The Basis of Everything

by Andrew Ramsey

  In fact, it was Oppenheimer who politely queried the wisdom of the visitor’s intemperance, and suggested Oliphant might refrain from openly canvassing a topic of such obvious military importance with which Lawrence’s colleague was clearly unfamiliar. ‘But that’s terrible,’ Oliphant forged on, unapologetic and unperturbed. ‘We need you.’11 All the while, Lawrence sat behind his desk, nodding sagely in agreement.

  As Oliphant prepared to fly back to the east coast, then on to Britain, Lawrence asked him to prepare a statement summarising the MAUD Report’s conclusions, for the benefit of the majority in the American science community who had been deliberately kept in the dark as to its contents.

  Oliphant, who in his own official report of discussions held with Lawrence during that visit claimed his colleague had ‘only come to know of its [the MAUD Committee’s] existence by accident’,12 duly completed a two-page summation. It noted the MAUD Committee had considered the respective merits of pursuing a fast-neutron fission bomb with either uranium-235 or plutonium at its core. In acknowledging the case for plutonium (which was expected to undergo fission more readily than the uranium isotope), Oliphant restated the MAUD Committee’s belief that ‘from the point of view of the war the separation of the U-235 isotope is alone justified’, even though that separation process, compared to the less cumbersome means by which plutonium could ultimately be manufactured in nuclear reactors, would be time consuming and expensive.

  His precis also recorded the committee’s majority view that such a project was beyond Britain’s current means, and would therefore need to take place in either the United States or Canada, as a joint enterprise. Oliphant’s emphatic conclusion included an admission that he carried no formal authority to propose such a view, but that, in itself, was scarcely grounds for him to stay silent.

  Finally, I would like to say that the preparation of a nuclear bomb, if this be possible, should be undertaken at once and on the very highest priority. We cannot afford to neglect even a probability, that the scheme will work successfully. Whichever nation is first to succeed in this quest will undoubtedly be master of the world. If peace were to come tomorrow it would still be necessary to obtain the answer first at all costs, for in the hands of a resentful or unscrupulous nation such power would be dangerous.

  While I have discussed the MAUD Committee and made very definite statements in this memorandum, it must be made perfectly clear that I speak as an individual without any official status or authority in this matter.13

  * * *

  The impact of Oliphant’s unofficial United States mission was both profound and immediate. No sooner had he departed San Francisco than Lawrence telephoned Arthur Compton, a Nobel laureate and the hugely influential professor of physics at the University of Chicago. In that call, Lawrence volubly echoed Oliphant’s view that the outcome of the current conflict likely rested on the race to the atomic bomb.

  It would be the beginning of a confluence of events over coming weeks that saw history gain pace, hastened by a free fall of coincidence.

  In the wake of Oliphant’s barnstorming tour, the once tightly held findings of the MAUD Committee became an open secret in America’s scientific circles. As history professor and author Ferenc Szasz would write:

  J. Robert Oppenheimer later admitted that the MAUD Report transformed the American [nuclear] program from a series of desultory committees to a focused, concentrated effort. Historian A.J.R. Groom has estimated that the MAUD Report accelerated the American weapons program by a minimum of six months. [Nuclear historian] Margaret Gowing stated it even more forcefully: ‘Without it [the MAUD Report],’ she wrote, ‘World War Two would almost certainly have ended before an atomic bomb was dropped.’14

  While Mark Oliphant was central in the preparation and dissemination of both the Frisch–Peierls Memorandum and the MAUD Report, it was his tireless lobbying and impassioned badgering of his scientific brethren in the United States that would prove his most tangible contribution. It would lead Szilard to reflect on the cataclysm that followed:

  Oliphant came over from England and attended a meeting of the Uranium Committee . . . He realised that something was very wrong and that the work on uranium was not being pushed in an effective way.

