21 Facts About MAUD Committee

1.

MAUD Committee was a British scientific working group formed during the Second World War.

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2.

The name MAUD Committee came from a strange line in a telegram from Danish physicist Niels Bohr referring to his housekeeper, Maud Ray.

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3.

MAUD Committee was founded in response to the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which was written in March 1940 by Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, two physicists who were refugees from Nazi Germany working at the University of Birmingham under the direction of Mark Oliphant.

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4.

The MAUD Committee Report was made available to the United States, where it energised the American effort, which eventually became the Manhattan Project.

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5.

MAUD Committee reckoned that if a neutron reflector were placed around it, this might be reduced to 12 tonnes .

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6.

MAUD Committee too believed the critical mass of a sphere of uranium to be "of the order of tons".

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7.

MAUD Committee wondered what would happen if he was able to produce a sphere of pure uranium-235.

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8.

MAUD Committee passed it on to Thomson, who discussed it with Cockcroft and Oliphant.

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9.

MAUD Committee told them of the interest the Germans had shown in the heavy water, and in the activity of the French researchers in Paris.

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10.

MAUD Committee was created as a response to the Frisch–Peierls memorandum.

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11.

The MAUD Committee held its first two meetings in April 1940 before it was formally constituted by CSSAW.

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12.

MAUD Committee was assumed by many to be an acronym, however it is not.

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13.

MAUD Policy Committee was kept small and included only one representative from each university laboratory.

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14.

MAUD Committee's research was split among four different universities: the University of Birmingham, University of Liverpool, University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford.

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15.

MAUD Committee described an industrial plant capable of producing a kilogram per day of uranium enriched to 99 per cent uranium-235.

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16.

MAUD Committee was assisted by Haworth, Johnson and, from 28 May 1941, Klaus Fuchs.

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17.

MAUD Committee examined the different processes by which they were obtaining isotopes.

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18.

The Uranium MAUD Committee became the Uranium Section of the OSRD, which was renamed the S-1 Section for security reasons.

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19.

Information from the MAUD Committee came from British scientists travelling to the United States, notably the Tizard Mission, and from American observers at the MAUD Committee meetings in April and July 1941.

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20.

MAUD Committee flew to the United States in late August 1941, ostensibly to discuss the radar programme, but actually to find out why the United States was ignoring the MAUD Committee's findings.

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21.

MAUD Committee 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.

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