The Sinews of Peace

What, then, was his message? The formal title of the speech is instructive. Churchill mapped out a route to peace, not war, and emphasized in this regard the role of the ‘special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States’. Like many people, he hoped that the recently founded United Nations (UN) would ensure peace, in which case this ‘special relationship’ would complement the UN’s work, but if the UN proved to be as ineffectual as its predecessor, the League of Nations, the US–UK– Commonwealth partnership would come into its own. As for the USSR, while avowing admiration for the Soviet peoples and sympathy for their security needs, Churchill warned that the Kremlin’s expansionist policies constituted a grave threat to peace. To counter this danger, the free world needed to unite under US leadership. But Churchill was careful to stress that armed conflict was not inevitable: he believed that the USSR wanted ‘the fruits of war’, not war itself, which meant that negotiations had a role to play. Indeed, he anticipated an international settlement that would safeguard Western interests, provide the USSR with adequate security and restore independence to the countries behind the iron curtain. The military strength of the US–UK alliance, which rested on the American atomic monopoly, would either help to bring about such a settlement or else offer ‘an overwhelming assurance of security’ if relations with the Soviet Union continued to deteriorate.

In his speech, Churchill trailed a number of themes that would inform his approach to the Cold War over the ensuing decade: the seriousness of the Soviet threat and the need to counter it; the vital necessity of close Anglo-American cooperation; the importance of Western military strength, especially in atomic weapons; and yet, at the same time, the hope for some kind of negotiated settlement. Churchill’s anti-communism ran deep, but he was pragmatic enough to recognize the value of compromise with the USSR whenever it stood to benefit Britain’s strategic interests; in 1941, for example, when Germany invaded the USSR, he had immediately proposed an Anglo-Soviet alliance against the common Nazi enemy. A similar blend of resistance and accommodation, along with an abiding faith in the concept of a balance of power in international relations, would characterize his approach to the USSR in the Cold War.

The Onset of the Cold War

The Fulton speech drew predictable criticism from the Soviet authorities (which dubbed Churchill a ‘firebrand of war’), but the reaction in the United States, the main target of his oratory, was decidedly mixed: while there was support for Churchill’s criticism of Soviet behaviour, the idea of an entangling alliance with the UK and Commonwealth against an erstwhile ally, the USSR, was not one that many Americans were ready to entertain. [ 5 ] However, over the next twelve months, as Soviet disregard for freedom in Europe became more pronounced, the Truman administration continued the public education process begun by Churchill until, in March 1947, the president was confident enough to declare to Congress that henceforward the policy of the United States was ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’. [ 6 ] Arguably it was this speech, ‘The Truman Doctrine’, not the one at Fulton a year earlier, that marked the start of the Cold War. At any rate, from this point onwards US opinion increasingly accepted (as Churchill hoped it would) that primary responsibility for coordinating the free world’s resistance to Soviet communism rested on American shoulders.

Soon after, in June 1947, the Truman administration unveiled the Marshall Plan, its scheme to revive the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe through a massive injection of US dollars. The Soviet Union interpreted the plan as a US attempt to organize an anti-communist bloc and responded by promulgating the ‘two camps’ theory of a world divided into irreconcilable spheres, the communist and capitalist. Then, in June 1948, reacting to American, British and French plans to convert their occupation zones in Germany into a single West German state, Stalin launched the Berlin blockade with the aim of eliminating the Western presence in the city (Berlin itself being deep inside Soviet-controlled East Germany). In April 1949, the United States and Britain, along with ten other states, signed the pact from which emerged the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The following month, when the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) came into being, Stalin lifted the blockade, but there was no escaping the fact that the Cold War was now fully joined. But it began in 1947, not in 1946. The Fulton speech was not a declaration of Cold War, either on Churchill’s part or that of the West generally, but a prophesy of what might – and did – come to pass.

