Mark Oliphant flew to America in a bomber to beg them to make the Atomic Bomb after British scientists had pushed its development while the American government held back.
Howard Florey flew to America in a Clipper plane to do ditto with Penicillin, a British development that the American government had also put on the back burner.
For both Australians, they did this out of strong personal conviction that it was the right thing to do.
It is true that both also did it with approval from some mid to upper level bureaucrats within the British government.
But there hadn't been anything like a full debate at the top of the British government about the matter, before the Australians were allowed to give away the store.
If there had been, it might have led to very different decisions on what was to become so portentous to Britain's dismal post-war fate.
Try to imagine our world post-1945 if the British , not the Americans , held the whip hand in atomic bombs and penicillin.....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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