Chapter 12 "A Communication from Britain" Summary

James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard University, goes to London in the winter of 1941 to open a liaison office between the British government and the American National Research Council, of which he is a member. He is the first American scientist of administrative rank to visit Britain. Conant has long opposed American isolationism and believes in using advanced technology in war. He lunches twice with Prime Minister Churchill, has an audience with the King, and picks up an honorary degree at Cambridge. He meets with a French scientist, who complains of inaction on uranium-heavy water research and tries to talk about fission studies.

Ernest Lawrence, now a California physicist, encourages the search for plutonium, and designs a means for uranium isotope separation by an industrial scale mass spectrometer. He pitches his plan to...