Foyle's War: The Eternity Ring question

[james_davis_nicoll]

It's set in 1946 and involves "the Eternity Ring,a group of Soviet sympathizers bent on betraying Britain's atomic secrets". What was the state of British atom bomb research at this particular time?

(not a veiled put-down of Britain: I don't know much about the British nuclear weapons programs)

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Well, in the Manhattan Project the guys who came up with the idea for using shaped charges to make the implosion system work were British, and some of them must have been home by then. And chemical separation of plutonium from uranium is an awful lot easier than gaseous-diffusion enrichment, so with literally no other information at my disposal I'd say they could have built a bomb just about as soon as they wanted.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Operation Hurricane was in 1952 and before that they'd tried to reopen cooperation with the US. It seems reasonable to me to think UK resources in this matter must have been constrained.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Resources, I accept your assessment. I was just pointing out they had the knowledge the day they got home.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think it would have been a resources issue rather than a knowledge one. As was mentioned, the guys who did the shaped implosion work were British, so they would have brought back enough working knowledge to build a bomb. The problem would have been for Britain in 1946 to generate enough material for a test which wasn't remotely likely.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Money was another resource issue. The UK was broke in 1945. Then, things got worse.

Bread was freely available throughout the war, but rationing started in 1946. In 1947, even potatoes started being rationed. Petrol (rationed throughout the war) was completely unavailable for private citizens from 1947-1948.

Food rationing didn't end until 1954; petrol rationing finally ended in 1957.

Researchers would find it difficult to get the resources necessary to build a large chemical plant. They might have found it easier to cannibalize a chemical weapons factory for parts than import or manufacture them from scratch.

The UK lacked the domestic uranium deposits of the US, and the then-functioning mines in Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria were unavailable. However, ore from Canada would be an obvious source.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Didn't they also have access to African uranium?

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I wasn't able to find out when those started production; likewise, I'm not sure when the Australian deposits were developed. Canada, of course, was the source for much of the US program.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkolobwe#Uranium_for_the_Manhattan_Project

[nojay.livejournal.com]

There were vague plans by the scientists and engineers working on the Manhattan Project to continue research and development of nuclear weapons as a joint US-UK venture with some assistance from Canada; what would have happened to Bohr and the other non-English-speaking types involved wasn't clear. The US political establishment put a kibosh on that with the McMahon act of 1946 and the British were sent home after having their luggage searched and any relevant documents confiscated. Mindwipe and/or a trench out back of one of the buildings in Los Alamos were not an option and Guantanamo Bay was not yet a gulag so the returnees were able to recreate a lot of what was needed from notes and memories plus the records of the original Tube Alloys work done before the US deigned to join in the fight against Fascism in early 1942.

In the end there was some R&D collaboration but at arms length mostly and only after Britain demonstrated their home-grown nuclear capability in the 50s, including a fake "thermonuclear" test meant to give the impression to US observers that they had their own fusion weapon when in fact it was just a very big fission device.

The "Eternity Ring" idea works sort-of if you assume that the research going on in the UK in 1946 isn't the primary target of the spy ring but the the people who worked on the Manhattan Project, a socialist Britain (Health care for all!) being perceived as easier to spy in than "Reds under the Beds" paranoid America.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

Speaking of anti Soviet paranaoia anyone know how well known Igor Gouzenko was in the UK? At this late date he's probably largely forgotten if he was, so I doubt he'd be mentioned in a recently written British fiction piece about the Cold War.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I think he was the defector in the Foyle episode.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

There really were no secrets about either the uranium or plutonium fission weapons that the Soviets didn't already possess, courtesy of Klaus Fuchs.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Happily, there's an in-story reason why that might not impede the Eternity Ring from carrying out its nuclear spying in the UK, which is SPOILER ROT 13 vg qbrf abg rkvfg.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

It doesn't hurt that Fuchs was also passing along information about the U.S. bomb program to the British, which could be deliciously ironic.

[(Anonymous)]

Snow gives a portrait of this in "The New Men". Not only were there British scientists who had returned from the Manhattan project, but relics of the earlier British project were well versed in the possibilities. And now free from other scientific war work.

Attlee ordered a feasibility study done in 1945, though no bomb was detonated until 1952. They might not have known much the Russians didn't already have, but it would have been foolish for the Russians to make that assumption.

William Hyde

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

Richard Rhodes has two very good books on the history and development of both the A and H bombs. Very dense, some math stuff (oooh brain hurts!) and lots of details.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

IMO, Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the best non-fiction work of the 20th century, from it's wonderful summation of the physics that led to the discovery of nuclear fission to the intensity of the bomb program under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos and finally, to the terrible nuclear bombing of Hiroshima that Rhodes evokes so well:

The world of the dead is a different place from the world of the living and it is hardly possible to visit there. That day in Hiroshima the two worlds nearly converged. ‘The inundation with death of the area closes to the hypocenter,’ writes the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who interviewed survivors at length, ‘ was such that if a man survived within a thousand meters (0.6 miles) and was out of doors…more than nine tenths of the people around him were fatalities.’ Only the living, however inundated, can describe the dead; but where death claimed nine out of ten or, closer to the hypocenter, ten out of ten, a living voice describing necessarily distorts. Survivors are like us; but the dead are radically changed, without voice or civil rights or recourse. Along with their lives they have been deprived of participation in the human world. ‘There was a fearful silence which made one feel that all people and all trees and vegetation were dead,’ remembers Yoko Ota, a Hiroshima writer who survived. The silence was the only sound the dead could make….They were nearer to the center of the event; they died because they were members of a different polity and their killing did not therefore count officially as murder; their experience most accurately models the worst case of our common future. They numbered in the majority in Hiroshima that day.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

I visited the hypocenter last time I was in Hiroshima. The site is now a paternoster parking garage.

[arkuat]

Yes, that is a good book. It makes clear the irony that the people who developed the bomb were mostly worried about the Nazis getting there first, and then the Nazis were defeated before the thing was ready to use.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

You need to read up on Tube Alloys. That's the codename of the world's first nuclear bomb program -- the British one. It got under way via the MAUD committee in late 1940, and in 1943 the allies agreed to a merger -- the UK sent all their scientists and research material over to join the MP (on the strict understanding that the results of the MP would be shared: an understanding which was ignored by Harry Truman once the Manhattan Project delivered in 1945).

Also worth googling: Klaus Fuchs.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I knew parts of Tube Alloys (which is why it turns up in some of my AH). The post-war US stab in the back is reasonably well known, at least in the Commonwealth (granted, they did give us some loaners later on).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Agreement