'MAUD Committee: Negotiations with ICI and Halban'

File consists of material on the UK atomic energy project, consisting of both official documentationand also post-war notes made by Sir Michael Perrin. Also notes in a different hand on 'Our Bomb', broadcast on Channel 4, 6 April 1988 and on Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1949-1945 (London: MacMillan, 1964)

The MAUD Committee was established by Henry Tizard, the chairman of the Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, to act on the propositions regarding urnaium fission by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls.

In particular, the papers focus on Dr Hans Halban's work with ICI in 1941 on the utilisation of nulcear energy. Perrin served as the Secretary of the Energy Co-ordination Committee (of the MAUD Committee), which co-ordinated ICI's nuclear energy work with similar research in British universities. Halban would later move to the USA to continue working on the development of the first atomic bomb. Perrin served as secretary to the Tube Alloys (British atomic bomb project) committee, which replaced the MAUD Committee, and played an important part in the adminstration and development of Britain's atomic research during World War Two.

1940s

1 file

Copyright assigned to the Wellcome Trust