42Price realised that if an aluminium cartridge burst, the uranium could burn and the powerful air cooling system would blow
00:21:51radioactive dust up the chimney.
00:21:53There was nothing to stop radioactivity blowing out over seascale and beyond.
00:21:59So I went to the next committee meeting and said that I think that it would be desirable to filter
00:22:07the air coming out of the chimney.
00:22:11And it went down like an absolute lead balloon.
00:22:13The chairman leant back in the chair and said,
00:22:16Don't be so silly, lad.
00:22:18Two tonnes of air go up chimney every second. Can't filter that.
00:22:22And it was considered such a fatuous remark that it doesn't even appear in the minutes of the meeting.
00:22:29Many thought filters would be an unnecessary delay, but John Cockcroft backed Price and ordered massive concrete filters to be
00:22:37winched 400 feet and attached to the top of the chimneys.
00:22:41That is why the filters are known as Cockcroft's Follies. At least they were.
00:22:47The word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident.
00:22:51It was a warning for Hinton.
00:22:53In Whitehall, meeting the deadline for the bomb was more important than the safety of the reactor.
00:23:00Hinton never took any chances with safety because of this pressure.
00:23:07But he was really having to work almost hand from hand to mouth.
00:23:14But the shortcuts taken with safety would later haunt the man who built Windscale.
00:23:33In 1951, after five years of back-breaking work, Windscale was built, just ten days behind schedule.
00:23:43This is the Windscale reactor, hung about with ladders like Gulliver in Lilligan.
00:23:49Hinton had achieved what many had thought was impossible in such a short time.
00:23:55Windscale is unique. It is science fiction intruding on our sober lives.
00:24:00And it is a very great producer of plutonium.
00:24:04It was true. Windscale could produce plutonium.
00:24:08Just not enough for the bomb.
00:24:11It was at the research laboratory at Harwell that scientists realised that the uranium cartridges weren't producing enough plutonium.
00:24:20The only way for Windscale to increase plutonium output was to heat the uranium even more.
00:24:26And the only way to do that was to reduce the amount of aluminium casing around the uranium.
00:24:32The problem was that the cartridges had been manufactured and were already inside the reactor.
00:24:38Then Windscale's deputy general manager, Tom Toohey, came up with an answer.
00:24:44Tom Toohey was the most impressive character. He was pretty young for his senior post.
00:24:50He largely ran it, I think, and he was extremely dominant.
00:24:55He got a finger on every part of the site and was very full of energy.
00:25:02He was a lively, handsome man, sort of bold features and a mass of gorgeous auburn hair flowing back from
00:25:13his forehead.
00:25:15Toohey simply took the cartridges out and trimmed off some of the aluminium, the fins.
00:25:22This meant unloading the 102 tons, clipping one-sixth of an inch of aluminium of every fin, of which there
00:25:31were 14 on each of 36,000 fuel elements, which meant we had to do about half a million fins.
00:25:39And one of our engineers devised a little machine, whereby you could place this on a rack and turn it
00:25:47round.
00:25:48And you made a stroke like that, clipped your fin, turned it round, clipped another, turned it round, clipped another.
00:25:55And we managed to get the whole half million fins off, as I say, in three weeks.
00:26:01It was a classic case of British make, do and mend.
00:26:04But it meant one of Windscale's safety features had been removed.
00:26:09Opinion at the reactor was split.
00:26:11Well, there were two schools of thought.
00:26:13They were proud of the fact that they were producing plutonium at whatever, at the faster rate maybe, or meeting
00:26:20the targets that had been set for them and so on and so on.
00:26:22And they were doing it indefinitely as they saw it. There was a national interest.
00:26:26Gung-ho queen and country stuff, you know.
00:26:29There was another very significant group who were extremely concerned about the attitude towards the possible dangers from radiation and
00:26:39so on and so on.
00:26:42The warnings were ignored. Nothing was allowed to delay the production of plutonium.
00:26:49And in August 1952, the first plutonium left Windscale, to become part of Britain's atom bomb.
00:26:57I broke down the reaction vessel myself personally, opened it up, scrambled around amongst calcium fluoride, see if I could
00:27:04find anything.
00:27:05And there I found a piece of plutonium about this size, about the size of a 50 pence piece, 132
00:27:13grams, and that was our very first piece.
00:27:15So all this vast industrial complex and six years of activity came down to 132 grams of plutonium.
00:27:27Hinton had done his job. Now it was the turn of William Penny.
00:27:38Seven years after helping the Americans build their bomb, Penny gathered his team for the crucial bomb test in Australia.
00:27:53The pressure was on Penny.
00:27:55Britain had a new prime minister, the man who had invented the phrase special relationship.
00:28:05Churchill was determined that Penny's atom bomb would restore Britain's standing with the Americans.
00:28:10Never shall we lose our faith and courage, and never shall we fail in exertion and resolve.
00:28:26And the word went round, on the permanent secretary's desk in the Ministry of Supply, there were two forms.
00:28:34And one said, hard luck, Dr. Penny. The other said, congratulations, Sir William.
00:28:39Now the key. Turning the circuit into position to fire.
00:28:49Minus one and a half minutes.
00:28:55Five, four, three, two, one.
00:29:00Now.
00:29:14That lethal cloud rising above Montebello marks the achievement of British science and industry in the development of atomic power.
00:29:24But it leaves unanswered the question, how shall this newfound power be used?
00:29:30The answer doesn't lie with Britain alone.
00:29:33But we may have a greater voice in this great decision, if we have the strength to defend ourselves and
00:29:39to deter aggression.
00:29:43The bomb worked. It was a triumph, not just for Penny, but also for Windscale.
00:29:54Britain's bomb maker, now Sir William Penny, came home to a hero's welcome.
00:30:12The achievement of this group of people is inspiring.
00:30:18It was a case of brain power and ability and will triumphing over meager resources and an austere climate
00:30:28and all sorts of political difficulties.
