BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS - PERSONAL HISTORY OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS

BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS - PERSONAL HISTORY OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS 

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BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS 

ROBERT JUNGK 

A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists 

The story of the moral and political temptations of the first atomic 

scientists 

'One of the most interesting books I have ever read. It is more exciting 

than any novel and, at the same time, is packed with information .. it's a 

tragic story of a group of men with quite exceptional intellectual gifts, 

idealistic and single-minded in youth, but gradually seduced by a mixture of 

good motives and bad to the service of the Devil. The harm they have done 

cannot be undone by them. If it can be undone, this must be through the 

public opinion of ordinary men and women throughout the world' 

- Bertrand Russell 

'Should be compulsory reading' - Spectator 

Introduction 

WHY are we interested only in what scientists do and not in what they 

are? The question first came to my notice in an article by the American 

educationalist George N. Schuster, and it has never suite left my mind. It 

was the question that led me to begin the long journey from continent to 

continent, country to country, atomic physicist to atomic physicist, and that 

produced this book. 

I must confess that it fell on fertile ground. In August 1949, a few minutes 

before my bus left at the end of my first visit to the American atomic city of 

Los Alamos, a scientist from Central Europe who had lived there for several 

years suddenly made a staggering personal confession. He said, ‘What an 

extraordinary and incomprehensible thing! My whole youth was absolutely 

devoted to truth, freedom, and peace; and yet fate has seen fit to deposit me 

here where my freedom of movement is limited; the truth that I am trying to 

discover is locked behind massive gates; and the ultimate aim of my work 

has to be the construction of the most hideous weapons of war. Could fate 

have been more perverse?' 

After this I often found myself thinking about the life led by atomic 

scientists, and I later tried to tell the tragic story of one of their number in the 

form of a novel. To give the novel the necessary accuracy, I had to study the 

background against which these men lead their lives. The first important 

nuclear physicist whom I met was Professor Fritz Houtermans of Berne 

University. This was a piece of good fortune, for Professor Houtermans - 

unlike many of his colleagues, who are more at home with formulae than 

story-telling and with the future than the past - had a gift for making his 

stories lively and exciting, whether they were about the good old days in 

Gottingen, the dark years of his captivity in Russian prisons, or the years of 

the Third Reich, when he and some of his colleagues had debated how they 

might prevent the great nuclear discoveries from being abused in the 

construction of bombs. 

I shall never forget my conversations with him. They took place at night 

in a Berne University laboratory. Every now and again our talks would be 

interrupted, while the Professor checked a measuring device which was 

ticking in the next room. (He was using it to examine the uranium content of 

alpine granite.) We drank coffee made in laboratory bottles and as the night 

advanced it became more and more obvious that no novel could be as 

revealing, as penetrating, or as exciting as a factual account of the atomic 

scientists' tragedy based on their own stories and on documents. By the time 

I left Professor Houtermans I knew that I should never find the raw material 

for my book in my own imagination. I should only get it by subjecting all 

those who had lived through these dramatic events which had shaped our 

age, and were still available, to the most detailed questioning. 

The decision was easily taken but not nearly so easy to act on. Although 

there were many - almost too many - accounts of the scientific and technical 

history of the development of nuclear science, hardly anything had been 

published about the human and moral problems. I therefore had to rely even 

more heavily than I had planned on personal accounts. 

Some of the scientists whom I asked for an interview agreed at once, but 

others made difficulties. Unfortunately I find it difficult to force myself upon 

people because I do not like to waste even short periods of important men's 

time - a quality that is no great advantage to a reporter; but now my task was 

so important that I had to forget my inhibitions. I followed one of my heroes 

through literally half a dozen European countries and he refused to see me 

time and again. Finally, I was able to have a long conversation with him 

during a physicists' conference in America. Luckily for me there was a 

particularly boring paper being read and the great man chose the lesser evil 

of a walk with me. In the end he turned out to be infinitely more 

forthcoming than I had dared to hope. 

There were three barriers that I had to overcome in almost every one of 

my conversations. The first was the fear that a remark might offend 

colleagues who were still alive. One nuclear scientist expressed this fear 

particularly strikingly. He said, with a laugh: 'I can't tell you what really 

happened unless you can deposit a million dollars in my bank, because, if I 

did, when your book appeared I should have to retire from nuclear circles for 

the rest of my life and work privately!' Fortunately I am not a physicist, so, 

as an outsider, I am in a position to write down what I discovered without 

any fear of boycott or reprisals by angry colleagues or Government 

departments. I was also able to promise those who were uncertain that, 

where they wanted me to, I would withhold the source of items of 

information. 

Another objection that was often raised was that I could not possibly 

understand the truth about their story, because I was not a member of the 

'physicists' family circle'. There was perhaps some truth in this when I began 

my researches, but the deeper I got into my subject the more clearly I began 

to see the position that these men occupied in a wider personal and historical 

context. Indeed, I finally acquired a broader view of the way in which the 

destinies of this vitally important and influential group had been shaped than 

had most of those who told me their own experiences and opinions; for, with 

only very few exceptions, they of course had only seen their own little part 

of the total pattern of events, whereas I, the chronicler, was familiar with a 

host of details and thus had a broader view of the interplay of many different 

events that had in many cases not been grasped by the protagonists 

themselves. Often a single conversation with a man I had gone to see was 

not enough. Facts that I got from a second and a third might lead me back to 

my first informant for further clarification of certain points that he had 

thought unimportant because of his ignorance of the whole context and so 

had not bothered to mention. 

The third difficulty which I encountered was an attitude shared by many 

of the scientists: that their personal, human story was unimportant and only 

their actual achievements counted. This was the attitude that produced many 

of the pangs of conscience and the tragedies described in this book. Any 

scientist who believes that he and his colleagues are mere 'tools of discovery' 

whose personal character, ambitions, hopes, and doubts are insignificant is 

guilty of unscientific thinking, for he is disregarding an important, perhaps 

the decisive, element in scientific experiment - namely his own nature - or 

labouring under the delusion that he can arbitrarily eliminate that element. 

Nothing less than this arbitrary and unnatural separation of scientific 

research from the reality of the individual personality could have allowed the 

creation of such monstrosities as the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. I 

shall never forget the picture of the brilliant mathematician whom I saw 

wallowing along the street during my last visit to Los Alamos in 1956. His 

face was wreathed in a smile of almost angelic beauty. He looked as though 

his inner gaze were fixed upon a world of harmonies. But in fact, as he told 

me later, he was thinking about a mathematical problem whose solution was 

essential to the construction of a new type of H-bomb. 

In the course of our subsequent conversations it turned out that this man 

had never watched the trial explosion of any of the bombs which he had 

helped to devise. He had never visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki even though 

he had been invited. He even refused to look at pictures of the destruction 

wrought in these two cities. To him, research for nuclear weapons was just 

pure higher mathematics, untrammelled by blood, poison, and destruction. 

All that, he said, was none of his business. 

There are many scientists who no longer think as this man does. They 

appreciate that they are not mere brains, but complete human beings, with all 

the weaknesses, the grandeur, and the responsibility that this implies. I have 

tried to explore the genesis of their great crisis of conscience and their 

attempt to solve it, and then to give as truthful a picture as all the 

contradictory accounts on which it is based allow. The attention that my 

book has aroused in the many countries where it has appeared suggests that 

the human destiny of these scientists, who are the great reformers and 

innovators of our age, is no less interesting than their achievements. As one 

reader put it in a letter to me: 'In our age it is the scientists who stand in the 

aura of tragedy like the kings of old. If Shakespeare had written Hamlet in 

our decade he would not have made him a prince but a nuclear scientist!' 

1 A TIME OF CHANGE 1918-23 

IT is said that during the last year of the First World War Ernest 

Rutherford, already famous for his work on atomic research, failed to attend 

a meeting of the British committee of experts appointed to advise on new 

systems of defence against enemy Submarines. When he was censured for 

his absence, the vigorous New Zealander retorted without embarrassment: 

'Talk softly, please. I have been engaged in experiments which suggest that 

the atom can be artificially disintegrated. If it is true, it is of far greater 

importance than a war. 

In June 1919, while the attempt was being made in Versailles and other 

suburbs of Paris to draft peace treaties designed to put an end to the four 

bloody years of war, Rutherford published in the Philosophical Magazine 

certain studies of his experiments. They showed conclusively that he had 

succeeded in making an ancient dream of mankind come true. By 

bombarding the element of nitrogen with tiny alpha particles he had 

transformed it at various times into oxygen and hydrogen. 

The "transmutation of matter' for which the alchemists had searched so 

long was now a fact. But those precursors of modern science, who took the 

whole world for their province, considered not only the material but also the 

moral consequences of such an undertaking. 'Deny the powerful and their 

warriors entry to your workshops,' they warned the coming generations of 

research workers. 'For such people misuse the holy mysteries in the service 

of power. 

Rutherford's well-known explanations of the process of transfonning the 

nitrogen atom contain no such warning. It would have transgressed the 

valued principles of the twentieth century. Philosophical considerations by 

the modem scientist of the incidental effects of his discoveries would be 

regarded as improper, even if his studies appeared in the Philosophical 

Magazine. Such has been the mle ever since the scientific academies of the 

seventeenth century determined that no discussions of political, moral, or 

theological problems should be allowed at their meetings. 

As early as 1919, however, the isolation of scientific research had become 

a working hypothesis only, which actual conditions had already rendered out 

of date. The war which had just ended had shown only too clearly, by its use 

of weapons made possible through the practical application of scientific 

discoveries, the fateful connexion between the remote laboratories and the 

bloodstained realities of the battlefield. Alfred Doblin, the Berlin author later 

driven by Hitler half round the world, wrote in October 1919: 'The decisive 

assaults upon mankind now proceed from the drawing boards and the 

laboratory.' 

Rutherford's workshop, too, had been rudely invaded by war. His 'boys', 

as he called his assistants and students, who looked upon him as a father, 

had almost been conscripted for military service. Moseley, the most gifted of 

all his colleagues, had fallen at the Dardanelles in 1915. The source of the 

radium which he used for all his atomic experiments had been confiscated. It 

happened to be, by an irony of fate, 'enemy alien property'. 

Before the war, the Vienna Radium Institute had loaned to their highly 

esteemed British colleague, Rutherford, 250 milligrams of the precious 

substance. It was a gesture which pre- 1914 Austria could easily afford to 

make; the only productive deposits of uranium ore in Europe lay in the 

Bohemian district of Joachimsthal, at that time still part of the Imperial and 

Royal Dual Monarchy. Rutherford never acquiesced in his government's 

confiscation of the radium loaned him by Austria, nor was he satisfied with 

the permission of the authorities to use this valuable metal for the time 

being. He was known to be a scientist of unbending temper and high 

principles, and insisted on his right to return the personal loan to his 

colleagues on the Danube at the end of hostilities or else to acquire it from 

them by paying for it. Rutherford's resolute attitude eventually won out. On 

14 April 1921 he was at last able to write to his old colleague, Stefan Meyer, 

in the inflation-stricken city of Vienna: 'I was much disturbed by your 

statement of the financial side of the Radium institute of Vienna and have 

been active in trying to raise some funds to buy at any rate a small quantity 

of the radium which the Vienna Academy so generously loaned me so long 

ago and which has been of so much aid in my researches.' 

