Gen 75 Committee

For broader coverage of this topic, see High Explosive Research.
This 1940 photograph includes several members of the Gen 75 Committee. Standing, from left to right, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Mr A. V. Alexander, Lord Cranborne, Herbert Morrison, Lord Moyne, David Margesson and Brendan Bracken. Seated, from left to right, Ernest Bevin, Lord Beaverbrook, Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill, Sir John Anderson, Arthur Greenwood and Sir Kingsley Wood.

The Gen 75 Committee was a committee of the British cabinet, convened by the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, on 10 August 1945. It was one of many ad hoc cabinet committees, each of which was convened to handle a single issue, and given a prefix of Gen (for general) and a number. The purpose of the Gen 75 committee was to discuss and establish the British government's nuclear policy. Attlee dubbed it the "Atom Bomb Committee". It was replaced by an official ministerial committee, the Atomic Energy Committee, in February 1947.

Matters considered by the Gen 75 Committee included decisions on what production facilities should be built to produce nuclear weapons, authorising the construction of nuclear reactors to produce plutonium at Windscale, and a gaseous diffusion plant to produce uranium-235 at Capenhurst. It took decisions on the administrative structures that would oversee production, and appointed Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal, the wartime Chief of the Air Staff, to run the project, which became High Explosive Research. The final decision to proceed with building nuclear weapons, however, was made by another Gen committee, the Gen 163 Committee.