00:30:32I would defy anybody to follow the career of Bill Penny through this period or of Christopher Hinton
00:30:41and not feel uplifted by what they did in the teeth of all sorts of difficulties.
00:30:50Armed with the atom bomb, Churchill was sure he could persuade the Americans to re-establish the special relationship
00:30:56and Britain's place at the top table.
00:31:06But within weeks of Britain's triumph, Churchill learned that the Americans were in the Pacific with a new weapon.
00:31:14The blast will come out of the horizon just about there.
00:31:18And this is the significance of the moment.
00:31:22This is the first full-scale test of a hydrogen device.
00:31:26If the reaction goes, we're in the thermonuclear era.
00:31:32For the sake of all of us, and for the sake of our country,
00:31:36I know that you join me in wishing this expedition well.
00:31:39It is now 30 seconds to zero time.
00:31:43Put on goggles or turn away.
00:31:45Do not remove goggles or face bursts until 10 seconds after the first light.
00:31:51It was a shock.
00:31:53The trump card had been trumped, as it were, which wasn't supposed to happen.
00:31:57Six, five, four, three, two, one.
00:32:10America's hydrogen bomb could deliver a blast of a megaton ten times the size of the British bomb.
00:32:25I think that they realised very quickly then that Britain couldn't actually compete with the United States,
00:32:35and probably couldn't compete with the Soviet Union, ultimately.
00:32:40In Congress, leading senators spoke out against sharing their new nuclear secrets with Britain.
00:32:48President Eisenhower has not proposed, and I'm sure the Congress would not be willing.
00:32:52I don't know if even our allies would ask that information be given to them,
00:32:58with respect to the mechanics of the weapon, how it is made, how it is put together.
00:33:03That is too vital to our own national security to be disclosed to anybody.
00:33:11An American senator said that a partnership with Britain would be like trading a horse for a rabbit.
00:33:19But Churchill would not abandon his desire to see Britain and America as nuclear partners.
00:33:25Secretly, he ordered Penny to develop the hydrogen bomb.
00:33:29In a sense, that made the stakes higher for developing a hydrogen bomb.
00:33:35This was something they had to do. This was one thing they could do.
00:33:38They had to do it. The pressure was on.
00:33:42And maybe if they could do that, they would rebuild this partnership with the Americans.
00:33:53It was a decision that would set Windscale on the path to nuclear disaster.
00:34:12Building an H-bomb would require not just more plutonium, but a new material.
00:34:17called Tritium.
00:34:23But Windscale had only been designed to make plutonium.
00:34:28And the reactor had begun behaving unpredictably.
00:34:33Unknown to the operators, a process was building up whereby the material, the main material of the reactor,
00:34:43was beginning to be different from an ordinary construction material.
00:34:50It was the graphite core that was causing alarm.
00:34:53Its temperature would suddenly increase dramatically.
00:34:56The Windscale men, concerned that the core could catch fire, switched on the fans and blew the graphite core.
00:35:03The radiation had caused the graphite to store up energy.
00:35:07At any moment, it could be released as heat and potentially start a fire.
00:35:13So the scientists invented a procedure to control the release of stored energy, called a Wigner release.
00:35:19By heating the reactor to much higher temperatures,
00:35:22the stored energy would be released gradually and the danger averted.
00:35:27We were told that the graphite grew.
00:35:30And by running it at a higher temperature for so long,
00:35:33you released the energy in the graphite and it returned back to normal.
00:35:38Which is...
00:35:40That was kind of a learning curve, all this.
00:35:44In fact, everybody was on a learning curve there, really.
00:35:48From, you know, ground floor to top level.
00:35:52Although the scientists were still on the learning curve,
00:35:55Churchill now publicly committed Britain to the hydrogen bomb.
00:36:06We have seen what the effects of an air burst atomic bomb, heat, radiation and blast,
00:36:12might do to a typical British city.
00:36:14Let us now apply these effects to the population of that city.
00:36:18These people are all killed.
00:36:21In theory, they have died three times over.
00:36:25The public began to grow anxious about what the scientists were doing.
00:36:32One of the sad things is you get this phrase, or used to in those days,
00:36:36the mad scientists.
00:36:40And the public had the idea of scientists, you know,
00:36:42my God, they're going to end the world, they're going to blow it up.
00:36:45It was never like that, really.
00:36:48It was never like that.
00:36:49But there were great pressures on the scientists to go faster than they would have liked to have done.
00:36:53We appeal as human beings to human beings.
00:36:57Remember your humanity and forget the rest.
00:37:00If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise.
00:37:05If you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.
00:37:1217th of October, 1956.
00:37:15A new reactor, Calder Hall, opened just yards from Windscale.
00:37:20This was the public face of nuclear science, which would, politicians hoped,
00:37:25answer the growing concern about the work of the nuclear scientists.
00:37:29Today, scientists, engineers and statesmen from 40 different countries...
00:37:34It was worthy of a royal unveiling.
00:37:43Calder Hall was the first nuclear power station in the world.
00:37:53The public were promised electricity that would be too cheap to need her.
00:37:59Anyhow, that's how I feel.
00:38:03Wow, I feel just like Polly Ann.
00:38:08It is with pride that I now open Calder Hall, Britain's first atomic power station.
00:38:18As the Queen sent electricity into the national grid, what the watching public didn't know
00:38:23was the new reactor hadn't been built just to make electricity.
00:38:28I believe there were times when it was taking electricity out of the grid rather than pumping it in.
00:38:34It's always been a cover, to some extent, for plutonium production.
00:38:37It took the edge off the destructive aspects of the bomb, which the government regards as good propaganda.
00:38:43We're doing this because it's going to be positively good for the people.
00:38:47We're not going to blow them all up. We're going to get some electricity out of it.
00:38:53Secretly, Calder Hall was helping Windscale produce more of the material it needed to meet the demands of the bomb
00:38:58programme.
00:39:00Britain had got to make its mark.
00:39:02And the way to make its mark was not to build a nuclear power station, but to learn each problem.
