In April 1951, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill conducted a conversation with an ex-officer of the US Army about the possibility of the nuclear bombing of the USSR. The conversation took place at Churchill’s house in Kent; Churchill’s opponent, former director-general of the American newspaper The New York Times and military leader Julius Ochs Adler, revealed the details of this conversation in his memo. The British newspaper The Times told about this on Wednesday, September 9.
As it became known to journalists, by the time of the meeting with Adler, Churchill had already been forced to leave of the prime minister because of the defeat of his party in the elections. While dining with an American, the 76-year-old statesman complained that British-American policy towards the Union was not aggressive enough. Further, as Adler said in his note, Churchill asked the American to name the number of atomic bombs in the United States, and at the same time to assess the Soviet arsenal. To this, the ex-officer of the American army replied that he did not have such information.
Churchill, however, preferred to continue the topic and said that if he remained prime minister and managed to enlist the support of Washington, he would present Moscow with a number of conditions, for refusing to fulfill which he would threaten to drop atomic bombs on the territory of a former ally in World War II. In response, Adler stressed that the United States would never agree to such a proposal.
Adler’s note was discovered some time ago by the head of the department of history at the University of Exeter, Richard Toye. Having studied this document, the British specialist, however, came to the conclusion that the statements of the British Prime Minister were more of a provocation or “element of the game.”
In 2014, journalist Thomas Mayer published the book When Lions Roar. It also told the story of Churchill’s appeal in 1947 to the American Senator Stiles Bridge with a request to persuade then US President Harry Truman to drop a nuclear bomb on the USSR. According to the British Prime Minister, the disappearance of the Kremlin from the face of the earth would turn the Soviet Union into an insignificant problem; otherwise, the politician threatened, the USSR could attack the USA in two or three years.
