Talk:Lyman James Briggs

His role in the American atomic bomb
I haven't seen any explaination about why Lyman Briggs was dragging his feet on the Uranium Committee, but I would think that perhaps this is what Franklin D. Roosevelt would have wanted him to do. Until Pearl Harbor the US was at least technically neutral in the war in Europe. There were two competing uranium weapons programs, one in England and the other in Germany. Otto Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilárd, Eugene Wigner and Enrico Fermi were all refugees from Nazi Germany who would have wanted to align the US war effort with England. British scientists like Ralph Fowler and Mark Oliphant also wanted this alignment because it was good for Britian. Boris Pregel, a uranium dealer, could only have more business if the US effort ramped up. The international scientists all talked with eachother, so a large secret program was not an option. Winston Churchill wanted to rule the world and Harry Truman at times seemed more aligned to Churchill than he was to Roosevelt.

If I were Roosevelt I might have wanted to keep my options open and not start a large scale uranium project with England until it were clearly necessary. When Lyman Briggs locked the MAUD report in his safe, he may have been doing exactly what Roosevelt wanted him to do.

--Prmacn 21:27, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

In 1940 & 1941 all Churchill wanted to do was for Britain to survive the war, and for him to survive in government. Britain was fighting alone. (The Soviet Union did not enter the war until June 1941 and the USA not until December 1941.)  Ruling the world was an unlikely ambition at that stage. All in all the paragraphs by Prmacn are not a cogent explanation why Roosevelt would want to deny himself the most powerful weapon imaginable. JMcC 08:23, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps, but doesn't it seem inappropriate to enter a value judgment such as "his undistinguished role" in the leading paragraph? The leading paragraph should be factual and uncontroversial. --Prmacn (talk) 01:13, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

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