page_title: Lyman James Briggs
section_title: Uranium Committee (1939–1941)
hierarchical_section_title: Lyman James Briggs / Life and work / Uranium Committee (1939–1941)
context_page_description: Lyman James Briggs was an American engineer, physicist and administrator. He was a director of the National Bureau of Standards during the Great Depression and chairman of the Uranium Committee before America entered the Second World War. The Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University is named in his honor.
context_section_description: In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt called on Briggs, by then aged 65, to head the Advisory Committee on Uranium to investigate the fission of uranium, as a result of the Einstein–Szilárd letter. Even though Roosevelt had sanctioned a project, progress was slow and was not directed exclusively towards military applications.  Eugene Wigner said that "We often felt we were swimming in syrup".  Boris Pregel said "It is wonder that after so many blunders and mistakes anything was accomplished at all".  Leó Szilárd believed that the project was delayed for a least a year by the short-sightedness and sluggishness of the authorities.  At the time Briggs was not well and was due to undergo a serious operation.  He was unable to take the energetic action that was often needed.
  Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom German refugees Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls under professor Marcus Oliphant made a breakthrough, indicating that it would be possible to make a bomb from purified U-235.  From June 1940, copies of British progress reports were sent to Briggs via a British contact in Washington, Ralph H. Fowler.  In March 1941 a British committee of Nobel Prize–winning scientists, called the MAUD Committee, concluded that an atomic bomb was "not only feasible, it was inevitable".  They also pointed out that a large part of a laboratory in Berlin had been devoted to nuclear research.  A copy of the MAUD Committee's interim report was sent to the Briggs in the USA because Britain lacked the resources to undertake such a large and urgent program on its own.  Britain also wished to move its key research facilities to safety across the Atlantic.  The MAUD Committee issued another report giving technical details on the design and costs on 15 July 1941.
  Britain was at war and felt an atomic bomb should have the highest priority, especially because the Germans might soon have one; but the US was not at war at that time and many Americans did not want to get involved.  One of the members of the MAUD Committee, Marcus Oliphant flew to the United States in late August 1941 in an unheated bomber to find out why the United States was ignoring the MAUD Committee's findings.  Oliphant said that: "The minutes and reports had been sent to Lyman Briggs, who was the Director of the Uranium Committee, and we were puzzled to receive virtually no comment.  I called on Briggs in Washington, only to find out that this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in his safe and had not shown them to members of his committee.  I was amazed and distressed."
  Oliphant then met the whole Uranium Committee.  Samuel K. Allison was a new committee member, a talented experimentalist and a protégé of Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago.  "Oliphant came to a meeting", Allison recalls, "and said 'bomb' in no uncertain terms.  He told us we must concentrate every effort on the bomb and said we had no right to work on power plants or anything but the bomb.  The bomb would cost 25 million dollars, he said, and Britain did not have the money or the manpower, so it was up to us."  Allison was surprised that Briggs had kept the committee in the dark.
  Oliphant visited other physicists to galvanise the USA into action. As a result, in December 1941 Vannevar Bush, director of the powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development, undertook to launch a full-scale effort to develop atomic bombs.  As the scale of the project became clearer, it came under direct military control as the Manhattan Project.
caption: S-1 Executive Committee at the Bohemian Grove, September 13, 1942. From left to right are Harold C. Urey, Ernest O. Lawrence, James B. Conant, Lyman J. Briggs, E. V. Murphree and Arthur Compton
exif: {}