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

THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 381
production and not a bomb, and therefore in the uranium-graphite experiment
and in quantity production of heavy water, which might go better in a pile.5'
The cautious progress of the bomb project under Dr. Briggs's advisory
committee was apparent in the meager funds and the assignment of them
proposed in July 1941. The committee recommended grants of $167,000 for
a pilot plant to produce heavy water for Fermi's chain-reaction studies,
$95,000 for the centrifuge work on elements 93 and 94, $25,000 for gaseous.
diffusion experiments, $10,000 for other isotope separation studies, $30,000
for investigation of the chemistry of uranium compounds and studies of sepa-
ration methods, and just $8,000 for an investigation of element 94, pluto-
nium.52 The total was $2 billion short of the final cost of the first atomic
bomb.
So far as the general public was concerned, the shroud of secrecy that
descended after 1940 on what the President called "atomistic research" was
almost absolute. The single letter on the subject from an inquiring citizen
found in Bureau files was wide of the mark. The reply was more pertinent.
In June 1941 a man in Meredith, N.H., wrote to the White House protesting
an unnamed scientist's claim that with the smashing of the atom the time
would soon come when "every householder would be able to store a thousand
years' fuel supply in his cellar." The New Hampshire man saw nothing but
disaster in this enormous power confined in his home or, more dangerously
in the possession of unfriendly persons, and sought reassurance.
Dr. Briggs's personal reply to the letter, which had been sent on from
the White House for an answer, was only vaguely comforting. It also
reflected something of his own feeling at the time. There was no need, he
wrote, "to feel unduly alarmed about smashing atoms. Up to the present
time at least this has been accomplished only by putting into the system as
a whole a great deal more energy than can be got out of it."
Although production of Lend-Lease equipment and munitions mounted
month by month and such priority projects as radar and rockets, the prox.
imity fuze, and new air, surface, and subsurface weapons progressed, no
comparable signs of achievement sustained the physicists working on the
bomb. British reports in the spring of 1941 that the Germans were produc-
ing heavy water in quantity in Norway and were acquiring materials that
could only be used in work with uranium prompted demands for greater
effort and more results. The fear grew that time was running out.
51 Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 37, 40; James P. Baxter, Scientists Against Time, p. 425.
52 Hewlett and Anderson, p. 40.
Letter, LJB, June 17, 1941 (NBS Box 455, IPXA). Cf. Leo Szilard's statement in a
letter of Jan. 25, 1939, that the possession of atomic energy is not "very exciting * * *
if the energy output is only two or three times the energy input." Quoted in Lewis S.
Strauss, Men and Decisions (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 172.