Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [57]
The MAUD Report came also to Lyman Briggs, the director of the National Bureau of Standards who had in 1939 been designated by the president chair of the new Uranium Committee. Briggs’s admirers described him as conservative and methodical; those less inclined to charity found him maddening in his deliberateness and his seeming suspicion of nuclear physics, in which he was not trained. (He had studied soil for the Department of Agriculture.) Briggs mistrusted foreigners and had a mania for secrecy, and he tried to exclude Szilard and Fermi from his committee’s sessions. By 1940 he was 66 years old, inattentive at meetings, and worried about the effect on his reputation should his uranium project receive lavish funding yet fail to produce results. So he resisted lavish funding. Prodded by Bush, Roosevelt had in June 1940 placed the Uranium Committee under the control of Bush’s newly established NDRC. But the Uranium Committee retained bureaucratic authority over the nuclear program, and Briggs could still mount obstructions if he wished to. When he got his copy of the MAUD Report in July 1941, Briggs promptly put it in his safe without showing it to the other committee members. MAUD’s conclusions, Briggs thought, were too sensitive to remain in the light of day.4
Marcus Oliphant, the Australian-born Rutherford student who worked on radar and nuclear physics at the University of Birmingham and was a member of the MAUD Committee, was one of those who wondered why the Americans had seemed to respond so tepidly to the MAUD Report’s extraordinary conclusions. In late August, just as Adolf Hitler was escalating the air war against Britain, he flew to the United States seeking answers. In Washington he met Briggs, who reassured him that the report was tucked away safe from the prying eyes of other Uranium Committee members. Oliphant registered his dismay. Granted an audience with the committee as a whole, Oliphant pointedly and frequently used the word ‘bomb’ to describe what MAUD had recommended, and he insisted that the Americans, the only ones able to spare the $25 million he thought the bomb would cost, had a responsibility to build it. Not satisfied with the response, Oliphant flew to California in early September and in Berkeley met the practical-minded physicist Ernest Lawrence. Here, at last, he found someone who shared his sense of urgency about a possible nuclear weapon. Lawrence showed Oliphant around his Berkeley facility and talked of using great machines to separate uranium and create plutonium. Oliphant told him of the MAUD conclusions; Lawrence paced worriedly among the eucalyptus trees as he heard Oliphant out. (Robert Oppenheimer joined the men afterward in Lawrence’s office, and there heard, for the first time, about interest in building an atomic bomb.) Lawrence promised to help, and immediately called Bush and Conant and urged them to see Oliphant. Both subsequently did so, though both were coy about how much they already knew about chain reactions and fast neutrons, and Conant was as uncomfortably evasive as he had been in England earlier that year— Oliphant’s news was ‘gossip among nuclear physicists’, he said. Oliphant also saw Enrico Fermi, who seemed to him as skeptical and cautious as Bush and Conant had been. As Richard Rhodes writes: ‘Oliphant returned to Birmingham wondering if he had made any impression at all.’5
2. The Americans get serious
He had. On a chill September evening, shortly after Oliphant’s departure from the United States, Arthur Compton welcomed Lawrence and Conant into his Chicago living room.