Minister for Coordination of Defence, checked with the Treasury and Foreign Office, and found that the Belgian Congo uranium was owned by the "Union Minière du Haut Katanga" company. Its British vice-president, Lord Stonehaven, arranged a meeting with the Belgian president of the company, Edgar Sengier. Since "Union Minière " management were friendly towards Britain, it was not considered necessary to immediately acquire the uranium, but Tizard's Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare (CSSAW) was directed to continue the research into the feasibility of atomic bombs. Thomson, at Imperial College London, and Mark Oliphant, an Australian physicist at the University of Birmingham, were each tasked with carrying out a series of experiments on uranium. By February 1940, Thomson's team had failed to create a chain reaction in natural uranium, and he had decided that it was not worth pursuing.