Fathers of the Bomb, parts III and IV

[Jenny Lake]

Fathers of the Bomb, part III, Enrico Fermi
article by Jennifer Lake
 
 
Enrico Fermi became a hub at the University of Chicago around which a crucial part of the Manhattan Project was spun, wholly dependent on the success of  Fermi and his team to produce a controlled nuclear 'reactor'. This feat was accomplished December 2, 1942, a year after the U.S. joined the war and set the race for a weapon in motion with the creation of Chicago Pile #1 (CP-1). Leslie Groves called it "the single most important scientific event in the development of atomic power" and later historians remarked that the "gamble", lacking shields and adequate safety, was a risk of "a possibly catastrophic experiment in one of the most densely populated areas of the nation". The Chicago locale, called the Metallurgical Lab, was a wartime relocation of the project originally at Columbia University in midtown New York City. For our eternal posterity, CP-1 sustained a 28 minute chain reaction that was jubilantly communicated by Arthur Compton as "the Italian navigator has landed in the New World" where the natives were "friendly". Team member Leo Szilard noted his personal remembrance as a "black day in the history of mankind" but one for which the highest honor in science given by the DoE, is remembered. In 1956, more than a year after Fermi's death from stomach cancer (Nov.28 1954), the Fermi Award became the physics prize of lifetime achievement. Only days before his death, Fermi received his own recognition from President Eisenhower for his life spent in atomic research.
 
Born in 1901, Fermi graduated from the University of Pisa in 1922 in the same year the Fascists took control of the Italian government. Tattered by decades of civil strife in a war of attrition for 'independence' and the devastating losses of WWI, the Italians were looking to the new sciences of chemistry and physics to rebuild their ruined economy. Under the patronage of powerful sponsors, including the famous Guglielmo Marconi and the Volpi di Misurata family, the brilliant Enrico Fermi was poised at the forefront of Italy's new technology renaissance, leading a team of young research physicists at the University of Rome. Helped by the wealthy and well-connected politician Orso Maria Corbino, himself a physicist, the Italian team pooled the academic talents of Italy's best and brightest by all accounts, among them the sons of prominent entrepreneurs and 'freedom fighters'. [1].
 
Fermi met his wife Laura at the University of Rome while he was a professor of chemistry and she was his student, marrying in 1928. Within 3 years, in 1931, Laura's father, Admiral Augusto Capon, became the head of Italy's Naval Intelligence. Other close associates and friends of the Fermis, like physicist Emilio Segre, also had family of high military rank that had served the revolutions and transferred their loyalty to the Mussolini regime. [2]. In the gathering storm of war to come, emergent in the 1930s, the Jewish families of Capon and Segre were among many whose members sought an exit --- Italy enacted its race laws in 1938, designed to dismiss 'undesirables' from positions of influence as had Germany before it. Enrico and Laura with their two small children, baptized as Catholics on the advice of Laura's mother Costanza, stayed until the end of 1938 and used the opportunity of a Nobel Prize to travel to Stockholm and subsequently pay their passage to the United States with the prize money. Fermi had secured a teaching post at Columbia after turning down several other offers at American schools and thus 'fled' to his new home in New York.
 
Fermi always looked upon the years of the 20s and 30s as a time of isolation for himself from the active center of physics. After graduation from Pisa in '22 he went to Gottingen in Germany to study with Max Born as did the central cadre of scientists who led the Manhattan Project. In 1924, he left for Leyden/Amsterdam to study under Paul Ehrenfest, working beside Samuel Goudsmit who later hosted him at the University of Michigan over the summer of 1935 while the Italian physicists were making business deals with American companies. Still, meeting and making such friends as Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller, Fermi felt out of the loop, perhaps because internal nationalist expectations may have weighed upon him as much as they supported and propelled him.  Fermi was among the first, along with Szilard, to register patents for radio-pharmaceutical isotopes in multiple countries. By 1934, as the physicists on his team were taking their leave for further study, Fermi was demonstrating the fundamentals of chain-reaction that he helped to perfect at the University of Chicago in 1942. Edward Teller, who worked beside Fermi in Rome for a time in 1932 and 33 said that Fermi "suspected...that he had opened the door to the transuranic elements...He had the right theory but the wrong experimental information. Had he guessed the right result, the hunt for chain reactions would have started sooner." Teller reports that Fermi dismissed the results of one Dr. Noddack, who wrote to inform Fermi of observations regarding the potential of chain reactions with transuranics [3]. In the years between 1932 and 1936, the entire physics community was applying itself to the fission of transuranics.
 
