Abstract
During the Second World War, British scientists made pivotal contributions to the creation of the first atomic bombs. In February 1940, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch composed their seminal “Frisch-Peierls Memorandum” that was crucial for getting serious nuclear weapons programs underway in Britain and the United States.1 British scientists then made considerable contributions to the British nuclear arms project—code-named Tube Alloys—and later the joint Anglo-American–Canadian Manhattan Project.2 After the war, Britain’s stature in world politics decreased to the rank of a secondclass power despite its permanent membership in the United Nations (UN) Security Council. This loss of influence, which revealed itself dramatically in the 1956 Suez crisis, was in particular the result of the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s emergence as the superpowers in the Cold War as well as the dissolution of the British Empire.
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Notes
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Laucht, C. (2012). “Dawn—Or Dusk?” Britain’s Picture Post Confronts Nuclear Energy. In: van Lente, D. (eds) The Nuclear Age in Popular Media. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086181_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086181_5
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