What is the first name of the person who discovered that the chairman of the OSRD S-1 Section, Lyman Briggs, had locked away the MAUD reports ?
The MAUD Committee reports urged the co-operation with the United States should be continued in the research of nuclear fission. Charles C. Lauritsen, a Caltech physicist working at the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), was in London during this time and was invited to sit in on a MAUD meeting. The committee pushed for rapid development of nuclear weapons using gaseous-diffusion as their isotope separation device. Once he returned to the United States, he was able to brief Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), concerning the details discussed during the meeting.In August 1941, Mark Oliphant, the director of the physics department at the University of Birmingham and an original member of the MAUD Committee, was sent to the US to assist the NDRC on radar. During his visit he met with William D. Coolidge. Coolidge was shocked when Oliphant informed him that the British had predicted that only ten kilograms of uranium-235 would be sufficient to supply a chain reaction effected by fast moving neutrons. While in America, Oliphant discovered that the chairman of the OSRD S-1 Section, Lyman Briggs, had locked away the MAUD reports transferred from Britain entailing the initial discoveries and had not informed the S-1 Committee members of all its findings.Oliphant took the initiative himself to enlighten the scientific community in the U.S. of the recent ground breaking discoveries the MAUD Committee had just exposed. Oliphant also travelled to Berkley to meet with Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron. After Oliphant informed Lawrence of his report on uranium, Lawrence met with NDRC chairman James Bryant Conant, George B. Pegram, and Arthur Compton to relay the details which Oliphant had directed to Lawrence. Oliphant was not only able to get in touch with Lawrence, but he met with Conant and Bush to inform them of the significant data the MAUD had discovered. Oliphant’s ability to inform the Americans led to Oliphant convincing Lawrence, Lawrence convincing Compton, and then Kistiakowsky convincing Conant to move forward with nuclear weapons. These actions from Oliphant resulted in Bush taking this report directly to the president.
Mark