Meyer warned that the price of radium in the world market was for the 

moment 'monstrously high'. This did not frighten Rutherford. He raised a 

sum of several hundred pounds which tided the Vienna Radium Institute 

over the worst years of the currency devaluation. 

Even during the war Rutherford had kept in touch, at least by 

correspondence, through neutral countries with his pupils and friends in 

Germany and Austria-Hungary, particularly with his old and loyal assistant, 

Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger counter for the measurement of 

invisible radioactivity, later to prove indispensable. The international family 

of physicists had kept together to the best of their ability, at all events better 

than men of letters and intellectuals in other fields, who bombarded each 

other with spiteful manifestoes. Physicists who had worked together before 

the war, often for years, either by correspondence or side by side in the 

laboratory, could never become enemies at a command from above. They 

helped one another whenever they could. Nernst and Rubens, the German 

teachers of James Chadwick, helped their pupil set up a small laboratory in 

the camp at Ruhleben near Berlin, where he had been interned at the 

beginning of the war. Chadwick, who had been a close associate of 

Rutherford and was later to win a Nobel prize, carried out a number of 

interesting experiments with other prisoners in the camp. In May 1918, when 

the terrible offensives in northern France were daily sacrificing the lives of 

so many Britons and Germans, he wrote to Rutherford: 

'We are now working, or rather about to work, on the formation of 

carbonyl chloride in light ... within the last few months I have visited 

Rubens, Nernst, and Warburg. They were extremely willing to help, and 

offered to lend us anything they could. In fact, all kinds of people lent us 

apparatus.' 

As soon as regulations at the frontiers were somewhat relaxed, physicists 

immediately resumed contact to exchange information about the progress 

made during the years of war. Letters and telegrams were sent to hasten the 

exchange of information. Telegraph clerks at Copenhagen often found it 

difficult to pass on correctly the messages, full of mathematical formulae 

which they did not in the least understand, from the Institute of Professor 

Niels Bohr to England, France, Holland, Germany, the United States, and 

Japan. 

At that time there were three main centres of attraction on the map of 

atomic research. From Cambridge Rutherford ruled like a sharp-tongued and 

easily irritated monarch that kingdom of the smallest possible dimensions he 

had been the first to re veal. Copenhagen decreed through the mouth of the 

learned Niels Bohr the laws of the bewilderingly new and puzzling territory 

of the microcosm. Meanwhile Gottingen's triumvirate - Max Born, James 

Franck, and David Hilbert - instantly asked questions about each new 

discovery made in England and supposed to have been correctly explained in 

Denmark. 

Many fascinating problems presented by the world of atoms could no 

longer be satisfactorily solved by correspondence. The era of congresses and 

conferences now began. Bohr only needed to announce that he would lecture 

in Gottingen for a week on his studies and every physicist tried to make the 

journey. News of interesting experiments and results achieved came even 

from lands which before the war either had conducted no physics research at 

all or only insignificant experiments. India and Japan, the United States and 

revolutionary Russia tried to exchange scientific information. During these 

years most zealous efforts were made by the Soviet Union to make contact 

with Western scientists. The Bolshevist state not only wished its scientists to 

learn from those 'out there'. It also took care to have its own publications 

translated into English, French, and German. Even that dictatorial state, in 

those days, imposed no rules of secrecy or censorship upon the held of 

research. 

A famous physicist remarked at the time that his profession was behaving 

like a community of ants. Each one hurried excitedly to a breach in the 

anthill with the tiny fragments of knowledge he had just picked up, only to 

find that as soon as his back was turned another had taken it away. Planck, 

Einstein, the Curies, Rutherford, and Bohr one after the other administered a 

series of severe shocks to the edifice of physics, which had seemed at the 

turn of the century so splendidly easy to survey and so firmly based. Arnold 

Sommerfeld of the University of Munich, probably the most successful 

teacher of the post-war generation, said that eager students before they 

entered the study of physics ought to be warned: 'Caution! Dangerous 

structure! Temporarily closed for complete reconstruction!' 

Rutherford unhesitatingly blamed the theoretical, not the experimental, 

physicists, for the confusion. ‘They’re getting too big for their boots,' he 

growled. 'We practical physicists will have to take them down a peg or two. 

What had really happened? In the midst of the post-war troubles of the 

world, its revolutions and inflations, people hardly had the time, the 

patience, or perhaps simply the vitality to grasp the meaning of the most 

profound of all revolutions, the most significant of all devaluations, the 

radical change of our image of the world. Planck had shaken the belief, 

which had been regarded as self-evident for thousands of years, that Nature 

makes no sudden advances. Einstein had defined as relative the 'facts' of 

space and time until now supposed to be fixed quantities. He had identified 

matter as 'frozen' energy. But now the Curies, Rutherford, and Bohr were 

proving that the indivisible could be divided and that the solid, when one 

came to scrutinize it precisely, was not stable but in constant motion and 

change. 

Professor Rutherford's alpha particles ought really, at that time, to have 

upset not only atoms of nitrogen but also the peace of mind of humanity. 

They ought to have revived the dread of an end of the world, forgotten for 

many centuries. But in those days all such discoveries seemed to have little 

to do with the realities of everyday life as men perceived them. The 

conclusions reached by the physicists through their complicated instruments 

and their even more complicated calculations about the true character of our 

world were still, it was generally agreed, solely their own affair. And in fact 

they themselves did not appear to expect any immediate practical 

consequences from their revelations. Rutherford had expressly stated his 

opinion that the world would never be able to exploit the slumbering energy 

in the atom. It was an error to which he held firm until his death in 1937. 

The German physicist and Nobel prize winner Walter Nemst wrote in 

1921 :'We may say that we are living on an island of guncotton.' He was 

trying to give the latest results of Ruther- ford's researches greater publicity. 

Yet he immediately added the consoling comment: ‘But, thank God, we 

have not yet found a match that will ignite it.' 

Why then should man be troubled? 

It was true that the physicists themselves were worried. For the time being 

actually, they were worrying less about the world than about their own 

science, in which already hardly any of the old ideas were making sense. But 

for that very reason much that was new and amazing much that earlier 

centuries had never known, was coming to light. 

This was the miraculous and exciting era of which one of the youngest, 

the American Robert Oppenheimer, wrote later: 

Our understanding of atomic physics, of what we call the quantum theory 

of atomic systems, had its origins at the turn of the century and its great 

synthesis and resolutions in the nineteen-twenties. It was a heroic time. It 

was not the doing of any one man. It involved the collaboration of scores of 

scientists from many different lands, though from first to last the deeply 

creative and subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, 

deepened, and finally transmuted the enterprise. It was a period of patient 

work in the laboratory, of crucial experiments and daring action, of many 

false starts and many untenable conjectures. It was a time of earnest 

correspondence and hurried conferences, of debate, criticism, and brilliant 

mathematical improvisation. For those who participated it was a time of 

creation. There was terror as well as exaltation in their new insight. 

Another witness to those years, the great German physicist Pascual 

Jordan, remembers: 

Everyone was filled with such tension that it almost took their breath 

away. The ice had been broken ... It became more and more clear that in this 

connexion we had stumbled upon a quite unexpected and deeply embedded 

layer of the secrets of Nature. It was evident that wholly new processes of 

thought, beyond all the previous notions in physics, would be needed to 

resolve the contradictions - only later recognized as merely apparent - which 

now came to a head. 

Young physicists from all over the world were studying under 

Sommerfeld in Munich. They even took their problems with them into the 

cafes. Marble-topped tables were covered with scribbled mathematical 

formulae. The waiters of the Cafe Lutz in the Hofgarten, regularly 

frequented by the Munich physicists, had strict instructions never to wipe the 

tables without special permission. For if a Problem had not been solved by 

the time the cafe closed for the night, the further necessary calculations were 

carried out the following evening. It happened fairly Often, moreover, that 

some unknown person would have the audacity to jot down the solution 

during the interval. Some young physicist would have been too impatient to 

wait until the next meeting. 

2  THE BEAUTIFUL YEARS 1923-32 

THIS tremendous transformation of the scientific view of Nature could 

only be compared with the change of outlook brought about by Copernicus. 

It originated, like all really important intellectual revolutions, in places 

where, to all appearance, deep tranquillity reigned. The most far-reaching 

revolution of the twentieth century was bom in an idyll: a picturesque park 

in Copenhagen, a quiet side street in Beme, the shore of the island of 

Heligoland, the meadows and tree-shaded river at Cambridge, the Hofgarten 

in Munich, the quiet neighbourhood of the Pantheon in Paris, the gentle 

slopes of Zurichberg, and the ancient fortifications of Gottingen, bordered 

by mstling tall trees. 

In the 1920s Gottingen was the real centre of the restless intellectual 

activities of the physicists. Eminent visitors came from other universities. 

There were so many of them, especially in the summer months, that the 

Dutch physicist Ehrenfest observed with his sharp wit: 'We really ought to 

avoid the msh of our foreign colleagues at the height of the season by 

visiting, to escape their visits, other establishments of learning.' 

Between 1920 and 1930 Gottingen was still as dreamy and comfortable as 

it was in the mid nineteenth century. To be sure, in this very town in 1908 

the first German experimental station for motor travel and aeronautics had 

been set up. And since the end of the war Gottingen had possessed the first 

great wind tunnel established in Europe for aerodynamic research. But these 

laboratories were outside the old town wall and did not change the 

countenance of the city. The half-timbered houses with their ingeniously 

carved beams, darkened by the smoke of many, many years, the high Gothic 

tower of the Jacobikirche, the professors' villas in the Wilhelm Weber 

Strasse with their twining clematis and glyzinia as in a picture by Spitzweg 

the smoky students' taverns, the classically serene Great Hall with its white, 

gilded pillars, combined to give an impression of something antiquated and 

consoling that had been preserved during the great war. 

The horn of the night watchman continued for many years to sound the 

day's end, in spite of the radio time signal from Nauen. All kinds of the most 

modern vehicles might be designed in Gottingen itself, behind the ugly red- 

brick walls of an institute called in jest the 'Lubricating Oil Faculty', but the 

citizens themselves made far less use of such noisy inventions than the 

inhabitants of most other German towns. 

Most people still went about on foot in Gottingen. The distances to be 

traversed inside the city were so short that it would have been hardly worth 

while to go by car or motor-cycle. Not until after the First World War did 

students and professors adopt the bicycle and this was a novelty not popular 

with everyone. Was it not those leisurely strolls before and after lectures 

which had so often given rise to the most interesting ideas? Had not chance 

meetings at a street corner or along the picturesque city wall often 

accomplished more than formal seminars or committee sessions? 

The venerable Georgia Augusta University remained, even after 1918, the 

spiritual and geographical centre of the town. In fact it was more so than 

ever after the collapse of the old political order. Something of the respect 

amounting to devotion that had been given under the Empire to higher 

public officials and Army officers was transferred to the deans and 

professors of the faculties. The decorations they received the prizes, degrees, 

and memberships of foreign scientific societies which were bestowed upon 

them compensated the proud citizens of Gottingen for the orders and titles 

conferred in the 'good old days '. 

