Come and join us for Professor Michael Goodman's talk on 'British intelligence and the wartime German atomic bomb: A case study in HUMINT'
About this event
Event description:
This lecture will look at the origins of the atomic bomb programmes in Germany, Britain and America. From the outset, British intelligence took a keen interest in what the Germans were doing. Aided by a number of well-placed humint (human intelligence) sources, there was a good awareness of progress. The talk will focus particularly on the first half of the war and the efforts in Norway to hinder the German programme by attacking the heavy water plant in Vemork. The lecture will end with a number of outstanding questions, as well as highlight some of the generic challenges of scientific intelligence that this case-study highlights’.
Speaker's bio:
Professor Michael S. Goodman is Professor of ‘Intelligence and International Affairs’ and the Director of the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence. He is a former Head of the Department of War Studies, King's College London. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Norwegian Intelligence School and at Sciences Po in Paris. He has published widely in the field of intelligence history, including The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Volume I: From the Approach of the Second World War to the Suez Crisis (Routledge, 2015), which was chosen as one of The Spectator’s books of the year. He is series editor for ‘Intelligence, Surveillance and Secret Warfare’ for Edinburgh University Press; and is a member of the editorial boards for five journals. He has spent many years on secondment to the Cabinet Office, where he has been the Official Historian of the Joint Intelligence Committee: Volume II will be published in 2024. He is a current British army reservist.