By 1935 Fermi's representative and buyer of his patents, Gabriello M. Giannini, who had been his former student, established a company in New York City for the purpose of marketing nuclear property. Giannini and Co. took an office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the central establishment of the Rockefeller complex where 2 years before (1933) a gilt statue of Prometheus was commissioned to reign above the promenade. [4]. Gabriello Giannini was the son of Torquato Giannini, credited with being a co-founder of the Dante Alighieri Society (DAS, 1889) which promoted Italian language, art, and culture abroad to its constituent diaspora. There is no obvious connection between Giannini's DAS and another DAS literary society formed first at Harvard in 1881 [5], as one can speculate on the presence of the DAS near the Jersey City harbor terminal. Years earlier in 1916, with the U.S. on the cusp of joining WWI, the Jersey DAS was a comfortable stroll from the Black Tom Island shipping jetty that served as the caching station for European bound war materiel. On July 31, 1916, Black Tom Island was overloaded with railcars of munitions that were blown sky-high in the middle of the night, standing as the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history before the bombing of the Oklahoma City Murrah building. The crime was never solved though the prosecutor, John J. McCloy, made his reputation as a lawyer on the case; in time Germany was held accountable by the railroad companies and finally settled its due for reparations in 1953 for 50 million dollars while McCloy went on to serve as the U.S. High Commissioner of occupied Germany in post-WWII. [6]. During and after WWII, Giannini and Co. was never satisfactorily compensated for the nuclear patents it owned due to the rules imposed by the Manhattan Project authorities but the company became a U.S. defense contractor just the same, making engines for Lockheed. In the 1950s Giannini pressed for a high-dollar lawsuit against the U.S. government for failing to pay on an agreed amount and then upped the figure punitively to over 10 times that amount. The suit was eventually withdrawn amid fears of anti-communist reprisals, Giannini and Fermi were paid less than the originally negotiated sum and much murmuring ensued among scientists thereafter about working for governments. Giannini's involvement with the Jersey Dante Alighieri Society and the true nature of its activities are a matter of speculation.
 
By 1936, according to scientist/historian Simon Turchetti [7], Fermi and Giannini had patented 60 isotopes intended for use in medicine and private industry. Successful agreements and contacts had been made with Philips Fabriken in Amsterdam, Sharp and Dohme pharmaceutical, and General Electric X-ray Corporation. In this year also the Italians physics team was breaking up. By the time Fermi was preparing to leave Europe in 1938, Giannini's business had "improved substantially" countering somewhat the effects of having his patron mentors, Corbino and Marconi, die in 1937. Fermi claimed to have felt unsupported after their loss. The Jewish team members were well abroad; Bruno Pontecorvo was in France (since 1933) and Emilio Segre had been hired at UC Berkeley where he later participated in the 'discovery' of plutonium. The others, Franco Rasetti and Edouardo Amaldi were routine travelers to the U.S.-- Rasetti landed a job in Quebec, and Amaldi was perched on the edge of spending the war in the U.S. (he did not). Regardless, they were all to meet Fermi again in America as they had many times in the course of their studies and travels. In the small and active society of quantum physics, world travel was common and expected. It reflected the "open world" as Niels Bohr called it, and the world of academics was eager and hungry to devour the moment to moment discoveries of physicists.  After the Nobel ceremony in December of 1938, Enrico, Laura and the children sailed for New York and in less than a year's time to come, the world of physics and the world at large irrevocably changed with the outbreak of open war and the announcement of the 'chain reaction'; controlled fission that unlocked and harnessed the power of the atom.
 
The Fermis' departure came nine months after one of Italy's more enduring mysteries in the academic community; the disappearance of Ettore Majorana. Majorana was described as a devout Catholic, perhaps the only religious man on the Fermi team, and a rising star with a brilliant mind that Fermi himself compared to a paradigm-shifting genius like " a Galileo or Newton". [8]. In the early 30s, as physicists applied themselves to the theoretical problem-solving of technical challenges, Ettore Majorana contributed key insights that made breakthrough applications possible for the struggling young team. According to the testimony of his teammates, Ettore foresaw the discovery of 'neutrons' (he called them neutral protons) before anyone else was guessing at their existence, and yet his name appears nowhere on the shared patents that later came to prove contentious in the burgeoning marketplace of nuclear development. He was last seen at the end of March 1938, known to have boarded a ship from Sicily on a routine ferry run to Naples. Speculation of foul play and a report that he may have been seen in Argentina all came to naught. The more popular theory contends he was kidnapped by Nazis and murdered.
 
