Oppenheimer went on: ‘[As a] matter of interest, I’ll give you a bit of classified information. At the present time there are only three nuclear weapons in existence. It would be half an hour’s work to take them apart . . . If the whole proposal failed, it’d take us another half hour to put them together again. So we’ve got nothing to lose by considering very seriously the Russian proposal.’
Oliphant then anxiously waited for a break in proceedings to brief Evatt, who was seated with gavel in hand at the bench overlooking the array of international representatives.
‘I’ve been talking to Robert Oppenheimer,’ Oliphant urgently told Evatt when the chance arose. ‘He and I both believe that the Russian proposal[s] should be considered very seriously. Will you please make a statement to that effect, that we should discuss them in detail?’
Evatt turned in clear irritation and shot back gruffly: ‘No, no, no. Nothing of the sort, we might want to use them against [the Soviet Union].’19
The first opportunity for de-escalation of a nuclear arms race was thus dead on delivery, three years before the Russians developed a bomb. It was a stark and ultimately calamitous illustration of Oliphant’s earlier misgivings about the scientists who conceived and delivered the bomb being marginalised by the military and politicians from the very moment of its birth.
* * *
On occasion over the decades that followed, some of Oliphant’s rebuttals when queried about his active role in the Manhattan Project would appear somewhat disingenuous. His claim that ‘many of us nuclear physicists associated with the development of the nuclear weapons in the United States and in Britain were unhappy at the end result, we always hoped that the thing wouldn’t work and that we would be absolved’20 seems sharply at odds with his furious advocacy of the bomb’s development – as do his enthusiastic, congratulatory notes to Lawrence and Groves as the weapon neared completion. Given the insistence and the energy he had shown in getting the bomb project to that point, it is difficult to entirely accept his revisionist regret.
His post-Hiroshima viewpoint certainly aligned with the small but vocal group of Manhattan Project scientists – Niels Bohr most notable among them – who made it known as the bomb program neared completion that deploying it against enemy civilians was an act no civilised nation should countenance.
By that stage of the war, Nazi Germany had been defeated. Before that, the all-consuming race to unlock the secrets of the atomic bomb seemed to have blinded these more altruistic members of the scientific community to the realities of global warfare. Or perhaps they hoped that the war would be completed by conventional means before any protagonist had perfected the weapon, at which time it might become an all-powerful deterrent against any future multilateral conflicts, as it has – in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities – proven to be.
The other possibility is that Oliphant understood all along what the end result would be once he and his colleagues had solved the enormous scientific conundrum on which they had been set to work. And that it was only when he was faced with the unspeakable consequences of his endeavours that his conscience dictated he spend the rest of his life preaching regret.
* * *
Where he remained utterly consistent, however, was on the other question regularly posed about his unrelenting campaign to ensure that the complex theory of atomic weaponry became cruel reality. That being: what would Ernest Rutherford have thought had he lived into his seventies, and borne witness to the horrific events of the Second World War?
Oliphant would be forever haunted by what he believed to be the unspoken judgment of his scientific inspiration, his fellow Antipodean, his closest friend.
At the heart of those feelings was Oliphant’s awareness, drawn from their years of close professional and personal connection, of Rutherford’s disdain for warfare – as well as his deep fear that the power of the atom he famously split at the close of the First World War might be hijacked for military and political purposes.
‘We, who worked with Rutherford and enjoyed his trust and friendship, often wonder what “the Prof” would think of this terrible prostitution of knowledge for which he, above all men, was responsible,’ Oliphant would muse decades after Hiroshima.21
A hallmark of Rutherford’s remarkable research career was his capacity to ‘see’ experimental results before they were achieved. His instinctive feel for atomic structure seemingly allowed him to know what he would find from the moment he began searching.
In delivering a speech at Manchester’s New Islington Town Hall at the bloody height of the First World War, Rutherford visualised the potential of nuclear energy, but feared for its use in such a climate of conflict. Later he also expressed grave worry over the increasing threat posed by military aircraft, and their potential to terrorise defenceless civilian populations.