The Cold War Deepens, 1947–9

Between the onset of the Cold War and his retirement from politics in 1955, Churchill would transform himself from the scourge of Soviet communism into a high-profile advocate of détente. To understand this process of evolution, his Cold War career needs to be considered as a series of interlocking phases. During the first of these – which ran from 1946 to 1949 – he continued to warn publicly of the dangers posed by the Soviet Union and to urge military preparedness to counter the Red Army threat in Europe. In 1947 he warmly welcomed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan as confirmation that the United States had assumed the leadership role he had called for at Fulton; in September, he wrote to Truman to tell him ‘how much I admire the policy into which you have guided your great country; and to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you are doing to save the world from famine and war’. [ 7 ]

In contrast, Churchill was often critical of the British Labour government for failing (as he saw it) to maintain a sufficiently strong UK defence capability and for relying too much on the protection of the US atomic monopoly instead of forging ahead with developing a UK atomic bomb. [ 8 ] He also promoted the idea of a United States of Europe as a ‘potent factor for world peace’ and in a celebrated speech at Zurich in September 1946 he called on France and Germany to bury past enmities and work together to build a united (in practice, Western) Europe. [ 9 ] This interest in continental unity dovetailed with his thinking on Germany: anxious to avoid the mistakes of the post-First World War settlement, when the apportioning of ‘war guilt’ fuelled German resentment and assisted in the rise of Hitler, he advocated a policy of reconciliation and rehabilitation rather than revenge. [ 10 ]

Interestingly, in many of his public statements Churchill balanced warnings about the Soviet threat with calls for a peaceful resolution of East–West differences, but in private he ventilated more confrontational views. The time had come, he avowed in November 1947, to tell Stalin to free Eastern Europe or ‘we will attack Moscow and your other cities and destroy them with atomic bombs’. [ 11 ] In practice, the negotiations he publicly championed were not negotiations in the strictest sense of the word; rather, they were to be the occasion for coercing the Soviets into accepting Western terms under threat of atomic destruction, for the ‘only vocabulary they understand is the vocabulary of force’. [ 12 ] The Truman administration, however, preferred the less aggressive strategy of ‘long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment’ of Soviet communism. [ 13 ] If Churchill found this caution frustrating, he took consolation in the US atomic monopoly. ‘[W]e and the Americans will be much stronger this time next year’, especially in atomic weaponry, he wrote to Anthony Eden in September 1948, and he was ‘not therefore inclined to demand an immediate showdown, although it will certainly have to be made next year’. Ending his letter, he reminded Eden that ‘None of this is fit for public use.’ [ 14 ] Less than a year later, in August 1949, the USSR tested its first atomic bomb, far sooner than many in the West, including Churchill, expected.

The Soviet A-Bomb, the ‘Fall’ of China, and the Korean War, 1949–50

The Soviet A-bomb test was quickly followed by the communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As the Cold War balance of power appeared to shift in favour of the communist bloc, Churchill’s outlook shifted with it. [ 15 ]

The time when the West could dictate terms to the USSR was fast disappearing. Although the American atomic arsenal would be superior to that of the Soviets for some time to come, Churchill became increasingly nervous about the UK’s vulnerability in the event of a Soviet (atomic) air offensive and his interest in a showdown consequently lessened. In February 1950, in the midst of a British General Election campaign, he delivered a speech in Edinburgh in which he called for a ‘talk with Soviet Russia upon the highest level ... a parley at the summit’. [ 16 ] This was the first time that the word ‘summit’ had been used to describe a meeting between the leaders of the great powers, and though the Labour government accused Churchill of promoting détente as an electoral stunt, the gap between his public rhetoric and private outlook had narrowed in the six months following the Soviet A-bomb test and he now spoke with evident sincerity. [ 17 ]

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and the accompanying danger that this local Asian conflict could escalate into global war, confirmed Churchill in his view that a top-level summit was urgently necessary. At the same time, he fully supported American plans, prompted by the fighting in Korea, to develop NATO into a fully fledged defence organization. Controversially, the Truman administration also wanted a West German contribution to the common defence, but whereas the French and the smaller European states were much alarmed at the prospect of German rearmament, Churchill felt that this was a small price to pay for the US pledge to defend Western Europe that went with it. [ 18 ]

