Q&A with Roland Perry author of Oliphant

Allen & Unwin
Sep 30
8 min read

Read a Q&A with Oliphant author Roland Perry.

Sir Mark Oliphant was a trailblazing Australian physicist whose brilliance shaped the outcome of World War II and transformed modern science. From pioneering radar technology to pushing the atomic bomb from theory to reality, his work influenced history on a global scale—yet his name is often missing from it. In this exclusive Q&A, bestselling biographer Roland Perry shares the extraordinary story behind Oliphant, revealing why this remarkable scientist deserves his place among the century’s most important figures.

A&U: What motivated you to write a biography of Sir Mark Oliphant?

RP: I had extensive interviews with Oliphant in 1994 for my book The Fifth Man, and felt he had been grossly underplayed on several levels in terms of his achievements, character and importance in history. I later read the Oppenheimer biography and was shocked to find Oliphant did not even appear in the index. Then I saw the film based on the book, and the first half was a travesty. I walked out of the cinema determined to write the biography based on the integrity of events regarding his development of the A-Bomb, and radar.

A&U: For those who don’t know him, who was Mark Oliphant—and why is his story important now?

RP: Oliphant was Australia’s greatest scientific achiever, even surpassing his friend Howard Florey, who developed penicillin in World War II. Oliphant proved to be the most important physicist of the Second World War. First, he developed radar into a war-winning weapon that rebuffed the Luftwaffe assaults on Britain, and this soon gave the Allies great advantages in battle. He was the lone ranger who pushed hard for an atomic bomb design, and succeeded.

It is important to get the integrity of history correct, rather that make claims based on fake or flimsy jingoism, which the Americans have done to an extent with this subject.

A&U: What were the biggest challenges you found when researching and writing Oliphant’s life story?

RP: In some aspects, this biography was not as demanding as the other 18 I have written, including with John Monash, Don Bradman, Harry Chauvel, Victor Rothschild, Queen Victoria and others. This does not mean he was not a complex character. He was, on some levels, but his story was clear cut, even episodic. He had an obsessive urge to experiment as a physicist, and no other big name of the 20^th century matched his motivation here. In the late 1930s the threat of war upped the tempo of his work even further and he had a messianic drive to stop Hitler and the Nazis. More than any other individual, including Churchill and Roosevelt, he knew how it could be done.

When Einstein, Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Max Born, and George Thompson and other dominant physicists before and during World War II, said an A-Bomb could not be made, Oliphant showed how it could done using Uranium 235, and Plutonium. Ultimately, it was not the bomb that stopped the Nazis, but it did bring about the end of the Pacific War.

A&U: Were there any misconceptions or myths about Oliphant that you wanted to correct or challenge?

RP: The only deliberate misconception was that he was somehow a bit player in the push to develop weapons to stop Hitler and the Japanese military regime in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Oliphant was the mastermind. This is not a claim. It is provable fact.

A&U: What was Oliphant’s contribution to the development of the atomic bomb and was he more critical to it than J. Robert Oppenheimer?

RP: Oppenheimer gained his fame as a theoretician, not an experimenter. There is a world of difference between those who put calculus on a blackboard and those who do the heavy, painstaking work in the laboratory to prove something.

Oliphant’s great strength was that he was adept at both.

First, he developed the blueprint for the bomb when others said it was impossible and impractical. The most important breakthrough was discovering in 1940, with his Jewish emigre assistants Otto Friesch and Rudolf Peierls, that the uranium 235 isotope could be used to set off a nuclear chain reaction with just a small amount of fissile material – small enough to fit in a bomb on a plane.

Second, because he had learned under Lord Rutherford at Cambridge to break down the esoteric language of physicists and communicate to anyone who could read, Oliphant created a three-page proposal for Winston Churchill. Churchill gave the A-bomb the green light after absorbing the digestible Oliphant communication.

The British did not have the funds for its development, so Oliphant flew to the US, explained the process to its top scientists, including Ernest Lawrence and Oppenheimer. Eventually, with Oliphant’s face-to face endorsement, President Roosevelt backed the bomb project in conjunction with the British (the Manhattan Project).

A&U: How did you strike the balance between making the science in Oliphant’s research accessible and staying true to its complexity?

RP: The trick here is to break down the esoteric or ‘complexity’ without talking down to an audience.

An author must take the Oliphant approach that he learnt from Lord Rutherford, who suggested that if the cleaning person at the laboratory could not understand what a physicist had written, then the physicist did not fully understand it his or herself.

I have had to do this with countless topics since first becoming a journalist in 1969. The approach that anyone who can read should be able to understand what you have written is the best way to communicate. I deal with scientists’ jargon almost every day in research.

As Oliphant so meaningfully said to a collection of the mightiest British scientific minds when reviewing their suggestions for the paper to go to Churchill about the A-Bomb:

‘It must be in English.’ He had to condense their 30 pages down to 3. He made it work.