Oliphant would reflect on those thoughts in a dissertation on his mentor’s enduring significance, delivered a century after Rutherford’s birth:
[Rutherford] said that scientists wanted to ascertain how they could release at will the intrinsic energy contained in radium and utilise it for our own purposes.
It had to be borne in mind that in releasing such energy at such a rate as we may desire, it would be possible from one pound of the material to obtain as much energy practically as from one hundred million pounds of coal. Fortunately, at the present time, we had not found a method of so dealing with these forces, and personally he was very hopeful that we should not discover it until Man was living at peace with his neighbours.22
As Oliphant knew from stinging experience, Rutherford regularly and vigorously espoused his belief that the atom was a sink for energy, rather than a reservoir. But in quieter moments, he also let slip his worries about whether his beloved nucleus might one day be mined for its rich treasures.
In the aftermath of one atom-splitting experiment, when asked where the research path led from that point, Rutherford replied wistfully: ‘Who knows? We are entering no-man’s land.’23
Yet he also had a canny idea of where such pursuits might lead. At a Royal Society Banquet in 1930, Rutherford approached Lord Hankey – then Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence – to discreetly canvass a topic the older professor thought was of some significance. Rutherford’s unerring instincts told him the nuclear transformation experiments he was overseeing at the Cavendish, years before fission was a known concept, might one day prove to be important to Britain’s defence. He was not sure precisely how, but he counselled Hankey that it might be worthwhile to ‘keep an eye on the matter’.24
It was in recognition of these ambiguities, as much as an unwillingness to speak for his departed and much-missed friend and teacher, that Oliphant routinely parried the question about Rutherford’s likely response to the bomb.
Oliphant would rightly assert that Rutherford played no direct part in the evolution of nuclear weapons; after all, his death came a year before the discovery of uranium fission. However, Oliphant also acknowledged that the atomic quest launched by that finding – then pursued at gathering speed to its horrific conclusion – had its roots firmly in Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory.
He did not live to experience the excitement created by the discovery by Hahn and Strassmann, in 1938, of the fission process, or the beautiful work of Frisch and Meitner which established clearly that the uranium nucleus could indeed split into two parts when it absorbed a neutron.
If he had lived, he would have rejoiced in the subsequent triumphs of Lawrence and his colleagues in the Radiation Laboratory. But he would have regretted that his nuclear atom had become of such practical importance that the main motives for the financial support of such work, in all countries, became other than the advance of the knowledge of nature.25
Oliphant had been drawn to nuclear physics by the purity of Rutherford’s vision. His lingering remorse over science’s subversion was mitigated by relief that Rutherford remained eternally oblivious to the causes for which his nucle
ar insights were taken hostage.
‘I am sure that he would agree that the preservation of no “ism’, no way of life, no political system, all of which are ephemeral, could justify the manufacture or use of these diabolic weapons,’ Oliphant would reason.26
‘Many who worked with him and knew him well have tried to visualise his reaction to the terrible possibilities which the new things in science make probable . . . Although we accept the fruits of the new spirit and of the new regard of the world for the scientific wizards whom it fears, at least we know that his view was right and ours is wrong. For him, our compromise would have been impossible.’27
‘We couldn’t have done anything else,’ Oliphant would ultimately say, ruminating on the conflict between his beloved science and the ends for which it was used, ‘but we have killed a beautiful subject.’28
EPILOGUE
Birmingham and Australia, 1945 to 2000
‘You’re a bloody fool!’
Mark Oliphant was pacing up and down the platform of London’s Victoria railway station with fellow expatriate Howard Florey, a recently ordained Nobel laureate three years Oliphant’s senior. ‘You know if you leave this country you’ll be committing scientific hari kari,’ Florey thundered above the shunting engines.
