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Fathers of the Bomb, Part IV; the British article by Jennifer Lake In 1943 a contingent of physicists from the "British Mission" headed for Los Alamos to join the collaborative Manhattan Project in the mountains of New Mexico. Only months earlier in August of '42, a formal pact had been signed between FDR and Winston Churchill, uniting the efforts of the governments of the U.S., England and Canada in producing an atomic bomb. The Quebec Agreement induced a palliative spirit of cooperation among the uneasy allies but issues of security and technology-trading divisively remained throughout the Project's duration, overshadowed by the expeditious demands of wartime. These issues erupted in the Cold War that followed, exposing the guiding hand of the British as the enablers of global espionage and a clearinghouse for the new Order of the ages. As the combatants of WWII took up their positions in 1933, certain Britons launched a campaign to "save science" and safeguard their imperialistic hegemony in a post-colonial world. To that end, the Academic Assistance Council was established by national economist William Beveridge and physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford on May 24, 1933. William Beveridge, himself made a Lord in the 1950s, recruited physicist Leo Szilard in Vienna as a co-founder of the AAC. Through the eager administrations of Szilard, a massive recruitment of 'displaced' Jewish scientists and scholars found material support among the institutions that prosecuted the attack upon Germany and brought forth the most destructive weapons in existence. According to the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) in an article posted February 2009, the British economists, William Beveridge and Lionel Robbins, met Leo Szilard and Englishwoman Esther Simpson in a hotel in Vienna where the Austrian Ludwig von Mises informed them of the Nazi dismissals of Jewish academics. "On the spot" Beveridge laid out his outline for the Academic Assistance Council, convening a special meeting back home at the London School of Economics which was under his directorship. By July of '33, forty of Britain's most eminent scholars had signed a letter published in the Times championing the rescue of international scholarship and culminating in a media event on October 3 "in front of a packed audience in the Albert Hall...in a speech by Albert Einstein." (1). Despite the economic hard times everywhere of the Great Depression, room and quarter were made for the influx of 'refugees' in a system that did not have room for its own. Counterpart organizations and institutions were created in Britain, France, USA, Switzerland, and elsewhere to handle the unemployed. The AAC reported that at the outbreak of war, 2000 scholars had registered and prospered through its office. The AJR claims this figure to be two-thirds of the total displaced academics. (2). In 1933, year of the first wave of dismissals, 1,400 were said to have lost their jobs and the "recipient countries, principally the USA but also Britain, benefited hugely". "Britain was the first country to seriously study the feasibility of nuclear weapons" according to the www.nuclearweaponarchive.org. Perhaps with the homegrown talents of Ernest Rutherford and James Chadwick it was a continuation of a role previously well-mapped. Rutherford was called the "Father of the Atom" and sometimes the "Crocodile". Born and raised by Scottish émigrés in New Zealand, young Ernest returned to Cambridge for his post-doctoral work at the Cavendish Lab. In 1898 he was appointed to the chair of physics in Canada at McGill University where he pursued a study of newly discovered radioactivity. In 1907 he returned to England again to receive the chair of physics at Manchester University from Arthur Schuster, a Frankfurt born immigrant who used his family wealth to finance labs and equipment at the fledgling Owens College. Schuster relinquished his chair on the conditional acceptance of Rutherford taking his place. (3). Over the next several years, Rutherford worked alongside his assistants Hans Geiger and Niels Bohr, and other science luminaries at Manchester, adding a key to the theory of atomic structure in 1918 by defining the proton and complementing his countrymen, J.J. Thomson (electron discovery in 1897) and James Chadwick (neutron discovery in 1932). In 1919, Rutherford became the director of the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge having previously received a knighthood and serving the Crown during WWI in submarine detection. His scientific and experimental excellence earned him a