The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Churchill had sent over Henry Tizard in the late summer of 1940 with a delegation of experts and a black-enameled metal steamer trunk, the original black box, full of military secrets. The prize specimen among them was the cavity magnetron developed in Mark Oliphant’s laboratory at Birmingham. John Cockcroft, a future Nobel laureate with a vital mission, traveled along to explain the high-powered microwave generator. The Americans had never seen anything like it before. Cockcroft got together one weekend in October with Ernest Lawrence and multimillionaire physicist-financier Alfred Loomis, the last of the gentlemen scientists, at Loomis’ private laboratory in the elegant suburban New York colony of Tuxedo Park. That meeting laid the groundwork for a major new NDRC laboratory at MIT. To keep its work secret it was named the Radiation Laboratory, as if serious scientists might actually be pursuing applications so dubious as those bruited by visionaries from nuclear physics. Loomis wanted Lawrence to direct the new laboratory. Lawrence preferred to stay at Berkeley laying plans and raising funds for a new 184-inch cyclotron but was willing to encourage his best people to move to Cambridge. He convinced McMillan: “I left Berkeley in November 1940 to take part in the development of radar for national defense.”1384 Lawrence’s and McMillan’s priorities are a measure of the priorities of American science in late 1940. Peacetime cyclotrons and radar for air defense came first befo...