MAUD Committee

The MAUD Committee was founded by Winston Churchill, in response to Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch's memorandum, in June 1940. Their memorandum was a discussion of the potential relative ease of obtaining a nuclear bomb, compared to earlier projections. All the work in the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum was purely theoretical, so the purpose of the MAUD committee was to do the research required for what Frisch and Peierls called a super bomb. The MAUD Committee investigated if applying nuclear technology to make a bomb was, in reality, feasible. The chair of the committee was Thomson. Each university where research was being done had a commander as well. All the research finally culminated, after fifteen months, in two reports - 'Use of Uranium for a Bomb' and 'Use of Uranium as a source of power' - known collectively as the MAUD report. These reports discussed the necessity of a super-bomb for the war effort. In order to research this further, the British created their own nuclear program officially named Tube Alloys.

Frédéric Joliot-Curie and his colleagues in Paris in April 1939 raised the possibility of an explosive chain reaction in a paper published in Nature. The calculation of criticality was deposited at the Academy of sciences on May 1, 1939 and three patents were filed by two of the team, Hans von Halban and Lew Kowarski. The first two are for the production of nuclear energy, and the third was titled Development of Explosive Charges (Provisional No. 445686). In the same year Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi also independently discovered similar results and warned President Roosevelt in the Einstein–Szilárd letter. Despite almost universal skepticism that an atomic bomb was feasible, George Thomson and Marcus Oliphant then began separate work in their British laboratories. Thompson was unsuccessful because he did not yet have the heavy water that the French has used. However, in Oliphant's laboratory were two refugees: Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls who did some calculations on critical masses. Just before the invasion of France in June 1940, Hans Halban and Lew Kowarski and the records and papers of Joliot-Curie's team were smuggled out of France to England. Halban and Kowarksi continued their research at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge for the MAUD Committee and later as part of the Tube Alloys project.

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