Clouds of Deceit by Joan Smith

nerve centres for the work were Oxford, Liverpool, Cambridge and Birmingham. A team based at Oxford worked on the separation of U235 from natural uranium. Frisch joined Chadwick at Liverpool, leaving Peierls behind in Birmingham. Peierls’s team was soon joined by the German, Klaus Fuchs, who played an important role in work on the size of the bomb. The importance of all this work cannot be overstressed. Robert Jungk, in his history of the first atomic scientists,
Brighter than a Thousand Suns,
wrote: ‘The countless administrative and technical obstacles which blocked the road to the release of atomic energy were finally overcome simply and solely by the determination and obstinacy of the scientists resident in the Anglo-Saxon countries… They repeatedly took the initiative in bringing that mighty weapon into the world.’
    Just over a year after the setting up of the Maud Committee, in the summer of 1941, it produced two reports. One was on the use of uranium for power, the other on its use in a bomb. The bomb report showed how far matters had progressed. ‘We have now reached the conclusion that it will be possible to make an effective uranium bomb,’ it said, going on to estimate that a 25 pound bomb would produce the effect of 1,800 tons of TNT.
    Margaret Gowing has written that ‘there is no doubt that the work of the Maud Committee had put the British in the lead in the race for a bomb.’ If it had not existed, she says, ‘the Second World War might well have ended before an atomic bomb was dropped.’
    Until the autumn of 1942, there had been considerable cooperation and exchanges of information between Britain and the US about work on the atom bomb. In October 1941,President Roosevelt had been told of the Maud Committee’s conclusion that a uranium bomb was feasible. He decided to speed up the American effort and increase the flow of information to and from Britain. On the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which took place on 7 December 1941, and brought the US into the war, scientists in the uranium section of the Office of Scientific Research and Development were informed of the new programme.
    Early in 1942, a British mission visited the US and reported back that the Americans were looking at both the uranium bomb and one based on the recently discovered heavier element, plutonium. Research in the US had clearly raced ahead after its early period in the doldrums. In the autumn of 1942, the American project had reached the point where a major reorganization was needed to cope with its huge industrial requirements. A special group of the US Army Corps of Engineers, known as the Manhattan District, was given charge of the project, under the overall leadership of Leslie Groves. At this point, Britain’s problems with her major ally started with a vengeance and provided, if the British had only known it, a foretaste of what was to come immediately after the war. The underlying cause of the trouble was the question as to who would control nuclear energy after the war.
    How much the exclusion of Britain from the Manhattan Project between 1942 and 1943, and from the American nuclear energy programme after the war, rankled on this side of the Atlantic can be gauged from Leonard Bertin’s history of the period,
Atom Harvest.
‘British scientists who, with full approval of their Government, had been ready to provide the Americans with all the data they wanted, suddenly found doors closed upon them,’ he wrote in 1955. ‘There is a popular but mistaken belief that this breakdown in cooperation occurred after the war with the passing of the McMahon Act [the act which forbade US scientists to share information] in 1946. It would be truer to say that it started the day the Americans were persuaded that, despite their own misgivings, the production of atomic weapons before the end of the war was possible.’
    The British were informed of the new,