This respect was also extended, though in smaller measure, to the 

undergraduates. When the students, especially during the period of 

intellectual excitement that lasted for the first few years after the war, stood 

and argued in the streets until late at night, the citizens took it as little amiss 

as the occasionally noisy homeward journey from the taverns. The 

landladies of the boarding-houses along the Friedlander Weg, the 

Nikolausburger Weg, or the Dusterer Eichenweg had been accustomed for 

generations to the students owing them money, though the debts were 

always paid up in the end somehow or other. Their patience often verged 

upon self-sacrifice. 

One day a young physicist in his first year who had not paid his account at 

a celebrated bookshop for a long time turned up at the door of the 

establishment leading a dancing bear, placed at his disposal for the purpose 

by travelling showmen. The young man, with a perfectly straight face, 

offered this long- suffering animal to the bookseller ‘on account'. The 

bookseller, well used to such awkward situations, did not turn a hair. He 

acknowledged with a laugh that it was really he - not the bear - who was 

being led round by the nose. 

The retired professors were treated like princes. They were assured of the 

veneration of all. Though they no longer gave lectures, they continued to 

take a lively part in the intellectual life of the town. Most of them still 

belonged to and often presided over its scientific bodies. The best seats were 

reserved for them when lecturers came to visit. When the old gentlemen took 

their leisurely walks along the streets which in some cases already bore their 

own names, they were respectfully greeted and even asked for advice, now 

by a young colleague who might be seated at his open window preparing a 

forthcoming lecture, now by a tutor, younger still, just arrived by invitation 

from some other university, and seated on a bench absorbed in scribbling 

ideas in a notebook. The steady progress of science and the acquisition of 

knowledge went on and no outside disturbance seemed able to trouble it. 

Never before-and perhaps never again-would university men have so 

much cause to consider themselves the true leaders of society as here in 

Gottingen during the 'beautiful years'. In the Ratskeller is an old student's 

motto: Extra Gottingam non est vita. To many members of the university 

who studied, taught, or spent the evening of their lives in the city it must 

have seemed that the statement was daily confirmed anew. 

Eminent philologists, philosophers, theologians, biologists, and professors 

of law had contributed to the establishment of the world- wide fame of the 

Georgia Augusta. But the University of Gottingen owed its celebrity above 

all to its mathematicians. Carl Friedrich Gauss had taught there until about 

the middle of the nineteenth century. He had made Gottingen the centre for 

the most abstract of all sciences. From 1886 on a man sat in this renowned 

chair who had consolidated and perhaps even enhanced its reputation by his 

standing not only as a thinker but as a bold, tireless, and inspired organizer. 

He was Felix Klein. 

For nearly thirty years, from 1886 to 1913, Klein worked in Gottingen. He 

was a tall, upstanding man with bright, penetrating eyes. He was described 

by the daughter of the mathematician Carl Runge as 'having something 

kingly about him'. A journey to America in 1893 had impelled Klein to try 

to abolish the distinction, at that time strictly maintained in Europe, between 

pure science and its various applications. He laboured incessantly to ensure 

that mathematics should 'keep in closer touch with practical life'. 

It was Klein, therefore, who really initiated the foundation or further 

extension of many astronomical, physical, technical, and mechanical 

institutes in Gottingen. There gradually grew up round them, in 

consequence, a whole private industry for the production of scientific 

measuring apparatus and optical precision instruments. The old-fashioned 

town became a cradle of the most modern technology. 

It is characteristic of the liberal tradition that still prevailed in those days 

that Klein did not hesitate to invite to Gottingen mathematicians like Hilbert 

and Minkowski who were utterly opposed to him intellectually. These men 

uncompromisingly repudiated every kind of specialization and all attempts, 

however tentative, to make any practical application of mathematics. 

Hilbert's lofty spirit, exclusively concentrated upon ultimate essences, could 

feel only contempt for 'technicians'. On a certain occasion he had to replace 

Klein, who was ill, as the faculty member in charge of students of the 

Mathematical School at the annual engineers' congresses at Hanover which 

Klein had arranged. Hilbert was warned that he must give a conciliatory 

lecture and speak against the notion that science and technology were 

irreconcilable. Bearing this admonition in mind, he declared in the 

somewhat harsh East Prussian dialect he affected: 'One hears a lot of talk 

about the hostility between scientists and engineers. I don't believe in any 

such thing. In fact I am quite certain it is untrue. There can't possibly be 

anything in it because neither side has anything to do with the other. 

Dozens of such anecdotes about Hilbert, whose frankness amounted to 

positive gruffness, circulated in Gottingen, but no one resented his ironic 

malice and well-aimed gibes. They expressed the same inflexible honesty 

with which he approached his own field of mathematics. This trait permitted 

him to proceed repeatedly to the most unexpected conclusions without 

paying the slightest attention to intellectual conventions. With justice his 

lectures attracted students from all over the world. When he stood by the 

enormous slide rule that overlooked his desk and raised the still-unsolved 

problems of mathematics, all who listened felt that they were taking direct 

part in the revelation of new knowledge. His hearers did not leave the lecture 

room with dead facts long proved, but with living questions. 

There was only one problem from whose solution Hilbert deliberately 

abstained, though he might have been able to win a small fortune - a hundred 

thousand gold marks - by elucidating it. This was the sum which a learned 

citizen of Darmstadt had bequeathed to anyone who could find the answer to 

a certain mathematical problem, 'Fermat's Last Theorem', which had 

remained unsolved ever since the seventeenth century. So long as no correct 

solution came to light the trustees of the bequest were entitled to devote the 

interest on the fund to any object they chose. It was used every year to 

enable prominent mathematicians and physicists to hold a series of lectures 

in Gottingen. Henri Poincare, H. A. Lorentz, Arnold Sommerfeld, Planck, 

Debye, Nemst, Niels Bohr, and the Russian Smoluchowski were among 

those thus invited to Giottingen. All made invaluable suggestions. 'It's lucky 

that I am probably the only person who can crack that nut,' Hilbert used to 

say every time he glanced through, in his capacity as chairman of the prize 

committee, the attempts at solutions annually submitted by laymen and 

professional mathematicians, pronouncing them all, as usual, inadequate. 

'But I shall take very good care not to kill the goose that lays us such 

splendid golden eggs.' 

Every Thursday, at three o'clock sharp in the afternoon, the four masters 

of the Mathematical Institute, Klein, Runge, Minkowski, and Hilbert, 

gathered in the porch overlooking the garden of Hilbert's home. A big 

blackboard stood there, half in the open. Hilbert had often been scribbling on 

it right up to the last moment, as the chalk on the sleeves of his jacket would 

show. The discussion of a new series of formulae often began there and then. 

It would continue while the participants climbed through the woods and over 

the open fields in all weathers up to the 'Kehr' hotel on the heights. There, 

over coffee, the illustrious quartet would argue about all the small and large 

questions of their private lives, their beloved university, and the wide world. 

Again and again, as the talk went on, often reaching the most rarefied 

atmosphere of the limits of human understanding, loud laughter would 

intervene, giving comfort and relaxation to minds that had reached the 

seemingly unconquerable frontiers. 

One of the many important new institutions which Felix Klein's inventive 

gift for organization had bestowed upon Gottingen was the mathematical 

reading-room in the Auditorium building. It contained not only the leading 

mathematical and physical periodicals of the world, as well as a reference 

library of manuals, but also summaries and occasionally even the entire 

typescripts of current lectures. Teachers and students who possessed the 

keys to both rooms could work in perfect peace between lectures and also- 

which often turned out to be more important- discuss the subjects of their 

reading in the ante-room, where the strict rule of silence did not have to be 

observed. Debates between physicists and mathematicians had never ceased 

since modem developments in natural science had required the help of 

mathematics to express their contradictory perceptions. Hilbert had 

remarked in his usual irritable style: 

'This will never do! Physics is obviously much too difficult for physicists!' 

He was not content with uttering that negative opinion. With characteristic 

zest he took up the study of what he used to call the 'intellectually poverty- 

stricken' science of physics and attempted to give mathematical assistance. 

Probably owing to his influence one of the most gifted theoretical 

physicists of the 'new school' was invited to Gottingen in 1921. Max Bom, at 

that time just thirty-eight years old, was no stranger to the Georgia Augusta. 

The son of a well-known Breslau biologist, he had graduated at Gottingen in 

1907 as one of the most brilliant pupils of the Mathematical Institute, 

receiving a prize for his work. His studies and travels took him to 

Cambridge, Breslau, Berlin, and Frankfurt. With his arrival at the Second 

Physics Institute in the Bunsenstrasse - a red-brick building with an 

unspeakably homely exterior like a Pmssian cavalry barracks - the brief but 

incessantly productive golden age of Gottingen atomic physics began. 

A small bureaucratic error, one of those tricks of fate which can 

accomplish so much, helped Bom soon after his arrival. Although a chair for 

experimental physics already existed in Gottingen, its occupant, Professor 

Pohl, spent practically all his time teaching and had far too little leisure for 

the research to which Born was looking forward. But the new head of the 

institute discovered on examining its papers that provision had been made in 

the budget for a second chair which had never been filled. This was merely 

due to a clerical error, he was told. Bom refused to give in and insisted on 

the letter of the law. He was able, therefore to call to Gottingen James Frank, 

already well known for his experimental discoveries, including the one 

which later gained him his Nobel prize. 

Hilbert, Bom, and Franck, a trio of men of high talent, tireless industry, 

and a fervent passion for the new view of Nature, worked together in 

Gottingen after 1921. Each differed fundamentally from the others. Bom 

was probably the most interested in the outside world, the most accessible 

and the most versatile. His talents were so various that he might well have 

become a first-rate pianist or author. His wealthy father had given him the 

following advice before he began his studies: 'Be sure you try out all the 

courses before you decide which one to follow.' So he entered his name 

Simultaneously, during his semesters at the university at Breslau, for 

lectures on law, literature, psychology, political economy, and astronomy. 

He felt himself most attracted to the last because, so he said, he preferred to 

all the other buildings that in which lectures on the world of stars 

Franck, like Bom, came of a Jewish family which had long been settled in 

Germany. He could never forget his Hamburg origin. In spite of the 

cordiality and warmth which made him very popular with his students, he 

kept other people at a certain distance. He remained always a Hamburg 

aristocrat. 'A distinguished fellow' people called him in those days. Later 

those who worked with him called him a saint. This was not only because of 

Franck's great kindness of heart but also because of his almost religious 

devotion to physics. He would tell his pupils that only one who was entirely 

absorbed by physics and actually dreamed about it could hope for 

enlightenment. He spoke of his own inspirations in the language of a 

medieval mystic. 'The only way I can tell that a flew idea is really important 

is the feeling of terror that seizes me. 

In almost every age a certain sphere of human reflection and creative 

activity exercises a peculiar fascination for gifted minds, in one period 

restless seekers after novelty take a special interest in architecture. In others 

they apply themselves to painting or music, theology or philosophy. 

Suddenly, no one knows how it happens, the most alert spirits perceive 

where new ground has recently been broken and press forward eagerly to 

become, not only its heirs, but its founders and masters. 

