British atomic bomb ?

Hi there,

Is it true that Britain started an atomic bomb programme before the start of World War II ? If so, could Britain have developed it on its own ? (assuming a slow, incremental process rather than a Manhatten Project style 'crash programme'. How long would such a programme have taken?

Thanks

Stephen O'Brien

Yes, Britain was doing its own research. British scientists and ideas made a number of key contributions to the American project. One British scientist, Klaus Fuchs, gave away much of the secrets to Russia.

Given the enormous industrial resources necessary to refine raw uranium into active material and Britain's dire straits during the war, I doubt it. The timetable would really be dependent on how much resource Britain would have been willing to devote to bomb production, at the expense of civilian needs. After the war, Britain had a lot of economic problems and took a long time to recover.

Have a look at Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Martin Sherwin, AWorld Destroyed also deals with the British role.

The atomic age started with the splitting of the atom at Oxford, England by Rutherford in, I think 1923. By 1942 British know how in this area was extensive but there was no attempt to build a British bomb as all the British scientists with anything to contribute were in the US working on the Manhattan project with Oppenheimer and Teller. Any idea at that time to develop a separate weapon would have been utter folly - the country did not have the resources and the bomb was wanted urgently - the British were afraid that Germany had a bomb under development. As to whether the raids on the German heavy water plants in Norway by the Mosquitos of 633 Squadron made a difference who knows?

Some time after the war the British developed their own means for warhead production carrying out tests in Australia at Woomera and to this day provide their own warheads. Since the infamous debacle of Blue Streak British delivery systems have all come from the USA - cruise, Trident submarines (which are built in the UK to US design).

Howard W Wortley

Actually, it was Sir John Douglas Cockcroft and Ernest Walton at Cambridge in 1932, a feat for which they jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951.

This is misleading. Rutherford never knowingly split an atom or said so. Cockcroft and Walton built a particle accelerator (important, but not splitting atoms.)

The critical experiment was done by Hahn in Berlin in 1938 (not much different from what Fermi was working on in Italy at the same period.) This was one of several experiments with mysterious results. Hahn's colleague Meitner and Frisch at Xmas 1938 developed the idea that the mysterious result (appearance of an element not there before) was as if an atom of uranium had broken in two to yield barium. They borrowed the word 'fission' from biology (where microscopists were used to watching one cell divide into two.)

'Atom' formerly meant 'indivisible element.' Naturally people had speculated before 1938 'what if' the indivisible could be divided. But 1938/39 was the first time experimental evidence was interpreted to mean this had really happened. I.e. the atom was 'first' split in 1938.

Unfortunatly, 633 Squadron (as per the movie) was just fictional. I'm pretty certain the RAF didn't have a 633 squadron, but if anybody knows different, please let me know.

Initial British atomic technology used heavy water, of which the only European source was the Norsk Hydro facility, so Britain mounted at least 3 special attacks, by commandos (cf. book Skis Against the Atom), Lancaster raids and saboteurs (successful by sinking the ferry boat that transported heavy water to the rail head.) The movie 633 Squadron is fiction.

The British did not then know that the German atomic project was handicapped by lack of certain theoretical discoveries. (Niels Bohr in Copenhagen reported to British intelligence his contact with top German nuclear scientist Heisenberg, but the British never agreed what was going on, cf. R.V. Jones's memoirs.) The practical point is that the German atomic science project never got 1 per cent of the men and money assigned to the Manhattan Project (which achieved success with graphite reactors, not heavy water reactors.)

Attempts were made to bomb the heavy water plant in Norway, I believe by B-17s.

633 Squadron was a myth, and not a very good one.