Until the NATO build-up was complete Churchill accepted that the ‘deterrent effect of the atomic bomb’ was ‘almost our sole defence’, while the threat of its use was ‘the only lever by which we can hope to obtain reasonable consideration in an attempt to make a peaceful settlement with Soviet Russia’. [ 19 ] This kind of frank talk was used against him in the October 1951 British General Election campaign when the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror newspaper depicted him as a warmonger. Churchill vigorously denied the charge, insisting that one of the main reasons he remained in public life was the belief that he could play a constructive role in helping prevent a third world war: rearmament and the US atomic arsenal were needed to ‘parley’, not to fight, and he described détente as ‘the last prize I seek to win’. [ 20 ]

Churchill Back in Power

In the event, the Daily Mirror’s jibes did not prevent Churchill’s return as prime minister, albeit with a slim parliamentary majority. For the next three-and-a-half years – the most important phase of his Cold War career insofar as he could directly influence events – he waged a dogged campaign to bring about ‘an abatement of what is called “the cold war”’, defying age and infirmity in the process. [ 21 ] He was sustained in his mission by faith in the value of personal diplomacy (the interaction of the top leaders on both sides, and their ability to rewrite the Cold War script) and by a deep-seated fear of nuclear war. [ 22 ]

Churchill had been delighted to discover on becoming prime minister again that the previous Labour government had done far more than he realized in secretly developing a British atomic bomb, and in October 1952, just a year into his peacetime administration, the UK became the world’s third atomic power. But to Churchill, the bomb had become less a weapon of war than a deterrent and, by extension, a means of strengthening the West’s negotiating position with the USSR. He was also interested in harnessing atomic energy for peaceful purposes and hoped that an ‘easement’ in the East–West contest would allow the major powers to ‘divert our riches and our scientific knowledge to ends more fruitful than the production of catastrophic weapons’. [ 23 ] Nearly seventy-seven years old when he won the 1951 General Election, the knowledge that he probably had limited time in which to achieve détente did not mean that he favoured peace at any price: on the contrary, he remained a believer in summitry from strength. However, he had been shaken by the Soviet A-bomb test and was readier to make concessions to Moscow than he had been in the late 1940s. [ 24 ]

The difficulty for Churchill was that while he believed that the West was already strong enough to negotiate safely, the Americans not only disagreed but made the completion of NATO’s military expansion, the Federal Republic of Germany’s integration into the Western Cold War alliance system, and West German rearmament within the framework of a European Defence Community (EDC), essential preconditions to any formal approach to Moscow. Churchill also faced opposition closer to home from his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and a number of other cabinet ministers, who suspected that Moscow’s public remarks on the need for ‘peaceful coexistence’ were intended to derail the NATO build-up. In France and other West European countries, the view that an East–West settlement would eliminate the need for the EDC (hence rearmed Germans) gained ground. For the Truman administration, and for Eden, détente was a question of timing: negotiations with the USSR should follow, not precede, the completion of NATO’s defence plans as well as an end to the Korean War. [ 25 ]

Churchill was disappointed by American hesitancy, but the election of General Dwight D. Eisenhower as US president in November 1952 offered the chance for a fresh start. However, the Republican Eisenhower soon proved to be as unenthusiastic about a leaders’ summit as the Democrat Truman. Worse still, the strident anti-communism of the Republican Party, including some of the Eisenhower’s top advisors, left Churchill worrying about a US-inspired showdown with the USSR. [ 26 ] His hope of the late 1940s had now become his fear. Indeed, he came to see détente as a means of curbing the United States’ more bellicose tendencies.