For the scientists who had escaped Europe, the U.S. had ample room and opportunity, even for dedicated foreign communist-socialists like Bruno Pontecorvo on Fermi's team, who was helped by Emilio Segre to get a job in Oklahoma at Wells Surveys, Inc. in 1940. [9]. In the escalating Cold War anti-communism that was directly fostered by nuclear weaponry and charges of espionnage, the Jewish Pontecorvo fled the United States, returning to Italy from where he then "defected" to the USSR. Franco Rasetti, who received a teaching post in Quebec, avoided the fray and became a staple member of American academia. Rasetti never worked for the military-complex by his own account and got a professorship at Johns Hopkins from 1947 to his retirement in 1970. [10]. More insight was given about Fermi and the various fates of his team by Edouardo Amaldi who gave his loyalty to his native Italy in the aftermath of the wars. Amaldi noted that Fermi was bitter about fascist policies and had been willing to leave Italy forever. Ironically, Amaldi said that it was those years together in fascist Rome, with the comings and goings of the world's brightest young physicists, that were the most free of them all. When Amaldi saw Fermi again after the war, his manner and speech about physics work in the U.S. was measured and constrained, the product of classified research, Amaldi speculated.
 
Fermi's contributions were not merely classified but key operations in creating nuclear weapons. He spent uncounted days at Los Alamos, became a co-director of the Manhattan Project alongside J. Robert Oppenheimer and continued in succeeding roles as a lead scientist and advisor. According to the Oppenheimer biographers, it was Fermi who brought up a suggestion in 1942 that the Allies forego the process of building a bomb and figure instead how to mass irradiate the enemy and contaminate the food supply, a suggestion that was secretly and seriously considered. [11]. Despite emphatic rhetoric against it, Fermi committed unswervingly to development of the H-bomb after the war. Fermi's wife Laura became an official history "maker" herself, contracted by the Atomic Energy Commission to write its "official history" following her husbands death. Laura Capon Fermi wrote six books, many short stories and manuscripts, published and unpublished, and kept an active correspondence registered in her papers at the University of Chicago archives. [12]. Among her correspondents was the famed neo-con idealogue Leo Strauss, and family members of Oppenheim and Warburg. She is noted for becoming an activist in support of gun control, on the board of the Civic Disarmament Committee, and "conservation" on the Chicago Air Pollution Control Board 1959-1968, winning a victory against the local soot that dirtied up the hanging wash and windowsills.    
 