00:39:07Sad.
00:39:22As the world fated Calder Hall, Windscale was creaking under the new demands for the H-bomb.
00:39:30The more modern Calder Hall was a closed system and couldn't blow radioactivity into the atmosphere.
00:39:36But readings taken around Windscale had produced alarming results.
00:39:44Frank Leslie, a Windscale research scientist, discovered high levels of radioactivity around Seascale.
00:39:54Some of the radioactive cartridges had got stuck.
00:39:58They'd become lodged in the back of the reactor, bursting open.
00:40:03The famous filters, Cockroft's Follies, had failed to prevent the radioactive dust being blown out over Cumbria.
00:40:12But Leslie's warnings were kept quiet.
00:40:16Though it was known at the highest political level, somebody up there also said it was to be kept secret.
00:40:23And that had very unfortunate repercussions because, again, for reasons I don't know, people in the research laboratories at Windscale
00:40:35were not allowed to know about it.
00:40:39Then Britain's H-bomb project was hit by a new deadline.
00:40:44World leaders had met in Geneva to sign up to a ban on nuclear bomb testing by 1958.
00:40:50Churchill knew that Britain was running out of time.
00:40:52It had to be hurried because of the nuclear test ban treaty.
00:40:59So there was that rather narrow moment of opportunity between us actually hitting the ground, not running very fast, in
00:41:07fact barely walking, and the moment when it would come into force.
00:41:15There could be no delays at Windscale.
00:41:19The leaking cartridges were dealt with by more make-do and mend.
00:41:23People such as myself, ready in the bottom of the chimney, would go along the duct with a sort of
00:41:32shovel and push them back into the water duct.
00:41:38So that there was no chance they would lie there and oxidise.
00:41:41So that helped to reduce the problem.
00:41:46Vic Goodwin was a 20-year-old physics graduate who'd just arrived at Windscale.
00:41:51Looking rather like a super version of a plastic Macintosh is a new suit designed for workers at Britain's atomic
00:41:57plants.
00:41:58New recruits did get that kind of job.
00:42:01One wore a kind of polythene suit.
00:42:04I think one had an air line.
00:42:06Once you're inside and the zip's been fastened, all that remains is to pump in compressed air so that the
00:42:12wearer can breathe easily.
00:42:13One certainly had a rope round one's waist and a minder.
00:42:17That was a very reliable man who would make sure that you didn't spend too long or fall over into
00:42:24the canal.
00:42:27It wasn't just unpleasant work.
00:42:30It was dangerous.
00:42:34You had to strip off as soon as you got there and put factory clothing on.
00:42:38And then on the way home, you all had to shower.
00:42:43And then you could go right through and then collect your clothes at the other end and come back in
00:42:48the clothes you went in.
00:42:49But you never wore your outdoor clothes on the factory completely from head to toe.
00:42:58Even vests and underpants.
00:43:00And socks.
00:43:02And shoes.
00:43:04So he got scrubbed in the showers and he came home with bandages on.
00:43:09The radiation dosage that we're allowed to take then was much higher than it is today.
00:43:16In fact, I think if we took the same kind of dosages today, there'd be questions asked in the Houses
00:43:23of Parliament.
00:43:24But that was life then, you know.
00:43:31But with a test ban looming, the politicians couldn't afford any more delays.
00:43:38Unless we do this very quickly, unless we achieve this research breakthrough in hydrogen weapons, then there will be a
00:43:47moratorium.
00:43:48There will be an end of fissile production.
00:43:50There will be a disarmament program, which the Americans and the Russians have signed up to, and we would be
00:43:56left behind.
00:43:57If the test failed, it could spell the end of British hopes for nuclear collaboration with America.
00:44:04So we had to go straight from the design principles, to engineering it, to putting it in a bomber.
00:44:10It was vital that Windscale make the deadline and deliver Penny the new material.
00:44:16Tritium.
00:44:17It was a mountain for Windscale to climb.
00:44:20America's Atomic Energy Commission devoted huge resources to this task.
00:44:25The Atomic Energy Commission controlled more assets and capital investment and scale of factories and so forth than the six
00:44:36largest United States corporations combined.
00:44:39Used something like one-tenth of all the electricity in the United States, and so on and so on.
00:44:45It was a truly monumental effort to make these very small amounts of material with these extraordinary properties.
00:44:55And Windscale was venturing into unknown scientific territory.
00:44:59New cartridges were designed containing enriched uranium and lithium magnesium, which could catch fire at high temperatures.
00:45:07Some of the senior scientists sounded the alarm.
00:45:11They were putting things in, which didn't look very nice from a safety point of view.
00:45:19The pressure was such that, and people accepted pressures then, if a production target had to be met.
00:45:26It was rather like wartime. You met it.
00:45:28They were running much too near the precipice.
00:45:38But the warning signs couldn't have come at a worse time for the government.
00:45:43Britain's failed attempt to win back control of the Suez Canal had been a national humiliation.
00:45:49The American President Eisenhower had refused to back the British action.
00:45:55Suez is undoubtedly the lowest point in the post-war special relationship with the United States.
00:46:01The United States effectively causes the withdrawal of Britain from the Suez operation itself.
00:46:14Britain's new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was not prepared to accept that the debacle in Suez was proof that Britain
00:46:20was no longer a great power.
00:46:23Every now and again since the war, I've heard people say,
00:46:27Isn't Britain only a second or third class power now?
00:46:31Isn't she on the way out?
00:46:33What nonsense.
00:46:35This is a great country, so don't let's be ashamed to say so.
00:46:39Macmillan was convinced he could deliver what he called the Great Prize,
00:46:42because of his friendship with the American President.
00:46:46They had a very close wartime relationship in North Africa.
00:46:49They'd remained friends during the post-war period.
00:46:52They knew each other very well. They trusted each other.
00:46:55In March 1957, Macmillan met Eisenhower in Bermuda.