The Death of Stalin, 1953

It was a change at the top in Moscow rather than Washington that most boosted Churchill’s hopes for détente: on 5 March 1953 the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died and was succeeded by a collective leadership whose early statements on international matters spoke of the potential for the peaceful reconciliation of East–West differences. [ 27 ] Churchill wrote to Eisenhower asking him to consider a top-level conference to explore ‘the apparent change for the better in the Soviet mood’, but his proposal was rejected. [ 28 ] With or without Stalin, American policy-makers felt that the USSR was looking to seduce Western opinion into believing that détente was imminent and, by so doing, to erode popular support for the EDC and German rearmament. [ 29 ] At a minimum, Eisenhower wanted ‘concrete Soviet actions’, not just words, as proof of Moscow’s sincerity. [ 30 ]

American guardedness was shared by the British Foreign Office, but when Eden was taken ill in the spring of 1953, Churchill took advantage of his absence to make one of his most important Cold War speeches. In the House of Commons on 11 May he called for ‘a conference on the highest level’ with the new men in the Kremlin. It ‘might well be that no hard-faced agreements would be reached’ but ‘there might be a general feeling among those gathered together that they might do something better than tear the human race, including themselves, into bits’. [ 31 ] Churchill had acted independently of the Americans and the UK’s other allies – as well as his own cabinet – and even though his summit proposal was warmly received by public opinion, his unilateral manoeuvre dismayed Western governmental decision-makers. In Washington, the Eisenhower administration worried that the illusion of détente he had conjured into being would be used by opponents of the EDC, especially in France, to scupper the scheme. Eden agreed. It ‘must be long in history,’ he reflected, ‘since one speech did so much damage to its own side’. [ 32 ]

Knowing that popular opinion was on his side, and with ‘no more intention than I had at Fulton or in 1945 of being fooled by the Russians’, Churchill considered visiting Moscow on his own as a precursor to a wider summit. [ 33 ] Neither the Americans nor his own government were keen: a high-level bilateral UK-Soviet meeting could raise false hopes amongst NATO public opinion of a general East–West agreement, whereas a lower-level encounter between foreign ministers, limited to a small number of precise agenda items, would be good public relations (proving that the Western powers were interested in negotiations) and pose little risk to the EDC. [ 34 ] Churchill, though, cared little for the EDC (which he derided as a ‘bucket of wood pulp’), complained that a foreign ministers meeting would get bogged down in dreary diplomatic detail, and continued to believe that only a leaders’ summit could change the course of Cold War history. [ 35 ]

Illness and Recovery

In June 1953, Churchill suffered a severe stroke, but went on to confound his doctors with his recuperative powers and by October he was back at his desk in No. 10. The quest for détente, which played a psychologically sustaining role in his recovery, was now more than ever a personal mission and became, in part, the justification (or excuse) for his refusal to honour several promises to Eden, his anointed successor, to handover the premiership and retire gracefully. [ 36 ] The Americans, however, remained a major obstacle. At a meeting in Bermuda in December 1953, Eisenhower scornfully dismissed Churchill’s suggestion that Soviet policy had changed for the better since Stalin’s death. [ 37 ] Adding to Churchill’s discomfort was Eisenhower’s revelation that if the communists broke the Korean armistice, signed the previous July, the United States would react with widespread atomic bombing of China. [ 38 ] The Americans doubted whether the USSR would honour its 1950 treaty pledge to support the Chinese, but Churchill was not so sure. If global war broke out, the UK, which in 1948 provided bases in East Anglia for US atomic-capable aircraft, would be a primary target (‘and perhaps the bull’s eye’) [ 39 ] of a Soviet attack, and he was greatly upset at the thought of the consequent loss of life. Even the few people who managed to survive ‘under mounds of flaming and contaminated rubble’ would, he feared, have ‘nothing to do but to take a pill to end it all’. [ 40 ]

Yet even the Americans accepted that it had become necessary to make a gesture to placate détente-hungry West European opinion and they duly agreed to take part with the UK, France and the USSR in a foreign ministers meeting in Berlin at the start of 1954. When deadlock ensued on the conference’s principal agenda items involving Germany and Austria, Churchill was confirmed in his view that only the heads of government, meeting on the Second World War model of Yalta or Potsdam, could make real progress. [ 41 ]

