Oliphant by Roland Perry- Author Q&A October 2025
This Q&A is consumer facing and will be posted on the Allen & Unwin blog to help readers gain more insight into the book.
1. What motivated you to write a biography of Mark Oliphant?
A: I had extensive interviews with him 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.
B: I 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. It was poorly researched or a historical fraud, or both.
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.
2. For those who don’t know him, who was Mark Oliphant—and why is his story important now?
Oliphant was Australia’s greatest scientific achiever, even surpassing his friend Howard Florey, who developed penicillin in WW2. Oliphant proved to be the most important physicist of WW2. First, he developed radar into a war-winning weapon that rebuffed the Luftwaffe assaults on the UK, 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 than make claims based on fake or flimsy jingoism, which the Americans have done to an extent with this subject.
3. What were the biggest challenges you found when researching and writing Oliphant’s life story?
This biography was not as demanding as the other 18 I have written, including John Monash, Don Bradman, Harry Chauvel, Victor Rothschild, Queen Victoria etc.
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 20th Century matched his motivation here.
The threat of WW2 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, George Thompson, and other prominent physicists before and during World War II said an A-bomb could not be made, Oliphant showed how it could be done using uranium-235 and Plutonium. The bomb did not stop the Nazis, but it did bring peace to the Pacific War.
4. Were there any misconceptions or myths about Oliphant that you wanted to correct or challenge?
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 SE Asia and the Pacific.
Oliphant was the mastermind. This is not a claim. It is a provable fact.
5. What was Oliphant’s contribution to the development of the atomic bomb and was he more critical to it than J. Robert Oppenheimer?
Oppenheimer gained his fame as a Theoretician, not an experimenter. There is a world of difference between those who put uber-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.
Oppenheimer was the manager of the Manhattan Project, not the director, who was General Leslie Groves.
First, Oliphant developed the blueprint for the Bomb when others said it was impossible and impractical.
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 UK PM 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).
6. How did you strike the balance between making the science in Oliphant’s research accessible and staying true to its complexity?
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 esoteric 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. They write papers for each other that have some hidden truths and depths, but on occasions, it is gobbledegook and so dense that peers and others cannot understand it, although they may pretend to.
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.
7. Oliphant’s work intersected with enormous ethical questions—war, weapons, global responsibility. How did he respond to these pressures in his lifetime?
These ethical questions were never an issue when Oliphant went after a weapon that would stop the Nazis. It was kill or be killed. I don’t think the Chinese ever stood about pondering deep questions of ethics concerning how to stop the enemy when the Japanese slaughtered 20million of them between 1931 and 1945, not to mention a further 4 million enslaved or killed in other Southeast Asia countries.
After-the-event analysis and moralising that some revisionists indulge in is a different matter.
Oliphant laid out the blueprint for a thermo-nuclear (or Hydrogen) bomb, 1000 times more powerful than the A-bomb in a landmark 1934 paper that appeared in the scientists’ ‘bible’, Nature.
But he wanted his thermodynamic discoveries for peaceful purposes, such as the Snowy Mountain Hydro-electric Scheme, where mountains might have to be removed, or long tunnels built.
Oliphant was against H-Bomb developments and stockpiling, which many countries have now done. He protested with Oppenheimer after WW2. They both ran the gauntlet of the CIA in the late 1940s and 1950s because of their opposition. Oppenheimer was more subtle. He declined to assist in the H-bomb creation in the US.
Oliphant, over the decades, protested openly about the 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 WW2 and Japan’s attacks, Australian PM 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 WW2 in the UK. By chance, he had been in Sydney Harbor 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 source, 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).
8. How do you feel we should remember or teach about Oliphant in the broader story of 20th-century science and warfare?
Oliphant should be remembered as the most dynamic scientist of the two 20th-century World Wars. In effect, he was one of the most important individuals in stopping the Hitler/Nazis’ rampage. He was more aware 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 beating the Nazi regime. In the end, his radar developments were most effective, 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 its brutal destruction in twenty countries.
9. In writing about such a complex and morally reflective figure, did you ever feel your own views shifting?
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 be restored and thrive post-WW2.
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 making a breakthrough despite nefarious efforts to stop it, in a similar way that Oliphant was shunned early on with his high-tech. His experiments and his 1934 Nature paper laid the groundwork for Cold Fusion, which creates safe atomic reactions at room temperature, once known as ‘a star in a jar.’ This leads to abundant energy release at little or no cost.
10. What do you hope readers will take away from the book—not just about Oliphant, but about the role of scientists in society?
Because of the breakthroughs in splitting the atom in the 1930s and 1940s, Oliphant felt that the brotherhood of international scientists were the most important people on earth. He was conflicted over the influence of religion, which had dictated his early life.
Oliphant felt that 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. It caused him in wartime to support the Soviets getting bomb tech that allowed it to draw level with the 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, and Pol Potism, etc. But even with this realization I don’t believe Mark Oliphant would have changed anything he did.
11. What do you believe is Mark Oliphant’s most enduring legacy—in science or in Australian history?
Oliphant was truly sui generis, one of a kind.
His forceful vision that led to war-winning efforts will be played out in the future when his peaceful experimentations will come to fruition with Cold Fusion. This will lead to the creation of unlimited energy for humankind in the way Nikola Tesla envisaged. It is now being developed with Oliphant-like commitment by another outstanding Australian scientist, Professor Malcolm Bendall.
Sir Mark Oliphant’s most enduring legacy should be as the greatest scientific achiever in Australian history, so far.