00:47:00He felt, I think, that his relationship with Eisenhower was so close, the trust was so great,
00:47:07that he could deliver what no other British Prime Minister had been able to deliver.
00:47:13Macmillan urged his friend to convince Congress to share their nuclear secrets.
00:47:18But he knew that Britain would have to prove it was America's nuclear equal.
00:47:25America's H-bomb had produced a blast of a megaton, ten times the size of Britain's atom bomb.
00:47:32Britain's H-bomb needed to be a megaton.
00:47:36Somewhere along the line, the magic megaton had been mentioned.
00:47:41A vast military force gathered in the Pacific for the H-bomb tests.
00:47:48The stakes for Penny had never been higher.
00:47:52The tests in May and June 1957 are politically very important indeed,
00:47:57because there is this pressure for a moratorium on nuclear testing.
00:48:00The politicians really see an opportunity during this period to influence the Americans.
00:48:08Winscale had met its target, delivering the tritium for the bomb.
00:48:15And so developing a weapons system, which appeared to have a megaton yield,
00:48:22was very important politically in this campaign of trying to reopen a collaboration with the United States.
00:48:29But would Penny's H-bomb produce the magic megaton?
00:48:46It was an embarrassing failure.
00:48:51The blast was nowhere near a megaton.
00:48:54It was barely bigger than the atom bomb of five years earlier.
00:49:00But Penny had a back-up plan.
00:49:03Another bomb.
00:49:05It was called Orange Herald.
00:49:08I thought Orange Herald was a stupid device.
00:49:11It wasn't elegant.
00:49:13It couldn't be developed any further.
00:49:16It was a dead-end design.
00:49:18And it consumed an enormous amount of very expensive fissile material.
00:49:22It's not what I would have recommended, but I wasn't in charge.
00:49:26It wasn't an H-bomb at all.
00:49:28Just a massive atom bomb they were convinced would produce a megaton.
00:49:32It needed huge quantities of plutonium and the magic ingredient, tritium.
00:49:38If you hoped to get a lot of big bangs, you needed a lot of tritium.
00:49:43It was as simple as that.
00:49:45And so the demand for tritium on places like Winscale went up considerably.
00:49:53As the Orange Herald test approached, Winscale was suddenly ordered to increase production of the new material, tritium, by 500%.
00:50:07Five years before, the scientists had increased production for the atom bomb by removing some of the aluminium cartridge.
00:50:16To try to meet the demands for the H-bomb, new aluminium cartridges had been made to house the uranium
00:50:22and lithium magnesium.
00:50:25And once again, some of the aluminium casing was then removed, to boost production by increasing the heat of the
00:50:32reaction.
00:50:34They also doubled the amount of lithium magnesium in the cartridges.
00:50:38But some expressed alarm at the danger of a nuclear accident.
00:50:44I would have said it was a reasonably green situation until the end of 55.
00:50:50I would have said it was orange in 56 and red from January 1st of 57.
00:51:03It had put Winscale under even greater strain.
00:51:10But Orange Herald was ready for the watching media.
00:51:15When the flash comes, you see it round you, although you can't look at it.
00:51:21It sort of, every rivet on the ship sort of lights up.
00:51:23Every bit of metal.
00:51:25And then after that, quite a long time after, you get the blast.
00:51:30So you see the thing very immediately.
00:51:32But you think, oh well it's all over, and suddenly, you're hit by the blast.
00:51:38And it's very impressive.
00:51:47The government didn't tell the media Orange Herald wasn't an H-bomb.
00:51:52There was confusion, and politicians fudged things by talking sometimes about an H-bomb, and sometimes about a megaton.
00:52:02Macmillan's spin worked.
00:52:04The press reported that Britain had produced a megaton H-bomb.
00:52:07They'd hoped for a megaton, and they got 800,000 kilotons.
00:52:11But it was still a colossal blast.
00:52:14There's a lot of press coverage of those tests, which suggest that Britain has developed an H-bomb.
00:52:20There is no desire to put the record straight at this particular time, for largely political reasons.
00:52:27But the Americans weren't deceived into thinking Britain was now their equal.
00:52:32The scientists were trying to deliver, and they were disappointed in the results.
00:52:38And so I think there must have been enormous anxiety in Whitehall at this time,
00:52:42that maybe, given the pressures, we wouldn't be in a position quickly to renew the collaboration,
00:52:48which was the great prize as far as Macmillan was concerned.
00:52:52Macmillan was undaunted.
00:52:54He ordered Penny to prepare another H-bomb test.
00:52:58But Winscale had already reached breaking point.
00:53:02The problem is that there was nobody to say no.
00:53:08Weeks after Orange Herald, Christopher Hinton, the man who led Winscale through so much, dramatically left.
00:53:16He was utterly upset towards the end of his day with what had happened,
00:53:21and he sort of had a semi-nervous breakdown.
00:53:25Winscale had lost its bold bad baron, just as the scientists were warning of impending disaster.
00:53:40But Macmillan's attention was elsewhere.
00:53:44A bolt from a clear blue Soviet sky.
00:53:53The Russians launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite.
00:54:00Suddenly, America was vulnerable to a Soviet attack.
00:54:05There was as much shock and fear about Sputnik as the United States felt with 9-11.
00:54:14It was such a precision strike.
00:54:17I said we should have been the first ones to have it, if there's such thing.
00:54:19It gets the American people along that foreign country, especially an enemy country, can do this.
00:54:26We fear this.
00:54:28One small satellite orbiting the Earth, and yet a profound convulsion in American society as a result.
00:54:38Macmillan seized his chance.
00:54:41On the night of October the 10th, 1957, he wrote to Eisenhower, urging him to force Congress to accept Britain
00:54:49as America's nuclear ally.
00:54:52But even as he wrote, 300 miles north, events were unfolding which could steal the great prize, just as it
00:55:00was in his grasp.
