Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [38]
There existed, of course, the possibility that the other powers would not agree to Britain’s conditions. What then? Lady Campbell, the aristocratic mother of Jane Campbell, who was Parliamentary Secretary at the Foreign Office, was not terribly worried, and espoused an early version of nuclear monopoly deterrence that would become popular in Washington in a very few years:
‘War?’ said Lady Campbell, having resumed her knitting. ‘War with whom?’ ‘War with everybody,’ said Jane, swallowing her coffee in desperation.
‘But surely, my dear Jane, how ridiculous you are! If the bomb is as bad as all that, and if we have several of them, no one will dare to go to war. Not if we have enough of those bombs. Besides, in any case, darling, you can’t dash off like this directly after luncheon.’39
Science is experimentation, observation, the careful use of instruments and numbers and applied principles and techniques. It is also imagination, the ability to think beyond received wisdom and to see what the instruments offer the eyes despite what the brain stubbornly insists cannot be true. Not only British scientists, nor those from other places who were welcomed into British laboratories, were capable of imagination, as the work of Joliot and Curie, Fermi, Hahn, Strassmann, Meitner, and Frisch indicates. But it took H. G. Wells and Harold Nicolson to imagine the atomic bomb, and the revelation of Leo Szilard, the Hungarian soaking in his London bathtub, to grasp that the discovery of fission might lead to terrible weapons. Two others transplanted to Britain, Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, would in 1940 crystallize this understanding in a memo of extraordinary consequence. In the end, as Margaret Gowing has written, ‘Britain had been the midwife of this bomb.’40
THREE - Japan and Germany: Paths not Taken
There is nothing outwardly remarkable about the ore pitchblende. Samples of it are available in university geology laboratories, where they might be inspected by students or borrowed by school girls masquerading as Marie Curie at science fairs. Pitchblende is brown, gray, and black, with a lustre described in technical manuals as ‘greasy’, and it sometimes appears in clusters that resemble grapes on a vine. Madame Curie, who got her samples of pitchblende from Europe’s geological museums, discovered that the ore held small amounts of radium, which interested and delighted her; she and her husband, Pierre, filled test tubes with radium to show captivated visitors, and Marie kept a glassful of the stuff next to her bed for illumination. Pitchblende is the most common form of the mineral uraninite, which holds traces of radium, thorium, and polonium but is principally constituted of uranium oxide. It yields abundant uranium.
1. Finding uranium
The source of Curie’s museum pitchblende, and before the First World War the only known source of uranium anywhere, was Joachimsthal (or Jachymov) in northwestern Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary. The area, known as the Erzgebirge, is wooded and mountainous. It was first known for its silver, discovered there early in the sixteenth century and formed into coins by the local count. He called the coins ‘Joachimsthalers’, later contracted to ‘thalers’ and then ‘dollars’ in English. The silver ore appeared in the upper workings of the mine; cobalt, nickel, and bismuth came further down; at the lowest level, embedded in narrow veins that ran through dolomite and quartz, was pitchblende. The Renaissance scientist Georgius Agricola came to Joachimsthal to study the region’s minerals, to write the first serious book that classified minerals according to their properties, and to invest enough in the Gotsgaab (God’s Gift) mine to keep his family comfortable