Atomic physics exercised this magnetic power in the years after the First 

World War. It was taken up by the philosophically talented, by men with 

artistic gifts, by politically minded young men who were repelled by the 

confusion of day-to-day politics, and by adventurous spirits who could find 

no more to conquer in a world whose most distant continents had been 

explored. Disclosures were still possible in the study of the most invisible 

and microscopic of all phenomena. Here one might come upon traces of new 

laws, and might experience the peculiar delight, mingled with fear, of having 

thought something which no one had yet thought, of having seen something 

which no one had yet seen. 

Since there was so much that was new and uncertain in the domain of 

atomic research, teachers and pupils drew closer together than in other 

disciplines. Experience and knowledge were worth little. Old and young 

became comrades on this journey into the interior of matter. Both alike took 

pride in their common conquest of fragments of knowledge. Both showed 

equal modesty and bewilderment before the impenetrable. 

James Franck, who already held the Nobel prize for physics, could turn 

from the blackboard on which he had lost his way in a difficult calculation 

and inquire of one of his students, 'Perhaps you can see the next step?' The 

professors made no secret of their mistakes and doubts. They kept their 

pupils posted on their private correspondence where unsolved problems 

were discussed with their foreign colleagues, and encouraged their youthful 

collaborators to seek for explanations which their elders had been denied. 

A highlight of every week of the term was the 'Seminar on Matter' 

conducted in Room 204 of the Institute by Bom, Franck, and Hilbert, gratis 

et privatissime. It became almost a tradition for Hilbert to open the 

proceedings with a pretence of innocence: 'Well, now, gentlemen, I'd just 

like you to tell me, what exactly is an atom?' 

Each time a different student tried to enlighten the professor. The problem 

was tackled afresh every time, and every time they searched for a different 

solution. But whenever any of the young geniuses sought refuge on the 

esoteric heights of complicated mathematical explanations, Hilbert would 

interrupt him in broadest East Pmssian: 'I just can't understand you, young 

man. Now tell me over again, will you?' Everyone was forced to express 

himself as clearly as possible, and to build solid bridges across the gaps of 

knowledge instead of trying to jump them with overhasty strides of thought. 

These debates were concerned more and more with the most basic 

problems of epistemology. Had the discoveries of atomic physics abolished 

the duality between the human observer and the world observed? Was there 

no longer any real distinction between subject and object? Could two 

mutually exclusive propositions on the same topic both be regarded as 

correct from a loftier standpoint? Would one be justified in abandoning the 

view that the foundation of physics is the close connexion of cause and 

effect? But in that case could there ever be any such thing as laws of Nature? 

Could any reliable scientific forecasts ever be made? 

Questions, questions, and still more questions. They could be discussed 

without end and everyone had something to say about them. In the winter 

semester of 1926 a slender, rather delicate looking American student 

distinguished himself, even among such highly talented people as these. He 

was often able to improvise on the spur of the moment entire dissertations, 

so that hardly anyone else had a chance to speak. At first the new boy was 

listened to with fascination. But after a time his excessive garrulity and 

eloquence began to cause irritation and possibly also envy among a number 

of his companions. They submitted a written petition to one of the professors 

suggesting that a check might be put on the Wunderkind. In a little less than 

twenty years he was to become world famous: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who 

was introduced to the public for the first time by the newspapers of August 

1945 as the 'father of the atom bomb'. 

Oppenheimer was one of the many young Americans who came to the 

Old World in those years to study physics. They sometimes called 

themselves 'Knights of Columbus in reverse', for they travelled in the 

opposite direction to that taken by Columbus and those who accompanied 

him. They, too, were in search of a 'new continent'. They returned from it to 

their own country, where 'old-fashioned physics' was still being taught, 

bringing back incredible information and fabulous discoveries which, like 

the gold procured by the Spanish seafarers of the sixteenth century, were to 

prove of great but troublesome profit to their native land. 

Almost all these young Americans came to Europe richly endowed with 

travelling scholarships. They were joined by some older hands, teachers who 

were in the habit of spending their sabbatical year - twelve months of private 

study on full pay awarded by tradition every seven years - as learners, 

exchanging ideas with their European colleagues. 

These scientific tourists from the other side of the Atlantic brought foreign 

currency into the university towns of Europe, impoverished by the war. 

Further capital in the shape of dollars often followed them, for the American 

university men were frequently successful in pleading the cause of their 

temporary European alma mater and in obtaining funds from philanthropic 

organizations. 

The impoverished German scientific institutes in particular, which 

perpetually complained of lack of money, benefited very much from this 

American assistance. What would Privy Councillor Sommerfeld at Munich 

have done without the occasional improvement in his scanty resources 

provided by the Rockefeller Foundation? Whenever Wickliff Rose, the 

distributor of funds endowed by the oil magnate, travelled in Europe, the 

universities received him like a despot. On the size of his cheque depended 

the number of research programmes which could be continued during the 

ensuing year and the number of young research workers who could be given 

scholarships. 

The American mathematicians and physicists were particularly fond of 

Gottingen. Before the First World War Charles Michelson had worked there 

for a term as visiting professor, and Millikan and Langmuir, the grand old 

men of American physics and chemistry, had studied at Gottingen. 

In the 1920s there were often a dozen or more Americans en- rolled in the 

faculty of natural science at the Georgia Augusta. They brought with them to 

Gottingen a little of the unburdened atmosphere of the American campus. 

Their annual Thanksgiving dinners, the most memorable presided over by K. 

T. Compton in 1926, were universally popular. The Americans showed their 

German colleagues how to eat turkey and sweet com and learned in turn to 

drink beer, to sing and to hike. Nearly all the Americans who became well 

known later on for the development of atomic energy had been at Gottingen 

at various times between 1924 and 1932. They included Condon, who 

complained in lively fashion of the lack of comfort in the Gottingen 

lodgings; the lightning-brained Norbert Wiener; Erode, always deep in 

thought; the modest Richtmyer; the cheerful Pauling - one of Sommerfeld's 

pupils, who often came over from Munich; and the amazing' Oppie ', who 

managed to pursue in Gottingen not only his physical studies but also his 

philosophical, philological, and literary hobbies. He was particularly deep in 

Dante's Inferno and in long evening walks along the railway tracks leading 

from the freight station would discuss with colleagues the reason why Dante 

had located the eternal quest in hell instead of in paradise. 

One evening Paul Dirac, who was usually so silent, took Oppenheimer 

aside and gently reproached him. 'I hear', he said, 'that you write poetry as 

well as working at physics. How on earth can you do two such things at 

once? In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood 

by everyone, some- thing that no one ever knew before. But in the case of 

poetry it's the exact opposite!' 

Oppenheimer and Dirac both lived in a fine granite villa at the start of the 

Geismarer Landstrasse, facing the Astronomical Observatory where Carl 

Friedrich Gauss had once worked. The villa belonged to a medical man, Dr 

Cario, whose son Gunther was preparing for a brilliant future as a physicist 

while acting as one of Franck's assistants. It was a usual practice for 

Gottingen families of good social position to take in students as 'paying 

guests'. They brought the outside world into the provincial parlour and 

received in return a measure of domestic security which they smiled at first 

but soon came to value and look track on with longing. Between those who 

leased the rooms and those who rented them often grew long-standing 

friend- ship and occasionally marriage. A surprising number of the wives of 

professors on the five continents come from little Gottingen. 

From these families the foreign students often learned German very 

quickly. They frequently even wrote articles in German for scientific 

periodicals during the period of their studies. In conversation, however, they 

made amusing mistakes. The young English astrophysicist Robertson 

wanted one day to check the exact weight of a letter he was going to send 

abroad. He burst into a shop and breathlessly asked the girl behind the 

counter: 'Haben Sie eine Wiege? Ich mochte etwas wagen. ' ('Have you a 

cradle? I want to do something risky.') The girl blushed and stared at him 

and he hastily corrected himself: 'I beg your pardon, I meant to say haben 

Sie eine Waage? Icit miichte etwas wiegen. ' ('Have you a pair of scales ? I 

want to weigh something.') 

American students could never get used to the bureaucratic formalities 

common in German universities. Even Oppenheimer stumbled over them. In 

the spring of 1927 he applied for permission to take the examination for a 

doctor's degree. To everyone's astonishment his request was flatly refused by 

the Prussian Ministry of Education, to which the University of Gottingen 

was subordinated. An inquiry by the dean of the Natural Science Faculty 

elicited the following reply from Ministerial Councillor von Ruttenburg in 

Berlin: 'Herr Oppenheimer made a wholly inadequate application. Obviously 

the Ministry had to refuse it.' 

Oppie had apparently forgotten to comply with the regulations which 

required a detailed account of his career along with his application for 

admission to the Georgia Augusts. He had never formally matriculated, 

therefore, and consequently had never been a member of the university at 

all! 

The professors of the future father of the atom bomb had to write 

imploring letters to the Rectorial Board and the Ministry. Max Bom said 

Oppenheimer's work for his doctor's degree had been so outstanding that 

Bom wanted to publish it in one of the series of Gottingen dissertations. The 

plea that the American undergraduate could not wait another term at 

Gottingen to take his examination in regular fashion was expressed to the 

authorities in a petition for the grant of belated matriculation. 'Economic 

circumstances render it impossible for Herr Oppenheimer to remain in 

Gottingen after the end of the summer term,' it declared. 

Was this argument justified by the facts? Oppenheimer was the son of a 

New York businessman who had left Germany for the United States at the 

age of seventeen and made a fortune there. Consequently it was not so much 

money that Oppie lacked, in all probability, as patience. He was bound to 

regard a further term at Gottingen as a waste of time. In these years, 

however, little fibs of this kind had not yet become the subjects of 

committees of investigation. The petition went through without further 

objection. 

Robert Oppenheimer took his oral examination on the after- noon of 1 1 

May 1927. He passed in all subjects - except physico- chemistry - with the 

marks 'excellent' or 'very good'. His written work for the doctorate was 

pronounced by Max Bom to be evidence of a high grade of scientific 

achievement, far above the level of the average dissertation. Bom's only 

criticism stated that 'the one fault to be found with the work is that it is 

difficult to read. But this formal shortcoming counts for so little in 

comparison with the content that I propose the paper be marked "with 

distinction". 

In the Gottingen of these twenty years it was possible to get along without 

a scholarship or a fat monthly cheque. The Russian mathematician 

Schnirelmann brought nothing with him but his toothbmsh and a copy of his 

latest work on prime numbers, but the Gottingen mathematician Landau had 

already given a lecture on the 'Schnirelmann proposition', and the young 

scholar, who had arrived in rags, soon got some decent clothes and board 

and lodging at the well-known Pension Wunderlich, frequented by 

physicists. His anonymous patrons also sent him every month a small money 

order to cover out-of-pocket expenses. He was often seen slowly making his 

way down the main street of Gottingen, his shoelaces undone and his gaze, 

as usual, fixed absentmindedly upon distant combinations of figures. 

The eminent stage director Kurt Hirschfeld, who was studying in 

Gottingen at the time, tells us how odd he thought these young 

mathematicians and physicists were. He once saw a member of Bom's 

'kindergarten', who was walking along in a dream, stumble and fall flat on 

his face. Hirschfeld mshed up and tried to help him to his feet. But the fallen 

student, still on the ground, vigorously repulsed his efforts. 'Leave me alone, 

will you? I'm busy!' Apparently a new brilliant solution had just occurred to 

him. Fritz Houtermans, today a professor of physics at a Swiss university, 

reports that he was once awakened in the middle of the night by someone 

banging on the window of his ground-floor rooms in Nikolausburg Strasse. 

