Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

The collier was the last cargo ship to sail from Bordeaux. According to Kowarski, Suffolk, who had not shaved for days and whose bare arms were covered with tattoos—symbols of his exuberant eccentricity—“had got the crew too drunk to sail until the machinery and ourselves were aboard.” The bemused Russian thought “Suffolk was straight out of Wodehouse…. There was sea-sickness: there were 25 women aboard. Suffolk was pouring them champagne. ‘This is the perfect remedy,’ he said.” [23] Suffolk would die the following year, 1941, while defusing a bomb. When the ship docked at Falmouth, the heavy water, which had been strapped to a raft in hopes it could be salvaged if the Broompark was torpedoed, was transferred first to Wormwood Scrubs prison and then—perhaps most incongruously of all—to the custody of the royal librarian at Windsor Castle.

As Otto Frisch had feared, Denmark too had quickly fallen. On the evening of 8 April 1940, while Niels Bohr was being entertained by King Haakon of Norway at the Royal Palace in Oslo, Nazi forces were preparing to invade his homeland as well as Norway. Unaware of what was about to happen, Bohr boarded the night train for Copenhagen. As the train was shunted off the ferry that had carried it across the Kattegat, Bohr was awakened by Nazi warplanes streaking overhead and shouts that the Germans were coming. At 4:20 a.m. that morning Hitler had presented the Danish government with an ultimatum: accept the protection of his Third Reich without resistance or face all-out attack. While the Danish king and his government agonized, Nazi aircraft flew very low over Copenhagen, their roaring engines emphasizing the Danes’ lack of choice. By noon on 9 April, Denmark was an occupied country.

Bohr hurried to the chancellor of the University of Copenhagen and to members of the Danish government to seek protection for the Jewish scientists at his institute, some of them refugees from Nazi racial persecution elsewhere in Europe, and to urge them to resist the imposition of race laws. In turn, officials from the U.S. Embassy sought out Bohr to offer him and his family sanctuary in the United States. Bohr knew that with a Jewish mother he was in personal danger but insisted he must remain to look after his staff. Somehow he found time to send an urgent telegram to Otto Frisch, warning him to remain in England.

Another telegram to England caused some puzzlement. It was from Lise Meitner, who had arrived in Copenhagen just twelve hours before the German occupation began and had been wakened by the noise of airplanes. Since the Germans initially allowed the Danes to retain a degree of self-rule in return for their bloodless surrender, Meitner was able to remain in Copenhagen unmolested for three weeks and to meet Niels Bohr. On her return to neutral Stockholm, she dispatched, at Bohr’s request, a telegram to one of his friends, the British physicist Owen Richardson, reassuring him that the family was all right. The text read, “Met Niels and Margrethe recently both well but unhappy about events please inform Cockcroft and Maud Ray Kent.” John Cock­croft jumped to the conclusion that Meitner’s words contained a hidden warning. He wrote anxiously to James Chadwick, suggesting that the final three words— Maud Ray Kent —were code for “uranium taken.” Others speculated that they were an anagram for “Make Ur Day Nt”—“Make Uranium Day and Night.” Only later did they learn the simple truth that Maud Ray had been the Bohr children’s governess. She lived in Kent, and her address had mistakenly been omitted from the telegram.

However, the telegram solved one problem: that of choosing a suitably coded name for the group set up in April 1940 by the British government in response to Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls’s memorandum to consider the possibility of constructing a uranium bomb. The group decided to call themselves the “Maud Committee”—formally the “M.A.U.D. Committee.” Many who became associated with it were convinced that the letters stood for “Military Applications of Uranium Disintegration.”

The Maud Committee was chaired by George Thomson of Imperial College, London, and members included Mark Oliphant of Birmingham University and James Chadwick of Liverpool University, who was to coordinate the laboratory research across the various universities. The committee did not, however, include Otto Frisch or Rudolf Peierls, who had been anxiously awaiting a reaction to their memorandum. While they waited, Frisch was summoned by the police as an enemy alien and interrogated. Security concerns meant that by this time many aliens were being interned—some in camps on the Isle of Man and others overseas in countries such as Canada. Even though Frisch was sent home, he felt that “all those questions really added up to the simple question ‘Is there any reason not to intern that chap?’” Genia Peierls, who, according to Frisch, “ran her house with cheerful intelligence, a ringing Manchester voice and a Russian sovereign’s disregard of the definite article,” was so convinced that the impractical Frisch was about to be locked up that she bought him “some shirts of sea-island cotton which could be washed by a bachelor” like himself.

Frisch was spared internment, but at first it did seem that he and Peierls would be barred from working on the project they had initiated. Mark Oliphant told the incredulous pair that the government was grateful to them for their analysis but that, since enemy aliens and recently naturalized British citizens could not be employed on sensitive war work, they would not be consulted further. The normally quiet, equable Peierls was angered by such idiocy, certain that he and Frisch had “the answers to important questions” likely to perplex and delay the committee. Peierls wrote politely but firmly to Thomson, who acknowledged the logic of his arguments and won agreement for Peierls and Frisch to be consulted on the Maud Committee’s progress and later to become members of a technical subcommittee.

Frederick Lindemann, professor of experimental philosophy (physics) at Oxford—later Lord Cherwell—also attended the technical subcommittee. He was both friend and adviser to Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister in the crisis of May 1940. Churchill, who always referred to him as “the Prof,” appreciated Lindemann’s ability “to decipher the signals from the experts on the far horizons and explain to me in lucid, homely terms what the issues were.” The British son of a naturalized Franco-Alsatian father and an American mother, Lindemann had studied physics in England and Berlin. He was also an ace tennis player who competed at Wimbledon. During the First World War, disturbed that pilots had no guidance on what to do if their planes went into a spin, he had studied the mathematics of spin until he believed he had the solution. Determined to test his conclusions without hazarding the lives of others, he learned how to fly, put his plane through a systematic series of spins, and, applying his theory, succeeded in straightening it out again. His work saved many lives. Like Churchill, he doubted that Germany was working on atomic weapons, but thought it vital that Britain was not outflanked.

The Maud Committee worked quickly, aware that with Britain battered, devoid of European allies, and facing invasion, time was not on their side. They were also aware of the desirability of greater contact with the United States. Since the start of the war there had been few scientific exchanges between Britain and the neutral United States. However, in the late summer of 1940 Winston Churchill decided to send a scientific delegation under Sir Henry Tizard to woo America by revealing Britain’s technical secrets. His team, which included John Cockcroft, sailed with a black-metal steamer trunk packed with tempting models and blueprints.