MAUD Committee
The MAUD Committee was a British scientific working group formed during the Second World War. It was established to perform the research required to determine if an atomic bomb was feasible. After fifteen months of work, the research culminated in two reports, known collectively as the MAUD Report. The report was handed over to the Soviet Union by its atomic spies, and helped start the Soviet atomic bomb project. The Report was made available to the United States, where it energised the American effort, which eventually became the Manhattan Project.
About MAUD Committee in brief
The MAUD Committee was a British scientific working group formed during the Second World War. It was established to perform the research required to determine if an atomic bomb was feasible. The name MAUD came from a strange line in a telegram from Danish physicist Niels Bohr referring to his housekeeper, Maud Ray. After fifteen months of work, the research culminated in two reports, known collectively as the MAUD Report. The report was handed over to the Soviet Union by its atomic spies, and helped start the Soviet atomic bomb project. In response, the British created a nuclear weapons project officially named Tube Alloys. The Report was made available to the United States, where it energised the American effort, which eventually became the Manhattan Project. 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 slow neutrons, and discovered that barium had been produced. By analogy with the division of biological cells, they named the process ‘fission’. In April 1939, Sir William Spens approached Sir Kenneth Pickthorn, the master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, to discuss the danger of anatomic bomb being developed. Even at such long odds, the odds of success were sufficiently great to be taken seriously. Like many scientists, Tizard was sceptical of the likelihood of an atomicBomb being developed, reckoning the odds at 100,000 to 1,000.
In May 1939, Lord Chartfield, the Minister of Defence for Imperial Defence, asked Sir Henry Ismay in turn for an opinion for the Coordination of Defence, Major General Ismay, in turn asked Sir William Ismay for the opinion of the Tizard for the Ministry of Defence. The Tizard’s opinion was that an atomicbomb was unlikely to be developed, and he asked Sir Ismay to turn his back on the idea. In July 1939, the T Wizard wrote to Sir William Pickthorpe, the Master of Corpus, asking him to check that the danger was sufficiently seriously to be checked. In October that year, Sir Henry Ismay turned his back for the first time on the possibility of a nuclear bomb. In November that year he wrote a letter to Lord Chartor, the Chief of the Defence Staff, in which he asked him to reconsider the case for developing a nuclear weapon. In March 1940, Sir Kenneth Chartor wrote to Lord Ismay again, this time with a more serious concern, and asked him for a view on how to deal with the threat of a German atomic bomb. This was the beginning of the Cambridge-Liverpool-Cambridge programme. The Cambridge-Oxford programme was split among four different universities, each having a separate programme director. The University of Birmingham, University of Liverpool, Universityof Cambridge and the University of Oxford had a different programme director for each programme. At Cambridge, Nobel Prize in Physics laureates George Paget Thomson and William Lawrence Bragg wanted the government to take urgent action to acquire uranium ore.
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