Otto Frisch

Otto Frisch appears in the account as a physicist whose work as a refugee in Britain helped turn the atomic bomb from a distant possibility into an urgent wartime concern. Together with Rudolf Peierls, he persuaded the British government that a bomb could be built soon enough to matter in the war, helping press governments to act on the danger of a German atomic weapon.

Identity and Wartime Context

Frisch was one of two German physicists living as refugees in Britain who recognized the urgency of the bomb question. By then, physicists in the United States had known since early 1939 that an atomic bomb was possible, but translating that knowledge into government interest had proved slow. Frisch’s importance in this account lies in helping bring the issue before a government prepared to respond.

Advocacy and the MAUD Committee

Working with Rudolf Peierls, Frisch persuaded the British wartime government that an atomic bomb project required urgent attention. In the spring of 1941, the MAUD Committee produced its top-secret report, “The Use of Uranium for a Bomb.” The report argued that a uranium or plutonium bomb might be small enough to carry in existing aircraft and could potentially be constructed within two years. The account presents Frisch and Peierls’ advocacy as part of the chain that made this assessment consequential: their warning helped establish the urgency to which the report gave institutional form.

Significance in the Bomb Project’s Origins

Frisch’s role is a pivotal but briefly recorded one. The United States had spent nearly two years after the creation of its Uranium Committee with little progress, while the British assessment sharpened the perceived race against Germany. After reading the MAUD report, Vannevar Bush changed his view of the bomb’s feasibility and urged Franklin D. Roosevelt to treat its potential power as decisive. Frisch’s contribution therefore belongs to the early international passage from scientific possibility to government mobilization, before the United States organized the S-1 Committee to marshal resources and recruit scientists.