The Montreal Lectures: 2 August - 2 October, 1944

The Second World War began in the summer of 1939 and spurred atomic science in the direction of weapons development. The United Kingdom (U.K.) was far ahead until about the summer of 1941 at which time the United States (U.S.) began to have serious interest in atomic weapons. Seen from Europe, the U.S. was a greater distance from the theatre of war and was deemed to be a safer place to conduct atomic research. In addition to good research centres it also had greater financial, manpower, and material resources. Early attempts at full collaboration between the U.K. and the U.S. met with little success and this led to the formation of a joint British-Canadian atomic weapons effort in 1942, with research laboratories located in Montreal, which were well up and running by spring 1943. The Montreal laboratory (ML) initially was administered by the National Research Council (NRC) and scientific direction was provided by the U.K. The ML was the foundation from which the Canadian nuclear industry evolved to the present time. Interest in atomic weapons development by the U.S. had been greatly accelerated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941. By the beginning of 1943 it was spending 10 times as much as the U.K. on atomic weapons research. From then on, the U.S. set the Allied agenda for the development of atomic weapons, in varying degrees of collaboration with the U.K. and Canada. This spending which grew to about $2B by the middle of 1945, was directed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the Manhattan Project, officially established on 13 August 1942, and led by Gen. Leslie R. Groves From 17 September 1942. (author)