 
Notes and References
 
The quotes in the opening paragraph provided at http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/cp-1_critical.htm
[1]the sons of prominent entrepreneurs, Fermi's team at the University of Rome and patent co-registrants :
Emilio Segre, son of hydro-electric and paper-making manufacturer, family of Segre/Treves
Bruno Pontecorvo, son of a textile manufacturer
Franco Rasetti, Edoardo Amaldi, Ettore Majorana, Giovanni Gentile, Giulio Trabacchi, and Oscar D'Agostino.
Giulio Trabacchi became the Director of Italy's Higher Health Institute http://igb.cnr.it/abt/approfondimenti/a ... ati_01.doc
[2]Admiral Capon, Admiral Segre, and the independence wars in Italy http://www.jewishmag.com/101mag/italian ... anjews.htm
[3]from Teller's autobiographical 'Memoirs', Fermi dismisses Dr. Noddick's observations in 1934 about potential chain reaction with transuranics, the by-products of uranium fission
[4]Statue of Prometheus, demi-god and bringer of fire to humanity, commissioned in 1933 for 30 Rockefeller Plaza by John D. Rockefeller Jr., with the following inscription: "Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends"
[5]Dante Alighieri Society at Harvard, its first 3 presidents: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (2)James Russell Lowell, and (3)Charles Eliot Norton, http://www.dantealighierisociety.org to promote "universal humanism" or the DAS at 591 Summit Ave. in Jersey City, NJ by NewYork Harbor and the rail lines to Communipaw Terminal and Black Tom Island.
[6]Black Tom Island http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/ ... losion.htm , tunnnels in place from Jersey City to the southern end of Manhattan were opened in 1908 and built by the Hudson and Manhattan Company run by William Gibbs McAdoo, son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson and Sec. of the Treasury. John J. McCloy, prosecutor of the Black Tom Island case, later with the firm Milbank,Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, was called the 'Chairman of the American Establishment' for his many directing roles including Morgan/Chase Bank, the World Bank, and High Commissioner of occupied Germany after WWII.
[7]Simon Turchetti, historical and biographical material on Enrico Fermi, http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/4609/1/Slow_Neutrons.pdf
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/4611/1/I ... essman.pdf
[8]Ettore Majorana disappeared, http://astro.physics.sc.edu/~physmgr/CI ... jorana.pdf and http://articles.gourt.com/en/Ettore%20Majorana , and  http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art204.htm
[9]Wells Surveys, Inc. of Tulsa, Oklahoma, an original concern of today's giant Baker Hughes Corporation http://bakerhughesdirect.com/cgi/atlas/ ... ler.jsp?...
[10]Franco Rasetti, http://oralhistories.library.caltech.ed ... asetti.pdf spent his last years in a nursing home in Belgium. Edoardo Amaldi who returned to Italy, was offered a 'chair' at the Univ. of Chicago http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4485.html recounted in this oral history produced by Charles Wiener in 1969
[11] ,irradiating the enemy, from 'American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer' authors Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, page 221, "Fermi took Oppenheimer aside one day and suggested another way to kill large numbers of Germans. Perhaps, he said, radioactive fission products could be used to poison Germany's food supply..."
[12]Laura Capon Fermi, archived correspondence at the U Chicago library http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/view.xqy?id ... ermi,Laura
and from memoirs of her daughter Nella Fermi Wiener and grandaughter Olivia Fermi http://www.fermieffect.com
 
 
 
Fathers of the Bomb, part IV, the British
article by Jennifer Lake
 
 
In 1943 a contingent of physicists from the "British Mission" headed for Los Alamos to join the collaborative Manhattan Project in the mountains of New Mexico. Only months earlier in August of '42, a formal pact had been signed between FDR and Winston Churchill, uniting the efforts of the governments of the U.S., England and Canada in producing an atomic bomb. The Quebec Agreement induced a palliative spirit of cooperation among the uneasy allies but issues of security and technology-trading divisively remained throughout the Project's duration, overshadowed by the expeditious demands of wartime. These issues erupted in the Cold War that followed, exposing the guiding hand of the British as the enablers of global espionnage and a clearinghouse for the new Order of the ages.  As the combatants of WWII took up their positions in 1933, certain Britons launched a campaign to "save science" and safeguard their imperialistic hegemony in a post-colonial world. To that end, the Academic Assistance Council was established by national economist William Beveridge and physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford on May 24, 1933. William Beveridge, himself made a Lord in the 1950s, recruited physicist Leo Szilard in Vienna as a co-founder of the AAC. Through the eager administrations of Szilard, a massive recruitment of 'displaced' Jewish scientists and scholars found material support among the institutions that prosecuted the attack upon Germany and brought forth the most destructive weapons in existence.
 
According to the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) in an article posted February 2009, the British economists, William Beveridge and Lionel Robbins, met Leo Szilard and Englishwoman Esther Simpson in a hotel in Vienna where the Austrian Ludwig von Mises informed them of the Nazi dismissals of Jewish academics. "On the spot" Beveridge laid out his outline for the Academic Assistance Council, convening a special meeting back home at the London School of Economics which was under his directorship. By July of '33, forty of Britains most eminent scholars had signed a letter published in the Times championing the rescue of international scholarship and culminating in a media event on October 3 "in front of a packed audience in the Albert Hall...in a speech by Albert Einstein." [1]. Despite the economic hard times everywhere of the Great Depression, room and quarter were made for the influx of 'refugees' in a system that did not have room for its own.
Counterpart organizations and institutions were created in Britain, France, USA, Switzerland, and elsewhere to handle the unemployed. The AAC reported that at the outbreak of war, 2000 scholars had registered and prospered through its office.The AJR claims this figure to be two-thirds of the total displaced academics. [2]. In 1933, year of the first wave of dismissals, 1,400 were said to have lost their jobs and the "recipient countries, principally the USA but also Britain, benefitted hugely".
 