00:55:02If you're a fatalist or believe, like the Greeks, in the malign influence of the gods, you could point to
00:55:11that week and say,
00:55:12it was extraordinary, that the very evening that my grandfather wrote to Ike, my dear friend,
00:55:21saying all the plans that he had that very evening, the fire started at Windscale.
00:55:34Three days earlier, Vic Goodwin had turned up for his shift at the Windscale control room.
00:55:40The men monitoring the temperature gauges on the control panel had noticed that the reactor was heating up, more than
00:55:46it should.
00:55:48They ordered a Vigna release.
00:55:51This was the process they had come up with a few years earlier.
00:55:54Heating the graphite core had the effect of releasing any dangerous stored energy in the core.
00:56:00Once the energy was released, the graphite would eventually cool down.
00:56:05They'd done Vigna releases before, eight times.
00:56:09If the Vigna release worked, Goodwin would see the temperature rising all across the core, showing the stored energy was
00:56:16being released.
00:56:18Instead, the temperatures were falling when they should have been rising.
00:56:23The Vigna release hadn't removed the stored energy, except in one channel, 2053, which did appear to be releasing its
00:56:33stored energy.
00:56:35Unlike the rest, its temperature was rising.
00:56:44By early Tuesday morning, they faced a choice.
00:56:48Leaving the stored energy in the reactor risk to fire, heating the reactor further, a second Vigna release, would raise
00:56:55the temperature of the core even higher.
00:56:58The experienced people decided that it would be necessary to warm it up again, which had been done in the
00:57:07past.
00:57:11The second heating worked.
00:57:13The temperatures rose in all the channels, including 2053.
00:57:18The stored energy was being released.
00:57:21Now they had to make sure the temperatures didn't rise above the maximum allowed.
00:57:26As the temperatures rose, and on some thermocouples they were approaching 400 degrees centigrade, we allowed more air to flow
00:57:35through the core in order to control the temperatures.
00:57:41Windscale's air cooling system was turned on, to cool the graphite core still further.
00:57:48But by Thursday morning, it was clear the reactor was behaving unpredictably.
00:57:54I was rather puzzled because some areas of the core, which had been cooling on Wednesday, were now heating up
00:58:06again.
00:58:08Goodwin checked the radiation levels coming out of the chimney.
00:58:11They were high. High enough for him to believe a rogue uranium cartridge was the cause of the problem.
00:58:19In my opinion, we'd got a badly burst cartridge, fuel element, uranium fuel element.
00:58:35As serious as a burst cartridge was, the team had faced that situation before.
00:58:40The problem was, it wasn't a burst cartridge.
00:58:44It was a fire inside channel 2053.
00:58:52The cartridges, which had been redesigned to increase tritium output, had caught fire.
00:59:03The decision the year before to reduce the aluminium in the cartridges meant they could burn more easily.
00:59:10The extra heating for the Vigna release had caused them to burst and catch fire.
00:59:16The accident the scientists had feared had finally happened.
00:59:23But the men at Windscale didn't know that.
00:59:26They still thought it was just a burst cartridge that needed removing.
00:59:30They decided to cool down the graphite core and turned on the fans to blow it cold.
00:59:37It was a fateful decision.
00:59:40It's like putting a match to a piece of paper.
00:59:47The fire will spread along the material.
00:59:51In trying to cool the core, they had fanned the flames of the fire, causing it to spread throughout hundreds
00:59:57of channels.
00:59:59The fire was soon burning out of control.
01:00:03Radioactivity pouring out of the chimney.
01:00:08The activity in the chimney went up a lot.
01:00:12And it became obvious that something was really adrift.
01:00:17Outside, arriving for work, Eddie Davis could already see signs of the fire.
01:00:22I was walking down the road towards the pile and looked up at the chimney.
01:00:28Because we were responsible for the filters on the chimney.
01:00:32And saw this smoke coming out of the chimney.
01:00:36In the control room, all eyes were on the temperature gauges.
01:00:39I came down and went into the control room again.
01:00:42And by then, quite a lot of people had gathered in there.
01:00:45One of my colleagues came across just reading out graphite temperatures, which were going up.
01:00:52So, you know, this was clearly dreadful.
01:00:58The men knew this couldn't be a burst cartridge.
01:01:01It could only mean the reactor was on fire.
01:01:05So then I walked up onto the top of the pile, and I saw a monitor up there.
01:01:13And he said, don't go in the precipitator house, because it's too hot.
01:01:18There's too much radiation there.
01:01:21There was no emergency plan for dealing with a fire.
01:01:25The men were on their own.
01:01:28He just said there'd been an incident.
01:01:31And I said, incident?
01:01:33He said, I can't talk about it, love.
01:01:35I won't be coming home.
01:01:38I'll let you know as time goes on.
01:01:41Everybody was very subdued.
01:01:43And, of course, nobody knew what was going to happen or how to treat it.
01:01:49The longer they did nothing, the more the fire would burn,
01:01:53and the more the radioactivity would pour out onto sea scale.
01:01:58If we carried on as we were,
01:02:04there was a risk that the whole lot would burn and go up the chimney.
01:02:09No official warning was given.
01:02:12People in sea scale went about as normal.
01:02:16John was my baby.
01:02:18And he was in a pram on the front lawn in the sunshine.
01:02:22And he rang up and said, get John in.
01:02:24And I said, well, I said, just get him inside.
01:02:27Close all the windows.
01:02:29Close all the doors.
01:02:30Don't go out and lock the hens up.
01:02:33I won't be home tonight.
01:02:34And that was it.
01:02:37One man had been missing from the emergency at Windscale.
01:02:40Tom Toohey.
01:02:42I was at home when this happened.
01:02:45And I got a phone call from the general manager.
01:02:49And we had a very brief conversation.
01:02:51He said, Tom, pile one's on fire.
01:02:54I said, good God, you don't mean the call.
01:02:56He said, yes, can you come in?
01:02:58I said, yes.
01:03:01I got in my car and went straight to the pile.
01:03:10I could climb up 80 feet into the air, no lift.
