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Marisa Guida The Smithsonian Affiliated National Atomic Testing Museum “Using lessons of the past to better understand the present.” 60th Anniversary Exhibit Opens September 21 1958 U.S. & U.K. Mutual Defense Agreement Background History The National Atomic Testing Museum is very excited to be hosting an impressive 60th anniversary exhibit commemorating the 1958 U.S. and U.K. Mutual Defense Agreement, also known as MDA. The exhibit opens on Friday, September 21 in our new Area 51 Theater. There is a long history of joint cooperation in the nuclear field between our two nations that goes back to the very beginning of the nuclear age. Great Britain played a significant role in the United States’ development of nuclear weapons. In fact, it can be argued that the idea to actually build an atomic bomb began in Britain. An Englishman, H.G. Wells, first conceived of such a power in his science fiction novels. Moving beyond fiction to reality, it was an Irish physicist, Ernest Walton, working with John Cockcroft who became the first to artificially split the nuclei of a lithium atom. They did this using an early form of a particle accelerator at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1932. Just weeks before that momentous experiment, James Chadwick discovered the neutron at Cambridge. The concept that tremendous energy could be released through a fission process slowly developed. Yet, scientists thought it would take huge amounts of fissionable material to create such an energy release. 1 Understandably, enthusiasm for research on an “atomic bomb” was thus cool—even though the great radio series “Buck Rogers” and “Flash Gordon” in the 1930s talked of “atomic” weapons as if they were on the verge of reality. By spring 1940, two German refugee physicists, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, working at Birmingham University authored two papers theorizing that if the rare isotope Uranium-235 could be separated, a weapon would result based on the principle of a fissionable chain reaction. Furthermore, what made their theory so startling was that it calculated that only a few pounds, rather than tons, of this material would be needed. A practical “super bomb” with the force of at least a thousand tons of TNT now seemed feasible. This was not an unattractive idea for Britain, which, at that time, in the wake of France’s fall, was soon to be facing Nazi Germany alone in a battle for the very survival of their island nation. As a result of this potentially important concept outlined in what is now remembered as the Frisch- Peierls Memorandum, (pictured right) the British government formed the “Maud Committee.” That organization facilitated research into fission and in doing so gathered together some of the leading British scientists of the day. By July of 1941 the Maud Committee concluded the theory proposed by Frisch and Peierls could realistically lead to a weapon. Peierls, (pictured below) would later be knighted by the British for his contributions. On the other hand, the committee, with Peierls’ help, soon realized that such a weapon would require a large-scale enrichment program for the separation of U-235. There inlay Britain’s catch-22 because the costs and logistics of producing enriched uranium were then beyond their ability. Britain’s national resources were already stretched to the breaking point in the war with Hitler. Yet, Hitler was the very problem. The fear, of course, as Albert Einstein and Hungarian physicist Leo Szilárd pointed out in a letter to Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, centered on the nightmare scenario that Nazi Germany could build a fission weapon. Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner had consulted on that letter as well, which Szilárd wrote and Einstein edited and signed and forwarded to Roosevelt. They knew that Germany had the know-how and scientists to start a nuclear program, which they feared would be fully supported by Hitler. They urged Roosevelt to start a U.S. program. Britain, which had just begun to break into the German secret Enigma codes and had a first-rate intelligence service, soon learned that Germany did indeed have several such nuclear research projects underway. 2 Earlier in 1938, it was a German chemist, Otto Hahn, with his pupil Fritz Strassmann, in consultation with Lise Meitner that raised the concept of an atomic bomb based on the process of “uranium fission.” Meitner, of Jewish ancestry, fled Germany, but Hahn and Strassmann remained. It was thought they were working on an atomic bomb project, but they never did. Other German scientists of note who stayed in Germany, like Werner Heisenberg, were known to be working on a bomb project. German efforts never succeeded, yet in 1940 no one could have guessed that. Fortunately for the western powers, Germany had lost many of its scientific all-stars due to Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. Since 1933, 11 Nobel prize-winning physicists and four chemists fled Germany, including Hans Beth, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn, Peter Debye, Dennis Gabor, Fritz Haber, Gerhard Herzberg, Victor Hess, George de Hevesy, Erwin Schrodinger, Otto