Oliphant and his family had arrived at the station as it bustled with early summer traffic in July 1950, preparing for the short ride to Tilbury Docks. There, on the opposite bank of the Thames Estuary at Gravesend, James Smith Olifent and his kin had embarked for their new life in Australia in 1854. And now, almost a century later, the RMS Orcades – a replacement for the vessel of the same name sunk by Germany during the war – would convey Mark, Rosa and teenagers Michael and Vivian Oliphant on their third across-the-world voyage inside a decade.
Mark Oliphant was about to take his boldest ever leap of faith: signing on as a founding father of Canberra’s Australian National University. Florey – who, along with historian and fellow expatriate Keith Hancock, had declined a similar offer – had travelled to London from Oxford, where he was Professor of Pathology. He had come not only to bid farewell to Oliphant, but also to offer some parting counsel to his friend, who he feared was courting professional disaster.
* * *
Had he sought personal reward, Mark Oliphant might easily have returned to America at war’s end. He was offered several senior positions, among them a role with his scientific soulmate Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley. All of them carried, as Oliphant pointedly advised Sir Edward Appleton during their tussles over Tube Alloys, ‘a much greater salary than any available in the UK’.1
But Oliphant returned from America in early 1945 with the aim of completing his long-stalled cyclotron project at Birmingham, and transforming it into an even more powerful machine than the ones Lawrence had devised, based on ideas he had formulated while with the Manhattan Project. His ambitious plans for a proton-synchrotron – a design of particle accelerator as yet unknown to the scientific world that relied less heavily on giant magnets – would overshadow the vast machinery at rival institutions, including Berkeley.
The initial price tag of £200,000 (almost £8 million today) for equipment alone seemed reasonable to Oliphant, given the scale of investments he had witnessed during the war. What he failed to recognise was the marked shift in thinking and circumstances, now the world was at peace. He quickly found Britain’s post-war economic situation even more restrictive than that he had confronted on first pursuing his cyclotron idea a decade earlier.
Consequently when, in 1946, he was invited to London’s Savoy Hotel to meet with Australia’s prime minister, Ben Chifley, and hear of bold plans to establish a world-leading research university in the nation’s capital city – but academic backwater – Canberra, the physicist’s curiosity was roused. It sounded, after all, a similar proposition to that which had lured Rutherford to Montreal a half-century before: a move that had brought historic results.
In the spirit of his partnerships with Rutherford and then Lawrence, Oliphant sensed an affinity for the vision outlined by Chifley, the son of a blacksmith who had risen to the nation’s top office through the ranks of the railways. Oliphant’s loss of faith through Churchill’s deceit was partially redeemed as he listened to Chifley expound his views on the importance of universities to the global post-war recovery effort.
‘I began to see that politics was not always just a power game,’ Oliphant later reflected. ‘That there were people like Chifley who thought very deeply and sincerely about the problems of mankind. I suddenly knew I had met a politician with a profound feeling for humanity.’2
Despite his own misgivings, and the warning of Florey that ‘what you’ll find when you get there . . . [is] a lot of promises, and a hole in the ground’, Oliphant’s need to grasp fresh projects led him to make the decision to return to the land of his birth. He left the still-unfinished cyclotron in the hands of Philip Moon, who also succeeded him as Birmingham’s Poynting Professor of Physics.
With Peto packed up, the family sailed for the glorified country town turned national capital that – rather like the ‘book colonies’ from which Oliphant and Rutherford hailed – had been purpose-built from the foundation stone upwards.
Beset by teething problems, internecine squabbles and political interference from bureaucrats and rival universities, which foresaw precious funds being diverted to what they deemed an unnecessary project, the picture painted by Chifley of a brave new enterprise struggled to take shape. Oliphant spent more resources fighting administrative battles than pursuing meaningful science at the ANU. His primary dream of establishing the world’s most powerful proton-synchrotron repeatedly stumbled into those holes of which Florey had warned, and was never realised in the form proposed. Reimagined and reconfigured as an ambitious homopolar generator, free of iron magnets, the huge machine was cruelly dubbed ‘The White Oliphant’.