01:03:14With a respirator on my face and a bottle of air on my back.
01:03:19To look down holes at the back of the reactor.
01:03:23There were four inspection holes at the back.
01:03:27And you could look down those and see what was happening.
01:03:30Well, I looked down onto a blazing inferno.
01:03:39And it went through my mind that if the temperature exceeded 600 degrees centigrade,
01:03:47the floor on which I was standing could collapse.
01:03:50I thought, what a bloody mess we're in.
01:03:53Literally, that's the thought that went through my mind.
01:04:02Word started to get out in Seascale.
01:04:09I do believe that Calder Girls' School closed because of the...
01:04:13Not immediately, because of the parents' worries about their children, of course.
01:04:18And I think some parents did come and take their children away immediately.
01:04:22The next thing was my daughter came flying in.
01:04:25Mummy, mummy, what's happening?
01:04:28I said, I don't know, pet.
01:04:29Why are you here?
01:04:31She said, well, we've all been sent home.
01:04:34She said, where's daddy?
01:04:35I said, he's at work.
01:04:36He said, is he coming home?
01:04:38I said, he won't be coming home today.
01:04:40Why?
01:04:41I said, I don't know, pet.
01:04:50Half the village vanished.
01:04:54A lot of the fathers of children and husbands of wives must have been able to get through.
01:05:02But they immediately said, get out, get out.
01:05:05Go to your mothers, go to your aunties, go, just go.
01:05:10And within, overnight, there was only half of us here.
01:05:15I wasn't going to move as long as my husband was there I was going to stop here.
01:05:22This was a blazing inferno and we knew it was pushing radioactive fission product waste up the chimney all the
01:05:32time and we didn't know what we could do to stop it in the first place.
01:05:38The decision was taken, I'm sure it was the right thing to do, to try to get shot of as
01:05:45much fuel from the core as possible.
01:05:57The men began an operation to try to remove the burning cartridges from the core.
01:06:05We were trying to push the burning fuel through into the back of the reactor.
01:06:15But the heat had melted the cartridges so they'd become stuck inside the core.
01:06:19They were forced to use scaffolding poles they'd found nearby to try and push the cartridges out.
01:06:26Radiation was so intense they could only work a few hours.
01:06:29They were running out of firefighters.
01:06:32The police from the factory had turned up looking for volunteers and they'd brought a bus and they decided the
01:06:42best way to get the volunteers was to go to the cinema and volunteer the back two rows at the
01:06:50show to go into the factory to, as it turned out, to help push the fuel rods out of the
01:07:01road.
01:07:01It was a reactor.
01:07:03Still on top of the reactor, one man ignored the radiation warnings.
01:07:09I decided I didn't want somebody tapping me on the back and say, hey, you know, had too much.
01:07:15I knew I had to be there until the damn thing was dealt with.
01:07:19With no sign of the fire dying out, Toohey began to think the unthinkable.
01:07:25It was I eventually who phoned the general manager's office and said, look, I want to use water.
01:07:35If they tried to put the fire out with water, the consequences could be catastrophic.
01:07:42You didn't have to know the details about some steam coming out of some place or other to realise the
01:07:47potentiality for disaster.
01:07:50And it's a control bomb, really, a nuclear power, a sort of control bomb.
01:07:56Mankind had not faced anything like this ever before.
01:08:01There's no way to give you any advice.
01:08:03You play it by ear.
01:08:09I was near him at the time and he said, and you see that everybody in the area is undercover
01:08:15round here.
01:08:17Which I did.
01:08:20We'd had Rishima, we'd had all these places where bombs were dropped and places.
01:08:28And I thought, we're only about two miles away.
01:08:32If it goes up, we will all go with it.
01:08:36And I said, okay.
01:08:40Toohey gave the signal for the water to be turned on.
01:08:54The pressure was too high, so I had the pressure reduced, so at least the water was then sinking down
01:09:00through the channels into the fire itself.
01:09:08There was no explosion.
01:09:17But the water wasn't putting out the fire.
01:09:22Toohey had one last hope.
01:09:25You had to keep the air on as long as you had men on the charge hoist.
01:09:30And of course the worst thing you could possibly do is to be feeding amounts of fire with air.
01:09:38So I phoned up General Manager Davey and said this water is having no effect, but I proposed to shut
01:09:46the air off.
01:09:49If turning the air off didn't work, they had no means of putting out the fire.
01:09:55You got this blazing inferno with these flames belting out and hitting the back wall.
01:10:00Air goes off and just like that.
01:10:05Absolutely incredible.
01:10:11The fire was out.
01:10:13The people of Windscale were saved.
01:10:17To see that you've licked it.
01:10:20The fire disappeared like that.
01:10:23That was a marvellous feeling.
01:10:26Probably everybody in the reactor building would have been killed.
01:10:29A lot of people on the site would probably have been killed.
01:10:33The neighbourhood would have been heavily contaminated and the land would probably not be in use to this day.
01:10:50I was so pleased to see him home because I honestly didn't think I was going to do it.
01:10:57But even thinking about it upsets me because I have never been so frightened in my whole life.
01:11:15The Atomic Energy Authority have announced that some uranium cartridges in the centre of the atomic pilot Windscale became overheated
01:11:22yesterday.
01:11:23The authority have said that staff are now reducing the temperature of the pile with water.
01:11:28At the moment, a north-east wind is blowing across the Windscale factory and is taking any radioactive dust or
01:11:35vapour out to sea.
01:11:37In fact, it had been turning the air off, not the water, which had put out the fire.
01:11:42And many believed the wind was blowing the radioactivity inland.
01:11:47Well, my impression was that it was blowing a bit eastward, which would probably be heading more towards Scofell, you
01:11:59know, at that particular time.
01:12:02The immediate concern appeared to be contaminated milk and the risk that babies could develop thyroid cancer.
01:12:09The government ordered all the milk produced from miles around to be poured away.
01:12:13Emergency at Windscale atom flood, and the milk from 200 square miles of farmland is condemned as radioactive.
