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A General Instruction from the Government

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Britain and the H-Bomb

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Abstract

The Cabinet in authorising the Lord President ‘to proceed with his plans for the production of thermonuclear bombs in this country’1 did not specify what it understood by thermonuclear. Writing to Duncan Sandys, the Minster of Supply, on 29 July the Lord President said that the Atomic Energy Authority needed a ‘general instruction’, not a restrictive commitment to produce a thermonuclear explosion in a particular way, using particular materials, by any specified date. In some official papers at this time one finds the words ‘hydrogen bomb’ crossed out and replaced by ‘higher powered bombs’, or ‘higher powered bombs employing thermonuclear techniques.’

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Notes and References

  1. On 27 July 1954. See Chapter 4.

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  2. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer — Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board Washington DC 12 Apr. 1954, through 6, May 1954 was published by the USAEC in 1954. Aldermaston scientists had a pre-publication transcript which had been sanitised by deletion of classified words and passages. They studied the scientific evidence with minute attention, sometimes deducing clues from the length of the deleted words.

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  3. See Chapter 6.

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  4. Statement on Defence, HMSO, Cmd 9391, 1955.

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  5. See Chapter 3.

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  6. HC Deb., vol. 537, cols 1894–1905, 1 Mar. 1955.

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  7. HC Deb., vol. 537, col. 2175, 2 Mar. 1955.

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  8. See A. J. R. Groom, British Thinking about Nuclear Weapons, pp. 146–54.

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  9. From Lord Moran’s diaries, quoted inj. Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence, pp. 178–9.

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  10. Ibid.

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  11. For the Mosaic and Buffalo trials see L. Arnold, A Very Special Relationship, chs 7 and 8.

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  12. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. XI, no. 5, May 1955. See L. Arnold, op. cit., p. 79.

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  13. See Chapter 6.

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Authors
  1. Lorna Arnold
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  2. Katherine Pyne
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© 2001 The Ministry of Defence

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Arnold, L., Pyne, K. (2001). A General Instruction from the Government. In: Britain and the H-Bomb. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599772_5

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