Gen 75 Committee
It was one of many ad hoc cabinet committees, each of which was convened to handle a single issue, and given a prefix of Gen (for general) and a number.
Sir John Anderson, the Lord President of the Council, was the minister responsible, and Wallace Akers from Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was appointed the director.
[1] At the Quadrant Conference in August 1943, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill and the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the Quebec Agreement, which merged Tube Alloys with the American Manhattan Project to create a combined British, American and Canadian project.
[2] The British considered the Quebec Agreement to be the best deal they could have struck under the circumstances, and the restrictions were the price they had to pay to obtain the technical information needed for a successful post-war nuclear weapons project.
[5] A British mission led by Akers assisted in the development of gaseous diffusion technology at the SAM Laboratories in New York.
[6] Another, led by Mark Oliphant, who acted as deputy director at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, assisted with the electromagnetic separation process.
[8] The British mission to the Los Alamos Laboratory led by James Chadwick, and later Rudolf Peierls, included distinguished scientists such as Geoffrey Taylor, James Tuck, Niels Bohr, William Penney, Otto Frisch, Ernest Titterton and Klaus Fuchs, who was later revealed to be a spy for the Soviet Union.
[14] Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill in June 1945, created the Gen 75 Committee on 10 August 1945 to examine the feasibility of a nuclear weapons programme.
[16] As reports came in of the devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Attlee considered how nuclear weapons had changed the nature of warfare and international relations.
Ultimately, though, it endorsed Attlee's preference that practical knowledge of nuclear weapons design not be shared with the Soviet Union.
[18] During the war, Chadwick, Cockcroft, Oliphant, Peierls, Harrie Massey and Herbert Skinner had met in Washington, DC, in November 1944, and drawn up a proposal for a British atomic energy research establishment, which they had calculated would cost around £1.5 million.
It endorsed the creation of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in September,[21] Attlee announced the decision in the House of Commons on 29 October 1945.
The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, and the Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy both recommended that it be placed within the Ministry of Supply.
[22] The Tube Alloys Directorate was transferred from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to the Ministry of Supply effective 1 November 1945.
Tube Alloys had performed much of the pioneering research on gaseous diffusion for uranium enrichment, and Oliphant's team in Berkeley were well-acquainted with the electromagnetic process.
[30] Michael Perrin, who was present, later recalled that:The meeting was about to decide against it on grounds of cost, when Bevin arrived late and said "We've got to have this thing.
"[15][31][32] The Gen 75 Committee thereupon approved the construction of the proposed gaseous diffusion plant, which was built on the site of an old Royal Ordnance Factory at Capenhurst, near Chester.
[38] Dissent came from Patrick Blackett, who submitted a paper to the Gen 75 Committee that forcefully argued against Britain acquiring atomic bombs.
[41] This was a smaller committee, consisting of Attlee, Morrison, Bevin, Wilmot, the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, Lord Addison, and the Minister of Defence, A. V.
