 |
The Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Inc. "Preserving, Exhibiting, Interpreting and Teaching the History of the Manhattan Project" |
|
| Home | Site Map | Contact Us | Feedback | Mission |
Manhattan Project History
Early Government Support
The MAUD Report
July 2, 1941
| "I still...think that the probability of anything of real military significance is very low" - Sir Henry Tizard; Appointed the MAUD Committee |
| "I have often been asked why I didn't abandon the project there and then, saying nothing to anybody. Why start on a project which, if it was successful, would end with the production of a weapon of unparalleled violence, a weapon of mass destruction such as the world had never seen? The answer is very simple. We were at war, and the idea was reasonably obvious; very probably some German scientists had had the same idea and were working on it". - Otto Frisch; Refugee Physicist whose work with Rudolf Peierls formed the basis of the MAUD report. |
The MAUD CommitteeG. P. Thomson, Chairman Mark Oliphant Patrick Blackett James Chadwick P. B. Moon John D. Cockroft |
| Web Master's Note: Most of the experimental and theoretical scientific calculations and assessments that formed the basis for the MAUD Report were the work of Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls. However, in 1941. being German, they were both "officially" classified as "enemy aliens" and could not, by law, be a part of a wartime committee. Of course this was short lived and both Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls made tremendous contributions at Los Alamos as part of the British Mission. |
| In July of 1941, Vannevar Bush and James
Conant, new head of the National Defense Research Committee, received
a copy of a draft report from their liaison office in London.
The report, prepared by a group codenamed the MAUD committee and set
up by the British in the spring of 1940 to study the possibility of
developing a nuclear weapon, maintained that a sufficiently purified
critical mass of uranium-235 could fission even with fast neutrons.
Building upon theoretical work on atomic bombs performed by refugee physicists Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch in 1940 and 1941, the MAUD report estimated that a critical mass of ten kilograms would be large enough to produce an enormous explosion. A bomb that size could be loaded on existing aircraft and be ready in approximately two years. American scientists had been in contact with the MAUD Committee since the fall of 1940, but it was the July 1941 MAUD report that helped crystallize the American bomb effort. Here were specific plans for producing a bomb, produced by a distinguished group of scientists with high credibility in the United States. The MAUD report dismissed plutonium production, thermal diffusion, the electromagnetic method, and the centrifuge and recommended gaseous diffusion of uranium-235 on a massive scale. The British believed that uranium research could lead to the production of a bomb in time to effect the outcome of the war. While the MAUD report provided encouragement to Americans advocating a more extensive uranium research program, it also served as a sobering reminder that fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany almost three years earlier and that since the spring of 1940 a large part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had been set aside for uranium research. Bush and Conant immediately went to work. After strengthening the Uranium Committee, particularly with the addition of Enrico Fermi as head of theoretical studies and Harold Urey as head of isotope separation and heavy water research (heavy water was still highly regarded as a moderator), Bush asked yet another reconstituted National Academy of Sciences committee to evaluate the uranium program. This time he gave Arthur Compton of the University of Chicago specific instructions to address the technical questions of critical mass and destructive capability, partially to verify the MAUD results. Note: Portions taken from "The Manhattan Project - Making the Atomic Bomb"; U. S. Dept. of Energy; January 1999 |
IF
YOU SEE A YELLOW "ENTER" BUTTON ABOVE, PLEASE DO NOT "CLICK" ON IT.
THIS WILL TAKE YOU TO A GAMBLING SITE WHICH WAS ADDED TO OUR WEB SITE
WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION!
This web site is growing by 150 pages per month - Click