01:12:20But for these filter tops, once nicknamed Cockroft's Folly because Sir John Cockroft insisted on them,
01:12:26farms much farther away would have faced not emergency but disaster.
01:12:30The farmers carry on as usual.
01:12:32For cows have to be milked, whatever happens to the milk afterwards.
01:12:36You can't explain radioactivity to a cow.
01:12:39Yes, well, I mean, they had to demonstrate how concerned they were.
01:12:44Wonderful public relations.
01:12:47Oh, they are concerned, they're wonderful.
01:12:49Now the worst seems to be over.
01:12:51Though Mr. Stan Ritson, who helped to bring Windscale's overheated reactor under control,
01:12:56was radioactive for four days and couldn't even kiss his wife till the Geiger counters gave permission.
01:13:05The press hailed the Windscale man as heroes.
01:13:10But within days, the men who had fought the fire would be fighting to clear their names,
01:13:15as Windscale became part of a political cover-up.
01:13:20For Macmillan, the fire at Windscale was a major embarrassment.
01:13:24He was only days away from a meeting where President Eisenhower would announce that Britain was fit to be America's
01:13:30nuclear ally.
01:13:32Macmillan ordered a closed inquiry under Sir William Penny, the man who had led Britain's bomb project.
01:13:40Six days after putting out the fire, the Windscale men were called in, one by one, to account for their
01:13:47actions.
01:13:47The evidence they gave was deemed so sensitive that only now, for the first time, can the tapes be heard.
01:13:55In a room just yards from where the fire had raged, Sir William Penny opened proceedings.
01:14:01To investigate into the cause of the accident at Windscale and the measures taken to deal with it and its
01:14:10consequences.
01:14:12Now, before we start, would you be good enough to say what your job is?
01:14:17The impression that I've retained is going into a room and seeing this very large man.
01:14:25Penny was a big man, but extremely pleasant, courteous and thoughtful and very polite indeed.
01:14:34If you wish for smoke, please do.
01:14:36For nine days, they gave their evidence.
01:14:38They were truly exhausted, and they were all worried to death, both for themselves and for the plant.
01:14:49It had been a dreadful experience for them, and you can hear it in the voices of many of them.
01:14:55At first, they said, if it went over 1,200, God help us.
01:14:59When it kept on creeping up, it was quite frightening just not to know what might happen.
01:15:05I was called in, and I remember they wrote up on the blackboard a list of things that they wanted
01:15:15to know.
01:15:16Things that had to be investigated pronto, quick.
01:15:20As the evidence mounted, the role of the new cartridges introduced for the H-bomb became central.
01:15:27Is the question, sir, anything Mr Rotherham can tell us about isotope cartridges?
01:15:32Yes, I'm telling you they're dangerous.
01:15:36Various different things are being cooked up in the reactor, not just uranium, you see.
01:15:42Because they were also making material for tritium for the thermonuclear bomb, the hydrogen bomb as well, in there.
01:15:49But the tritium certainly was a critical one.
01:15:51Some of the men told Penny that they believed the new lithium magnesium cartridges had started the fire.
01:15:58The analysis does, in fact, give a very clear indication of what sequence of events was.
01:16:03What is this sequence?
01:16:04You can get the AM cartridge which will, if it's perforated, it will burn.
01:16:09If it burns, the temperature in the channel will rise, 7 or 800 degrees centigrade.
01:16:14And again, I would have thought that the graphite and the fire might very well burn under those conditions.
01:16:19Yes.
01:16:20Oh, thank you very much.
01:16:22I consider both the questions that we want to ask you.
01:16:33Penny began to focus on another possible cause.
01:16:37He asked if the decision to have a second nuclear heating or Wigner release had been a mistake.
01:16:42You did say that you couldn't quite remember whether it was you or not that put on the second nuclear
01:16:49heating.
01:16:50Do you reckon that was the right decision anyhow?
01:16:53Yes.
01:16:54We've done this reheating several times before with no serious effect.
01:17:03The men were adamant that they hadn't caused the fire.
01:17:07They'd followed the tried and tested procedure.
01:17:15As Penny was conducting his inquiry, Macmillan travelled to Washington to claim his great prize.
01:17:25The one result of the Washington talks is that Britain and America will cooperate more closely in nuclear science.
01:17:31It was a historic moment which would redefine the relationship between their two nations.
01:17:36Macmillan and Eisenhower declared that Britain and America would now be nuclear partners.
01:17:44My grandfather was absolutely over the moon.
01:17:47When they went back to the embassy, they did crack open a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
01:17:53But when Macmillan returned to Britain, Penny's report was on his desk.
01:17:58It showed that the political demand for a megaton bomb had fuelled the fire at Windscale.
01:18:04You can imagine the bottom dropping out of Macmillan's stomach, saying, is this another disaster that's going to rob us
01:18:13of this great prize, as he called it, of American cooperation?
01:18:19The Windscale.
01:18:19The Windscale fire threatened to wreck everything he and his predecessors had been striving for.
01:18:24That night, he wrote,
01:18:27How are we to deal with Sir William Penny's report?
01:18:29To publish it to the world, especially the Americans,
01:18:33might put in jeopardy our chance of getting Congress to agree to the President's proposal.
01:18:39Macmillan ordered that all copies of the Penny report be recalled.
01:18:44They didn't want to look like a bunch of amateurs.
01:18:48And the Windscale fire certainly threatened to do that.
01:18:52This was the first really big nuclear accident.
01:18:59But Windscale wouldn't just disappear.
01:19:03Frank Leslie, who two years before had discovered radiation leaks, this time went to the press.
01:19:10He told them the fire had caused another leak.
01:19:14He was by no means unrepresentative.
01:19:17There were plenty of people who also felt like him.
01:19:20That really, the industry needed to really pull its socks up and get a lot more concerned about safety issues,
01:19:31particularly radiation safety issues, than it had up to that time been.
01:19:36Macmillan dismissed Leslie as an opinionated ass.
