‘The Swansea Boys Who Built Bombs’

The pivotal role a crop of exceptional scientists from Swansea played in the development of the nuclear bomb is told in a three part BBC radio series, presented by Elin Rhys FLSW and featuring several other LSW Fellows.

The journey began at the purely theoretical level in the 1920s as the emerging field of sub-atomic physics found its way to Swansea University. There, Ceredigion’s E.J.Williams would hone the skills that lead him to work with Nobel-prize winning physicist Niels Bohr.

Williams was one of a number of students to emerge from Swansea at the time, among them Lewis Roberts, perhaps motivated by his experience witnessing the German bombing of his home town. Roberts, along with Brian Flowers, was the son of a Welsh minister, steeped in the pacifist tradition which shaped the debate about nuclear deterrence. Many of the women, for example, who would later protest against the deployment of US cruise missiles at Greenham Common, came from Wales including Karmen Thomas and Ann Pettitt.

At the time, ethical debates were overshadowed by the need to produce the weapons that could end the war. The work on radar and submarine detection by Williams and another ‘Swansea boy’, Edward Taffy Brown, was shared with the Americans by Churchill as part of his efforts to bring the US into the war effort.

These technological advances were backed up by Welsh industrial innovation, from experimental work on enriching uranium at Rhydymwyn, near Mold, to the production at ‘The Mond’ in Clydach of high-grade nickel, which built the meshes used in the separation of uranium isotopes. In this way Welsh expertise reached the top of the US’s A-Bomb programme, the Manhattan Project, with Leslie Groves, who had roots in Rhyl, an assistant director on the Project. One of the few women scientists to break the male-dominated world, ‘Swansea girl’ Joan Strothers, would also work on the Manhattan Project, after her work developing ‘chaff’, the radar countermeasure, saw her invited to work at Berkeley, California.

The expertise built up at Swansea during the war continued after its end. Roberts and Flowers were key in developing the UK’s independent nuclear program, working on the production of fissile material at the Harwell reactor facilities, while Ieuan Maddock, a miner’s son from Gorseinon, developed the weaponry’s instrumentation and telemetry.

Swansea’s expertise is still felt. The leadership of the physics department by Frank Llewellyn Jones in the 1950s and 1960s produced a crop of scientists, including Dr Malcolm Jones, now a senior figure at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, and Professor Lyn Evans FLSW, the designer of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

It is a remarkable story, which features contributions from several LSW Fellows: Professor John Baylis FLSW, Professor Mike Charlton FLSW and Dr Rowland Wynne FLSW and Dr Lyn Evans FLSW.

The three programmes can be heard on BBC Sounds until 21st October.