The Basis of Everything

by Andrew Ramsey

  Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle later wrote movingly of that time:

  You have all seen big fires, but I doubt if you have ever seen the whole horizon of a city lined with great fires – scores of them, perhaps hundreds. There was something inspiring just in the awful savagery of it.

  Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen’s valour, only to break out again later. About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation, like a bee buzzing in blind fury.9

  So Oliphant was understandably edgy in the wake of that September meeting, as his return train to Birmingham edged out of London’s Euston Station after nightfall.

  Minutes into the journey, the train came to a dead halt. The scream of air-raid sirens piercing the constant low rumble of approaching bombers that played to a background chorus of exploding shells drew Oliphant to the blacked-out window of his carriage. He lowered it sufficiently to crane his head towards the pyrotechnics that were punching holes in the night sky. His curiosity was driven partly by the chance to watch how effectively London’s anti-aircraft guns operated, and to assess how they might benefit from some form of radar guidance.

  As horns wailed around him, the view from the railway bridge on which his train had come to rest was both daunting and dazzling. Rounds of heavy artillery blazed against the blackness, and the glow cast everything in an amber pall.

  Suddenly a huge blast from beneath the train rocked his carriage and sent him crashing to the dusty floor. He was convinced, once more, that he had fallen victim to an enemy bomb. Again, however, after a few moments of stunned disorientation, he was able to clamber to his feet, unhurt. The source of the explosion was then revealed to be a battery of guns installed not 100 metres away, beneath the very same bridge.

  It was during his regular journeys to the capital, and the hours he spent caged within rail carriages or walking to and from his accommodation at the Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall, that Oliphant’s resolve to employ any means available to end the war gained steel. ‘It was the . . . hatred of the Hitler regime that really drove me,’ Oliphant later recalled of his wartime work.10

  There were times during the Battle of Britain when, following massive air raids in London, seeing the havoc among people and buildings as I walked the streets in the grey light of early morning, I felt hatred of the enemy welling up within me, so that I was nauseated and longed for retribution. Perhaps it was because, as a student, I had so liked and admired the Germans, that my revulsion was so powerful. Now . . . I realise that we know very little about such deep human emotions, from which flows the desire to kill.11

  * * *

  At the heart of those MAUD Committee meetings held during the relentless Blitz of September 1940 and beyond were two questions.

  One was how to determine the most effective means of separating a critical volume of the uranium-235 isotope. The thermal diffusion technique employing Clusius tubes initially favoured by Frisch had been deemed too time consuming. Thus the favoured method became ‘ordinary’ diffusion, which required the toxic gas uranium hexafluoride to be forced through tiny holes or slits punched in a metal plate, so it could separate the lighter isotopes. However, the uncertainties attached to this method meant much further experimentation and detailed calculations were required. Oliphant took it upon himself to assign Peierls to the case.

  The other significant query was the precise size of the critical mass required to sustain a chain reaction in a bomb. It was this need to understand more about the mysterious properties of uranium isotopes in gaseous forms that effectively sidelined Oliphant from the initial MAUD Committee – now officially known as the MAUD Policy Committee – in early 1941. In order to keep that panel to a manageable number, membership was limited to one representative per institution or department. Birmingham’s man would be chemistry professor Norman Haworth, who could lead the examination of uranium’s chemical mysteries.

  Further calculations had already shown that the likely quantities advanced by Frisch and Peierls in their famous memorandum were significantly short of what would be needed. Instead of ‘a pound or two’ of uranium-235 that had been separated and therefore enriched, the core of a bomb was likely to require around twenty-five times that amount. This, in turn, meant that the time necessary to refine it, and the cost of doing so, also increased exponentially.

  Had the pair’s original ‘back of the envelope’ sums been informed by knowledge subsequently available to the MAUD Committee, it is quite likely that Tizard’s early doubts would have seen the bomb project shelved – at least until after Britain had dealt with the threat of German invasion.

  * * *

  As a result of the committee reshuffle, Oliphant’s direct input was restricted to matters of logistics and process. However, he was a potent presence when the subsidiary MAUD Technical Committee convened in Burlington House at 11am on 2 July 1941, to finalise the report they would submit via Tizard to the Scientific Advisory Committee of the War Cabinet, chaired by Lord Hankey.

  Along with other MAUD members, Oliphant had received a draft version of Thomson’s final report a week earlier, and asked if he saw the need for any major amendments. When the group gathered that morning, Oliphant pointed out that the intricate detail contained in the lengthy document was unlikely to be understood by anyone beyond those walls. If production of a bomb were to be pursued by military and political leaders, they would not be persuaded by pages of scientific jargon. They would need a simple over-arching summary of whether it would work, and how that might be achieved.

  The first comprehensive road map to the development of an atomic bomb was submitted to Tizard on 15 July 1941. In its final iteration, the MAUD Report ran to more than thirty pages of dense text, a scattering of mathematical formulae and tables, and a diagram of the proposed isotope separation plant. It also listed technical details on the properties of uranium, the critical mass, projected size and fusing options for the weapon, estimates of the damage it could inflict and a list of production problems the process faced. Finally, the document featured multiple appendices addressing the engineering issues that such a vast undertaking would encounter.