The Spectre of the H-Bomb

Churchill’s search for a summit acquired added urgency in February 1954 when the United States announced that it was in possession of a workable thermo-nuclear weapon – a hydrogen bomb. Press reports of the hideously destructive power of this ‘super bomb’ fuelled alarm in the UK and elsewhere that nuclear developments were getting out of hand. [ 42 ] Churchill was also unsettled at this time by an emotive letter he received from Eisenhower expressing his fear of communist world domination, denouncing the ‘savage individuals in the Kremlin’, and seeking ‘renewed faith and strength from ... God’ in order to ‘sharpen up his sword for the struggle that cannot possibly be escaped’. Might that sword have a thermo- nuclear tip? [ 43 ] The USSR had acquired its own H-bomb in 1953, and this development, when added to Eisenhower’s apocalyptic vision, left Churchill ‘more worried about the hydrogen bomb than by all the rest of my troubles put together’. [ 44 ] In his reply to the president he pointedly remarked on Britain’s ‘smallness and density of population’ and how, in consequence, ‘several million people would certainly be obliterated by four or five of the latest H-bombs’ if war came. [ 45 ] Arguably, the need for a summit had never been more pressing. Yet, despite his dread of nuclear holocaust, in 1954 Churchill still gave the go- ahead for the production of a British hydrogen bomb, a decision that might appear at odds with his push for peace. In fact, it fitted well with his plans. At a military-strategic level, he recognized that ‘the only sane policy in the next few years is Defence through Deterrents’, and this is where the H-bomb played a part. For if Britain’s enhanced military power served to buttress the West’s overall deterrent capacity, and thus helped maintain general peace, the prospect of negotiations with the USSR, still Churchill’s overarching objective, would be kept alive. [ 46 ]

To this end, in June 1954, Churchill revived his old idea of a solo mission to Moscow and travelled to Washington in search of American approval. Eisenhower encouraged him only to the extent that he did not veto outright a unilateral UK initiative, but Churchill seems to have taken this amber light as a green one. [ 47 ] Returning home aboard the Queen Elizabeth, he cabled the Kremlin asking for a meeting ‘with no agenda and no object but to find a reasonable way of living side by side in growing confidence, easement and prosperity’. [ 48 ] Eden, who had accompanied him to North America, might have blocked the cable but was apparently bought off by a promise from Churchill that he would retire after a summit meeting, but the Foreign Secretary nonetheless urged his chief to seek advance cabinet clearance. [ 49 ] Churchill ignored the advice and consequently found himself embroiled in a major political row on his return to London, with many of his ministerial colleagues outraged at his disregard for the principles of cabinet government and unimpressed by his argument that his message to Moscow was both informal and private. [ 50 ] Churchill was also upset by Eisenhower’s irritation: the president’s light had indeed been amber and he continued to express his ‘utter lack of confidence in the reliability and integrity of the men in the Kremlin’. [ 51 ] A cabinet split – even the collapse of the government – was only averted when the Soviets responded to Churchill’s cable by proposing a multilateral foreign ministers’ conference on European security issues rather than the bilateral and agenda-less Anglo-Soviet leaders’ summit he had wanted. The Kremlin’s veto allowed both sides in the cabinet dispute to disengage. [ 52 ]

By now, Churchill was almost a ‘one-issue premier’. [ 53 ] Harold Macmillan, a close observer, worried about his ‘Russian monomania’ and felt that, since his stroke, his ‘judgement is distorted … He thinks about one thing all the time – the Russia visit and his chance of saving the world – till it has become an obsession … He has forgotten what barbarians the Russians are.’ [ 54 ] Churchill’s hopes suffered a further set-back on 31 August 1954 when the French parliament threw out the treaty that would have given life to the EDC and sovereignty to West Germany; with the future of the US security commitment to Western Europe suddenly in doubt – the Americans had repeatedly stated that their continued support for NATO hinged on the success of the EDC – and the entire Atlantic Alliance in disarray, there was no chance whatsoever of Churchill meeting with the Soviets in the near future. At this point, Eden emerged as the crisis manager-in-chief. Thanks to the Foreign Secretary’s diplomatic skill and direction, at the start of October 1954 an inter-governmental organization, the Western European Union (WEU), was substituted for the supranational EDC which allowed for German rearmament under safeguards and eliminated the danger of US desertion of Europe. In May 1955, the WEU ratification process was completed and the Federal Republic joined NATO. [ 55 ]

