Hopkins Papers
The Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development ( Bush ) to the President 1
Memorandum for the President
[Subject:] Tubealloy —Interchange with the British.
We await your instructions regarding interchange with the British on this subject as a result of correspondence with Sir John Anderson [Page 1097] recently placed in your hands through Mr. Hopkins.2 A report on the present status of the whole project has just been forwarded to General Marshall.
The next steps, if you approve the correspondence regarding interchange,3 are to convene a combined committee, which will lay down rules for security and arrange conferences between scientific groups as needed to expedite the program fully.
I suggest, before you leave the Prime Minister, one step to accelerate matters. It would help if a top British scientist, accepted and of sound judgment, could be sent here as chief liaison under Sir John Anderson, to help make arrangements for the committee’s work. He should be of the caliber of Sir Henry Dale or Sir Henry Tizard, and not one of the group working experimentally on a single phase of the problem,
I hasten to make this suggestion for the following reason. In previous negotiations difficulty was encountered because the British representative was an industrialist, Mr. Akers of International Chemical Industries. This same man is now here, apparently to make similar arrangements. He recently, and without consulting us, brought four eminent British scientific workers here for interchange. As we cannot use them until the combined committee has laid down the rules, they are likely to think us reluctant to interchange, whereas the exact opposite is true and we are anxious to get appropriate interchange going in an orderly fashion, so that relations will not this time become tangled. Akers is a very able man, but not the one to handle this matter.
We will proceed promptly with the whole affair on receiving your instructions.
- This memorandum was apparently sent by courier to the President at Quebec, and there turned over to Hopkins, who gave a copy of it to Churchill during the concluding days of the Quebec Conference. See Gowing, p. 172.↩
- See ante, pp. 645–651.↩
- The reference is to the agreement on this subject signed at Quebec on August 19, 1943. See post, p. 1117.↩