april 1940: MAUD Committee opgericht

Records held at the Public Record Office Kew



Cabinet Office records:

CAB126 Atomic energy files, 1941-1955



332 files

In April 1940, a committee of scientists, with Professor George Thomson as Chairman, was set up, originally under the Air Ministry and later under the Ministry of Aircraft Production.1 This committee, which was later to be know as the MAUD Committee, was instructed to examine the whole problem of the use of fission for energy production (see CAB 126/1), to co-ordinate work in progress and to report whether the possibilities of producing atomic bombs during the war and their military effect were sufficient to justify the necessary diversion of effort for this purpose. The committee decided early in its career that it should be know be the initials MAUD - a camouflage name to avoid the necessity of making all letters secret. By mid-1941, the committee had decided that the feasibility of a military weapon based on atomic energy with unprecedented powers of destruction was definitely established and submitted a report2 of its findings and recommendations to the Scientific Advisory Committee.3 A new organisation, known, for security reasons, as the Directorate of Tube Alloys (TA), was established in September 1941 to supervise the development of the project. It formed part of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which was under the administrative charge of Sir Edward Appleton, but was supervised by a Consultative Council4 under the chairmanship of Sir John Anderson5 with Mr A W Akers of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd (ICI) as Director and Mr M W Perrin, also from ICI, as his deputy. The Council was advised by a Technical Committee composed of scientists which first met on 6 November 1941 when it arranged for the immediate dissolution of the MAUD Committee.6 During 1942 there was an exchange of ideas and information on the project between American, British and Canadian research groups and in August, the setting up of a Combined Policy Committee in Washington resulted in the pooling of scientific and technical research on the production of an atomic bomb in America.7 In October 1943, Professor Niels Bohr escaped from Denmark and was appointed as an adviser on scientific matters.8 This class consists of the general policy files of the Tube Alloys Consultative Council and the atomic energy committees' secretariat and includes Sir John Anderson's correspondence, telegrams and reports. The list is arranged in order of file numbers with un-numbered files (including telegrams between London and the Combined Policy Committee in Washington) arranged chronologically at the end of the list. The following scientists all worked on the project - Chadwick, Frisch, and Peierls. They reported by memorandum to Sir Henry Tizard (see CAB126/1).

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/lhcma/pro/p-cab126.htm