"Britain was the first country to seriously study the feasibility of nuclear weapons" according to the http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org. Perhaps with the homegrown talents of Ernest Rutherford and James Chadwick it was a continuation of a role previously well-mapped. Rutherford was called the "Father of the Atom" and sometimes the "Crocodile". Born and raised by Scottish emigres in New Zealand, young Ernest returned to Cambridge for his post-doctoral work at the Cavendish Lab. In 1898 he was appointed to the chair of physics in Canada at McGill University where he pursued a study of newly discovered radioactivity. In 1907 he returned to England again to receive the chair of physics at Manchester University from Arthur Schuster, a Frankfurt born immigrant who used his family wealth to finance labs and equipment at the fledgling Owens College. Schuster relinquished his chair on the conditional acceptance of Rutherford taking his place. [3]. Over the next several years, Rutherford worked alongside his assistants Hans Geiger and Niels Bohr, and other science luminaries at Manchester, adding a key to the theory of atomic structure in 1918 by defining the proton and complementing his countrymen, J.J. Thomson (electron discovery in 1897) and James Chadwick (neutron discovery in 1932). In 1919, Rutherford became the director of the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge having previously received a knighthood and serving the Crown during WWI in submarine detection. His scientific and experimental excellence earned him a place in the royal peerage in 1931 when he became 'Ernest, Lord Rutherford of Nelson'.
 
Lord Rutherford became the president of the Academic Assistance Council and by the end of 1933, the AAC's activities centered around Cambridge, necessarily at the Cavendish Lab and in and around the lives of other British physicists such as the Lindemann brothers. Frederick A. Lindemann appears to have recruited more displaced scientists than any other single individual. As an Oxford University chair holder since 1919, F.A. Lindemann had a golden opportunity to recruit for Oxford's Clarendon Lab, taking a central role in what Winston Churchill called the "Wizard War".  In 1941, F.A. Lindemann sat in Parliament as a member of the peerage, Lord Cherwell, becoming a Cabinet minister and science advisor to Churchill. Charles Lindemann, the elder brother, formerly served as a science advisor to the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. and took up his wartime role as a diplomatic liason, first to Paris (site of family estates) and then to Washington, D.C. Their youngest brother, Septimus Lindemann, joined British Intelligence. [4]. The Lindemanns' position and nouveaux riche wealth gave them enormous influence over policy and procurement of military technology. Albert Einstein became a lifetime friend to Frederick Lindemann. It was Frederick, Lord Cherwell, bachelor vegetarian and tea-totaller, who recommended later in the war that the RAF carpet-bomb German cities and civilians.
 
In 1939, hopes were high for cooperation with the United States. At the end of 1938, the chain reaction of nuclear fission had been decisively demonstrated; first by the German team of Hahn and Strassman, and again by their former colleagues Meitner and Frisch in Denmark. The confirmed experiments were reported immediately to Niels Bohr who by January of 1939 had booked passage and was on his way to America where he brought the message to Princeton and Columbia. The ensuing activity by the displaced-to-America scientists generated excitement about the prospects of weaponry for the handful who understood the implications. Leo Szilard, in London through 1938, and then on to Columbia in New York, worked with Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn successfully in achieving a chain reaction at Columbia's Pupin Lab. In August of '39 he composed his famous letter from 'Einstein' and Bohr's colleagues, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, further demonstrated to the British the feasibility of the atom bomb, called the "Frisch-Peierls Memorandum" which resulted in the creation of the MAUD Committee (Military Application of Uranium Detonation) in April of 1940. Sir Henry Tizard and physicist John D. Cockroft took the leadership of the MAUD Committee and arranged for the existence of the "British Mission", a delegation that initially came to Washington, D.C. to persuade the Americans to supply the needed resources for developing weapons technologies as a mutually beneficial economic boon.
 
