The Basis of Everything

by Andrew Ramsey

  Roosevelt instructed that a three-man advisory committee on uranium be established, reporting to Lyman J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards. He proved an uninspired choice. With a four-decade background in agricultural science, Briggs was daunted by the assignment handed to the Advisory Committee on Uranium, and consequently it had made little progress.

  Soon after the MAUD Committee had been set up, its members had contacted Archibald Hill, a Cambridge old boy and Nobel laureate who had recently been posted to the British Embassy in Washington. Hill was asked to establish the level of interest in nuclear fission in the United States, in order to ascertain whether a joint venture might be worth pursuing.

  Hill’s response in May 1940 had been as unambiguous as it was deflating.

  There is, I am informed here, no possibility within practicable range of using uranium either as a power source or as an explosive. It is not inconceivable that practical engineering applications and war uses may emerge in the end. But I am assured by American colleagues that there is no sign of them at present and that it would be a sheer waste of time for people busy with urgent matters in England to turn to uranium as a war investigation.

  If anything likely to be of war value emerges they will certainly give us a hint of it in good time. A large number of American physicists are working on or interested in the subject; they have excellent facilities and equipment: they are extremely well disposed towards us: and they feel that it is much better that they should be pressing on with this than that our people should be wasting their time on what is scientifically very interesting, but for present practical needs probably a wild goose chase.23

  However, more than a year later, with Britain having been given prime ministerial approval to pursue the development of an atomic bomb, there was hope that American attitudes might have changed.

  In keeping with the spirit of co-operation that had brought such success with the cavity magnetron, and had led more than 3000 British military officers and businessmen to visit the United States by mid-1941 to promote their embattled nation’s cause, regular updates on the MAUD Committee’s uranium deliberations had been fed to its equivalent body in America.

  A copy of the MAUD Report and all its accompanying technical appendices had been provided to Dr Briggs at the uranium committee upon the report’s completion in July 1941. It had been accompanied by a note requesting that it be forwarded to Roosevelt’s powerful science tsar, Vannevar Bush, and to James B. Conant, head of America’s peak science body, the National Defense Research Committee.

  Weeks later, George Thomson – chair of the two soon to be disbanded MAUD committees – expressed surprise that no response had been received from any of the American recipients in relation to the report’s seismic findings.

  Around the same time, in August 1941, Oliphant was advised that he would be travelling to the United States to engage in further information-swapping on radar issues stemming from the Tizard Mission. Shortly before his departure, however, Oliphant received a letter from Thomson. It stressed that although Oliphant’s principal mission was furthering the crucial trans-Atlantic radar partnership forged a year earlier, he should also make a few ‘guarded inquiries’ as to how the MAUD Report had been received in the United States.

  It was a directive that Oliphant chose to interpret as a mandate to relentlessly push the imperative of America’s involvement in the bomb project.

  This campaign would prove so fervent, and ultimately persuasive, that he could later lay claim to being a founding father of the Manhattan Project that would follow.

  19

  ‘MEDDLING FOREIGNER’

  United States and Birmingham, 1941

  Although the accepted means of safe passage from Britain to the United States in 1941 was the Pan American clipper service through Lisbon, the Portuguese capital seethed with spies, who would surely identify such a recognisable, eminent physicist as Oliphant and thus compromise his journey’s confidentiality. It was also a comparatively slow route, and time was ticking.

  Instead, Oliphant took the option of an unheated, heavyweight B-24 Liberator bomber run from the RAF-operated Prestwick air base in Scotland. He was seemingly unfazed by whispers that a previous passenger had lost digits to frostbite during a similar sixteen-hour, high-altitude haul to Newfoundland on Canada’s east coast. Investigations into that persistent rumour had revealed that the unfortunate victim had been an airman whose flying boots were too tight, resulting in interrupted blood flow that had cost him a couple of toes. Everything else about the enterprise, though, seemed steeped in mystery.

