Why it's really the British we have to thank for the atom bomb

Telegraph

16 hours ago

Manhattan, Mayson, Maud. One of these is synonymous with the race to build an atomic bomb during the first half of the 1940s. But we ought to have heard of all three, argues Gareth Williams in his book The Impossible Bomb – a pacy and potent mix of wartime politics and high technology.
Williams sets out to recover the role of British scientists in building the bomb, but there's no triumphalism here. Pinned to a noticeboard in his study, Williams tells us, is a black lapel badge bearing the logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Now an emeritus professor at the University of Bristol, Williams grew up in the post-war years fearing that he might see a 'mushroom cloud boiling up into the sky above the rooftops'.
Williams was motivated to write this book after discovering some declassified government papers pertaining to a secretive 'Maud Committee'. He later heard a scientist who'd worked on the British hydrogen bomb make a striking claim: that without Britain's help, the United States wouldn't have been able to create a working atomic bomb until after the Second World War ended.
This isn't, it must be said, a new idea. As Williams accepts, it was put forward by a war correspondent named Ronald Clark back in 1961. But myth-making in America about the birth of the nuclear age has long sidelined British figures, and still does. American Prometheus (2005), the Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin biography on which the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer (2023) was based, all but reduces the British contribution to a man hosting a dinner party at Los Alamos.
After some helpful preliminaries on the history of atomic physics, The Impossible Bomb begins in the 1930s, as trepidation among scientists is growing. The destructive potential of splitting the atom is dawning on them, just as Europe appears once again to be moving towards war. The Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard begs colleagues to stop publishing their ideas on nuclear fission, and asks the editor of Physical Review to record the date of manuscript submissions on the subject – thereby preserving claims to originality – then lock them away in a drawer. When these efforts meet with mixed results, Szilard helps to compose a letter to US president Franklin D Roosevelt in 1939 – co-signed by Albert Einstein – urging that America try to beat Nazi Germany to the bomb.
This moment is often treated as the origin of the Manhattan Project. But Williams argues that most scientists in the United States were, at this point, unconvinced that an atomic weapon was feasible in the near-term. They were more interested in developing radar, and were confident that if America were drawn into the war, their conventional forces would see them through. In the early years of the conflict, the most promising work on a bomb was happening in Britain.
Enter Maud, a committee formed in Britain in the spring of 1940. (Though its name was written in capitals as MAUD, and thus was usually taken to be an acronym, the letters didn't stand for anything.) It came about in response to a document created by two expatriate German physicists working at the University of Birmingham: Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls. The Frisch-Peierls memorandum sketched out the theory behind a 'super-bomb', to be created using uranium-235. By the summer, Williams tells us, Maud involved four universities (Cambridge, Oxford, Liverpool, Birmingham) and boasted five Nobel laureates, including James Chadwick and John Cockcroft. In its final report, in 1941, the committee concluded that a super-bomb could be made in two years: great excitement followed, and an organisation was formed to work on the project, with the usefully abstract name of the 'Tube Alloys Directorate'.
Williams excels at interweaving the technical challenges of the subsequent months with the vicissitudes of politics. We find Churchill and Roosevelt wary of one another, at first, on the question of atomic co-operation. 'Mayson' was Roosevelt's proposal for Anglo-American partnership; but for a time, at least, Churchill wanted a British bomb, independent of the Americans.
It wasn't to be. American help turned out to be indispensable in building a 'super-bomb'. In the end, British scientists had to set aside their own work on Tube Alloys and travel to the USA – to Los Alamos, Berkeley and Oak Ridge – to help on what became the Manhattan Project. Chadwick was among around 84 British scientists making the journey, and neither of the bombs detonated over Japan in August 1945, concludes Williams, would have been possible without them.
Through Frisch and Peierls, we experience the profound anxiety of Jewish refugees living in Britain during these years; they were only too aware of how they would likely fare if the Nazis won the race to build a bomb. Across the water in Germany, great minds such as Werner Heisenberg were hard at work trying to make that happen. We encounter British and American spies working around the clock to ascertain the state of the Nazi effort, and to thwart it wherever they could. The Americans considered abducting Heisenberg during one of his research trips to Switzerland.
Williams's labours in the archive have been considerable, but the result is a significant contribution to our understanding of 'the most significant international collaboration of the 20th century'. It's eminently readable, too: to follow the development of nuclear weapons requires the explanation of plenty of science, but Williams succeeds, deploying vivid analogies and simple sketches. A spherical aluminium container for a globe of uranium oxide, constantly turning in order to keep heavy water circulating, is an especially memorable one. Williams compares it to 'an oversized glitterball that someone had forgotten to switch off after the last dance'.
★★★★★