Hitler's summer invasion of Paris in 1940 caused the 'heavy water' reactor project underway at the College de France to be relocated to the Cavendish in Cambridge along with its team, minus its leader, the avowed communist Frederic Joiliot-Curie. [5]. Of this new Cavendish team which would soon transfer to Canada, perhaps only one member was a native Briton. The others were displaced Jewish scholars and objections were anticipated about placing the team directly in the U.S. At the end of the year that it took the MAUD Committee to issue its final reports, arrangements to send a 'heavy water' team were focused on McGill and Montreal Universities. The stated object of the heavy water work was to initiate the building of nuclear reactors for the purpose of creating new isotopes for bomb cores. The British dubbed this program "Tube Alloys" which became its codeword for the very substance it was striving for --plutonium. At a future point, Brigadier Charles Lindemann and Rutherford's son-in-law and lab assistant, Ralph Fowler (emissary for MAUD), joined the Canadians in hopes of gathering secret technology to carry home to Britain, the real purpose of the "British Mission". A native Canadian, George Craig Laurence, who had spent years under Rutherford's tutelage at Cavendish, was already ahead of the 'reactor' teams elsewhere. By March of 1940 Laurence had completed a "miniature" reactor design using graphite which was secretly built over the following months and finished in September. According to one of his biographies "At this time Dr. J.D. Cockroft visited Ottawa [and] was so impressed with Laurence's work that he persuaded Imperial Chemical Industries of Britain to send a contribution...In Dec. 1940, Laurence was asked to visit the United States where he met Lyman J. Briggs, head of the Uranium Commission, and other scientists including Fermi. An exchange of relevant secret reports lasting nearly two years resulted." [6]. Fermi's team at Chicago achieved sustained nuclear chain reaction with a graphite design in December of 1942, precisely two years later.
 
Attainment of a reactor was the momentous event switching the Manhattan Project into high gear. The U.S. Army took control of the Project and the various teams were assembled to take up residence at Los Alamos. The British sent dozens of scientists; 19 came to Los Alamos, 35 went to the University of California Berkeley and more were placed at other Project locations not including Canada. James Chadwick and William G. Penney led the UK's Los Alamos team that included Rudolf Peierls, Otto Frisch, Egon Bretscher, and Klaus Fuchs. [7]. Under British auspices, Niels Bohr and his family were helped out of Denmark and then brought to Los Alamos to join in. Somewhere in this time period, the MAUD reports that were issued in 1941 and contained the speculative strategy and pertinent technical achievements to date, came into the possession of the USSR's Joseph Stalin. Klaus Fuchs, convicted in the 50s of spying for the Soviets, presumably had nothing to do with the MAUD reports though he was a refugee to Edinburgh Scotland where he studied under refugee Max Born. [8]. Wherever the leaks were coming from, they could easily have been high-level subterfuges with so many of the British patrons advocating the "open world" concept. The scientists themselves, familiar travelers of international scope, were equally invested in these ideas, many of them having shadowy questions and doubts about loyalties and allegiances in their own deeper relationships; to each other, to science, and to their sponsors. [9]. In their world a fierce competitiveness and opportunism was the stark reality they sought to publicly deny.
 
In the wake of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Britain's 'heros' were well rewarded and some were eventually knighted such as Sir Rudolf Peierls. William Beveridge, organizer of the AAC, was elevated to the peerage and under postwar Prime Minister Attlee, Lord Beveridge instituted the socialist Welfare State that had won him the support of the Fabians decades before. Rutherford's assistant, Marcus Oliphant from Australia, who endured an uncomfortable trans-Atlantic flight to pressure the Americans into hastening bomb development after the MAUD reports, became the Governor of South Australia. [10]. Lord Cherwell, Frederick Lindemann, maintained his close ties to Winston Churchill and served the Atomic Energy Authority until his death. Cherwell's brother Charles kept his close ties also, to friends in NewYork's Knickerbocker Club and Jupiter Island Club. [11]. Others under the British wing returned to their home countries and secured top jobs in the nuclear industry, and still a few, like Klaus Fuchs, joined the British atomic energy program at Harwell. It was many years after Los Alamos that accusations and convictions of espionnage surfaced, coinciding with the McCarthy hearings in the U.S. The most severely and publicly punished Briton was Allan Nunn May who served a term of hard labor and was forced to later seek work as a physicist in Ghana. A Soviet defector to the West, Igor Gouzenko, who worked secretly for the KGB in Canada gave the testimony that led to the arrests of Fuchs and Nunn May. [12]. Gouzenko's indictments of a spy-ring he claimed was based in Britain netted over 30 individuals from several countries who were purportedly passing atomic secrets.
 