  Its explicit premise, however, was spelled out in the three-page summary for which Oliphant had successfully argued. The main report began by acknowledging that, at the start of the process of inquiry, the committee members had been more inclined to scepticism than belief. Over the course of fifteen months, however, that view had evolved to the point where they were convinced that a bomb was indeed feasible.

  As the report’s opening summary noted: ‘It will be possible to make an effective uranium bomb which, containing some 25lbs [eleven kilograms] of active material, would be equivalent as regards destructive effect to 1800 tons of TNT and would also release large quantities of radioactive substances, which would make places near to where the bomb exploded dangerous to human life for a long period.’12

  As it happened, 1800 tons of TNT was equivalent to the total explosives payload that Germany had dropped on London during the nine-month Blitz. It had ended in May 1941, just two months before the MAUD Report was finalised, at a cost of more than 20,000 civilian lives.13

  The specifications outlined for the bomb were almost as daunting as the projections of its power. The estimated cost of a separation plant able to produce one kilogram of uranium-235 per day – the yield needed to fuel three bombs per month – would be approximately £5 million (almost £250 million today). The time needed to build a manufacturing plant for uranium separation and bomb fusing would be just over two years, with an estimated completion date of late 1943. The plant would comprise around 1900 individual isotope separation units, and occupy an industrial footprint of almost 700 square metres.

  The raw expense appeared prohibitive for a nation still engaged in a fight for its very survival, even if Hitler’s attention had recently turned to Russia. Yet the r
eport calculated that a fully operational production facility should be capable of turning out sufficient enriched uranium fuel for thirty-six bombs per year, at a cost per weapon of around £236,000. By comparison, 1800 tons of TNT in regular bomb form represented an outlay of £392,000. Putting aside the huge establishment cost, production of a British atomic bomb in per-weapon terms made economic sense.

  It would be the fusing mechanism, needed to slam together the two sub-critical sections of enriched uranium at a speed of around 6000 feet per second, that would account for most of the bomb’s mass. However, the finished device was not expected to weigh more than a ton, and would therefore be within the carrying capacity of a modern bomber aircraft.

  Items of concern included the likely need for the bomb to be deployed using a parachute, to allow the transporting plane time to clear the huge blast zone before detonation. Another issue was that, because a fission chain reaction could not occur without the calculated critical amount of uranium-235, ‘the main principle cannot be tested on a small scale’.14 There was no scope for a concept design to be proven via an atomic hand grenade.

  Not that those mitigating factors were canvassed in the final summation, which pronounced that the MAUD Policy Committee ‘considers that the scheme for a uranium bomb is practicable and likely to lead to decisive results in the war. It recommends that this work be continued on the highest priority and on the increasing scale necessary to obtain the weapon in the shortest possible time.’15

  In addition to the bullish forecasts about the infrastructure and the practicalities of building a bomb, Tizard’s attention was drawn to an item addressed in the summary and detailed further in the body of the document.

  The report mentioned that British intelligence had already learned that, since the Germans had occupied Norway, they had actively increased production levels of heavy water at the Norsk Hydro plant.

  A daring sabotage, planned in Britain and involving Norwegian commandoes, would be launched on the fortress-like site in late 1942 and, when that proved a disaster, reprised with greater success the following February. The destruction of this plant, combined with the stockpile that Lieutenant Allier had helped remove from Norway under the Germans’ noses – and which ultimately found its way to back to Britain following the fall of France – meant that the Nazis’ access to the rare commodity had been stopped, for the time being. The plant would be repaired, however, and heavy water production resumed. This would require a further, final mission on Norway’s Lake Tinnsjø two years later.

  Upon receiving the report in mid-1941, Tizard understood that if German scientists were trying to get hold of the moderating agent, it could only be for use in nuclear fission work. The MAUD Report had explained that while heavy water was valuable for use in fission experiments designed to produce nuclear energy, its value in the production of a bomb was limited. Once the Germans realised this, and accepted that pure graphite worked far more efficiently as a moderator, Tizard believed Britain’s competitive edge in the bomb race would be lost.

  * * *

  From Lord Hankey of the Scientific Advisory Committee, the MAUD Report progressed to Lord Cherwell, Winston Churchill’s hugely influential scientific advisor. Cherwell then drafted a note to the Prime Minister on 27 August 1941, and his advice was as resolute as Tizard’s initial view had been equivocal.

  ‘I am quite clear that we must go forward,’ he counselled Churchill. ‘It would be unfortunate if we let the Germans develop a process ahead of us by means of which they could defeat us in war or reverse the verdict after they had been defeated.’16

  Three days after receiving the communiqué – and less than eighteen months from the time when Oliphant had sat alone in his office in Birmingham, absorbing the news that a uranium fission bomb might be possible – Churchill drafted a historic memo to his military chiefs of staff.

