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This book analyzes a little-known but highly significant document that played a key role in early nuclear history: the Frisch-Peierls memorandum of March 1940. Prepared by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, refugee European physicists then at the University of Birmingham, this 10-page document described the physics behind the possibility of creating nuclear weapons utilizing a chain reaction with uranium-235, as well as the associated military, strategic, and ethical implications of such weapons. This remarkable manuscript made its way to the UK government's Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare, initiating the wartime British nuclear program. In 1943, the British effort merged with the US Manhattan Project; a number of native and naturalized British scientists including Frisch and Peierls, participated in the work that culminated with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This book examines the background to the memorandum, gives biographical sketches of Frisch and Peierls, describes how the memorandum came to be prepared, offers a detailed analysis of its physics content, outlines contemporary parallel events in the American nuclear program, and surveys the influence of the memorandum on the British and US wartime nuclear projects.
List of contents
Nuclear Fission: A Review.- Frisch and Peierls.- The Memorandum: Qualitative Part.- The Memorandum: Technical Part.- Epilogue.
About the author
Bruce Cameron Reed earned his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo (Canada) in 1984. His doctoral work was in observational astronomy, a study of the distribution of stars in the Puppis direction of the Milky Way. Just before formally finishing his graduate work in 1983, he became Faculty Member in the Department of Physics at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There he continued to work in observational astronomy, taking up a position as Associate Professor of Physics at Alma College in Michigan in 1992. At Alma, Cameron began to develop an interest in the history and physics of the Manhattan Project. This grew into his primary research focus and has resulted in some 90 publications and six books. He also developed an undergraduate-level general-education class on the project and has given a number of related talks and seminars.
Summary
This book analyzes a little-known but highly significant document that played a key role in early nuclear history: the Frisch-Peierls memorandum of March 1940. Prepared by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, refugee European physicists then at the University of Birmingham, this 10-page document described the physics behind the possibility of creating nuclear weapons utilizing a chain reaction with uranium-235, as well as the associated military, strategic, and ethical implications of such weapons. This remarkable manuscript made its way to the UK government's Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare, initiating the wartime British nuclear program. In 1943, the British effort merged with the US Manhattan Project; a number of native and naturalized British scientists including Frisch and Peierls, participated in the work that culminated with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This book examines the background to the memorandum, gives biographical sketches of Frisch and Peierls, describes how the memorandum came to be prepared, offers a detailed analysis of its physics content, outlines contemporary parallel events in the American nuclear program, and surveys the influence of the memorandum on the British and US wartime nuclear projects.
