The Basis of Everything
Page 41
3.Henry Tizard, letter to Wing Commander William Elliott, 4 May 1940, National Archives, London, Series AB 1/222.
4.Frisch, What Little I Remember, p 128.
5.Guy Hartcup and Thomas Allibone, Cockcroft and the Atom, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1984, p 121.
6.Clark, Tizard, p 221.
7.Oliphant in Rolph (ed.), Fifty Years of the Cavity Magnetron, p 10.
8.Ibid.
9.David Nichols (ed), Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Dispatches, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986, p 42.
10.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 82.
11.Mark Oliphant, written recollections (undated), Oliphant Collection, Series 20.
12.‘Report by the MAUD Committee on the Use of Uranium for a Bomb’, National Archives, Series AB 1/238.
13.Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p 343.
14.‘Report by the MAUD Committee on the Use of Uranium for a Bomb’, National Archives.
15.Ibid.
16.Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p 372.
17.Ibid.
18.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 109.
19.Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb, Faber & Faber, London, 2013, p 200.
20.Clark, Tizard, p 298.
21.Silvan Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008, p 45.
22.Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, American Institute of Physics, Woodbury, 1996, p 14.
23.Archibald Hill, ‘Uranium-235’, 16 May 1940, National Archives London, Series AB 1/222.
19. ‘Meddling Foreigner’
1.Mark Oliphant, letter to George Thomson, 9 August 1941, National Archives, London, Series AB 15/6077.
2.Mark Oliphant, ‘The Beginning: Chadwick and the Neutron’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol 38, No 10, December 1982, p 17.
3.Jeremy Bernstein, ‘A Memorandum that Changed the World’, American Journal of Physics, Vol 79, No 5, May 2011, p 446.
4.Williams, op cit.
5.Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, Jonathan Cape, London, 1969, p 112.
6.William Coolidge, letter to Frank Jewett, 13 September 1941, Oliphant Collection, Series 11.
7.Davis, op cit, p 113.
8.Hiltzik, op cit, p 15.
9.Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p 373.
10.Oliphant, ‘The Two Ernests’, p 52, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
11.Peter Michelmore, The Swift Years: The Robert Oppenheimer Story, Dodd, Mead & Co, New York, 1969, p 66.
12.Mark Oliphant, ‘MAUD: Notes on Conversation with E.O. Lawrence in Berkeley’, 25 September 1941, National Archives, London, Series AB 1/709.
13.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 108.
14.Szasz, op cit, p 5.
15.Spencer Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1978, excerpt in The Bulletin (Sydney), April 1979, p 29.
16.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 108.
17.Williams, op cit.
18.Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, Henry Holt & Co, New York, 2002, p 40.
19.Davis, op cit, p 114.
20.Franklin Roosevelt, letter to Winston Churchill, 11 October 1941, National Archives, London, Series PREM 3/139/8A.
21.Raymond Priestley, diary, 6–14 October 1941, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, XUS38 2/4.
20. A Misguided Mission
1.Cockburn, interview with Rosa Oliphant, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
2.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 113.
3.Raymond Priestley, diary, 21–28 February 1942, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, XUS38 2/4.
4.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 92.
5.Cockburn, interview with Rosa Oliphant, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
6.Robert Nimmo, draft of telegram to Mark Oliphant per David Rivett, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, 30F/3.
7.Mark Oliphant, telegram to Robert Nimmo, 3 June 1942, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, 30F/3.
8.J.M. Martin, letter to Robert Nimmo, 4 June 1942, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, 30F/3.
9.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 111.
10.Raymond Priestley, diary, 20 August 1945, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, XUS38 2/6.
11.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 112.
12.Szasz, op cit, p 6.
13.Ibid, p 12.
21. Manhattan
1.Oliphant, ‘The Beginning: Chadwick and the Neutron’, op cit, p 18.
2.Kenneth Nichols, ‘The Road to Trinity’, in Cynthia Kelly (ed), The Manhattan Project, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York, 2009, p 121.
3.Robert Serber, Peace and War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, p 72.
4.Szasz, op cit, p xvii.
5.Robert Norris, Racing for the Bomb: The True Story of General Leslie R. Groves, Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont, 2002, p 528.
6.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 112.
7.Mark Oliphant, letter to General Leslie Groves, 27 November 1943, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
8.Ibid.
9.Mark Oliphant, letter to Ernest Lawrence, 16 February 1944, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
10.Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p 373.
11.James Chadwick, letter to General Leslie Groves, 23 January 1945, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
12.Oliphant, ‘The Beginning: Chadwick and the Neutron’, op cit, p 18.
13.Raymond Priestley, diary, 11–17 December 1944, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, XUS38 2/6.
14.Letter from Mark Oliphant to Ernest Lawrence, 16 March 1945, quoted in Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 122.