A&U: Oliphant’s work intersected with enormous ethical questions—war, weapons, global responsibility. How did he respond to these pressures in his lifetime?

RP: These ethical questions were never an issue when Oliphant sought atomic weapons for the Allies before the Nazis could obtain them. It was kill or be killed. After-the-event analysis and moralising is a different matter. Oliphant laid out the blueprint for a thermo-nuclear (or Hydrogen) bomb, 1000 times more powerful that the A-bomb, in a landmark 1934 paper that appeared in the scientists’ ‘bible’, Nature.

But after the war he envisaged his thermodynamic discoveries for peaceful purposes, such as the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, where mountains might have to be removed, or long tunnels built.

Oliphant was against H-bomb proliferation and stockpiling, which many countries have now done. He protested with Oppenheimer after World War II. They both ran the gauntlet of the CIA in the later 1940s and 1950s because of their opposition. Oppenheimer was more subtle, and declined to assist in the H-bomb creation in the US.

Oliphant over the decades protested openly about H-bomb experiments, particularly with the US, French and British in the Pacific. His words carried weight. He even volunteered to join a boat to protest the French bomb-tests around Tahiti.

But there was a catch in his thinking. Straight after World War II and Japan’s attacks, Australian Prime Minister Ben Chifley and his Labor government were more than keen to employ him to develop A-bombs for the defence of Australia.

Oliphant was amenable to this. He had suffered under the German bombing in the Blitz of World War II in the UK. By chance, he had been in Sydney Harbour when the Japanese mini-subs attacked shipping and killed 22 American sailors.

He explained to Chifley that peaceful technology could be ‘screwdriver ready’ to build atomic weapons quickly.

His ideas have great relevance to the AUKUS arrangement between the US, UK and Australia. It is developing nuclear-powered subs which will be ‘screwdriver ready’ to produce weapons. Oliphant always wanted nuclear power as a clean energy, which the subs will use. But he would not have been happy that the Americans will most likely control the subs in the event of war and their rapid conversion to weaponry (despite protestations to the contrary).

A&U: How do you feel we should remember or teach about Oliphant in the broader story of 20th-century science and warfare?

RP: Oliphant should be remembered as the most dynamic scientist of the 20^th century’s two world wars. In effect, he was one of the most important individuals in stopping the rampage of Hitler and the Nazis. He was more aware that anyone that that the Allies had to develop the big A-bomb weapon first. He employed outstanding German refugee physicists and knew how close the race was to beat the Nazi regime. In the end, his radar developments were decisive, and the Germans were defeated before the A-bomb was tested. But the Japanese went on fighting for months after their ally Germany capitulated.

Oliphant’s brainchild finished their brutal destruction in twenty countries.

A&U: In writing about such a complex and morally reflective figure, did you ever feel your own views shifting?

RP: My views did not shift after writing the book, but it took the reflection of themes in the book to understand him more. A successful biography always takes the subject on chronologically. Others may jump around the time frame, but this is the lazy route to a person’s life story. Incidents that occur in childhood and youth are a guide to the subject’s adulthood and later life. I found Oliphant in his deeds and actions comprehensible through the various stages of his life.

He loved his physics experiments and was better at it than anyone. Oliphant’s passion, hunger, knowledge and unsurpassed vision caused him to ignore everyone else and create war-winning weapons and technology, that in the end allowed humanity to survive and thrive post-World War II.

In my interviews with him, we discussed part of that vision for the future, which included clean energy abundance for the planet via cold fusion (the opposite of hot fusion, which leads to nuclear bombs.) This technology, discarded thirty years ago, is now re-emerging.

A&U: What do you hope readers will take away from the book—not just about Oliphant, but about the role of scientists in society?

RP: Because of the breakthroughs in splitting the atom in the 1930s and 1940s, Oliphant felt that the brotherhood of international scientists could change the world. He was conflicted over the influence of religion which had dictated his early life.

Oliphant felt that he had his fellow scientists could solve the world’s problems that politicians and God could not. This led him down an inevitable path of believing in socialism and communism as superior political systems, which dominated intellectual thinking at Cambridge and Birmingham where he worked, studied and lectured for 23 years. His war-time support for the Soviets getting bomb came at personal cost. It drew them level with US, so that MAD—mutually Assured Destruction—became the most delicate political balancing act in human history.

His thinking matured late when he understood the true mentality of Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Potism, and so on. But even with this realisation I don’t believe Mark Oliphant would have changed anything he did.

A&U: What do you believe is Mark Oliphant’s most enduring legacy—in science or in Australian history?

RP: Oliphant was truly sui generis, one of a kind. His forceful vision led to war-winning efforts, discoveries that later had a multitude of peacetime uses. His microwave technology developed for radar led to the microwave oven. ‘I wish I had a dollar for every microwave sold,’ Oliphant said to me years later.

Sir Mark Oliphant’s most enduring legacy should be as the greatest scientific achiever in Australian history, so far.