One of his fellow students was begging urgently for admission. He had just 

had a splendid idea, he said, which would dispose of some of the unsolved 

contradictions in the new theories. Far from driving the intruder from his 

door, the disturbed sleeper opened it, as soon as he had got into his dressing- 

gown and slippers. The two worked until dawn on calculations with the 

newly established equations. 

In those exciting years it was not unusual for such sudden 'brain waves' by 

very young men to make a great stir in inter- national professional circles or 

even in certain cases to bring their authors fame almost overnight. 

For example, Werner Heisenberg the son of a professor of ecclesiastical 

history, had spent his last year at school in the threes of the Munich 

'Councils' Revolution' and served with an anti-Communist unit of 

schoolboys. To bring food to his starving family in the blockaded city he had 

twice, at the risk of his life, slipped through the lines of 'White' and 'Red' 

troops. While on sentry duty on the roof of a theological seminary he had 

read Plate and been aroused by the atomic theories of the ancient Creeks. 

But the opinion stated in Plate's Timaeus that atoms were ordinary 

substantive bodies satisfied him as little as a drawing in his physics textbook 

which depicted them with hooks and eyes. This critical attitude of refusal to 

be impressed by any authority did not desert Heisenberg even when his 

instructor, Sommerfeld, took him to Gottingen in 1921 to attend the Bohr 

Festival Season. Far from merely listening with reverence to the great man 

from Copenhagen, the boy, who was then only just nineteen years old, 

crossed swords with him during long walks to the Rohns and up to the 

Hainberg. 

Because of these conversations, which delighted Heisenberg, he decided 

to study physics. His name would soon be read as a collaborator in one of 

Sommerfeld's publications. At twenty- three he was working as assistant to 

Bom, at twenty-four he was lecturing on theoretical physics in Copenhagen 

and at twenty-six he became a regular professor at Leipzig. When he was 

barely thirty-two years old Heisenberg received the Nobel prize for 

theoretical studies of fundamental importance, published actually some six 

or eight years previously, in other words at an age when most students of 

medicine and law have just concluded their training. 

One of his closest friends states in his recollections of Heisenberg at 

Gottingen: 

He looked even greener in those days than he really was, for, being a 

member of the Youth Movement, the moral idealism of which greatly 

attracted him, he often wore, even after reaching man's estate, an open shirt 

and walking shorts. He always considered himself constitutionally lucky and 

this was quite tme. Brilliant intellectual achievements, such as his 

recognition of the 'uncertainty principle' or the basic ideas of the 'matrix 

calculus', which he afterwards developed with the help of Bom and his 

fellow student Pascual Jordan, a few months younger than himself, seemed 

simply to have fallen into his lap. 

Those who came to know Heisenberg later, after the political upheaval 

had troubled him with grief and doubt, cannot know how radiant he once 

was. He had brought his revolutionary quantum mechanics with him in 1925 

from Heligoland, where he used to climb on the red cliffs while he read 

Goethe's West-Ostlicher Divan and worked in the intervals on his own ideas 

in a kind of intellectual intoxication. I doubt if he had any sleep worth 

mentioning during that blissful Whitsun vacation. 

The lean and lanky Dirac, son of a Swiss father and an English mother, 

attained a high reputation in the world of physicists when he was even 

younger than Heisenberg. Even the initiated could not always follow his 

mental processes. The 'mystic of the atom' was not in the least worried by 

that. When he was not at Cambridge he could often be seen working in one 

of the classrooms of the Second Physics Institute at Gottingen. As if in a 

dream, he would be holding a mental colloquy with the rows of symbols he 

had chalked on the blackboard. Even in the presence of a second person 

Dirac hardly ever accompanied the stages of his mathematical proofs with 

words. Speech of course would never have been able to express what he had 

to say. The other physicists used to say that Dirac was so silent that he 

uttered an entire sentence only once every light year.* 

This little group of young men between twenty and thirty years old, 

inspired by or endowed with genius, included Enrico Fermi, an Italian who 

had attracted hardly any attention among his gifted colleagues in Gottingen. 

Another was 'Pat' Blackett, a former British naval officer, who photographed 

and interpreted the miraculous world of atomic events. That merry and 

freakish soul from Soviet Russia, George Gamow, had more ideas than 

anyone else but left it to others to distinguish the true from the false. Then 

there was Wolfgang Pauli, from Vienna, who once danced for joy in the 

middle of the Amalienstrasse at Munich because something new had just 

occurred to him. They all knew, of course, that they were engaged on work 

of far-reaching importance. But they never dreamed that their somewhat 

esoteric studies would so soon, so profoundly, and so violently affect the 

fate of mankind and their own lives. 

*In one of the usual sketches produced at the end of term in European 

universities the author attributed the following quatrain to Dirac: Age is of 

course a fever chill That every physicist must fear. He's better dead than 

living still, When once he's past his thirtieth year! 

The young Austrian Houtermans could never have suspected at that time 

that certain ideas which he advanced one hot summer day in 1927 during a 

walking tour near Gottingen with his fellow student Atkinson would lead a 

quarter of a century later to the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, the 

'absolute' weapon that might be instrumental in bringing about an end of the 

world. 

To pass the time the two undergraduates had raised partly as a joke the 

old, unsolved problem of the true source of the inexhaustible energy 

supplied by the sun that was beating down above their heads. There could be 

no question in this case of any ordinary process of combustion, otherwise the 

substance of the sun must long since have been consumed in the fierce heat 

generated for so many millions of years. But ever since Einstein's formula of 

the interchange ability of matter and energy the suspicion had been growing 

that in all probability a process of atomic transmutation was at work in that 

tremendous laboratory in the sky. 

Atkinson had participated in Rutherford's transformations of atom at 

Cambridge. He suggested to his companion that what had been 

accomplished in the Cavendish Laboratory must also be possible 'up there'. 

'Naturally!' Houtermans retorted. 'Let's just work the thing it, shall we ? 

How could it happen in the case of the sun ?' Such was the origin of the 

labours of Atkinson and Houtermans on their theory of thermonuclear 

reactions in the sun, which later achieved such fame. The theory for the first 

time put forward the conjecture that solar energy might be attributed, not to 

the demolition, but to the fusion, of lightweight atoms. The development of 

this idea led straight to the H-bombs that threaten humanity today. 

At that time, of course, neither of the two young students of the atom 

dreamed of such sinister consequences. Houtermans reports: 'That evening, 

after we had finished our essay, I went for a walk with a pretty girl. As soon 

as it grew dark the stars came out, one after another, in all their splendour. 

“Don't they sparkle beautifully?" cried my companion. But I simply stuck 

out my chest and said proudly: "I've known since yesterday why it is they 

sparkle." She didn't seem in the least moved by this statement. Perhaps, she 

didn't believe it. At that movement, probably, she felt no interest whatever in 

the matter. 

3 COLLISION WITH POLITICS 1932-3 

A TEXTILE manufacturer named Levin had leased the second floor of a 

villa to James Franck, in the Merckelstrasse at Gottingen. One evening a 

foreign physicist, as so often before, was a guest in the drawing-room. But 

on this occasion he was listened to with more than usual attention, for 

Professor Abraham Joffe came from Soviet Russia and had wonderful 

reports of the practical support given to scientists by the state. There they 

had no financial worries like those the Second Physics Institute had to 

contend with. The rooms at the Institute were hardly heated at all during the 

cold winter of 1929. At late seasons of the year, in order to save electricity, 

it was strictly forbidden to work before ten in the morning or after four in the 

afternoon. The man from Leningrad declared that at his own institute there 

were three hundred students and numerous well-paid assistants. They could 

ail count on safe employment and steady promotion, for their aspiring 

country needed competent scientists. 

'All that sounds good,' said Joffe. Then he lowered his voice suddenly and 

added in a barely audible tone: 'I often feel as if I were living on top of a 

volcano. One never knows when, or for what reason, it is actually going to 

erupt.' 

The internal struggle for power between Stalin and the other factions of 

the Communist Party in the U.S.S.R. had become so acute that it had begun 

to affect even the scientists. Certain Soviet physicists, who had previously 

been able to travel abroad without much difficulty, suddenly and 

inexplicably ceased to appear. The few who did visit the rest of Europe 

began noticeably to keep their distance. The Soviet physicist Landau, who 

was suspected of Trotskyism, begged his colleagues at the Berlin Technical 

Academy not to discuss politics with him on any account. Only a few years 

earlier the exact opposite had been the case. Landau himself had defended 

the new order of society with fiery zeal. He had come to Berlin with holes in 

his shoes and couldn't under- stand at all why he was given not only one but 

two pairs of new ones. 'Who can possibly need two pairs of shoes?' he said, 

criticizing such 'capitalist customs'. 

It was rumoured in Gottingen, Cambridge, and Copenhagen that Gamow, 

the 'innocent' among the physicists, who had always been ready to amuse his 

listeners with conjuring tricks and childish games, was just then playing a 

decidedly less hilarious version of hide-and-seek with the secret police. 

When he found that he was no longer to be allowed to visit the West, he had 

at first made a vain attempt to escape across the Afghan border. He was 

caught, but convinced the frontier guards who picked him up that he was 

only mountain climbing. Gamow, who had recently married, soon made a 

second attempt to escape. He planned to cross the Black Sea, with his wife, 

in a small sailing vessel, from the Russian to the Turkish shore. Unluckily he 

ran into so violent a storm that he was glad to be rescued from imminent 

shipwreck by the motor-boats of the frontier police patrol, the very people he 

had intended to evade. 

And yet Gamow belonged, actually, to the post-Revolutionary generation, 

neither for nor against Communism, but simply ready to take advantage of 

the opportunities afforded by the-state for further education and the making 

of a career. Now, however, the new lords of the 'machine' in Moscow had 

indicated that they were no longer content with the neutral attitude of 

scientific specialists. They demanded active ideological support. 

Modem physics in particular, in the form it had assumed in the West 

during the twenties, appeared ideologically suspect to the cultural 

commissars of Soviet Russia. The assertion made, above all by Bohr and 

Heisenberg, that in the act of observing sub-microscopic processes it was no 

longer possible to draw any clear distinction between the subject (that which 

observed) and the object (that which was observed) clashed with the doctrine 

of materialism. For this view allowed the individual far too much influence 

over natural phenomena. Such a concession amounted in the eyes of the 

official philosophers of the Soviet Union to 'dangerous idealism' which 

could only end in 'ecclesiastical obscurantism '. 

Jaroslav Frenkel, in a 'lecture for the toilers' in Moscow, gave an account 

of the theory that light, according to the conditions under which it was 

observed, could at various times be described as consisting either of small 

particles or, nearly, of waves. He then added, by way of a joke: 'Of course, 

according to the type of thinking hitherto prevalent among us, these two 

alternatives absolutely exclude each other So, Comrades, you can believe 

in the particles on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and in the waves on 

Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.' A woman from the audience seized 

upon this remark. She administered a stem rebuke to the lecturer for 

indulging in 'bourgeois propaganda.' The authorities got wind of the incident 

and the Physicist was persecuted as a 'reactionary' though all he had done 

was to report on the latest advances in his professional field. Even the article 

under Frenkel's name in the Soviet Encyclopedia did not fail to censure 

Soviet Russia's possibly greatest contemporary teacher of physics: 

The philosophical ideas of Ja. L. Frenkel are not notable for their lucidity 

and consistency so far as his attitude to materialism is concerned. Many of 

the statements in his books suffer directly or indirectly from idealist 

distortion and have been rightly subjected to strong criticism by the 

community of Soviet scientists. 