  He travelled across this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific and disregarding international etiquette told all those who were willing to listen what he thought of us. Considerations other than those of military security prevent me from revealing the exact expressions which he used. If Congress knew the true history of the atomic energy project, it would create a special medal to be given to meddling foreigners for distinguished services, and Dr Oliphant would be the first to receive one.15

  * * *

  Oliphant’s intention to bend the will of a reluctant nation could never have been accomplished without an equally insistent American co-conspirator. Oliphant acknowledged this in the letter he sent to Lawrence from Washington before his flight back across the Atlantic.

  ‘May I say how much I enjoyed my few hours in Berkeley, and how much I still admire the way in which things are done in your Laboratory,’ he wrote. ‘I feel quite sure that in your hands the uranium question will receive proper and complete attention, and I do hope that you are able to do something in the matter.’16

  Oliphant returned to Birmingham, satisfied that his efforts would prove worthwhile, but scarcely imagining how rapidly events would move. ‘Ernest took this up like anything,’ he would remember of Lawrence’s subsequent actions. ‘He was a very vigorous person. Before you could say Jack Robinson, he’d moved a committee, and then Bush and Conant, and finally the President to set up the Manhattan Project.’17

  That cascade of events was initiated by Lawrence’s call to Arthur Compton, which brought an unexpected outcome. Compton agreed that Lawrence should make his case directly to Conant, who, as chance would have it, was due to be at the University of Chicago the following week as part of that institution’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations. On the same evening, Lawrence would be delivering a lecture to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, on the potential medical applications spawned by his new cyclotron.

  The three men met later that night at Compton’s house, taking coffee around a raging fire as the autumn chill set in. Lawrence presented his own précis of Oliphant’s MAUD summary, and once again bemoaned the lack of action coming from Washington despite the growing fear – fanned by Oliphant – that Germany was moving forward with its atomic bomb plans.

  It was then that Conant, who did not reveal he was fully aware of the MAUD Report and its findings, pulled his own surprise. He admonished Lawrence for his egregious lapse of national security in revealing unauthorised details to Oppenheimer about bomb research.

  If Lawrence felt he was taking the fall for Oliphant’s indiscretion at Berkeley, his irritation might have been mollified had he known Conant had expressed similar misgivings about the Australian’s trustworthiness to Bush a week earlier: ‘Oliphant’s behaviour does not help the cause of secrecy!’ Conant had sniped.18

  Conant then tested Lawrence’s commitment to the cause by suggesting the services of America’s physicists could be better utilised in areas of defence work other than an unproven atomic bomb concept. For final effect, he added that he had advised Bush to terminate the fission investigation, and redeploy those on the uranium committee in more viable programs, such as radar.

  When Lawrence took the bait and began pointing out the folly of such a move, Conant reeled him in.

  ‘Ernest, you say you are convinced of the importance of these fission bombs,’ Conant said, his gaze shifting from the fireplace to the physicist. ‘Are you willing to devote the next several years of your life to getting them made?’

  Lawrence’s jaw dropped and his mouth gaped wide as the gravity of the request, and the position in which it placed him, became clear.

  In another of those history-defining moments that littered those few September weeks, Lawrence sifted his thoughts
with sufficient clarity to respond: ‘If you tell me this is my job, I’ll do it.’19

  From that evening, Lawrence became as ardent in his support for the atomic bomb as Oliphant had been during his campaigning across the United States. When the uranium committee next met in October 1941, Lawrence opened the meeting by reading aloud Oliphant’s summary of the MAUD Report.

  Within two weeks of Oliphant’s return to Britain, Vannevar Bush took a copy of the MAUD Report to the White House and presented its findings, as well as a page of talking points drawn up by Conant, directly to President Roosevelt. So convincing was Bush’s case that Roosevelt agreed to the immediate launch of a comprehensive research program with the stated outcome of building a uranium bomb.