Reflections

Two months later, in July 1955, the first East–West heads of government summit since Potsdam took place in Geneva. Churchill, though, was not there: physical infirmity and political pressure had combined to force his resignation in April, and it was Eden who led the UK team. ‘How much more attractive a top-level meeting seems when one has reached the top,’ he quipped, a reference to Eden’s previous opposition to his summitry. [ 56 ] But Churchill, too, might have had his summit if the EDC had been approved during his time in office, and it was his misfortune that its successor, the WEU, was only launched the month after he retired. [ 57 ] The ‘Western nations could not, with self-respect, have earlier consented to a ... Summit meeting,’ Eisenhower wrote to him on the eve of Geneva, but ‘your long quest for peace daily inspires much that we do’. [ 58 ] ‘I have never indulged in extravagant hopes of a vast, dramatic transformation of human affairs,’ Churchill replied, ‘but my belief is that, so long as we do not relax our unity or our vigilance, the Soviets ... will be increasingly convinced that it is in their interests to live peaceably with us’. [ 59 ]

Then again, at over eighty years-of-age, in poor health, lacking the energy and concentration to master complex briefs, easily led to abandon logic and embrace emotion, and displaying a near mystical faith in the notion that great deeds are accomplished only by great men, Churchill might have been a liability in any direct encounter with hard-nosed and well-drilled Soviet negotiators. [ 60 ] Eisenhower sometimes felt that ‘Winston is trying to relive the days of World War II’ when:

he had the enjoyable feeling that he and our president were sitting on some rather Olympian platform with respect to the rest of the world and directing world affairs from that point of vantage ... Even if this picture were an accurate one of those days, it would have no application to the present. [ 61 ]

By mid-1954, Harold Macmillan considered the Prime Minister ‘physically and mentally incapable of serious negotiation’ and ‘with the Russians up against him, he would ... be absolutely lost’. [ 62 ] Moreover, recent research on the USSR side of the story suggests that Soviet decision-makers, remembering Churchill’s virulently anti-communist reaction to the Bolshevik revolution, never really trusted him: ‘He was an imperialist to the core,’ Molotov avowed. Nor did the USSR rate the UK highly as a factor in international politics, and when it came to détente it much preferred to do business with the United States. [ 63 ]

In the event the Geneva summit failed to advance the cause of détente in any meaningful way and the Cold War continued until, in the 1960s, the two sides reached the point of Mutually Assured Destruction. This, of course, was precisely the kind of incendiary development that Churchill had hoped to prevent; the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, the prize he really wanted was the one for peace. It was not to be. Still, it is important to set his quest for détente alongside his ‘iron curtain’ speech and his interest, in the late 1940s, in using atomic diplomacy to dictate terms to the USSR, in order to appraise his Cold War record in the round. Thanks to Fulton, the popular perception of Churchill as the original Cold Warrior persists, but as with many other aspects of his long career in public service, he went on to reinvent himself. Deeply disturbed by the increasing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, he reshaped his Cold War outlook, and though he was dogged by accusations from political opponents of warmongering, the fact is that from 1950 onwards he was much more of a peace-monger. [ 64 ] It is true that even in the final phase of his career his hatred of communism was wont to bubble to the surface. It is equally true that his hankering after a meeting with the Soviets was employed, sometimes brazenly, as an excuse for clinging to power. Yet there is still no reason to doubt the essential sincerity of what he told the Conservative Party Conference in October 1953, in his first major speech following his stroke four months earlier, namely, that ‘what I care about above all else [is] the building of a sure and lasting peace’. [ 65 ]