On this day, the 80th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Britain’s Sky News, in an article entitled “The Chilling Document That Traces Nuclear Weapons Back to Britain—And the Threat We Now Face,” calls attention to the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum, the document “credited with jump-starting the Manhattan Project that ultimately built the bomb.” Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, two Jewish scientists who had fled Nazi Germany, wrote the document at the University of Birmingham in 1940. It was so secret that it was initially only produced in one copy but is now in the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University. It is the first description of an atom bomb small enough to be used as a weapon.
Not only does it detail how to build a bomb, Sky News reports, but it also foretells the previously unimaginable power of its blast. “Such an explosion would destroy life in a wide area,” they wrote. “The size of this area is difficult to estimate, but it will probably cover the center of a big city.” Radioactive fallout would be inevitable “and even for days after the explosion any person entering the affected area will be killed.”
“What they didn’t believe was that the bomb they proposed, and went on to help build at Los Alamos, would ever be used,” says Sky News. Devastated by its use on Japan, Peierls disavowed the bomb and later campaigned for disarmament.
British historian Peter Hennessey included the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum in his 2007 book, Cabinets and the Bomb. Hennessey reports Peierls describing to him, his and Frisch’s thinking in the early months of 1940 that led to the memorandum, including calculating how much enriched uranium it would take to ignite a chain reaction and how powerful the resulting detonation would be. “We also pointed out the consequences of this weapon, including the fallout, including the fact that it would probably be very difficult to use it without killing a lot of civilians, and we added that for that reason it might never be suitable for use by any country,” Peierls told Hennessey during an encounter at a BBC studio in 1988.