Almost from the time he arrived back in Australia, Mark Oliphant also faced personal trials. Barely a year after he had settled in Canberra, his mother Beatrice died aged eighty-three. Then, in 1963 – the year in which Mark’s father Baron died – his now-adult son Michael began to develop numerous health problems. He underwent surgery in 1969, which found cancer in his stomach that had spread to his liver. He died in Melbourne in late January 1970, at the age of thirty-five and with his wife Monica more than eight months pregnant.
As Mark Oliphant’s prior experience had taught him to do, he turned to his work to serve as grief’s trusted outlet. By that time, his renown had grown to include a title.
In the first year of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign in 1952, she agreed to appoint Oliphant a Knight Bachelor: an honour that he declined, just as he had in 1942. But he finally accepted a knighthood seven years later at the insistence of Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who convinced him it would aid the wider cause of scientific advancement in Australia: the same justification expressed by Rutherford when he was elevated to life peerage.
Oliphant was also chosen to lead Australia’s delegation at the UN’s first conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy held in Geneva in 1955. Two years later, he joined fellow scientists, including Max Born and Frederic Joliot-Curie, and several from the Soviet Union, at the inaugural Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, which lobbied for the ban of nuclear weapons in war. It was a forum that Oliphant long considered among his most important post-war projects, along with establishing the Australian Academy of Science, an Antipodean offshoot of Britain’s Royal Society, for which he received a charter from Queen Elizabeth II in 1954.
As the years passed, Oliphant’s abhorrence for nuclear weapons evolved into a distaste towards atomic energy sourced from enriched uranium. Instead, he began to champion the potential of the universe’s largest fusion generator – the sun – as the optimum means of meeting earth’s energy needs.
After retiring from the ANU, he was named Governor of South Australia in 1971 and so became the first locally born appointee, as well as the first s
cientist to hold a role historically reserved for military men. He served a five-year term at Government House, where the immaculate grounds abutted Adelaide’s former destitute asylum, once overseen by his great-grandfather, and the State Library where he had worked as an adolescent.
By the early 1980s, Rosa Oliphant was exhibiting symptoms of dementia, and following a serious fall in 1983 she was admitted to a nursing home in Adelaide. In January 1987, as her condition deteriorated, she was transferred to palliative care, where Mark, maintained a bedside vigil, just as Mary Rutherford had done to comfort her stricken husband fifty years earlier.
It was there, as Mark gently held her hand, from which the delicate wedding band he had fashioned had been removed to protect her fragile skin, that Rosa died calmly in her sleep.
Mark subsequently returned to Canberra, where he lived in a small flat at the rear of his daughter Vivian’s home. Though his mind remained agile, he became increasingly physically frail and died on 14 July 2000, three months from his ninety-ninth birthday.
He had stipulated none of the ceremony or symbolism that had adorned Rutherford’s funeral and internment at Westminster Abbey. Instead, Oliphant wanted the plainest of coffins, a perfunctory service attended only by immediate family, no flowers ‘to wilt away’, cremation as soon as practicable, and for his ashes to be scattered at Cleland Conservation Park in his cherished Adelaide Hills.
He wanted to be released to eternal rest within walking range of Mylor – as Cleland Park would certainly have been for the intrepid Oliphant boys, in the days when they trekked bush paths and forged their own tracks through the eucalyptus forests and flint-dry bracken, a world apart from the lush lawns and entrenched formality of Cambridge.
It was his home terrain, where the only scintillations witnessed were explosions of golden wattle against a screen of mottled green, transmuting to brown under summer’s ferocity. Where the only laughter that split the stillness and echoed off ancient stones was the comforting peal of the kookaburra. Where the world’s physical wonders endure, immutable and undisturbed, as they have for millennia.
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