Enola Gay's Cargo
The Birth of the Bomb. By Ronald W. Clark.
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(Phoenix House, 16s.) "
THERE was a tape-recorder in the Enola Gay, the American warplane which dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. It took down the words Spoken by the men aboard her. It shows that one of them said, after the explosion: 'My God, what have we done?' This question was the end- Product of a process which had begun in Britain in 1919, when Rutherford first tampered with the atom. The full story of the process is now related in The Birth of the Bomb, a nuclear whodunit Which fills a gap in our history. For it makes Plain that the bomb was born in Britain. To Write it, Mr. Clark has gone to the scientists who 'did the work—Sir George Thomson, Rudolf Peicrls, Otto Frisch, and the others. He sets down h1S findings in langnage intelligible to readers for whom the patois of nuclear physics is so much abracadabra. He has a startling story to tell. Hitler, all unwittingly, was the midwife of the bomb. When he came to power in 1933, scientists fled from Germany as if from a plague. Many of them came to Britain. They brought with them their fears as well as their knowledge. For they dreaded that he might win the race to make the first nuclear weapon. When war began. these refugees were scattered through British univer- sities. As aliens, they were barred from radar and other defence work; but they were free !o go on with nuclear research. In February, 1940, Peierls and Frisch wrote from Birmingham to Sir Henry Tizard. They outlined how a uranium bomb might be built. In July, 1941, a scientific committee headed by Sir George Thomson re- Ported that such a bomb was practicable. The committee's report was given to the United States, then neutral. The British Govern- ment set up Tube Alloys to make the bomb. Then in 1942, after Pearl Harbour, we agreed to transfer the job to America, on the basis that we should share equally with her in the results. What•happened then is, in Mr. Clark's words, a story 'in which justice appears visibly to stumble.' Britain was squeezed out. The Ameri- cans took over our research, used it without much more than formal reference to us, excluded us from the results. They feared that we might let them make the bomb while we developed atomic energy for our post-war industry.
Mr. Clark documents all this, so far as the records are available (some of them are still barred from publication). His facts are of more than historical interest. For they have relevance to our post-war policy of keeping Britain an independent nuclear power. (One part of Mr. Clark's narrative may also illuminate France's nuclear policy too. He discloses that the Joliot- Curie researchers in Paris took out a patent in 1939 for making a uranium bomb to be tested in the Sahara.) There is irony as well as drama about Mr. Clark's story. For the bomb was born out of fear of Hitler. It was a baseless fear (though we con- tinued to nurse it throughout our researches). He never made such a weapon himself, nor did he seriously seek to do so. When the Enola Gay was loaded in the moonlight on August 6, 1945, Hitler was dead, and the war with Germany was
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