15.Mark Oliphant, letter to General Leslie Groves, 3 July 1945, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
22. ‘Death, the Shatterer of Worlds’
1.Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Bloomsbury, New York, 2017, p 275.
2.Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p 419.
3.Serber, op cit, p 91.
4.Leslie Groves, ‘Memorandum to Secretary of War: Subject – The Test’, 18 July 1945, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
5.Ibid.
6.Ibid.
7.Robin Hughes, op cit.
8.Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1953, p 638.
9.Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p 699.
10.Ibid.
23. ‘We Have Killed a Beautiful Subject’
1.‘The First Real Holiday’, The Times (London), 6 August 1945, p 2.
2.Wallace Akers, telegram to Tube Alloys scientists, 4 August 1945, National Archives, London, Series AB 1/53.
3.‘The First Atomic Bomb Hits Japan’, The Times (London), 7 August 1945, p 4.
4.Richard Kisch, ‘Mark Oliphant Wages War on Bomb Secrecy’, The News (Adelaide), 17 November 1945, p 2.
5.‘The First Atomic Bomb Hits Japan’, The Times (London), op cit.
6.Ibid.
7.Hugh Warren, letter to Wallace Akers, 8 August 1945, National Archives, London, Series AB 1/53.
8.Stewart Cockburn, interview with David Robertson, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
9.Cockburn, interview with Mark Oliphant, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
10.Serber, op cit, p 91.
11.Mark Oliphant, article for Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 1979, Oliphant Collection, Series 20.
12.Williams, op cit.
13.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p xiii.
14.Joffe, op cit.
15.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 126.
16.Anna Rothe (ed), Current Biography: Who’s New and Why, H.H. Wilson Co, New York, 1951, p 468.
17.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 134.
18.Margaret Gowing
, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–1952, Macmillan Press, London, 1974, p 323.
19.Robin Hughes, op cit.
20.Mark Oliphant, interviewed on The Scientists radio program, 16 September (year not recorded), Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
21.Oliphant, ‘The Significance of Rutherford Today’, Oliphant Collection, Series 4.
22.Ibid.
23.Larsen, op cit, p 73.
24.Clark, Birth of the Bomb, p 153.
25.Oliphant, ‘The Two Ernests’, pp 51–52, Oliphant Collection, Series 26.
26.Oliphant, ‘The Significance of Rutherford Today’, Oliphant Collection, Series 4.
27.Oliphant, speech to the Physical Society (UK), Special Collections, University of Birmingham.
28.C.P. Snow, The Physicists, House of Stratus, Looe, Cornwall, 2001, p 2.
Epilogue
1.Mark Oliphant, letter to Edward Appleton, 14 February 1945, National Archives, London, Series AB 1/690.
2.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 146.
3.Robin Hughes, op cit.
4.Andrade, op cit, p 70.
5.Cockburn and Ellyard, op cit, p 130.
6.Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, ‘Status of World Nuclear Forces’, Federation of American Scientists, June 2018, fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces.
7.Peter Baker and Choe Sang-Hun, ‘Trump Threatens “Fire and Fury” Against North Korea if it Endangers US’, New York Times, 8 August 2017, p 1.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collections
Oliphant Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Adelaide
Series AB, PREM, National Archives, London
Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia Special Collections, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham
Interviews
David Gregory, ‘On the Right Side of Wrong’, interview with Otto Frisch, BBC Midlands, Birmingham, 17 February 2000
Robin Hughes, interview with Mark Oliphant, Australian Biography, 20 January 1992, www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/oliphant/interview1.html
Mick Joffe, ‘Sir Mark Oliphant: Reluctant Builder of the Atom Bomb’, 1996, Mick Joffe Caricatures, www.mickjoffe.com/Sir_Mark_Oliphant
Andrew Ramsey, interview with Monica Oliphant, Adelaide, November 2017
Robyn Williams, interview with Mark Oliphant, The Science Show, ABC Radio, Sydney, 1986
Newspapers and Magazines
The Advertiser (Adelaide), trove.nla.gov.au
Birmingham Gazette
Birmingham Mail
Birmingham Post
The Bulletin (Sydney), trove.nla.gov.au
Evening Despatch (Birmingham)
Independent (London)
New York Times
Newcastle Journal and North Mail
The News (Adelaide), trove.nla.gov.au
The Register (Adelaide), trove.nla.gov.au
Sunday Express (London)
Sydney Morning Herald, trove.nla.gov.au
The Times (London)
Washington Post
Books, Journal Articles and Webpages
Edward Andrade, Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom, Heinemann, London, 1965
Lawrence Badash, ‘Nagaoka to Rutherford, 22 February 1911’, Physics Today, Vol 20, No 4, April 1967, pp 55–60
James Phinney Baxter, Scientists Against Time, Little, Brown & Co, Boston, 1946
Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, American Institute of Physics, Woodbury, New York, 1996
—— ‘A Memorandum that Changed the World’, American Journal of Physics, Vol 79, No 5, May 2011, pp 440–46
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005
J.B. Birks (ed), Rutherford at Manchester, Heywood & Co, London, 1962
Brebis Bleaney, ‘Sir Mark (Marcus Laurence Elwin) Oliphant A.C., K.B.E.’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, No 47, 1 November 2001, pp 383–93
Niels Bohr, ‘The Right Hon. Lord Rutherford of Nelson, O.M., F.R.S’, Nature, Vol 140, No 3548, 30 October 1937, pp 752–53
John Campbell, Rutherford’s Ancestors, AAS Publications, Christchurch, 1996
—— Rutherford: Scientist Supreme, AAS Publications, Christchurch, 1999