  On 11 October 1941, less than three weeks after Oliphant and Lawrence had stood atop Charter Hill and fused their formidable wills, Roosevelt penned a letter to Churchill to set in motion the process that would yield the most destructive force humankind had ever imagined.

  ‘My dear Winston,’ wrote the president of the nation that, months earlier, had decided on the basis of two top-level reviews that a bomb was not an immediate priority, ‘It appears desirable that we should soon correspond or converse concerning the subject which is under study by your MAUD committee, and by Dr Bush’s organisation in this country, in order that any extended efforts may be co-ordinated or even jointly conducted.’20

  Years before the bomb project had yielded a weapon, it hosted a pre-emptive chain reaction that altered history’s course. The energy brought across the Atlantic by Mark Oliphant had been infused into Lawrence, who had projected it to Conant, then Bush and finally to the Oval Office.

  * * *

  As events played out, the timing proved as momentous as the decision itself. Barely two months after Roosevelt’s missive to Churchill, Japan launched a bombing raid on the United States Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor.

  Had the ink not been barely dry on final approvals for the bomb project, it was unlikely to have gained top presidential priority in such a radically altered political climate. It’s also not unreasonable to assume, therefore, that the Second World War would have passed without the delivery of the atomic bomb’s horrifying exclamation mark.

  The furious entry of Japan into the war also changed life for Mark Oliphant. Having returned from the United States to be confronted by the disbandment of the MAUD Committee, Oliphant eventually settled back into work at Birmingham. He retained his place on the Tube Alloys project’s technical committee, although his input was minimal due to the ongoing demands of Birmingham’s radar work, where new and improved units continued to be produced in the laboratory.

  However, the impact of his unofficial American sojourn had been noticed in higher offices.

  Birmingham Vice-Chancellor Raymond Priestley wrote in his diary in early October 1941: ‘Oliphant is back from America – by bomber – and Charles [Wright], who came down to see the lab last week and stayed the night with us, says that he has gone down very well out there. He is so impressed with the value of Oliphant’s work, indeed, that he would like to see him have some reward.’21 Wright, director of scientific research with the Admiralty, in addition to being Priestley’s brother-in-law, was sufficiently well placed to hear whispers from power’s corridors.

  Even if Oliphant had been aware of any such talk, he doubtless would have dismissed it as mere background noise. He was, despite his stature within the global physics community and the decisive advantages he had helped deliver to the Allied war effort, driven by his dedication to science and not any personal kudos it might bring. Besides, barely had he returned from his mission to America than his attention was drawn to other events that were moving at pace even further afield.

  20

  A MISGUIDED MISSION

  To Australia and back, 1942 to 1943

  Mercifully removed from Britain’s wartime torment she might have been, but life had not been correspondingly straightforward for Rosa Oliphant. Any comfort she might have wished for upon return to the home shores her two young children had not previously seen diminished just weeks before they sailed. On top of leaving behind her husband and her home, Rosa departed England having learned that her mother, Clara, had died suddenly in hospital aged seventy-eight. (Her father, Frederick, had died many years earlier.)

  To compound the hardship of her relocated life as a single mum, Rosa’s hopes of finding work to supplement her £20 monthly allowance from Mark’s salary (around AU$1700 today) were stymied, as in Cambridge, by her lack of previous employment. ‘I wanted to get work, but I was not trained to do anything. [There was] no kindergarten, no pre-school, no child-minding facilities.’1

  She was understandably jubilant, therefore, when a telegram arrived from her husband in February 1942, stating simply ‘am being sent to Australia’. The reason for this unforeseen occurrence would soon become clear.

  * * *

  When Singapore fell to the Japanese in mid-February 1942, the threat of imminent invasion that had compelled Oliphant to repatriate his wife and children from Britain was thought to be levelled at Australia. While concern for his family was a primary motivation in his desire to travel to the homeland he had not seen in more than a decade, his rationale also reflected the call of patriotic duty.