place in the royal peerage in 1931 when he became 'Ernest, Lord Rutherford of Nelson'. Lord Rutherford became the president of the Academic Assistance Council and by the end of 1933, the AAC's activities centered around Cambridge, necessarily at the Cavendish Lab and in and around the lives of other British physicists such as the Lindemann brothers. Frederick A. Lindemann appears to have recruited more displaced scientists than any other single individual. As an Oxford University chair holder since 1919, F.A. Lindemann had a golden opportunity to recruit for Oxford's Clarendon Lab, taking a central role in what Winston Churchill called the "Wizard War". In 1941, F.A. Lindemann sat in Parliament as a member of the peerage, Lord Cherwell, becoming a Cabinet minister and science advisor to Churchill. Charles Lindemann, the elder brother, formerly served as a science advisor to the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. and took up his wartime role as a diplomatic liaison, first to Paris (site of family estates) and then to Washington, D.C. Their youngest brother, Septimus Lindemann, joined British Intelligence. (4). The Lindemanns' position and nouveaux riche wealth gave them enormous influence over policy and procurement of military technology. Albert Einstein became a lifetime friend to Frederick Lindemann. It was Frederick, Lord Cherwell, bachelor vegetarian and tea-totaller, who recommended later in the war that the RAF carpet-bomb German cities and civilians. In 1939, hopes were high for cooperation with the United States. At the end of 1938, the chain reaction of nuclear fission had been decisively demonstrated; first by the German team of Hahn and Strassman, and again by their former colleagues Meitner and Frisch in Denmark. The confirmed experiments were reported immediately to Niels Bohr who by January of 1939 had booked passage and was on his way to America where he brought the message to Princeton and Columbia. The ensuing activity by the displaced-to-America scientists generated excitement about the prospects of weaponry for the handful who understood the implications. Leo Szilard, in London through 1938, and then on to Columbia in New York, worked with Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn successfully in achieving a chain reaction at Columbia's Pupin Lab. In August of '39 he composed his famous letter from 'Einstein' and Bohr's colleagues, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, further demonstrated to the British the feasibility of the atom bomb, called the "Frisch-Peierls Memorandum" which resulted in the creation of the MAUD Committee (Military Application of Uranium Detonation) in April of 1940. Sir Henry Tizard and physicist John D. Cockroft took the leadership of the MAUD Committee and arranged for the existence of the "British Mission", a delegation that initially came to Washington, D.C. to persuade the Americans to supply the needed resources for developing weapons technologies as a mutually beneficial economic boon. Hitler's summer invasion of Paris in 1940 caused the 'heavy water' reactor project underway at the College de France to be relocated to the Cavendish in Cambridge along with its team, minus its leader, the avowed communist Frederic Joiliot-Curie. (5). Of this new Cavendish team which would soon transfer to Canada, perhaps only one member was a native Briton. The others were displaced Jewish scholars and objections were anticipated about placing the team directly in the U.S. At the end of the year that it took the MAUD Committee to issue its final reports, arrangements to send a 'heavy water' team were focused on McGill and Montreal Universities. The stated object of the heavy water work was to initiate the building of nuclear reactors for the purpose of creating new isotopes for bomb cores. The British dubbed this program "Tube Alloys" which became its codeword for the very substance it was striving for --plutonium. At a future point, Brigadier Charles Lindemann and Rutherford's son-in-law and lab assistant, Ralph Fowler (emissary for MAUD), joined the Canadians in hopes of gathering secret technology to carry home to Britain, the real purpose of the "British Mission". A native Canadian, George Craig Laurence, who had spent years under Rutherford's tutelage at Cavendish, was already ahead of the 'reactor' teams elsewhere. By March of 1940 Laurence had completed a "miniature" reactor design using graphite which was secretly built over the following months and finished in September. According to one of his biographies "At this time Dr. J.D. Cockroft visited Ottawa [and] was so impressed with Laurence's work that he persuaded