  Civilians berthed on these clandestine flights would receive cryptic confirmation shortly before departure – simple advice that a sleeper berth had been reserved aboard the night train to Glasgow, and to alight at Kilmarnock where further instructions would be forthcoming. Passengers would then rendezvous with an unmarked vehicle that appeared at Kilmarnock railway station, and were ferried to a makeshift air terminal nearby. There they were weighed (along with their luggage), and flying suits were issued to stave off the piercing cold of their imminent journey. Oxygen masks were mandatory in the non-pressurised military plane, and Benzedrine (amphetamine) tablets were provided just in case anyone found themselves drifting off to sleep despite the freezing, unfurnished interior.

  Oliphant’s gravitas spared him that cattle-class indignity, however, and he was allocated a cockpit seat, which meant he was privy to the final dramatic minutes of his first trans-Atlantic flight. It was scheduled to terminate at Gander airbase on Newfoundland Island, but with fuel critically low and the flight deck’s navigator afforded minimal visibility, the lumbering aircraft dropped out of low cloud to find an expanse of water immediately below, where land was meant to be. The frantic pilot found a freshly laid earthen landing strip among the marsh of waterways, where the craft put down safely.

  Undeterred, Oliphant immediately commenced his onward journey, which took him to the land of plenty. After two years on the besieged island of Britain, he quickly became transfixed by the sight of fresh fruit stalls on American city streets, and public lighting that blazed after dark.

  * * *

  The radar business he was to pursue with the United States National Defense Research Committee took him to the Radiation Lab at MIT in Boston, to Bell Telephones in New York, and finally to Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. All of these bodies received Oliphant with great warmth, as befitting his standing as overlord of the department that had devised the crucial microwave apparatus.

  Accompanied by Cavendish alumnus Charles Galton Darwin – now Director of the British Central Scientific Office in the United States capital – Oliphant then embarked on his unofficial mission, which would ultimately supersede his radar commitments.

  The first meeting the two men would conduct on the sensitive matter of the atomic bomb was with Lyman Briggs, the man entrusted a month earlier with a copy of the final MAUD Report.

  Seated in Briggs’s stifling office, Oliphant quickly comprehended the sticking point. Despite his self-effacing nature and permanent half-smile, the white-haired Briggs struck his visitor as an insipid apparatchik whose lack of initiative and limited comprehension of the science were obvious. To compensate, Oliphant surmised, Briggs had developed ‘a mild mania about the secrecy business’,1 which extended to hiding details from some of those directly providing the uranium committee’s experimental expertise.

  Oliphant’s temperature was rising, and Washington’s early August heat was only partially to blame for the steam that began to build beneath his sharply starched collar. For if there was a trait that riled him above most others, it was inertia. He watched Briggs roll the bowl of his empty pipe between thumb and forefinger, staring at Oliphant with heavy lidded eyes from across an expansive desk. In pride of place upon it was a tiny cube of dull metal that his agitated guest had immediately recognised as uranium.

  While Briggs’s uranium committee had been holding regular meetings over
the past year, it became apparent that little of that time had been spent even contemplating the prospect of an atomic weapon. Oliphant’s incredulity boiled over upon learning that the MAUD Report had not made it out of Briggs’s keeping – or even onto his desk, for the most cursory perusal.

  Oliphant would recall that ‘this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in his safe and had not shown them to members of his Committee. Amazed and distressed, I reported the situation to [the report’s intended recipients] Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant . . .’2

  Bush and Conant had been privy to earlier discussions of the MAUD Committee, having been provided with meeting minutes since early 1940. They had even seen a draft of its report before the final iteration was submitted to Briggs. But such was the agreed need for concealment in the United States that nobody seemed prepared to discuss its findings.

  They had not, however, reckoned on Oliphant’s obduracy – nor his belief that confidentiality should always take a back seat to the greater good.

