A History of the National Bureau of Standards
WORLD WAR Ii RESEARCH (1941-45) CHAPTER 'TI! ThE EVENT OF WAR" The second worldwide war was foreshadowed in the Japanese in of Ethiopia in 1935, and Hitler's march into the Rhineland in 1936. Isolated and safeguarded by successive Neutrality Acts passed in 1935, 1936, and 1937, which barred the sale of arms or munitions to any warring nation, America watched the piecemeal fall of small nations, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Albania to Musso- lini. With the German attack on Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war against the dictators and World War II began. The first amendments to the Neutrality Acts were enacted. By temperament strongly neutral and still in the grip of depression, the Nation had willed belief in Chamberlain's "peace in our time" until shaken by the occupation of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939. But cer- tain of war and of America's inevitable involvement was the small band of foreign-born scientists, their spokesman Niels Bohr, who had recently arrived in this country. Shepherding atomic research here, Bohn at once urged restriction in all Allied countries of the publication of further data on the possibility of nuclear fission. Many individual scientists refrained, but control of publication in American scientific journals did not become effec. five until almost a year later, following Hitler's invasion of Denmark and Norway. The National Bureau of Standards, convinced by the physicists on its Advisory Committee on Uranium of the certainty of a general war, began to put its affairs in order. On September 1, 1939, the day Germany marched into Poland, and one week before the President declared a state of limited national emergency, Dr.
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