Imperial Chemical Industries of Britain to send a contribution...In Dec. 1940, Laurence was asked to visit the United States where he met Lyman J. Briggs, head of the Uranium Commission, and other scientists including Fermi. An exchange of relevant secret reports lasting nearly two years resulted." (6). Fermi's team at Chicago achieved sustained nuclear chain reaction with a graphite design in December of 1942, precisely two years later. Attainment of a reactor was the momentous event switching the Manhattan Project into high gear. The U.S. Army took control of the Project and the various teams were assembled to take up residence at Los Alamos. The British sent dozens of scientists; 19 came to Los Alamos, 35 went to the University of California Berkeley and more were placed at other Project locations not including Canada. James Chadwick and William G. Penney led the UK's Los Alamos team that included Rudolf Peierls, Otto Frisch, Egon Bretscher, and Klaus Fuchs. (7). Under British auspices, Niels Bohr and his family were helped out of Denmark and then brought to Los Alamos to join in. Somewhere in this time period, the MAUD reports that were issued in 1941 and contained the speculative strategy and pertinent technical achievements to date, came into the possession of the USSR's Joseph Stalin. Klaus Fuchs, convicted in the 50s of spying for the Soviets, presumably had nothing to do with the MAUD reports though he was a refugee to Edinburgh Scotland where he studied under refugee Max Born. (8). Wherever the leaks were coming from, they could easily have been high-level subterfuges with so many of the British patrons advocating the "open world" concept. The scientists themselves, familiar travelers of international scope, were equally invested in these ideas, many of them having shadowy questions and doubts about loyalties and allegiances in their own deeper relationships; to each other, to science, and to their sponsors. (9). In their world a fierce competitiveness and opportunism was the stark reality they sought to publicly deny. In the wake of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Britain's 'heroes' were well rewarded and some were eventually knighted such as Sir Rudolf Peierls. William Beveridge, organizer of the AAC, was elevated to the peerage and under postwar Prime Minister Attlee, Lord Beveridge instituted the socialist Welfare State that had won him the support of the Fabians decades before. Rutherford's assistant, Marcus Oliphant from Australia, who endured an uncomfortable trans-Atlantic flight to pressure the Americans into hastening bomb development after the MAUD reports, became the Governor of South Australia. (10). Lord Cherwell, Frederick Lindemann, maintained his close ties to Winston Churchill and served the Atomic Energy Authority until his death. Cherwell's brother Charles kept his close ties also, to friends in New York's Knickerbocker Club and Jupiter Island Club. (11). Others under the British wing returned to their home countries and secured top jobs in the nuclear industry, and still a few, like Klaus Fuchs, joined the British atomic energy program at Harwell. It was many years after Los Alamos that accusations and convictions of espionage surfaced, coinciding with the McCarthy hearings in the U.S. The most severely and publicly punished Briton was Allan Nunn May who served a term of hard labor and was forced to later seek work as a physicist in Ghana. A Soviet defector to the West, Igor Gouzenko, who worked secretly for the KGB in Canada gave the testimony that led to the arrests of Fuchs and Nunn May. (12). Gouzenko's indictments of a spy-ring he claimed was based in Britain netted over 30 individuals from several countries who were purportedly passing atomic secrets. Notes and References Many sources favorably document the fates of 'displaced scholars' in 1933 and enumerate the organizations and individuals who assisted, among them this piece by Bill Williams on the University of Manchester (aka Owens College and Victoria University) http://www.mucjs.org/MELILAH/2005/3.pdf Tibor Frank, cited in the article on Leo Szilard (part II) contributes an essay, "Cohorting, Networking, Bonding: Michael Polanyi in Exile" profiling the career of Michael Polanyi who relocated to U Manchester, and was turned down at a later application to move to the University of Chicago http://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/polanyi/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD28-2/TAD28-2-full-pdf.pdf Sir Henry Tizard, chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee who led the first official delegation of the MAUD Committee in 1940, made many successful contacts which led to technology development, notably in the advancement of RADAR, supplying Bell Telephone and Dr. Alfred Loomis (chair of the Microwave Committee) with contracts for the "magnetron" and MIT's Radiation Lab. (1) Oct. 3, 1933, speech by Albert Einstein, cited in a London School of Economics article of the meeting between Beveridge and Szilard in Vienna: http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/LSEHistory/academic_assistance_council.htm (2) AJR article quotes from http://www.ajr.org.uk/index.cfm/section.journal/issue.Feb09/article=1883 (3) Ernest Rutherford takes the chair given by Arthur Schuster. Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish family of textile merchants that converted to Unitarianism, as did the extended family of relatives in Britain. Arthur's brother, Felix Otto Schuster was a well-known banker in London and received a Baronet from the Crown that passed as far as his grandson's lifetime, to 1996. His cousin Claud Schuster joined the Civil Service as a barrister, and though noted for incompetence, acted as secretary and counselor for several Parliamentarians in the House of Lords. see the wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schuster (4) Lindemann family background, the 3 brothers and one sister by their parents (Prussian) Adolphus F. Lindemann and (American) Olga Noble who was a Connecticut banker's widow. Olga Noble inherited English property in the aristocratic enclave of Sidmouth. Adolphus' mother came from the shipping wealthy Cyprien-Fabre family. for more on Frederick, www.dannen.com/decision/lrg-fal.html (5) French heavy water team, (without) Joliot, included Hans von Halban, Lew Kowarski, and Francis Perrin, all displaced Jewish scientists. Von Halban and Kowarski went to Montreal and Perrin went to NYC's Columbia. Francis Perrin's father, Jean Baptiste Perrin, was a noted physicist who was given the directorship of Rothschild Institute of Biophysics in Paris when it was newly opened in 1929. In 1941, J.B. Perrin joined his son in New York and opened the French University of New York, ostensibly a networked institution with the New School of Social Research that sponsored his son. (6) Canadian George Laurence, http://www15.pair.com/buchanan/laurence/george.htm from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, series V, vol. IV, 1989 (7) the British team to Los Alamos: Penney, Chadwick, Peierls, Frisch, Bretscher, Fuchs and many unnamed. --William Penney participated in Sec. of War Stimson's "Target Committee" and witnessed the bomb drop on Nagasaki. --James Chadwick presumably beat his contemporaries to the drawing board in the neutron 'discovery', publishing first in the British science journal, Nature, which was founded originally by Thomas Huxley. --the others had all worked together over the years. Frisch, Peierls, and Fuchs were likely present company to a confirming chain reaction experiment sometime (or multiple times) between Jan. of 1939 and Mar of 1940. Chadwick would write years later that in these days (1939-40) he realized that a nuclear bomb was "inevitable". --Egon Bretscher, originally from Zurich, became a division chief at Harwell where he worked again with Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, among others. He tells a story in his recollections and memoirs of nearly sliding over a cliff in the Swiss Alps while tied to friend Felix Bloch who had fallen. Bretschers two sons, Mark and Tony, are both cell biologist and biophysicist with ties to Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell. (8) Max Born at Edinburgh, where he was relocated in 1933 was a physicist's teacher of teachers, formerly at Gottingen (9) A controversy and case of suppression among the physicists regarding plagiarism is addressed here as speculation based on facts http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/category/cavendish-laboratory/ (10) Marcus Oliphant, claimed to have instigated the Manhattan Project (11) Charles Lindemann, listed with the Knickerbockers, died at Jupiter Island Florida http://www.energy-net.org/1NWO/KNICKS.HTM and for a lengthy treatment, here http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030304lberg/030304ch8.html Charles' role in his Secret Service capacity (believed to be Charles and not Septimus) http://books.google.com/books?id=zkhZOylX7TAC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=%22brigadier+lindemann%22&sour ce=bl&ots=SMY-Iu0mqV&sig=gK0GKMlKkyCmdRSy0z2QDnKPR8w&hl=en (12) Soviet KGB defector Igor Gouzenko: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSgouzenko.htm and http://www.ccnr.org/chronology.html, |