British contribution to the Manhattan Project
Britain initiated the first research project to design an atomic bomb in 1941. Building on this work, Britain prompted the United States to recognise how important this type of research was, helped the U.S. to start the Manhattan Project in 1942, and supplied crucial expertise and materials that contributed to the project's successful completion in time to influence the end of the Second World War.
James Chadwick (left), the head of the British Mission, confers with Major General Leslie R. Groves Jr. (right), the director of the Manhattan Project
Australian physicist Mark Oliphant was a key figure in the launching of both the British and United States nuclear weapons programmes
Sir John Anderson, minister responsible for Tube Alloys
Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, a British representative on the Combined Policy Committee
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".
Peierls in 1966
The Poynting Physics building at the University of Birmingham. Its mode of construction helped give rise to the phrase "redbrick university".
Peierls in 1937
Plaque commemorating the Frisch-Peierls memorandum at the University of Birmingham's Poynting Physics Building