Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

362 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
director of Lehman Bros., friend of Einstein, and since 1932 an economic
adviser to the administration, with direct access to the President, offered to
put the letters in the President's hands.
The letters were transmitted on October 11, 1939. After reading
them Roosevelt said he must have the advice of Dr. Briggs, his principal
counsellor in the official family on scientific matters. With the President's
permission, Sachs informed Dr. Briggs the same night of his visit to the
White House.1S3 That week the President appointed an Advisory Commit-
tee on Uranium, with Dr. Briggs as chairman and Col. Keith F. Adamson of
Army Ordnance and Commander Gilbert C. Hoover of the Navy Bureau of
Ordnance his associates. to look into the cuestion of uranium fission.
The first meeting of the committee on October 21, 1939, attended
also by Mohler of the Bureau, Sachs, Szilard, Wigner, and Edward Teller,
resulted in a report to the President, dated November 1, saying that a chain
reaction, though unproved, was a distinct possibility. In tentative terms it
speculated on the potential energy that might be released by splitting of
uranium atoms, looking toward the possibility of both a new explosive, in
which the military was interested, and a new source of energy, long sought by
the Navy to drive its submarines without the need of frequent surfacing.
Specifically, the report recommended that 4 tons of pure.grade graphite be
obtained at once for research, and later acquisition, if justified, of 50 tons
of uranium ore.
Three months after the report, in February 1940, the sum of $6,000
from Army and Navy Ordnance funds was made available to purchase a
small quantity of graphite for experiments on its absorption qualities. The
war in Europe was then 6 months old. Seven weeks later Hitler invaded
Denmark and Norway, preliminary to his attack on the Low Countries and
France.
It was an awesome responsibility that had been thrust upon Dr. Briggs.
in his 66th year—_and seventh as Director of the Bureau—he had gone
through a series of investigations of Bureau operations and witnessed a
serious reduction in Bureau funds and staff. The depression was still on, and
so were many of the constrictions of a planned economy. And no end was
in sight. A younger man might have seized on the adventure into the un-
known promised by nuclear fission, but Dr. Briggs had learned to be cautious.
Nor was he at all certain that this was the kind of research, or direction of
Testimony of Alexander Sachs. Roosevelt's choice of Dr. Briggs was also probably
dictated by the absence of any other real liaison between Government and science, and
the fact that security as well as policy restricted him to official circles. See Richard G.
Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939—1946; A History of the U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), pp. 19—20.