  Thomson might have only suggested that Oliphant make a few ‘guarded inquiries’ upon landing in America, but Oliphant saw that engendering support in America for the MAUD Committee’s findings would require the same sort of shameless hectoring he had employed to fund his Birmingham cyclotron. He would be described by physicist and science writer Jeremy Bernstein as ‘like a man possessed . . . he simply would not be contained when it came to discussing prospects of a bomb’.3

  He took it upon himself to dedicate the remainder of his United States visit to a relentless, one-man campaign devised to deliver a clear, unauthorised outcome: to convince all scientific peers with whom he came into contact of the dire need for America to get serious about an atomic bomb. Before it became Germany’s decisive weapon.

  * * *

  After the unfortunate meeting with Briggs, the campaign began in earnest with Bush and Conant.

  Oliphant’s dinner with Conant in Washington prompted much interested listening but little enthusiasm. His subsequent twenty-minute meeting with Bush in New York was less encouraging still. ‘They were not interested,’ Oliphant would recall of his interactions with America’s pre-eminent science administrators. ‘They said “oh that’s for the next war, not for this one”.’4

  When these discussions met clear resistance, Oliphant took his message directly to a meeting of the uranium committee at which Conant was present, bolstered by his belief that he held immunity to discuss the potential of a bomb with any colleague he thought suitably influential.

  As a newly installed member of Briggs’s panel, Samuel Allison from the University of Chicago was taken aback by the confronting message laid out by the avuncular, bespectacled guest from England. Like most of his colleagues, Allison had been utterly unaware of the MAUD Committee’s findings, until Oliphant’s blunt presentation set him straight.

  ‘He came to a meeting of the Uranium Committee and said “bomb” in no uncertain terms,’ Allison later recalled of that autumn day. ‘He told us we must concentrate every effort on the bomb and said we had no right to work on power plants or anything but the bomb. The bomb would cost twenty five million dollars, he said, and Britain didn’t have the money or the manpower, so it was up to us.’5

  Oliphant also sought out influential figures at General Electric’s headquarters at Schenectady in New York State. There he met with William Coolidge, who had been commissioned by Bush two months earlier to produce a review of the uranium committee’s operations. It had reiterated the findings of a previous report Bush had commissioned earlier in 1941: that a uranium bomb was a distant proposition.

  Coolidge was at first delighted to welcome a visitor of Oliphant’s eminence. This was, after all, a physicist bathed in the Cavendish Laboratory’s glorious achievements, and whose name appeared on published papers alongside that of the late Lord Rutherford. Then, after Coolidge was regaled with information unavailable to him during the preparation of his review because it had been sitting, unopened, in Briggs’s safe, the credulity of GE’s acting chairman was stretched.

  He wrote immediately to Frank Jewett, President of the National Academy of Sciences, the body to which both review reports had been sent.

  I was greatly interested in what Dr Oliphant told me on his recent visit to Schenectady. You may well have heard his story on the diffusion method of separating the isotopes and his prediction that only 10 kilograms of the pure 235 would be needed for the chain reaction . . . He said that it had been estimated that the 10kg bomb of pure 235 would be equivalent in explosive effect to 1,000 tons of ordinary high-power explosive and could be used to destroy everything in an area over a mile in diameter . . .

  This information, so far as I know, was not available in this country . . . I think that Oliphant’s story should be given serious consideration as it may make a further study of separation by diffusion look far more important in connection with national defense than the further work that we recommended . . .6

  Oliphant’s relentless prosecution of the case for the atomic weapon had finally stirred some influential support. He was, however, yet to play his trump card.

