Quebec Agreement

The Quebec Agreement was signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt on 19 August 1943, at the First Quebec Conference in Quebec City, Canada. It stipulated that the US and UK would pool their resources to develop nuclear weapons, and that neither country would use them against the other. British scientists performed important work as part of the British contribution to the Manhattan Project. In July 1945 British permission was given for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan.

About Quebec Agreement in brief

The Quebec Agreement was signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt on 19 August 1943, at the First Quebec Conference in Quebec City, Canada. It stipulated that the US and UK would pool their resources to develop nuclear weapons, and that neither country would use them against the other. It also gave the United States a veto over post-war British commercial or industrial uses of nuclear energy. British scientists performed important work as part of the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, and in July 1945 British permission was given for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. The agreement was superseded by a modus vivendi, an agreement which allowed for limited sharing of technical information between the U.S., Britain and Canada. The neutron was discovered by James Chadwick at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in February 1932. In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at Hahn’s laboratory in Berlin-Dahlem bombarded uranium with slowed neutrons, and discovered that barium had been produced. In May 1939, a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in September 1939, it was directed to conduct research into the feasibility of atomic bombs. The discovery of fission raised the possibility that an extremely powerful atomic bomb could be created. The term was already familiar to the British public through the writings of H. G. Wells, in his 1913 novel The World Set Free. Sir Henry Tizard’s Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defence was originally formed to study the needs of anti-aircraft warfare, but branched out to study air warfare generally.

The MAUD Committee was established to investigate further. It directed an intensive research effort. It determined that the most promising method was a presence of plutonium, now called fissile plutonium. This was determined to be a most promising material, and a team at Cambridge investigated whether another element could be used as a fissure material. The group at Liverpool experimented with different types of isotope separation in mixtures of thermal diffusion, where different particles exhibit different responses to the force of temperature. This group was run by Klaus Fuchs, with the help of fellow German scientist Rudolf Peierls, who could not work on the university’s secret projects like radar because they were enemy aliens, and therefore lacked the necessary security clearance. By February 1940, Thomson’s team had failed to create a chain reaction in natural uranium, and he had decided that it was not worth pursuing. Oliphant’s team reached a strikingly different conclusion. They calculated the critical mass of a metallic sphere of pure uranium-235, and found that instead of tons, as everyone had assumed, as little as 1 to 10 kilograms would suffice, and would explode with the power of thousands of tons of dynamite. The September 1944 Hyde Park Aide-Mémoire extended Anglo-American co-operation into the post- war period, but after the war ended, American enthusiasm for the alliance with Britain waned.

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Uranium Plutonium S-50 (Manhattan Project) Paris Agreement