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Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, for introducing this debate so carefully and for laying out the issues so accurately. I agree with everything that he said. It is not often that a politician hears that, but today one does. I want to take a different route, however, and I must give an account of my own links with universities. I have links with more than a dozen universities, which I would be happy to spell out on another occasion.

I will start with a team list. It is an international team: from Hungary, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner; from Switzerland, Felix Bloch and Otto Frisch; from the Netherlands, George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit; and from Germany, Rudolf Peierls, Gregor Wentzel, Bernard Peters, Hans Bethe, James Franck, Charlotte Riefenstahl and Wolfgang Pauli. They were all members of Robert Oppenheimer’s team in the Manhattan project in Los Alamos. They were recruited to that team by Oppenheimer and they were recruited because they clung to Oppenheimer. They were bright physicists—some won Nobel prizes both before and after Los Alamos—and with them the centre for physics research, at a critical time in the history of the West, moved to the USA.

Oppenheimer met all these scientists in his early studies as a postgraduate in Europe in the late 1920s. All of them were willing to attach themselves to Oppenheimer. By then many of them were already working in the USA. What moved them around is the fact that science and physics are international. They worked together, driven by intellectual curiosity and by enthusiasm for their subject and not limited by national boundaries. They were willing, ready and able to move at a time of critical importance and they all were all key members—I am indebted to Ray Monk’s biography of Robert Oppenheimer for this—of Oppenheimer’s team that got access to this important research before Hitler could capitalise on it.

I ask now: where would we be today? That was a climate of opinion that encouraged this international movement, driven by curiosity and intellectual ability. Is that what the Government have in their current policy? As we are hearing all round in this debate, the answer is no. Interestingly—I include a footnote saying that I am indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, for this quotation—Churchill said:

“We had better German scientists than the Germans”.

That made the difference and it was a critical difference. I put it to noble Lords that the lumbering system that has been set up does not serve us well. We have a lesson to learn from history.