  ‘Although personally I am quite content with the existing explosives,’ he wrote, ‘I feel that we must not stand in the path of improvement, and I therefore think that action should be taken in the sense proposed by Lord Cherwell.’17

  There was no higher British administrative authority than Churchill’s. The long march to the development of an atomic bomb would proceed.

  But having effectively set in motion that chain of occurrences, Oliphant was taken aback by the next development. The escalation of the project to government’s top level had meant the formation of another committee – this time a consultative council, which decided that the bomb development work should be entrusted, in turn, to a new division within the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

  For reasons of opacity, that body would be known as the Directorate of Tube Alloys. The man chosen to oversee the new entity, which would replace the MAUD committees, was Wallace Akers, Director of Research at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Akers had initially proposed the body be called ‘Tank Alloys’, to signify that its importance to the military effort corresponded with that of the heavy artillery vehicle. However, the minister responsible for the project, Sir John Anderson, pointed out that the bomb’s success might well signal the end of the tank’s pre-eminence. Therefore, a more enduring symbol of armaments manufacture – the simple tube, with its many applications – was more apt.

  Whatever the reasoning behind the name, the decision to disband MAUD and place development of the bomb under the jurisdiction of an individual with clear commercial loyalties – without a hint of consultation or forewarning – annoyed many committee members.

  It infuriated the more combustible Oliphant. He penned a scorching letter to the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Sir Edward Appleton, complaining bitterly that this most complicated assignment was now being managed by people utterly lacking the requisite scientific rigour, and threatening to resign his post immediately.

  ‘I, personally, was responsible for the whole of the recrudescence of this subject and had to fight hard to get things going and to get Frisch and Peierls accepted,’ Oliphant fumed. ‘In the reorganisation I was left off the policy committee and I feel that the time has now come for me to sever my connection altogether. This problem is too important to be trifled with.’18

  Writing to Chadwick, Oliphant described the appointment of Akers as ‘disgraceful’, because he would ‘obviously . . . look after the commercial interests of ICI’. In the same letter, Oliphant even went so far as to threaten to lead a mutiny of other disgruntled MAUD members and enlist them to set up a ‘rival show’, which would allow them to continue their research without ‘a lot of interfering busybodies who know nothing whatever about the problems involved’.19

  Despite his headstrong belief that science should proceed unhindered for its own noble sake, not bend to the whims of political or private interests, Oliphant was eventually placated by the more measured Chadwick. As his younger brothers, his university contemporaries, and even a few of his Cavendish colleagues well knew, Oliphant’s flashes of indignant temper usually passed like an Adelaide summer storm: much noise and spectacular fireworks before the sun surely reappeared.

  In this instance, Oliphant came to appreciate that the magnitude of the project, as detailed in the MAUD Report, required manufacturing and management expertise on a scale that lay beyond the capabilities of the scientists’ collective. And he would even come to develop admiration for the skills and sensibilities of Akers.

  * * *

  One recommendation by the MAUD Committee that had addressed Tizard’s nagging doubts about the bomb’s likely success was the reference to ongoing co-operation between British scientists and their American counterparts. The report’s suggestion that developmental work on isotope separation should continue on both sides of the Atlantic resonated with Tizard, who believed the entire project would be better pursued in the United States. He had admitted as much in a letter to Lord Hankey:

  I . . . think it is absurd to embark on this very big and highly speculative industrial undertaking in this country with
all we have to do in other ways, and I think the only sensible thing to do is to send Chadwick and Thomson to America to discuss all the results with the Americans who have been doing similar work, and on the basis of that decide whether a plant should be put up somewhere in North America.20

  Indeed, the United States had established a uranium committee a year before MAUD first met in 1940. Across the Atlantic, the force driving investigations into uranium fission, and the possibility it might yield a ‘super-bomb’, was the man considered the world’s foremost physicist after Rutherford’s passing: Albert Einstein.

  Shortly before Poland fell in 1939, Einstein had been contacted by Leo Szilard, the Hungarian-born physicist who first foresaw the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. Szilard’s spiralling concern led him to approach his friend about lending his revered name to a letter to the Queen of Belgium, formally requesting that she intervene to prevent the sale of Belgian Congo uranium to Nazi Germany. However, upon realising that Einstein’s repute meant he stood a chance of getting a message directly to United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Szilard saw the prospect of an even bigger win. When he explained the theory behind uranium fission to Einstein, months before Frisch and Peierls began their calculations, the greatest thinker of the twentieth century exclaimed simply: ‘that never occurred to me’.21

  By the time Einstein’s letter reached the White House, Poland was under German occupation. The note’s text subtly urged Roosevelt to commission a group of physicists in America to explore chain reactions, but it also reflected scientific opinion as it existed in late 1939 in pointing out: ‘A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.’22

  Come the war’s end, Einstein would declare this letter to be his sole contribution to the development of the atomic bomb, a project with which he is often spuriously linked. But even though it bore his weighty signature, the letter’s impact was muted.