Destroyer of Worlds, Archive on 4 (the beginning of Nuclear Weapons)

[weltweit]

Very interesting program on R4 now about this.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061pchg

How Britain discovered the world's first atomic bomb only to lose it to the Americans when the U.S. reneged on an Anglo-American agreement to share atomic research.

So apparently Britain lost a lead in the development of the bomb and instead helped America to get there first. A mistake of Churchill perhaps.

 

[weltweit]

So the Americans got the bomb, their security leaks meant that the Soviet Union also got it, sooner than expected, and that defined the power dynamics of the following years.

 

[youngian]

Whereabouts was the first atomic bomb discovered?

 

[weltweit]

Whereabouts was the first atomic bomb discovered?

I don't know, I am assuming it was the one developed by the American project.

 

[existentialist]

Whereabouts was the first atomic bomb discovered?

Birmingham!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys

 

[farmerbarleymow]

Birmingham has an awful lot to answer for.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Birmingham has an awful lot to answer for.

Not as much as Manchester though, according to Mozza.

 

[pogofish]

Birmingham has an awful lot to answer for.

Much of the practical work for Tube Alloys was done in Wales:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/northeastwales/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8077000/8077550.stm
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/r/rhydymwyn/

Whilst much of the former gas infrastructure is being demolished, the Tube Alloys buildings at the site are scheduled for preservation. The full DEFRA report is linked from the second link.

 

[hot air baboon]

...seems like the handing over of the Britain's nuclear scientific "crown jewels" - built on the back of pioneers like James Chadwick - was part of a wider programme that I first read about in the otherwise very dubious A Man Called Intrepid :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission

The Tizard Mission, officially the British Technical and Scientific Mission, was a British delegation that visited the United States during the Second World War in order to obtain the industrial resources to exploit the military potential of the research and development (R&D) work completed by the UK up to the beginning of World War II, but that Britain itself could not exploit due to the immediate requirements of war-related production.

pretty much an intra-allied Project Paperclip - pursued for largely illusory political gains

 

[pogofish]

So the Americans got the bomb, their security leaks meant that the Soviet Union also got it, sooner than expected, and that defined the power dynamics of the following years.

Not their leaks, ours - Klaus Fuchs was the assistant to Rudolph Peierls and came to the Manhattan Project via Tube Alloys, where he was already reporting back to the USSR.

Probably not so much a mistake. More accepting the reality that whilst we may have solved some critical parts of the problem we were nowhere near putting together a viable bomb. Once it was known the Germans were on the same track and thought to be well ahead of everyone else, Britain had to face-up to not having the spare resources to see a project like this through to completion. I doubt there was much choice but combine with the US and Canada - but should have got stronger/treaty protection against the MacMahon Act.

 

[pogofish]

...seems like the handing over of the Britain's nuclear scientific "crown jewels"

Not just Nuclear. The Tizard Mission carried details of a number of British innovations/improvements that helped give the US a lead in a number of critical wartime areas and left them in the best position to exploit our work after the war.

 

[weltweit]

Not their leaks, ours - Klaus Fuchs was the assistant to Rudolph Peierls and came to the Manhattan Project via Tube Alloys, where he was already reporting back to the USSR.

Oh ok ... interesting

Probably not so much a mistake. More accepting the reality that whilst we may have solved some critical parts of the problem we were nowhere near putting together a viable bomb. Once it was known the Germans were on the same track and thought to be well ahead of everyone else, Britain had to face-up to not having the spare resources to see a project like this through to completion. I doubt there was much choice but combine with the US and Canada - but should have got stronger/treaty protection against the MacMahon Act.

Doesn't bear thinking about, if the Nazis had gotten the bomb, before anyone else.

 

[2hats]

Whereabouts was the first atomic bomb discovered?

A term coined inside H. G. Wells' head? He may have influenced some of the key players...

HG and the H-Bomb

In his 1914 novel 'The World Set Free', Wells imagined bombs that destroy civilisation and lead to a new world order. But his "atomic bombs" - a name he conceived - are grenades that keep on exploding.

Wells mixed with key scientists and politicians such as Lenin and Churchill. Churchill claimed Wells was solely responsible for the use of aeroplanes and tanks in the First World War. Thanks to Wells, Churchill was also ahead of many in writing about the military potential of nuclear weapons - as he did in his 1924 article for the Pall Mall Gazette, "Shall We All Commit Suicide?"

On iplayer radio.

From "Shall We Commit Suicide?" Nash's Pall Mall Magazine, (24 September, 1924):

Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession on a hostile city, arsenal, camp, or dockyard?

 

[pogofish]

Doesn't bear thinking about, if the Nazis had gotten the bomb, before anyone else.

Yes - Thankfully many of their most capable scientists in this area were "impure" enough to have been marginalised and escaped the country - usually ending-up working for the British or Americans. Even some of the remaining Scientists in charge were treated with pretty open hositlity/mistrust due to their heritage and by 1942, when the Army relinquished control to a lesser body, their initial 2-year head start over everybody else had evaporated and the value of their work kept-on dwindling.

 

[weltweit]

If the Nazis had gotten the atomic bomb first, assuming they could have produced multiple warheads, history would have been very different indeed.

 

[2hats]

You might also find this lecture interesting - given last year by Graham Farmelo, the author of the book "Churchill's Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics":

Winston Churchill foresaw the nuclear age over a decade before it arrived and was the first national leader to agree to the development of nuclear weapons. His friend and advisor Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford professor of physics, exerted considerable influence on his thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear power. In this talk, I discuss the surprisingly large role that Churchill played in nuclear history and the notion that he was the first politician to be a nuclear visionary.

Podcast here.

Just for completeness - for a very thorough description of the history of development of nuclear weapons it is hard to beat Richard Rhodes' books "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", and "Dark Sun - The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb".