
Manhattan Project: Australian physicist alerted Britain to US secrecy plan - techrede
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/manhattan-project-australian-physicist-alerted-britain-to-us-secrecy-plan
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InTheArena
It's worth realizing that this was at a time that the United States was
working on a plan to place all nuclear research (weapons and otherwise) under
the UN, and subject to UN agreements. The UK and the Russians opposed this,
and the idea basically died. At the same time, the US shut down (for a year)
both the lend-lease and the atomic research programs, feeling that they were
no longer needed after the war. After the cold war got going, they restarted
both. It was too late for the British. Atlee started work on a "independent
nuclear policy" in 1947.

Lookup the Acheson-Lilienthal Report in 1946. It's a fascinating "road not
taken".

~~~
Luc
Richard Rhodes writes about these subject in 'The Making of Hydrogen Bomb' and
'Arsenals of Folly', but I wouldn't summarize it the way you did...

~~~
InTheArena
Richard Rhodes had a particular axe to grind. I would suggest looking at
Atcheson and primary sources before Rhodes. You are also mixing titles -
Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun and Arsenals of Folly.

Making of the Atomic Bomb is amazing... but also bone chilling when you
realize that scientists were basically advocating a dictatorship of
technocrats.

~~~
zeth___
Given post war history, can you say it would have been much worse than what
we've had?

The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democracy
while making a dictatorship of the billionaires.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democracy
> while making a dictatorship of the billionaires.

The political system was even more run by the elites 60 years ago. For one
example, we raise issues now that party insiders or elite-written election
rules may somewhat distort the results of the primaries (and caucuses that are
open to most party-registered voters, though they are more time consuming and
for that reason exclusionary than primaries), 60 years ago we had the same
partisan duopoly, without even a fig-leaf of meaningful primary elections,
where caucused were much more limited in participation.

~~~
zeth___
Yet today we have a system that benefits the rich far more than the one in
1958. This is what I mean by the forms of democracy. We have even quantified
it [0].

That we got the vote for blacks in the south isn't much of a win, from then on
the poor blacks along with the poor whites have been disenfranchised through
other means.

That we don't elect representative in smoke filled rooms doesn't mean much
when the control has moved to selecting who gets to vote in the primaries [1].

[0]
www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf

[1] [https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york-
primary...](https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york-primary-
voter-problem-polls-sanders-de-blasio/index.html)

~~~
jngreenlee
This is an incinderary comment: "benefits the rich far more than the one in
1958."

First, that would require a tremendous amount of data and an inherently biased
framework of benefits valuation to support.

Second, you can't demonstrate the opposite, namely, that without the first
happening, all others would have been better off. Sometimes wealth and
structural freedoms benefit all participants, not to the detriment of the
lower end, even when opportunity costs are included.

Not saying you are wrong, but your argument is.

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physicsguy
It's worth remembering the other people involved in this. Peierls and Frisch
worked under Oliphant at the University of Birmingham, and they wrote the
memorandum which formed a major part of the Tizard Mission to the US. This
also included the much better design for the Cavity Magnetron, also developed
in Birmingham by Randall and Boot, who also worked for Oliphant.

In 1943 a British delegation led by James Chadwick (who discovered the neutron
and won the 1935 Nobel Prize) went to work on the Manhattan Project, and
included Oliphant, Peierls and Frisch, as well as Klaus Fuchs (who it turned
out was a Soviet spy) and Tony Skyrme (more famous for his work on what later
became known as 'skyrmions'), all from Birmingham, the Danish Physicist Neils
Bohr (Nobel Prize winner in 1922) and Lord Cherwell who had invited Bohr to
England and who was an advisor to Churchill and who advocated area bombings of
Germany. The British techological 'Tube Alloys' programme was absorbed into
the Manhattan project.

Bohr advocated sharing the technological developments with the Russians, and
met both Churchill and Roosevelt in attempts to try and convince them of this.
The British mission basically left with the passing of the Atomic Energy Act
1946 which prohibited the sharing of nuclear secrets with allies by the US
government. It wasn't until a few years after the British developed their own
nuclear warheads (the first being the Blue Danube) that cooperation on nuclear
warhead technology began again in 1958.

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teachrdan
The heart of TFA:

 _Holden, however, reveals documents that indicate on one occasion he risked
leaking information of such potential magnitude that the FBI might well have
taken drastic action against him had he been discovered. Certainly, it
imperilled the cooperative relationship between the two nations regarding
weapons research – by revealing that the cooperation was, in fact, only going
one way._

 _The researcher details a 1944 meeting at Berkeley, California, between
Oliphant, Nobel laureate Ernest Lawrence and the military man in charge of the
Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves. At the fiery meeting, Groves –
usually a very discreet operator – let it slip that there were some parts of
the research that were not being shared with the British._

 _An imminent visit to Washington DC by one of Winston Churchill’s closest
advisors, Lord Cherwell, was to be an exercise in misdirection. Further,
Groves revealed, after the end of World War II the US intended to ensure that
nuclear weapons manufacture and the storage of nuclear material would happen
only in the central portions of North America._

 _Secretly appalled by this, Oliphant – Holden plausibly suggests – stopped
work almost immediately and then travelled, perhaps for three days on a train,
to the British embassy in Washington DC, and there sent a confidential memo to
the British authorities, blowing the whistle on the US intentions._

Was putting nuclear weapons manufacture and storage in the central parts of
the US part of keeping the technology secret?

~~~
madengr
Also further away from long range bombers, though I don't know if that was an
immediate concern prior to the cold war, but surely anticipated. Fissile
materials are made further towards the coasts, but production and assembly is
in Kansas City and Amarillo. Not to mention missile fields and bombers also in
the central states.

~~~
bpye
There is an interesting documentary about how Britain dealt with nuclear
materials despite not having remote locations like the US. It may be
"Windscale: Britain's Biggest Nuclear Disaster", but I'm sorry if that's the
wrong title.

~~~
madengr
Saw that recently on YouTube. A plutonium fire in an air cooled reactor; what
a mess.

~~~
sgt101
Luckily the chimney had a filter - known as a cockcrofts folly when it was
constructed.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-
cumbria-29803990](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-29803990)

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phendrenad2
Link to abstract:
[http://www.publish.csiro.au/HR/HR17023](http://www.publish.csiro.au/HR/HR17023)

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anon2457
The title suggest he was doing something secretive between three countries but
it should be noted that Australia didn’t have non-British passports until 1949
and at that stage Australia was still very much part of Britain.

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danieltillett
We might have had British passports, but we were certainly not part of
Britain.

~~~
anon2457
We had British passports and British currency. There was a lot of
nationalistic work put in after World War 2 so that Australia and NZ would see
themselves as completely separate countries.

~~~
danieltillett
No we had Australia currency. There certainly was a breakaway from Britain
during WWII after Churchill abandoned us and the USA came to our rescue.
Curtin pulling the Australian troops out of North Africa was probably the
point of no return.

It was a slow divorce from the empire, but it was well advance pre WWII.

In some ways the relationship of Australia (and NZ) was similar to that of the
countries of the EU. There was free movement of people (provided you were
white) and free trade around the empire, but most people thought of themselves
as citizens of their own countries.

