Frankel: The Accidental Atomicist
Shortly before his death, Hyman Frankel, the last surviving member of the team whose work led to the development of the atom bomb, talked to Maureen Paton about why he decided not to join the Manhattan Project.
In early 1941 Hyman Frankel’s life changed overnight when the physics student and member of the Young Communists was hand-picked to join a team of scientists working on a secret British nuclear project, codenamed Tube Alloys, at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory. The secret project to produce a British atom bomb was later immortalised in C.P. Snow’s 1954 novel The New Men.
A chance family friendship led to the recruitment of Frankel to the Cavendish operation. His elder brother William, a barrister who was later to become a long-serving and radical editor of the Jewish Chronicle, was friendly with Henry Lipson, a professor of physics at Cambridge. Lipson had been asked by Hans von Halban, a French-Jewish refugee physicist working on the project, to find a young scientist to ‘do an important job measuring neutron cross-sections’. Hyman was considered to be an ideal candidate for what he came to describe as ‘a routine but vital job’. He also became the Cavendish shop steward for the Association of Scientific Workers union to which he managed to sign up nearly every member of the Tube Alloys project, most of whom shared his left-wing politics.
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