The tranquility even of Gottingen was disturbed, when the economic crisis 

began in 1934 by louder and louder echoes of the grating notes of politics. 

The leading newspaper of the city, the Gottinger Tageblatt, a middle-class 

journal, had followed an extremely conservative policy for Some years. It 

started to praise Adolf Hitler as a redeemer at a time when the rest of the 

nationalist press in Germany still qualified their judgment of the 'leader' with 

certain reservations. Students of the Second Physics and the Mathematical 

Institutes were discreetly combining into a National Socialist group. For the 

moment they confined themselves to spreading anti-Semitic propaganda 

among their followers, from which their own Jewish professors were of 

course exempt, since their characters, after all, were known from daily 

experience to be above all reproach. There was also a small but active 

Communist cell among the Gottingen students smuggling Communist 

leaflets and pamphlets into the library of the Physics School. The matter was 

Investigated. Although the culprits were not discolored, the atmosphere of 

the institute, formerly so friendly, grew tense and suspicious. 

Some years before, nationalist students had hissed Einstein off the 

platform in Berlin from which he was lecturing on his relativity theory. The 

incident had disgusted people in Gottingen. 'Here,' they said, 'we have only 

once had a demonstration by students. They marched out to the house of a 

famous Physicist who has just arrived and gave him an enthusiastic welcome 

by chanting in the twilight, Planck's quantum formula.' Now, however, 

demonstrations were beginning to occur rather often, even in this idyllic 

university city, against 'objectionable' instructors like the outstanding 

mathematician Hermann Weyl, who was a close friend of Einstein. 

The brown-shirted students made a particular onslaught against Jewish or 

half- Jewish undergraduates who had come from Poland or Hungary to study 

in Germany. These people were already victims of the 'cold' anti-Semitism 

of their native lands, which had denied them admission to universities under 

the numerus clausus law restricting the number of Jewish university students 

to a small quota. Now they were sacrificed for the second time to racial 

prejudice. Talented young natural scientists such as Eugen Wigner, Leo 

Szilard, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller were at that time making 

notable contributions in Gottingen, Hamburg, and Berlin to discussions on 

the subject of atomic physics. Only a few years later they became the most 

active champions of the construction of the atom bomb. The alarm which 

they then felt at the possibility that Hitler might be the first to possess so 

terrifying a weapon can only be understood when one realizes what abuse 

and persecution they had to endure from National Socialist students in 1932 

and 1933. They were never really able to get over the shock of the inroad of 

political fanaticism upon the peace of academic life, a shock which was 

destined to make history. 

Long before Hitler's seizure of power a small group of German physicists, 

styling themselves 'national researchers', had formed around the Nobel prize 

winners Lenard and Stark. This group boldly declared Einstein's theory of 

relativity to be 'Jewish world- bluff. They attempted to dismiss, under the 

summary heading of 'Jewish physics', all studies based on the data of 

Einstein and Bohr. Even at that time they characterized as 'Je wish-minded' 

the Aryans who founded their published work on relativity and quantum 

mechanics. Johannes Stark was especially bitter against Sommerfeld. This 

arrogant inventor of a nebulous science of 'German physics' had been 

offended by the pertinent criticism directed at his work by the Munich 

professor who had dared to call him in jest 'Giovanni Fortissimo'.* The 

nickname, planted first by Einstein, had stuck ever since. Stark also held his 

eminent Munich colleague responsible for his dismissal from the University 

of Wurzburg. In reality Stark had been fired because he had used his Nobel 

prize money for the purchase, contrary to the statutes of the Stockholm 

foundation, of a china factory, and thereafter had taken more interest in this 

than in his scientific duties. The learned world of the Weimar Republic did 

not take very seriously these excursions of a few of their number into the 

foggy regions of demagogic racialism. For the time being professional 

achievement counted more than anything else. The adherents of 'German 

physics' who had become agitators no longer attracted much attention, and 

their 'stupid clamour' was regarded as of no importance. 

* Translator’s note: Stork in German means 'strong'. 

The growing agitation of the cranks, the unrecognized and the 

unsuccessful who gathered about the National Socialist physicists, was in 

fact a symptom of the profound political and social unrest in Germany. 

Unemployment statistics rose week by week, Every day the newspapers 

reported meeting-hall riots between 'brown shirts' and members of other 

political parties. Political assassination became a commonplace event. But 

the Gottingen atomic physicists, like most other natural scientists throughout 

the world, at first behaved as though it were possible to ignore these 

outrageous events. With an obstinacy amounting to monomania they applied 

themselves even more intensively than before to their work. 

The reasons for this ostrich-like policy were clearly analysed by Franck 

fifteen years later. It was in 1947 that he told the Emergency Committee of 

Atomic Scientists: 

It is a custom in science - and perhaps a principle - to select from the 

infinite reservoir of unsolved problems only those simple ones the solution 

of which seems possible in terms of available knowledge and skills. We are 

trained to subject our results to the most severe criticism. Adherence to these 

two principles results in our knowing very little, but on the other hand being 

very certain that we know this little. 

We scientists seem to be unable to apply these principles to the 

immensely complex problems of the political world and its social order. In 

general we are cautious and therefore tolerant and disinclined to accept total 

solutions. Our very objectivity prevents us from taking a strong stand in 

political differences, in which the right is never on one side. So we took the 

easiest way out and hid in our ivory tower. We felt that neither the good nor 

the evil applications were our responsibility. 

The fame of the University of Gottingen had slowly grown over centuries 

of patient, brilliant achievement and studies crowned with success. It had 

spread throughout the world. A few months, in fact only weeks, in the spring 

of 1933, were enough to destroy its reputation. At the Georgia Augusta, and 

at most other German seats of learning, there were noisy demonstrations by 

a minority of students who pretended to represent a majority. There were 

fiery speeches by political demagogues to proclaim the coming of the 'new 

order'. There were brutal expulsions of respected scholars whose opinions or 

heredity were flung in their faces like crimes. In Gottingen's retreat this 

seemed even more senseless and outrageous than in Other university cities. 

For there one knew one's fellow citizens too well to believe in the incessant 

flood of accusations from the new masters of the state. It was known for 

certain that the men who were being given notice to quit their posts were 

irreplaceable. Pupils from all Europe, from the United States, and even from 

Asia had come to sit at their feet. If they left, Gottingen would sink to the 

level of a provincial establishment. 

Almost a hundred years before, seven professors had been obliged to 

leave the University of Gottingen because they had protested against the 

violation Of the Constitution by the King of Hanover. Now also, seven 

professors, the first victims of another violation of the Constitution, were 

compelled to leave. For barely a month after Hitler's seizure of power 

telegraphic orders were received from Berlin for the immediate retirement of 

seven members of the Natural Science Faculty. Most of them, Max Bom, for 

instance, who happened to be abroad at the time, made no serious effort to 

contest this arbitrary decision. Only one member, the mathematician 

Courant, tried to resist the decree by submit- ting petitions. But neither his 

reference to the fact that he considered himself entitled to be treated as a 

'patriotic German' after being shot in the stomach and badly gassed as a 

front-line soldier at Verdun in the First World War, nor the petition of 

protest on his behalf signed by twenty-two German professors - including 

Heisenberg, Hilbert, Prandtl, and Sommerfeld, as well as the Nobel prize 

winners von Laue and Planck - helped matters in the slightest. 

Franck was at first exempted, no doubt because, as a Nobel prize winner, 

he was particularly well known abroad. But he had sufficient pride to 

dispense voluntarily with any such special privilege. In 17 April 1933 he 

sent in his resignation. Two days later he informed the public, through the 

few newspapers which had not yet been rendered completely subservient to 

the Party line, that he felt obliged to withdraw in sympathy with his expelled 

colleagues. 'We Germans of Jewish origin are now treated like aliens and 

enemies of our country, he complained, stressing the fact that he had no 

desire to occupy any special position. 

The great physicist's honourable attitude was, however, taken amiss by 

certain professors of the Georgia Augusta. Instead of defending academic 

freedom and intellectual dignity forty-two lecturers and professors 

forwarded an infamous document to the headquarters of the local Gottingen 

group of the National Socialist Party. In this communication they 

condemned Franck's action as 'playing into the hands of foreign atrocity 

propaganda'. Only a single one of Gottingen's natural scientists had the 

courage to protest openly against the dismissal of the Jewish savants. This 

was the physiologist Krayer. He did not allow him- self to be intimidated 

either by his own dismissal, which was then ordered by the new Prussian 

Minister of Education, Stuckart, or by the threat of being debarred from 

employment for the rest of his life. 

The great majority of the Gottingen professors deplored the invasion of 

their quiet retreat by demagogues and hatred, but to protect their professorial 

chairs, they dared no protest. When second- and third-raters, whose only 

merit was to have joined the Party in time, began to reorganize everything 

and issue decrees, they met, instead of real resistance, only a lightly mocking 

attitude, which harmed nobody. The new National Socialist Dozen- 

tenfuhrer* played first fiddle in those days, as a purifying agent and 

representative of the new order, but was soon unmasked as the plagiarist of 

other people's work. Though he was recognized by many, even at that early 

stage, as a thief of intellectual property and a braggart, no one found the 

civic courage to demand his recall. The intention was to cooperate in order 

to rescue what could still be salvaged. Through this policy the remaining 

professors became more or less disguised supporters of a regime destined to 

bring untold misfortune on the country it administered and on the world. 

Some weeks after these melancholy events the colleagues, pupils, and 

friends of Franck gathered once more in the tearoom of the Second Physics 

Institute to bid him farewell. On the eve of their chiefs departure they 

wished to assure him of their gratitude and esteem. His assistant Cario 

handed him, with a short speech, a portfolio of pictures of Gottingen to take 

with him on his travels as a memento of the beautiful years. Franck was 

visibly moved as he acknowledged the gift. 

* Translator's note: The Dozentenfuhrer - a post created by the Nazis was 

the political supervisor of the lecturers attached to each university. 

Next day he vacated his rooms in the Merckelstrasse villa. He drove to the 

station unaccompanied, for he had asked to be allowed to leave alone. 

Nevertheless, a number of his friends came to the station. Ahlbom, the 

porter, described Franck's departure in the following words: 'Just imagine,' 

he said. 'After the Herr Professor had got into the train, the thing didn't 

move. Engine didn't want to go. Had more sense than our new leaders!' 

Those left behind in Gottingen - there were still some eminent men of 

learning among them, even then - could never rival, in their subsequent 

labours under the Third Reich, the great achievements of the twenties. The 

dearest account of the state of the university was given by the mathematician 

Hilbert, by that time well advanced in years. About a year after the great 

purge of Gottingen he was seated at a banquet in the place of honour next to 

the new Minister of Education, Rust. Rust was unwary enough to ask: 'Is it 

really true, Professor, that your Institute suffered so much from the departure 

of the Jews and their friends ?' Hilbert snapped back, as coolly as ever: 

'Suffered? No, it didn't suffer, Herr Minister. It just doesn't exist any more!' 

