After the Second World War, as scientists and philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic grappled with the threat of nuclear weapons, C. P. Snow reflected on the national and ethical dimensions of Britain’s atomic programme, as well as on nuclear disarmament, in the novels The New Men (1954) and Corridors of Power (1964). Set amidst the context of the Cold War, the novels represent how civil servants wield power as they circulate files and deal in paperwork to manage the risks of the nuclear age. In the decades when Britain was falling behind the United States in the development of new defence technologies, Snow’s works represent the Civil Service as a stable and traditional institution. In these novels, a twentieth-century technology – atomic weapons – collides with the Civil Service, a Victorian institution which nonetheless provides the administrative framework for the use of nuclear weapons by the state.

In this chapter, I examine the function of paperwork in two novels from Snow’s ten-volume Strangers and Brothers (1940–70) series: The New Men, which looks back on the years between 1939 and 1947, and Corridors of Power, which focuses on the period between 1955 and 1959. The Strangers and Brothers series as a whole is a retrospective first-person memoir of the novels’ central character and narrator, Lewis Eliot, a barrister, civil servant and novelist. The New Men looks back on the beginnings of Britain’s nuclear programme during the Second World War, when Eliot works as a government representative tasked with recruiting scientists to work on the project. Set during the Cold War and in the wake of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Corridors of Power is concerned with the politics of nuclear disarmament. These two novels are joined thematically by their focus on Britain’s development of nuclear technologies during the Second World War and the Cold War. Through the series as a whole, Eliot rises through the ranks of the British Civil Service, moving in a vast network of characters – civil servants, politicians, scientists – in settings that shift from Whitehall and Cambridge to London homes and country houses. Along these almost exclusively male circuits, women make only occasional appearances as wives, daughters, secretaries or typists. Women interact with technologies only in supporting roles; they rarely direct the uses of paperwork and atomic energy.