 In response, the British government created a nuclear weapons project known as Tube Alloys.There was still little urgency in the United States, which unlike Britain was not yet engaged in World War II, so Oliphant flew there in late August 1941, and spoke to American scientists including his friend Ernest Lawrence at the University of California.He not only managed to convince them that an atomic bomb was feasible, but inspired Lawrence to convert his cyclotron into a giant mass spectrometer for isotope separation, a technique Oliphant had pioneered in 1934.