Mark Oliphant, from Adelaide, lights the fuse for Robert Oppenheimer to be involved in WWII atomic bomb project
Cillian Murphy (inset) stars as the central character in the Christopher Nolan 2023 film Oppenheimer that omits the role of Adelaide-born and -educated physicist Mark Oliphant (right) in getting Robert Oppenheimer (left) involved in the Manhattan atomic bomb project during World War II.
Images from Wikipedia and Universal Pictures
Adelaide-born and -educated physicist Mark Oliphant – not Robert Oppenheimer – set off moves by the United States of America to produce and drop atomic bombs in World War II. Oliphant’s role was overlooked in Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer.
A September 1941 meeting between Oliphant and Oppenheimer, researched by Fremantle-based geoscientist Darren Holden, was highlighted by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News in the wake of the Oppenheimer film’s release.
That 1941 meeting with Oliphant brought Oppenheimer into the atomic bomb project. Until then, Holden found, Oppenheimer was just “part of the chorus line of theoretical physicists and had certainly not been involved in any applied bomb research. Oliphant shifted Oppenheimer from the shadows of theory and into the light of practicality, and thus began his passage towards his place in history."
Oliphant, who graduated from Adelaide University in 1922, was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1927 for research on mercury and he studied under Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge University’s Cavendish laboratory. There, by using a particle accelerator to fire heavy hydrogen nuclei (deuterons), he discovered the nuclei of herium-3 (helions) and tritium (tritons) that, when reacting with each other, released particles that had far more energy than before – a result of nuclear fusion.
In 1937, Oliphant became Poynting professor of physics at Birmingham University where two colleagues – Jewish refugees Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls – showed a "super bomb", transported by aircraft, using the isotope uranium-235 was more possible than usimg the more plentiful uranium-238. Oliphant was on the high-level scientific MAUD Committee in the United Kingdom that reported in 1941 that an atomic bomb might be feasible by 1943.
Armed with this knowledge and amid concerns that Nazi Germany could develop the weapon, and worried that United Kindom nuclear research was languishing, Oliphant took matters into his own hands. He left Britain for the United States of America (USA) – still a neutral nation in the war – in 1941. Oliphant found an ally in convincing the American to take up what became the Manhattan atomic bomb project.
Through his friend Ernest Lawrence at the radiation laboratory in Berkeley, California, Oliphant got Oppenheimer to "check the numbers" in the Frisch-Peierls paper. Dr Holden said it was “essentially at that point that Oppenheimer was brought in" and nuclear research reinvigorated in the USA. Holden noted that Oliphant and Oppenheimer continued to collaborate after the war, trying to convince the governments of the world, and the United Nations, to ban all atomic weapons.
But Oliphant remained sufficiently pleased with his work on the bomb to write a letter to The Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide in 1986 to champion the British contributions to the Manhattan atomic project.