01:19:40More difficult to ignore were the voices emerging from America.
01:19:44One senator, Clinton Anderson, accused Britain of not telling the truth about Windscale.
01:19:50At stake, Macmillan believed, was the future of Britain's relationship with America.
01:19:55The full story of Windscale could not be revealed.
01:20:00It had to be covered up. The report could not be published.
01:20:03When it then came to be explained to the country,
01:20:05my grandfather realised how important it was going to be to reassure people.
01:20:10And so he covered it up, plain and simple.
01:20:14Macmillan turned once more to William Penny's report into the fire.
01:20:18Although Penny accepted that the cartridges had spread the fire,
01:20:22he believed that the Windscale team themselves had been the primary cause of the accident,
01:20:27because they had started the second nuclear heating too soon and too rapidly.
01:20:33This had been the moment, on October the 8th, two days before the fire was discovered,
01:20:38when the Windscale team reheated the reactor, the second Wigner release.
01:20:45I don't believe that the second nuclear heating did contribute to the fire in any way, shape or form,
01:20:53except that it evidently got the release going again,
01:20:57and it was during the second phase, if you like, of the release that the fire started.
01:21:02But I don't believe that the second nuclear heating initiated the fire in any way.
01:21:11But Penny's conclusion gave Macmillan the opportunity he was looking for.
01:21:16A white paper was published.
01:21:17It left out much of the detail of Penny's report, but inserted a phrase which Penny had not used.
01:21:24The fire at Windscale had been caused by an error of judgement by the Windscale men.
01:21:31So my grandfather, as a fine editor of books, edited the report in such a way that he was then
01:21:38able to lay something on the table,
01:21:39as if it was a relatively minor thing.
01:21:43Most politicians, then, regarded the Windscale fire rather as they might have regarded a minor accident in a colliery.
01:21:51So, happily, the chaps got out, you know, that sort of thing.
01:22:03He rarely suggested the operators were a bit fallible and their judgement wasn't terribly good,
01:22:10and the press latched onto it, and so that was a very bad week for the operators there.
01:22:20The reaction then was very, very bitter, because they felt that the blame which was not theirs had been, by
01:22:29implication, loaded onto them.
01:22:31They'd been made to look as though they didn't know what they were doing and they'd not, you know, and
01:22:35it was all their fault.
01:22:46On the day the white paper was published, Britain detonated a genuine megaton hydrogen bomb.
01:22:54It was a personal triumph for Penny.
01:22:57He wrote to his team in the Pacific.
01:22:59Glad you got it off on Friday.
01:23:01This took some of the sting out of Windscale.
01:23:03I expect to get to Washington on Sunday.
01:23:09Penny flew to Washington to take part in the first exchange of nuclear secrets with America since the war.
01:23:19They had a delicate and frosty first encounter in which nobody quite knew how much they were supposed to reveal.
01:23:27And that after this the British thought, well, is this worth it? You know, are they ever going to tell
01:23:31us anything?
01:23:32And they decided, right, we'll just put our cards on the table, we'll show them what we've done.
01:23:37And they went back into the room and revealed a full design.
01:23:43And the Americans then left the room and had a ten minute powwow.
01:23:47And they came back in and said, well, gentlemen, it's clear that the laws of physics apply in Britain in
01:23:55the same way that they do in the United States.
01:23:57Yes, I think the British were able to make a contribution and the Americans benefit to a certain extent.
01:24:03But, of course, the benefit to Great Britain is remarkable.
01:24:08Here we have access, not to all American nuclear secrets, but to a very substantial range of nuclear technology, nuclear
01:24:17secrets.
01:24:19And for one power to share with another state those kinds of secrets, which are at the forefront of its
01:24:29military security, I think is quite remarkable.
01:24:32Macmillan had secured Britain's place at the top table, but for the men who'd averted a tragedy at Winscale, it
01:24:39came at a great cost.
01:24:41Sir William, what caused the accident? Was it a failure of men or of gear?
01:24:45It was both. There was an error of judgment during a standard operation on the pile called a Wigner release.
01:24:55But there were inadequacies of instrumentation which prevented the operators from being able to form a really reliable judgment.
01:25:08Error of judgment. The men who'd prevented a tragedy were now officially to blame for the fire.
01:25:17The fact that they seemed to be blaming people for what they did and the wrong people of that, I
01:25:26think is, er, was, er, very bad.
01:25:31But, er, we were resentful at the time.
01:25:37And I certainly think it was absolutely disgraceful to everyone.
01:25:41And then cast the blame at junior people who had no means of defending themselves.
01:25:54It's like putting a cake in an oven.
01:25:58If you haven't made the cake, you know, if it doesn't come out right, it's not your fault.
01:26:05That's how I've thought about it.
01:26:08But the people of Windscale were perhaps the first to realise that a new Britain was emerging.
01:26:14The trust between leaders, scientists and men which had been forged in wartime had begun to disappear.
01:26:22Most of the people on this site had been in the services, as had I.
01:26:27They were all accustomed to doing their best.
01:26:30And they rather expected to pat on the back now and then.
01:26:35And I think it came as a terrible shock when they were held up in the press as being, you
01:26:42know, inadequate.
01:26:43And that attitude lives on even now, 50 years later.
01:26:48Months later, the Americans visited Windscale.
01:26:51They met senior managers there, who described what had happened the previous October.
01:26:57They all held forth as though they fought the fire.
01:27:02And I was sitting there, not a single question was put to me, the man who dealt with the situation.
01:27:11How did you feel about that?
01:27:15Well, how polite do you want me to be? I thought, what a shower of bastards!
01:27:25Newsnight's next on BBC Two. Then, as part of the Why Democracy season, a gripping investigation into torture methods used
01:27:32in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.
01:27:35Taxi to the dark side at 11.20.
01:27:39I feel, while I feel, just like a Pollyanna.
01:27:46I should worry, not for nothing...
01:27:50...
01:27:50...