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

ThE EVENT OF WAR"
WORLD WAR Ii
RESEARCH (1941-45)
The second worldwide war was foreshadowed in the Japanese
in of Ethiopia in 1935, and Hitler's
march into the Rhineland in 1936. Isolated and safeguarded by successive
Neutrality Acts passed in 1935, 1936, and 1937, which barred the sale of
arms or munitions to any warring nation, America watched the piecemeal
fall of small nations, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Albania to Musso-
lini. With the German attack on Poland in September 1939, Britain and
France declared war against the dictators and World War II began. The first
amendments to the Neutrality Acts were enacted.
By temperament strongly neutral and still in the grip of depression,
the Nation had willed belief in Chamberlain's "peace in our time" until
shaken by the occupation of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939. But cer-
tain of war and of America's inevitable involvement was the small band of
foreign-born scientists, their spokesman Niels Bohr, who had recently arrived
in this country. Shepherding atomic research here, Bohn at once urged
restriction in all Allied countries of the publication of further data on the
possibility of nuclear fission. Many individual scientists refrained, but
control of publication in American scientific journals did not become effec.
five until almost a year later, following Hitler's invasion of Denmark and
Norway.
The National Bureau of Standards, convinced by the physicists on its
Advisory Committee on Uranium of the certainty of a general war, began to
put its affairs in order. On September 1, 1939, the day Germany marched
into Poland, and one week before the President declared a state of limited
national emergency, Dr. Briggs sent to the Department of Commerce a
memorandum of the services the Bureau was prepared to render "in the event
of war."
In the event of a European war, the Bureau was ready to test all
materials to be purchased under the President's recent Strategic Materials
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CHAPTER 'TI!