Science and Public Policy: The Open World 83 



the course of the Second World War to the development of 

 the nuclear bomb. At its start it was hardly a secret at all. 

 It was certainly not a military secret. The scientists in whose 

 minds the idea was born themselves decided, as a corporate 

 voluntary act, to curtail open publication of any information 

 which might point in the direction of a bomb. When the 

 idea of a nuclear weapon became an officially defined project. 

 Government administrators both in the U.K. and the U.S. 

 found themselves in a quandary because of the number of 

 refugee scientists who were involved. But in spite of the 

 administrators' opposition — to quote from the Official British 

 History s of the subject — "the greatest of all wartime secrets was 

 entrusted to scientists excluded for security reasons from other 

 war work." Later, officials in our two countries argued about 

 the manner and extent to which security should be main- 

 tained, and at the end of the war the British authorities ex- 

 pressed strong opposition, on grounds of security, to the pub- 

 lication by Dr. Smyth of his famous report on the Manhattan 

 project, a volume which the U.S. authorities felt needed to ap- 

 pear in print. Here the British authorities concerned were 

 almost certainly too cautious. Niels Bohr, whose intervention 

 in the politics of nuclear affairs had a better reception at the 

 hands of President Roosevelt than at those of Mr. Churchill, 

 as well as Sir James Chadwick, one of the most distinguished 

 of the British contributors to the project, believed that the 

 mechanics of the bomb could not be held secret for long, and 

 for this reason they argued for the international control of 

 the atom well before the end of the Second World War. What 

 happened? Even though every effort was made to prevent in- 

 formation passing to other governments about the design and 

 construction of bombs, and the construction and operation of 

 plants producing fissile material, other Governments — and not 

 just the U.S.S.R. — did find out. And many who have not yet 

 revealed a knowledge of the subject probably know its secrets, 



5. Gowing, Margaret (1964). Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945. London. 

 Macmillan. 



