a Department of Astronomy under Bart Bok, a Department of Theoretical Physics under Kenneth Le Couteur and a Department of Mathematics under Bernhard Neumann. Oliphant was an advocate of nuclear weapons research. He served on the post-war Technical Committee that advised the British government on nuclear weapons, and publicly declared that Britain needed to develop its own nuclear weapons independent of the United States to "avoid the danger of becoming a lesser power". The establishment of a world-class nuclear physics research capability in Australia was intimately linked with the government's plans to develop nuclear power and weapons. Locating the new research institute in Canberra would place it close to the Snowy Mountains Scheme, which was planned to be the centrepiece of a new nuclear power industry. Oliphant hoped that Britain would assist with the Australian program, and the British were interested in cooperation because Australia had uranium ore and weapons testing sites, and there were concerns that Australia was becoming too closely aligned with the United States. Arrangements were made for Australian scientists to be seconded to the British Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, but the close cooperation he sought was stymied by security concerns arising from Britain's commitments to the United States. Oliphant envisaged Canberra one day becoming a university town like Oxford or Cambridge. A threat to the future of the university arose in the wake of the 1949 election, when the Liberal Party of Australia led by Robert Menzies won. Many Liberals were opposed to the university, which they saw as an extravagance. Menzies defended it, but in 1954 he announced that it had entered a period of consolidation, with a funding ceiling, ending the possibility of successful competition with universities in Europe and North America. A further blow came in 1959, when the Menzies government amalgamated it with the Canberra University College. Henceforth, it would no longer be a research university, but a regular one, with responsibility for teaching undergraduates. Nonetheless, parts of the university stayed committed to the old mission, and the ANU remained a university where research is central to its activities. Despite the setbacks, by 2014 the vision of Canberra as a university town would be well on its way to becoming a reality. In September 1951, Oliphant applied for a visa to travel to the United States for a nuclear physics conference in Chicago. The visa was not refused, nor was