Briggs Advisory Committee On Uranium
As a result of the letter Roosevelt asked Lyman James Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards, secretly to organize the Briggs Advisory Committee on Uranium. The committee's first meeting was on October 21, 1939, in Washington, D.C.; $6,000 was budgeted for conducting neutron experiments conducted by Fermi and Szilárd at Columbia.
Four aspects of uranium seem to be critical from the start:
- Finding reliable sources of uranium ore in places where the supply cannot be disrupted by other countries.
- Developing mass production methods of extracting uranium-235 from ore and/or creating plutonium.
- Making uranium (fission) chain-reaction bombs.
- Using controlled fission to power machines and synthesize isotopes.
Read more about this topic: S-1 Uranium Committee
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