MAUD Committee

The MAUD Committee was a British scientific working group formed during the Second World War. It was established to perform the research required to determine if an atomic bomb was feasible. The name MAUD came from a strange line in a telegram from Danish physicist Niels Bohr referring to his housekeeper, Maud Ray.

The MAUD Committee was founded in response to the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which was written in March 1940 by Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, two physicists who were refugees from Nazi Germany working at the University of Birmingham under the direction of Mark Oliphant. The memorandum argued that a small sphere of pure uranium-235 could have the explosive power of thousands of tons of TNT.

The chairman of the MAUD Committee was George Thomson. Research was split among four different universities: the University of Birmingham, University of Liverpool, University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, each having a separate programme director. Various means of uranium enrichment were examined, as was nuclear reactor design, the properties of uranium-235, the use of the then-hypothetical element plutonium, and theoretical aspects of nuclear weapon design.

After fifteen months of work, the research culminated in two reports, "Use of Uranium for a Bomb" and "Use of Uranium as a Source of Power", known collectively as the MAUD Report. The report discussed the feasibility and necessity of an atomic bomb for the war effort. In response, the British created a nuclear weapons project, code named Tube Alloys. The MAUD Report was made available to the United States, where it energised the American effort, which eventually became the Manhattan Project. The report was also revealed to the Soviet Union by its atomic spies, and helped start the Soviet atomic bomb project.