  * * *

  By now Oliphant’s kinship with Ernest Lawrence had grown beyond their shared devotion to science. A colleague who worked closely with both men observed of the pair: ‘They were as alike as two peas in a pod. Oliphant knew a little more physics than Lawrence, but both were energetic developers, essentially promoters’.7 They also felt mutual frustration at the inaction of Briggs’s uranium committee, with Lawrence deriding the ponderous chairman as ‘slow, conservative, methodical and accustomed to operate at peacetime government bureau tempo’.8

  The bond between the two physicists had been galvanised at the outbreak of the war, after Lawrence’s younger brother, John, sailed to England to attend a conference staged by Oliphant’s physics department at Birmingham University. On the day after Germany invaded Poland, John Lawrence boarded the unarmed passenger steamer Athenia at Liverpool for his return voyage to the United States. When the ship was struck by a pair of German U-boat torpedoes the next evening, Oliphant became the trusted source to whom Ernest turned in an effort to establish his brother’s fate, which was still unknown after days of monitoring every radio news bulletin.

  Knowing well the helpless anxiety engendered by being distant from loved ones in times of trauma, Oliphant enlisted his friends in high places to establish that John Lawrence had bravely remained on board the Athenia, in the inky vastness of the North Atlantic, to help injured passengers and crew into rescue vessels. He had then found safe refuge in the last of the lifeboats, which made for Ireland as the stricken ship slipped forlornly to the ocean floor. On his return to the United States, John Lawrence pursued a highly successful and decorated career exploring the use of radioactivity in the treatment of cancer.

  The Athenia incident had stirred Ernest Lawrence’s will to fight the war using the full artillery of his nuclear research, in whatever capacity might be required, in the same way Oliphant’s London Blitz experiences had hardened his heart against Germany.

  With the war confined to Europe over the intervening years, such sentiment in the American science community had been largely confined to political and Jewish refugees such as Leo Szilard. But Oliphant well knew that Lawrence shared his own repugnance for Germany and its atomic aspirations and, given Lawrence’s scientific clout on both sides of the American continent, he would be the final rallying point before Oliphant’s return to Britain.

  ‘I’ll even fly from Washington to meet at a convenient time in Berkeley,’9 Oliphant cabled Lawrence.

  Despite having been in the United States for more than six weeks, on a mission that had long since met its radar objectives, Oliphant boarded another uncomfortable military flight – this time eighteen hours in a frigid DC-2, from New York to San Francisco – when he might just have happily spent that period of discomfort making his way in the opposite direction, towards home.

  He was met at the airpor
t by Lawrence’s laboratory deputy, Donald Cookesy, who taxied the weary visitor to Berkeley’s bayside campus. There, on the afternoon of Tuesday, 23 September 1941, one of the more critical meetings in the history of atomic weaponry took place.

  Lawrence was anxious to show off his latest project, the monstrous 184-inch (4.6-metre) cyclotron taking shape at the crest of the city’s Charter Hill, and after a short drive up the snaking dirt track dubbed ‘Cyclotron Road’, he and Oliphant alighted beneath the world’s largest magnet.

  With the sight and scent of eucalyptus trees – so redolent of his boyhood in the Adelaide Hills – behind him to the east, and a westward view in which the recently completed Golden Gate Bridge spanned the sparkling expanse of San Francisco Bay, Oliphant was struck by the site’s aesthetic beauty as much as the proposed cyclotron’s latent power. Then he snapped back to business, and the matter that had brought him there: the need for the United States to seriously embrace development of the bomb.

  ‘We discussed the general problem, and in particular the methods which we had been considering in Britain for the separation of the isotopes of uranium,’ Oliphant later wrote of the conversation with Lawrence. ‘He was deeply impressed by the serious view of scientists in England that nuclear weapons were not only almost certainly possible, but that Germany might be working on the problem.’10

  The two friends then made their way back down the hill to Lawrence’s office, where Oliphant unhesitatingly reeled off a detailed description of material contained in the confidential MAUD Report.

  He barely paused for breath even after they were joined by Lawrence’s physics department colleague Robert Oppenheimer, whose eyes bulged wide at the news he was hearing for the first time. If Oliphant was suddenly concerned at having let slip so fundamental a secret to someone on the periphery of nuclear research, with an unknown security profile, he gave no indication.