"Collar the Lot" : Churchill's callousness push-starts A-bomb and Penicillin development

I don't like Winston Churchill.

Granted he was a very complex man, much given to uttering extreme verbal outbursts on whatever position he held that moment, replaces a few hours or weeks later by an equally exaggerated outburst on the opposite view on that same issue.

So it is easy to find vivid quotes from him displaying both humanity and brutality towards the German Jews and Leftists who fled Hitler for Britain before 1939.

For brutal , see his comment 'collar the lot' as soon as he became PM in May 1940.

"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace

The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.

By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral  authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.

Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.

And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...

The morality of good - temporary - military secrets and bad - semipermanent - military secrets

There is little morally to fear for all of us agreeing to keep  traditional (and temporary) military secrets such as all troop movement before the planned big invasion.

By their very nature, such secrets are no longer a secret two or three days into battle.

But Enigma code-breaking, The (atomic) Bomb, the Proximity Fuse and Wartime Penicillin were all military secrets with huge moral costs attached.

Enigma was only kept secret for so long by sometimes deliberately not revealing to the effected military units the grim fate before them that the code-breaking revealed --- all in an attempt to keep the code-breaking secret from the enemy long enough for code-breaking to reveal (and foil) huge plans by the enemy.

This moral dilemma has kept the Enigma industry churning out lots of books and movies, 75 years after the events.

Proximity fuses were so wonderful that we couldn't use them against the Germans, convince they would find one unexploded and  quickly duplicate it and then use it to horrible effect against our bomber streams because it was actually more useful to them than to us.

This is the same dilemma that the Germans faced about the nerve gas they invented, because they rightly feared we could make better use of it than they could --- so they never used it and kept it secret.

(At least the Germans didn't put much effort into producing nerve gas  because it more or less fell into their laps- while proximity fuses were one of the single biggest scientific and engineering effort of the entire war - in my view, a mammoth mis-allocation of scarce war resources.)

The Atomic Bomb could not remain a 'secret' for very long once it was used, because it was seemingly so war-endingly successfully.

Hence nations big enough to afford it simply felt they had to pour immense amounts of money, expertise and national willpower into duplicating what the Americans had hoped to keep secret for at least a generation.

The entire American civic culture changed, for the worse, when the American atomic establishment decided atomic information could actually be "born secret and kept secret government property", even at the moment a new concept first formed in a scientist's mind !

What really kept the Bomb a 'secret' , quote unquote , is the expense and complexity of making it consistently successfully.

Everyone on Earth had heard of The Bomb, knew what it did , what it was made up and even basically how it worked : the American government had showed them all this in the public Smythe Report.

But a successful Bomb, like the Devil , was in the details ; these were complicated, expensive and remained secret to all but the best foreign spies.

And this - presumably - was how the Allies expected to keep the "Penicillin Secret" once they unleashed it as a secret medicine weapon only for Allied frontline casualties on D-Day (if Patty Malone and that damned beta-lactam ring hadn't spoiled the plan).

Who could really expect to keep the good news about penicillin's life-saving powers away from the general public (aka the relatives of frontline troops), as soon as  millions of Allied casualties were coming back home alive, while enemy POWs from the same battle  were dying like flies ?

No, like The Bomb, penicillin would quickly become uniquely famous  all around the world and only remain a 'secret', quote unquote, because the Allied scientific elite figured that the information as how to make it could remain secret from the enemy for at least a year, because it was complex and expensive.

Remember, even the atomic bomb secret was broken in the end, but only about six years after it became first known to Britain, France and Russia that an A-Bomb would likely work.

That's the length of the entire (long drawn-out) WWII.

So a permanent military secret kept for as short a time as a year long, might still be viewed as long enough to be militarily effective.

But penicillin was no where as complex or as expensive as proximity fuses or nuclear weapons : in fact, it is a piece of cake for every and any hospital bacteriology lab to make safely and cheaply, in amounts sufficient to save the lives of all the people in that hospital dying of infections no other medication could help.

In normal situations, those really are not large numbers, spread over an entire year and over an entire country: in peacetime, there needn't ever be a penicillin crisis, for least for the dying of infections would get it when they really needed it.

But a huge invasion like D-Day requires an extraordinary amount of penicillin over a few days or weeks, in a small area , under fluid combat conditions that obviously doesn't allow much in the way of crude penicillin-making labs in sedate base hospitals.

So war weapon (frontline battle) penicillin really did require a lots of stable penicillin in a dry power, to be useful.

But in fact, even without Patty Malone to tip them off,  as soon as word of penicillin great success got about, the enemy would start making it by the crude means known in the vast amount of public literature on penicillin.

But the cost of keeping penicillin a non-public success before unleashing it on D-Day, was in denying it for civilians in Allied,Neutral, Occupied and Enemy countries for years and in fact, in denying it to ordinary soldiers dying of infections penicillin could cure, again between 1940 and 1944.

That is literally millions of needless deaths --- at least as much as the Jewish Holocaust.

It was and is , a horrific moral crime, a deliberate crime promoted by doctors.

And it is why I write about wartime penicillin , 75 years after its events...

"A Rare Breed Indeed" : US wartime Int'l treaties on the A-Bomb, Lend-Lease, Bases for Destroyers ... and synthetic penicillin

Most of the antibiotics we use today (beta-lactams) are still the close relatives of the first and best-ever antibiotic, Penicillin G.

They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.

They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.

But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.

Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.

It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.

So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.

(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)

But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !

It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.

This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.

As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.

That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.

10% of nothing is ..... still nothing !!

When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union  local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".

The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !

Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.

The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of  the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....

The A-Bomb and synthetic penicillin were attractive war weapons, not because they were easy - but because they were hard

Shades of President Kennedy explaining his decision to push for an all-out effort to land men on the Moon before the end of the decade, "not because it was easy but because it was hard" !

"Hard" attracted lots of top (alpha male) scientists who could graceful forget about doing something boringly useful in this current war by focusing instead on daydreams of achieving eternal scientific glory.

The glory of building a new bomb that would fire-bomb entire cities just as good as existing fire bombs already were  and the glory of artificially synthesizing an already existing - and already useful- natural substance.

"Hard" also meant that A-Bombs and synthetic penicillin would remain a dark secret to the enemy for at least a year or three, even after their first use at the front revealed their existence : this is the reason why the OSRD and their British equivalent were so interested in these "hard" projects....

Like synthetic penicillin, the harder the A-Bomb was to make, the more attractive it was to the OSRD

Late in 1942, Britain's highest political, military and Intelligence leadership decided that the Atomic Bomb was almost certainly too difficult and too expensive for Hitler's Germany to produce during World War II ---- if only because it would take too many resources from more pressing necessities for the Nazi war machine.

But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.

These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.

(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)

But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.

They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.

But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.

Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.

Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.

But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only  the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.

America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only  information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.

Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.

Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.

(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)

I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.

Lessons from the attractiveness of difficult-to-synthesize penicillin

But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.

You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.

Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.

Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.

Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.

That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.

 Still,  a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.

Poor old Washington and poor old London and  poor old Berlin.

Always forced to fight a three front war.

Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......