 
Notes and References
Many sources favorably document the fates of 'displaced scholars' in 1933 and enumerate the organizations and individuals who assisted, among them this piece by Bill Williams on the University of Manchester (aka Owens College and Victoria University) http://www.mucjs.org/MELILAH/2005/3.pdf
Tibor Frank, cited in the article on Leo Szilard (part II) contributes an essay, "Cohorting, Networking, Bonding: Michael Polanyi in Exile" profiling the career of Michael Polanyi who relocated to U Manchester, and was turned down at a later application to move to the University of Chicago
http://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/pol ... ll-pdf.pdf
Sir Henry Tizard, chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee who led the first official delegation of the MAUD Committee in 1940, made many successful contacts which led to technology development, notably in the advancement of RADAR, supplying Bell Telephone and Dr. Alfred Loomis (chair of the Microwave Committee) with contracts for the "magnetron" and MIT's Radiation Lab.
[1] Oct. 3, 1933, speech by Albert Einstein, cited in a London School of Economics article of the meeting between Beveridge and Szilard in Vienna: http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/LSEHisto ... ouncil.htm
[2] AJR article quotes from http://www.ajr.org.uk/index.cfm/section ... ticle=1883
[3] Ernest Rutherford takes the chair given by Arthur Schuster. Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish family of textile merchants that converted to Unitarianism, as did the extended family of relatives in Britain. Arthur's brother, Felix Otto Schuster was a well-known banker in London and received a Baronet from the Crown that passed as far as his grandson's lifetime, to 1996. His cousin Claud Schuster joined the Civil Service as a barrister, and though noted for incompetence, acted as secretary and counselor for several Parliamentarians in the House of Lords.
see the wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schuster
[4] Lindemann family background, the 3 brothers and one sister by their parents (Prussian) Adolphus F. Lindemann and (American) Olga Noble who was a Connecticut banker's widow. Olga Noble inherited English property in the aristocratic enclave of Sidmouth. Adolphus' mother came from the shipping wealthy Cyprien-Fabre family.
for more on Frederick, http://www.dannen.com/decision/lrg-fal.html
[5] French heavy water team, (without) Joliot , included Hans von Halban, Lew Kowarski, and Francis Perrin, all displaced jewish scientists. Von Halban and Kowarski went to Montreal and Perrin went to NYC's Columbia. Francis Perrin's father, Jean Baptiste Perrin, was a noted physicist who was given the directorship of Rothschild Institute of Biophysics in Paris when it was newly opened in 1929. In 1941, J.B. Perrin joined his son in New York and opened the French University of New York, ostensibly a networked institution with the New School of Social Research that sponsored his son.
[6] Canadian George Laurence, http://www15.pair.com/buchanan/laurence/george.htm  from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, series V, vol. IV, 1989
[7] the British team to Los Alamos: Penney, Chadwick, Peierls, Frisch, Bretscher, Fuchs and many unnamed.
--William Penney participated in Sec. of War Stimson's "Target Committee" and witnessed the bomb drop on Nagasaki.
--James Chadwick presumably beat his comtemporaries to the drawing board in the neutron 'discovery', publishing first in the British science journal, Nature, which was founded originally by Thomas Huxley.
--the others had all worked together over the years. Frisch, Peierls, and Fuchs were likely present company to a confirming chain reaction experiment sometime (or multiple times) between Jan. of 1939 and Mar of 1940. Chadwick would write years later that in these days (1939-40) he realized that a nuclear bomb was "inevitable".
--Egon Bretscher, originally from Zurich, became a division chief at Harwell where he worked again with Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, among others. He tells a story in his recollections and memoirs of nearly sliding over a cliff in the Swiss Alps while tied to friend Felix Bloch who had fallen. Bretschers two sons, Mark and Tony, are both cell biologist and biophysicist with ties to Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell.  
[8] Max Born at Edinburgh, where he was relocated in 1933 was a physicist's teacher of teachers, formerly at Gottingen
[9] A controversy and case of suppression among the physicists regarding plagiarism is addressed here as speculation based on facts http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress. ... aboratory/
[10] Marcus Oliphant, claimed to have instigated the Manhattan Project
[11] Charles Lindemann, listed with the Knickerbockers, died at Jupiter Island Florida http://www.energy-net.org/1NWO/KNICKS.HTM and for a lengthy treatment, here http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303 ... 04ch8.html
Charles' role in his Secret Service capacity (believed to be Charles and not Septimus) http://books.google.com/books?id=zkhZOy ... PR8w&hl=en
[12] Soviet KGB defector Igor Gouzenko: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSgouzenko.htm and http://www.ccnr.org/chronology.html,

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

This is incredibly GOOD material!