M.A.U.D. committee

M.A.U.D. committee, name given to a scientific body, set up in April 1940 and chaired by the British physicist, George Thomson, whose brief was to ‘examine the whole problem, to co-ordinate work in progress and to report, as soon as possible, whether the possibilities of producing atomic bombs during this war, and their military effect, were sufficient to justify the necessary diversion of effort for the purpose’ (quoted in R. Clark, The Greatest Power on Earth, London, 1980, pp. 91–2). As a sub-committee of the Tizard Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare it was at first called the Subcommittee on the U-Bomb, but was given the cover name, M.A.U.D. committee, by Thomson in June 1940 (neither the initials, nor the name they spelt, meant anything). It reported in July 1941 that a uranium bomb was practicable and ‘likely to lead to decisive results in the war’. It recommended that the UK develop such a weapon and this led to the formation in October 1941 of a government body, codenamed TUBE ALLOYS, to control all aspects of British nuclear research. However, one of the committee, Patrick Blackett, recommended that the atomic bomb be developed in the USA; the government acted on his minority report; and the same month the report was handed to the Americans and the following year the MANHATTAN PROJECT came into being to build a nuclear weapon. See also atomic bomb, 1.