  Oliphant’s restive character, enlivened by the impact of his evangelical visit to the United States, demanded a new challenge. The violent threat posed by Japanese aggression towards his Australian homeland was just the scenario that might benefit from his expertise.

  True to type, he was not about to sit on his hands awaiting an invitation. No sooner was Singapore’s fate decided than Oliphant contacted Australia’s high commissioner in London – former prime minister Stanley Bruce – offering his services to the nation’s incumbent leader, John Curtin. He followed this up with a cable to the University of Sydney’s John Madsen, who was Australia’s kingpin in radar research at the time. His missive was passed on to the head of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in Melbourne, Sir David Rivett.

  Oliphant was already known to Rivett, through an earlier indiscretion that had arisen from his loose-lipped American campaign. Shortly before flying west to meet with Lawrence in September 1941, Oliphant had shared dinner with Australia’s inaugural United States ambassador in Washington – another former federal MP, Richard Casey – who was surprised to hear his new acquaintance revealing details of the highly secret uranium research being undertaken in Britain. His curiosity piqued, Casey asked Oliphant to provide a brief written summary of the MAUD Committee’s findings relating to atomic energy (though not details of any proposed bomb), which was duly delivered to the embassy next day. It was the first formal notification Australia had received of prospects for nuclear power derived from uranium fission.

  Casey wasted no time in forwarding Oliphant’s report to Rivett, with the accompanying note that Australia might want to get involved in any developments for the ‘energy machine’2 before all its patents were locked away by other administrations. Not only had Oliphant wilfully bypassed security provisions in discussing the MAUD Report with unauthorised American colleagues, he had also chosen to admit a previously uninvited player into the security bubble.

  It was therefore with a growing reputation for indiscretion that Oliphant announced he wished to take leave from Birmingham.

  ‘Oliphant came to supper . . . and told me that he might have to go to Australia to take charge of radiolocation there,’ the university’s vice-chancellor Raymond Priestley wrote in late February. ‘If they want him we shall have to let him go, for Australia, with its wide spaces and sparse population, is particularly dependent upon radio of all sorts for its defence.’3

  By that time, the first airborne raid on Darwin had already been launched.

  * * *

  When he received the standard cryptic message in mid-March to travel via train to Scotland, Oliphant prepared himself for a gruelling, even longer journey aboard a bomber aircraf
t to Australia. He was surprised, and more than a little miffed, when follow-up orders directed him instead to Glasgow docks, where passage had been reserved on a commissioned troopship that had previously plied the Antipodean route as the Dominion Monarch.

  The prospect of indolent weeks at sea rather than a few days of discomfort in the air set the impatient physicist immediately on edge. While the risk of such a long voyage through treacherous wartime shipping channels was mitigated by the convoy of almost fifty vessels that accompanied the Dominion Monarch – including half a dozen destroyers, a pocket battleship and the 23,000-ton aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious – Oliphant soon sensed he had committed a serious tactical error. As the fleet weighed anchor and nosed into the North Atlantic, beneath which the torpedoed Athenia now lay silent, he began to wonder whether he would have been of greater service back in his office and laboratory at Birmingham.

  After a month at sea, during which he passed his time presenting lectures to interested crew and officers, Oliphant arrived in Cape Town with a further six weeks’ sailing ahead of him. Despite advising Rosa he was on his way shortly before leaving Glasgow, Oliphant used his African stopover to send an urgent cable to Stanley Bruce in London, requesting that room be found for him on the next available transport back to Britain. He made little effort to hide his grievance at the High Commission’s failure to secure him air travel.

  Bruce’s response was curt. Wartime transport was a fraught logistical exercise that did not accommodate the whims and fancies of the only nonmilitary passenger on a troopship. By the time that word of Oliphant’s petulant change of plans reached Australia and it was agreed that radar development there could continue without him if circumstances demanded, he was back aboard the liner codenamed SL-4 – heading eastwards across the vast Indian Ocean.