David Cassidy, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century, Pi Press, New York, 2005
Brian Cathcart, The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom, Viking, London, 2004
Neville Chamberlain, ‘Declaration of War’, 30 September 1939, BBC Archives www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ww2outbreak/7957.shtml?page=txt
Herbert Childs, An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, E.P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1968
Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1953
Ronald Clark, Birth of the Bomb, Phoenix House, London, 1961
—— Tizard, Methuen & Co, London, 1965
Stewart Cockburn and David Ellyard, Oliphant, Axiom Books, Adelaide, 1981
Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative, Oxford University Press, London, 1956
J.G. Crowther, British Scientists of the Twentieth Century, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1952
Marcus Cunliffe, ‘America at the Great Exhibition of 1851’, American Quarterly, Vol 3, No 2, Summer 1951, pp 115–26
Per Dahl, Flash of the Cathode Rays: A History of J.J. Thomson’s Electron, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, 1997
Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, Jonathan Cape, London, 1969
Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1928
Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Bloomsbury, New York, 2017
Arthur Eve, Rutherford: The Life and Letters of the Rt Hon. Lord Rutherford O.M., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1939
Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb, Faber & Faber, London, 2013
Otto Frisch, What Little I Remember, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979
Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, ‘Frisch–Peierls Memorandum, March 1940’, Atomic Archive, www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Begin/FrischPeierls.shtml
R.M. Gibbs, Under the Burning Sun, Southern Heritage, Adelaide, 2013
Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–1945, Macmillan Press, London, 1964
—— Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–1952, Macmillan Press, London, 1974
Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, André Deutsch, London, 1963
Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2011
Guy Hartcup and Thomas Allibone, Cockcroft and the Atom, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1984
John Heilbron and Robert Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1989
John Hendry (ed), Cambridge Physics in the Thirties, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1984
Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, Henry Holt & Co, New York, 2002
James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima – The Making of the Nuclear Age, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993
Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson Jr, The New World 1939–1946: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, 1962
Michael Hiltzik, Big Science, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2015
Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler: Collection of Speeches 1922–1945, archive.org/details/AdolfHitlerCollectionOfSpeeches19221945
Timothy Jorgensen, Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2016
Cynthia Kelly (ed), The Manhattan Project, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York, 2009
Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, ‘Status of World Nuclear Forces’, Federation of American Scientists, fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces
William Lanouette (with Bela Silard), Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, Scribner, New York, 1992
Egon Larsen, The Cavendish Laboratory: Nursery of Genius, Edmund Ward, London, 1962
Rob Linn, The Spirit of Knowledge: A Social History of the University of Adelaide, Barr Smith Press, Adelaide, 2011
Malcolm Longair, Maxwell’s Enduring Legacy: A Scientific History of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016
Robin McKown, Giant of the Atom: Ernest Rutherford, Julian Messner, New York, 1962
Frederick Mann, Lord Rutherford on the Golf Course, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976
Peter Michelmore, The Swift Years: The Robert Oppenheimer Story, Dodd, Mead & Co, New York, 1969
Ann Moyal, Portraits in Science, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1994
David Nichols (ed), Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Dispatches, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986
Ted Nield, ‘Beyond the Call of Duty’, New Scientist, Vol 123, No 1681, 9 September 1989, p 77
Robert Norris, Racing for the Bomb: The True Story of General Leslie R. Groves, Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont, 2002
Hans C. Ohanian, Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius, Norton & Co, New York, 2008
Mark Oliphant, Rutherford: Recollections of the Cambridge Days, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1972
—— ‘Some Personal Recollections of Rutherford, the Man’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, Vol 27, No 1, August 1972, pp 7–23
—— ‘The Beginning: Chadwick and the Neutron’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol 38, No 10, December 1982, pp 14–18
—— ‘Sir Mark Oliphant’ in Peter Rolph (ed), Fifty Years of the Cavity Magnetron: Proceedings of a One-Day Symposium, 21 February 1990, Birmingham University School of Physics and Space Research, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, 1990
Abraham Pais, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life, Oxford University Press, New York, 2006
Rudolf Peierls, Bird of Passage: Recollections of a Physicist, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985