A graduate of Bedford College , London , she trained as a teacher at the Cambridge Training College for Women , but left teaching in 1940 . During the Second World War , she served with the Army Council secretariat . In 1944 , she transferred to the Foreign Office to head a section of the secretariat of the European Advisory Commission . In June 1945 , she moved to Berlin as part of the Allied Control Council , working in the Economic Directorate alongside counterparts from France , America and Russia to co-ordinate administering the districts and supplying food to the population . She was posted to Washington , D.C. , in November 1946 as part of the British negotiating team that agreed to merge the U.S. and British zones of Allied-occupied Germany into Bizonia , and remained at the Pentagon until 1949 . In January 1959 , she joined the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority ( UKAEA ) , where she worked within its Authority Health and Safety Branch ( AHSB ) , coordinating the investigation of the 1957 Windscale fire , about which she would later write a book . In 1967 , she joined Margaret Gowing in writing the history of the British nuclear weapons programmes . As its second official historian , she had access to previously secret documents and personally knew many of the people involved . She produced histories of the 1957 Windscale fire , the nuclear weapons tests in Australia and the British hydrogen bomb programme . In her old age she was still an active participant in intelligence/historical community debate
Windscale fire
Windscale fire
Lorna Arnold