Stern, and Eugene Wigner. The year 1940 proved a period in which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was successfully soliciting more and more aid and close cooperation from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. The cash strapped Britain had little to offer in return except scientific know-how, which Churchill quietly and subtly used as a bargaining chip. Aside from nuclear theory, Britain was far in the lead in areas like radar, anti-submarine warfare, ballistics research, and aircraft engine technology. Although, in the nuclear field they had another unique insight. The Cavendish Laboratories (pictured right) predicted in 1940 that a new man-made element called “Element 94” could be created by bombarding Uranium- 238 with neutrons. Simultaneously, the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory discovered under physicist Edwin McMillan that a byproduct of the operations of nuclear reactors was that same new Element 94. Element 94, soon called plutonium by McMillan, was subsequently first produced by chemists Glenn Seaborg in early 1941 on the cyclotron at the University of California Berkeley. (Plutonium provided an alternative to the problem of the slow rate at which uranium could be enriched for a bomb. Because of this only one uranium-based bomb design could be built by the end of the war which was so simple it did not need testing and was called “Little Boy” and subsequently used on Hiroshima. Plutonium presented more complex challenges, but allowed the “Fat Man” series of three additional nuclear plutonium bombs to be produced. One was tested on July 16, 1945, and one was soon used on Nagasaki with one spare left if Japan would not have surrendered.) By late 1940 Britain began exchanging nuclear information with America. In October 1941 the American Manhattan Project formally began. Britain worked closely with America on this project under the code name “Tube Alloys.” Sir Wallace Akers lead that British team overseeing the Directorate of Tube Alloys in England. Initially, with America’s continued inability to enter the war as a combatant, the British planned to design a plant to produce enriched uranium on their own. The Maud Committee’s continued research and findings motivated Roosevelt to step-up the pace of the Manhattan Project. Then came Pearl Harbor and coupled with the U.S. entry into the war, a greater commitment from America followed to build an atomic bomb. Under the Quebec Agreement of 1943 Britain abandoned their own Tube Alloys effort and via an agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt, Britain became a partner, albeit a junior partner, with the Manhattan Project. Churchill in fact understood the immense economic burden that a nuclear project posed and willingly looked to the United States to make the tremendous investment required. 3 Professor James Chadwick then led a British effort of 40 nuclear scientists, of which 19 went to work directly at Los Alamos. This included Sir Geoffrey Taylor, William Penney, Mark Oliphant, James Tuck, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, German immigrant Rudolf Peierls and Klaus Fuchs (pictured right). Peierls, then having tremendous stature, had insisted that Fuchs join the mission because everyone widely agreed his calculating skills were unsurpassed. Fuchs, of course, would later become famous for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets; however, Fuchs played an important role in developing the implosion method that enabled plutonium to be detonated successfully in a nuclear device. The original Frisch-Peierls Memorandum conceived of the gun-assembly for the detonation of nuclear material and that worked fine with enriched uranium. Plutonium proved a much more difficult element to bring to a chain reaction, and the British team made a significant contribution in designing the implosion method. They already had a lot of experience studying blast waves and the principles of ballistics, all of which contributed to the idea of using specially-shaped charges or explosive lenses that imploded the fissile plutonium core in a critical-mass explosion and thus starting a chain reaction. Fuchs, Peierls, and Tuck were key minds behind this technique. Ironically, Adolf Hitler, the whole reason America and Britain put so much effort into making a nuclear bomb, had brought himself and his nation to ruin by the time the first atomic plutonium bomb was tested. 4 Rudolf Peierls from the British team witnessed that first-ever nuclear test (called Trinity) in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. What history has completely ignored about the subsequent use of the American uranium bomb on Hiroshima and a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki is that the original agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt back in 1943 in Quebec created a “Mutual Consent Clause.” Although Roosevelt did not live to see the bomb used, his successor, Harry Truman, formally honored that mutual consent agreement in a communiqué from Washington to Churchill on July 2, 1945, 14 days before the first bomb was even tested in New Mexico and 15 days before the Potsdam Conference began.
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