There remained one island of peace and mutual tolerance in the flood of 

noisy political fanaticism. At the Universitets Institut for Teoretisk Fysik, 

No. 15 Blegdamsvej, Copenhagen, physicists of all nations, races, and 

ideologies gathered, as in the years before Hitler's seizure of power and 

Stalin's 'new line', around their master Niels Bohr. The more shamelessly the 

pretensions of half- truths and lies spread from one nation to another in 

public life, the more strenuously the people in Bohr's circle laboured to 

discover the obscure image of the whole truth, perpetually elusive, forever 

withdrawing to deeper and deeper strata. The new dictators did not tolerate 

anything outside the items in their programmes and inflicted savage 

punishment upon the mildest critics of their plans. The 'spirit of 

Copenhagen', on the other hand, invited criticism. It insisted upon the 

observation of everything from several points of view and postulated the 

eventual synthesis on another level which appeared to be contradictory. 

The supposedly unworldly Bohr took more rapid and effective action than 

any other member of the family of physicists to help those of his colleagues 

who were living under the dictatorships. Many of those engaged in atomic 

research who were still resident in Germany found sudden and urgent 

invitations from Bohr in their letter boxes, though they had made no 

previous application for any such thing. 'Come and stay with us for a while,' 

such messages would run, 'and think things over quietly until you decide 

where you would like to go. 

Those who, in the autumn of 1933, arrived at Copenhagen by the 

afternoon train from Germany, and found members of Bohr's Institute 

waiting to welcome them as cordially as their own relatives, felt after a few 

hours that a miracle had occurred in their return from the world of Party 

decrees and mute anguish to the formerly familiar atmosphere of reciprocal 

esteem and friendship. 

Bohr lacked, as his pupil Weizsacer put it, two qualities which usually 

distinguish most heads of a school. He was neither a pedagogue nor a tyrant. 

He showed no signs of offended pride when his ideas were sternly or even 

rudely criticized. The free- and-easy relations between master and pupils in 

an establishment headed by Bohr are vividly represented in a parody of 

Faust which was staged at the beginning of the thirties on the occasion of the 

annual September School attended by Bohr's foreign students. The Lord in 

this play is obviously intended to be Bohr himself. The part of Mephisto was 

allotted to his pupil and tireless critic Wolfgang Pauli. One conversation 

between these two, given in slightly exaggerated terms for the sake of the 

parody, was reported as follows: 

BOHR [the Lord]: 

Hast thou naught else to say? 

Comest thou ever with complaint? 

Is physics never to thy mind? 

PAULI [Mephisto]: 

Nay, 'tis all folly! Rotten, as ever, to the core! 

E'en in my days of dule it grieves me sore 

and I must ever plague these physicists the more. 

a. [In the mixture of German and English he always used when excited]: 

Oh, it is dreadful! In this situation we must remember the essential failure 

of classical concepts ... muss ich sagen ... just a little remark ... what do you 

propose to do with mass2 

P.: What's that got to do with it? Mass? We shall abolish it! 

a.: Well, that's very, very interesting ... but ... but - 

P.: No, shut up! Stop talking rubbish! 

a.: But ... but - 

P.: I forbid you to speak! 

a.: But Pauli! Pauli! We're really much more in agreement than you think! 

Of course, I quite agree! Only ... Certainly, we can abolish mass. But we 

must uphold load ... 

P.: What for? Why? No, no, that's wishful thinking! Why not abolish load, 

too? 

a.: I must ask ... I understand perfectly, of course ... but ... but - 

P.: Silence! 

a.: But Pauli, you must really give me a chance to finish what I have to 

say! If both mass and load are abolished, what have we got left ? 

P.: Oh, that's quite simple! What we've got left will be the neutron! 

[Pause. Both pace to and fro.] 

a.: It's not to criticize, it's but to learn 

I take my leave now, later to return. 

[Exit.] 

P .[Soliloquizes]: 

I like to see the old chap now and then and take good care we don't fall 

out. It's jolly decent of so grand a Lord, I must say, when he comes himself 

for a nice chat with Pauli! 

[Exit.] 

Bohr did not take himself very seriously, with the result that slight lapses 

of respect for his personality did not seem to vex him. Perhaps for that very 

reason all who worked with him held him in such great honour and felt such 

warm affection for him as has seldom been the lot of any teacher. They 

smiled at his absent- mindedness and failure to remember things, but in the 

very act of smiling they admired a spirit capable of overlooking for the time 

being all external matters in order to concentrate on the really essential. In 

1932 the government had placed at his disposal, to show its appreciation of 

the most learned man in Denmark, the castle of Carlsberg. When Bohr left 

the castle on his bicycle for the Institute, he hardly ever took any notice of 

red traffic lights. If he travelled by trolley he was often so deep in thought 

that he not only passed his stop and went on to the terminal, but occasionally 

forgot again to get out at the same stop on the return journey. And yet Bohr's 

activities were by no means confined to study. He went sailing with his 

pupils, carved windmills for them, helped them to solve crossword puzzles, 

and played ping-pong with them. But his favourite game was always soccer. 

As a young man he had been a useful member of a good team. It was true 

that some frivolous people declared that he would sometimes, instead of 

kicking the ball towards the opposing goal, pick it up in the middle of the 

game in order to see precisely what that sphere of leather might really 

contain. 

Niels Bohr was a poor speaker. Nearly all his lectures began with similar 

sentences, in which he would for the hundredth time give his reasons for 

departing from classical theory. His pupils called this exordium 'Bohr's 

celebration of Mass'. He often spoke in too low a tone, mixed up German, 

Danish, and English expressions, and put his hand in front of his mouth 

during the most important passages. In mathematical knowledge he was 

greatly inferior to the majority of his audience. Yet what he had to say went 

deeper and meant more, if one took the trouble to develop its significance, 

than most of what could be heard from physics professors at other 

universities whose lucidity and impressive powers of oratory far exceeded 

Bohr's. 

Bohr's true greatness was most evident to his pupils in private 

conversation. When a new piece of work was submitted to him, his first 

comment was usually: 'Magnificent!' But it was only newcomers who 

exulted prematurely over this exclamation. Those who had known Bohr 

longer were well aware that, for instance, the words: 'Very, very interesting - 

' uttered with a slight, deprecating smile after the lecture of a visiting 

professor, really denoted a most contemptuous verdict. By asking certain 

questions, occasionally speaking at length, or else remaining silent for some 

minutes, the great thinker would gradually persuade the young physicist who 

had come to him for advice to realize for himself that perhaps his work had 

not yet been quite thoroughly thought out. Such an interview might last for 

several hours and be prolonged until late at night. Frau Bohr would 

sometimes come quietly and unostentatiously into the room. The students 

admired her domestic virtues even more, possibly, than they did her classic 

beauty. Without a word, at most with a smile, she would hand the disputants 

plates of excellent sandwiches, together with a few boxes of matches for the 

lighting of the master's pipe, which was always going out. 

In the end the pupil would not only begin to discover the faults in his 

work but would also start remorselessly tearing it to pieces himself. At this 

point, however, Bohr would check him, warning the young man against 

indiscriminate rejection, since even errors contained something which might 

later turn out to be useful. 

'When, after a few years, one left his Institute, one knew some- thing 

about physics which one didn't know before and couldn't have learned in any 

other way,' Weizsacker once said in talking of Bohr. It was no wonder that 

so many eminent natural scientists emerged from his classes. He was one of 

those rare teachers who know how to apply caution and, if necessary, force, 

to the task of liberating the slumbering genius in each man's mind. Like 

Socrates, whose expression of thought through dialogue he considered 

exemplary, Bohr was a midwife of ideas. 

Among those who studied with him in Copenhagen during the year of 

crisis brought about by Hitler's seizure of power were two unusually 

different friends. Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker was the highly gifted son of 

a prominent German diplomat. Edward Teller was a Hungarian who had 

been famed to leave Germany on account of Hitler's racial decrees. The 

friendship between the German aristocrat and the expelled non- Aryan was 

rare because Weizsacker, like so many young German idealists, mistakenly 

believed at that time that possibly Hitler and his movement, despite certain 

features of it which Weizsacker himself repudiated, might be the preliminary 

symptoms of something really admirable, the beginning of a social and 

religious revival in revolt against the spirit of commerce and arid 

intellectualism. He made no secret of his hopes in this respect and at first 

would not allow the sceptical Teller to convince him of the opposite view. 

He repeatedly argued that it might be one's duty to find some good in the 

regime of which he had come to know the dark side only too well in 

Copenhagen, the refuge of so many victims of National Socialism. Five 

years later these political discussions, which really only took place on the 

margin, so to speak, of conversations on physics and general philosophy, 

were to have an important influence on the course of global history. For in 

1939 a small group of physicists, including Teller, who had emigrated to the 

United States, learned that Weizsacker was supposed to be in charge of the 

German 'uranium project'. Teller, among others, thereupon urged the 

American military authorities to undertake the construction of an atom bomb 

as a preventive measure. He assumed that his former fellow student, in his 

admiration for the political successes achieved by Hitler's power politics, 

would support him in spite of the horror with which he had at times regarded 

the Fuhrer. In reality, as it happened, Weizsacker had by that time entirely 

got over his illusions about National Socialist though only his most intimate 

friends in Germany knew it. 

Teller, the san of a respected Budapest lawyer, had known ever since his 

tenth year that he would never be able to make a career in his native kind, 

whose laws excluded nearly all Jews from academic education. Accordingly, 

at eighteen he left Hungary for Karlsruhe, where he studied chemistry. As a 

result of the interest he soon began to take in the 4uantun theory he planned 

to continue his studies under Sommerfeld in Munich. But he saw little more 

of the Bavarian capital than the four walls of a hospital. Teller, who was a 

keen mountaineer, one Sunday morning in 1928 after his arrival in the city, 

was on his way to catch an excursion train bound for the Alps. Finding that 

he was rather late he alighted from the Moving trolley in front of the main 

station so hurriedly that he was knocked down and his right foot amputated. 

'I don't have much luck in this tower.' he thought, so he went to Leipzig. 

Heisenberg had just been appointed a professor there and was starting to 

collect a band Of talented young pupils. It was at Leipzig that Teller first 

met the dreamy, highly imaginative Weizsacker, who was four years 

younger than he. Weizsacker had really intended to study general 

philosophy, but in Copenhagen, where his father had been sent by the 

Foreign Office on diplomatic service, he met Heisenberg working then with 

Bohr. 'One can't get anywhere in philosophy now without knowing some 

thing about modern physics,' Heisenberg told him at a party given by his 

father. 'But you'll have to start on physics pretty soon if you don't want to be 

too late.' 

Teller himself had always been gifted with a highly imaginative character. 

Only a few people guessed that he wrote poems in secret. The friendship 

between him and Weizsacker was founded less upon their common interest 

in science than on their love of poetry, literature, and philosophical 

speculation. After Teller had obtained his doctor's degree at Leipzig he went 

to Gottingen to work under Bom, in collaboration with whom he wrote a 

study of optics. After Hitler came to power Teller escaped to Copenhagen by 

way of London. He had married a girl he had known when he was a boy, but 

he kept the marriage secret - the Rockefeller scholarship he held was 

awarded only to bachelors. He lived as the unmarried men who worked at 

Bohr's Institute did, residing in one of the private boarding-houses nearby. 

Two of these places were especially popular with the physicists, those mn by 

Froken Have and Froken Thalbitzer. It was a matter for debate which of 

these two ladies was the more extraordinary character. The first had picked 

up so much mathematics over the Years from her learned guests that she was 

fond of expounding to them her own theories of heaven and earth, while the 

other declared all such hair splitting to be morbid, smoked a pipe, often wore 

an old soldier's cap, and told the young men they ought to throw their 'silly 

books' into the sea. 'I love to hear the waves roar,' she used to exclaim in her 

deep voice, when she returned from one of her frequent excursions to the 

beach. 'That's where you learn to know Nature! Not from dry, printed 

papers!' 

Teller and Weizsacker both lodged with this energetic lover of nature. 

Weizsacker was in the habit of going to Teller's room about midnight for 

friendly disputes that lasted till two o'clock in the morning. They enjoyed 

close argument so much that Teller invented a discussion game. From time 

to time one of them had to try to convince the other of the truth of an utterly 

paradoxical statement. In the ensuing debate one of the partners was only 

allowed to indicate his position by putting adroit questions in the style of the 

Platonic dialogues. One of the propositions which Weizsacker tried to prove 

in those days was, 'To stand at attention is a Dionysian experience,' while 

Teller advanced the following: 'Malicious pleasure is the purest of pleasures. 

Another game which had a serious background consisted of the 

questionnaires they submitted to each other. Teller, later the 'inventor' of the 

most dreadful weapon in the world, gave certain answers at that time which 

are particularly interesting in the light of what he was to become. To the 

question, with what sort of things would he least like to be concerned, he 

replied, not quite twenty years before the great hydrogen-bomb experiments, 

'Machines'. The next question was: 'What do you most like doing?' Teller 

answered: 'Making clear to others what they find obscure and obscuring 

what they find clear.' Teller, who later composed for the American 

government so many confidential reports of great influence on the future 

course of history, stated that what he most hated doing was 'writing for other 

people'. In reply to a further question he compared himself, among 

characters in fairy tales, with Lucky John, whose gold nugget melted away 

to nothing and among historical personages with Louis II, a king of Hungary 

whom he much admired for staking everything on a single card at the battle 

of Mohacs and thus losing both his kingdom and his life. 

Teller often used to translate into German verses by the Hungarian poet 

Ady, a great favourite of his. One of these translations, which were never 

published, seems full of the presentiment of an existence which Teller and 

other research workers in atomic physics were fated to lead. 

The Lord takes all whom he strikes and loves, 

he bears them far from Earth ... 

their hearts aflame, their brains made ice, 

Earth sends her laughter up to them 

and, compassionate, the sun strews diamond dust 

upon their lonely way. 

Copenhagen could be only a temporary refuge for the many atomic- 

research scientists who had escaped from Central Europe. The indefatigable 

Bohr, with Lord Rutherford's powerful assistance - the latter had been 

created a baron in 193 1 - repeatedly managed to procure means of 

subsistence for his colleagues who and been robbed of their appointments, 

incomes, and savings. But this life of dependence pleased no one. It could 

not go on for ever, and posts were sought for the expelled physicists 

through- out the world. This proved to be less easy than it had appeared, for 

the number of vacant chairs in European universities and the space available 

for work in the laboratories were limited. Hardly any country yet understood 

that the admission of refugees who brought with them no material 

possessions but invaluable knowledge would be profitable rather than a 

burden. 

Only the United States, with its hundreds of universities and institutes, 

could provide enough appointments for the intellectual refugees. In the first 

two years after Hitler's accession to power the United States was still 

suffering from the consequences of the great economic crisis that had begun 

in 1929. But when Albert Einstein, in the autumn of 1933, accepted the offer 

of employment at the newly established Institute for Advanced Study at 

Princeton and transferred his residence from Berlin to that small American 

university city, the French physicist Paul Langevin, half in jest and half in 

earnest, made a true prophecy. 'It's as important an event', he said, 'as would 

be the transfer of the Vatican from Rome to the New World. The Pope of 

Physics has moved and the United States will now become the centre of the 

natural sciences. 

It was surprising that the Russians, formerly always so anxious to engage 

foreign specialists, made so little effort to admit the expelled scientists. The 

fact was that Stalin's promotion of Soviet patriotism and the growing fear of 

sabotage and spies had already begun to make the curtain between the Soviet 

Union and the rest of the world more and more impenetrable. A provisional 

comer, however, was lifted to admit foreign 'comrades'. Accordingly, a few 

well-known atomic-research physicists did emigrate, as 'fellow travellers' or 

members of the Party, to the Soviet Union. A terrible fate eventually 

overtook them there. Until 1937 they were allowed to work in physics 

institutes and even to publish a periodical in German. But during that year 

they fell victims, in common with other foreign Communists, to the great 

purge. They were thrown into prison and tortured. Attempts were made to 

extract false confessions from them. They were sent to Siberia. 

The West at first suspected nothing of all this. Bohr actually sent to the 

Soviet Union, as late as 1938, two of his pupils, the Viennese physicists 

Weisskopf and Placzek, to investigate the prospects of employment for the 

new refugees coming from Austria, just occupied by Hitler. The two 

emissaries were regarded by Stalin's secret police as espionage scouts and 

could only report to Copenhagen, in the end, the sad tidings of the fate of the 

physicists Houtermans and Alexander Weissberg. 

Petitions signed by Einstein, Bohr, and Joliot-Curie - the latter only 

became a Communist some years afterwards - were then forwarded to the 

Kremlin. They probably saved the lives of the two Western scientists. 

Houtermans and Weissberg were at first offered Soviet citizenship and 

restoration to all the offices they had formerly occupied, but they refused 

this offer because of their earlier appalling sufferings. In 1940, the Soviet 

secret police escorted the scientists, who had originally ~ed from Hitler, to 

the frontier of the ' General-gouvemement ' - Poland as then occupied by 

German troops. There the two men were delivered up by the Ogpu to their 

'colleagues' of the Gestapo, only to face new trials and new imprisonment. 

4 AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY 1932-9 

AT the beginning of the thirties, during the same period in which politics 

had so brutally invaded the quiet world of the laboratories, nuclear science 

also knocked at the door of politics. In 1932 James Chadwick discovered the 

neutron, the key to atomic fission. 

But the knock was a very gentle one. Hardly anyone heard it. Fritz 

Houtermans stated in his 1932 inaugural address to the Technical Academy 

in Berlin that this tiny particle, which had then just been discovered at 

Cambridge, might well be able to free powerful forces dormant in the 

matter. His statement attracted little serious attention. Three years later 

Fredric Joliot-Curie went to Stockholm to receive with his wife, Irene, the 

Nobel prize for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. 

He said there: 'We are justified in reflecting that scientists who can 

construct and demolish elements at will may also be capable of causing 

nuclear transformations of an explosive character. ... If the propagation of 

such transformations in matter can be brought about, in all probability vast 

quantities of useful energy will be released.' 

Even Joliot' s prophetic words aroused no more than a transitory interest. 

Only one professional investigator drew, almost immediately, political 

conclusions from the scientific revelation provided by the discovery of the 

neutron. The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, bom two years before the turn 

of the century, had already suffered, as quite a young man, the effects of 

political convulsions. He had been barely a year at the Technical Academy 

in Budapest before he was conscripted. The war was going badly for the 

Triple Alliance, but the imperial and Royal officers still drilled their recmits 

as sternly as in the years of the great reviews before the Emperor. They gave 

Szilard so passionate an aversion to everything military that nearly thirty 

years later he replied to an American reporter who asked him what his hobby 

was: 'Beating brass hats!' 

The weeks of the Red Terror under Bela Run, followed by the months of 

the White Terror under Horthy, drove Szilard, who had at first tried to 

continue his studies in Budapest after demobilization, to Berlin. There he 

began by joining the Technical Academy at Charlottenburg and in the 

following year matriculated at the university. Einstein, Nernst, von Laue, 

and Planck were then teaching and working in the German capital. Under 

their influence Szilard, who had originally intended to become a civil 

engineer like his father, turned to theoretical physics. The vivacious, 

imaginative young scientist soon began to make a name for himself in his 

chosen field, first as von Laue's assistant, then as an unsalaried lecturer 

taking part in the work of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. 

When Hitler achieved power Szilard first went to Vienna, but his special 

gift for deducing future events from present facts made him realize that 

Austria would sooner or later be overrun by National Socialism. He 

therefore stayed only six weeks in Vienna before leaving for England. 

In the autumn of 1933, at the annual meeting of the British Association, 

Lord Rutherford made a speech in which he ob- served that people who were 

prophesying the release of atomic energy on a large scale were 'talking 

moonshine'. 'This set me thinking' Szilard recollects,' and it occurred to me 

in October 1933 that a chain reaction might be set up if an element could be 

found that would emit two neutrons when it swallowed one neutron. At first 

I suspected beryllium, then some other elements, including uranium. But for 

some reason or other the crucial experiment was never carried out.' 

Szilard was not, in fact, experimenting any further with neutrons at that 

time. He was wondering as a realistic student of future events, how 

politicians, industrialists, and soldiers would be likely to react if success 

were really achieved one day in the generation of atomic energy. It was true 

that hitherto no one had been able to penetrate to the hard core of the atom 

and harness its slumbering energy to practical purposes. But so many 

investigators and their teams were already working at such problems that it 

seemed the solution might not be far off. As soon as this discovery, at 

present 'floating in the ah', could be brought down to earth once and for all, 

the current indifference of the governments in power would be certain to 

turn to alert attention. Ought not scientists to realize that Possibility here and 

now? 

Such considerations caused Szilard, as early as 1935, to approach a 

number of atomic research workers and ask them whether it would not be 

advisable, in view of the possibly momentous and perhaps even dangerous 

consequences of their present studies, to refrain, at least for the time being, 

from publishing any future results of their investigations. His suggestion was 

for the most part repudiated. After all, there seemed to bane chance of the 

fortress of the atom ever being conquered. And yet Szilard was already 

talking of what should be done with the prize! Because of this ‘premature' 

proposal he acquired the reputation of always thinking about third and fourth 

steps before 'he first and second had been taken. 

However, other scientists, too were troubled by similar venturesome 

speculations. Paul Langevin, who did so much in those years for refugees 

from the Third Reich, was sufficiently stirred by these ideas to attempt to 

console, in a somewhat un, conventional manner, a student of history who 

had made his escape from Germany. 'You're taking it all much too seriously,' 

said he. 'Hitler? It won't be long before he breaks his neck like all other 

tyrants. I'm much more worried about something else. It is something which, 

if it gets into the wrong hands, can do the world a good deal more damage 

than that fool who will sooner or later go to the dogs. It is something which - 

unlike him - we shall never be able to get rid of: I mean the neutron.' 

The young historian had so far heard only quite casual reports about this 

neutron supposed to be so dangerous. That was the business of a different 

faculty, he told himself, and bad nothing to do with him. At that time he 

understood as little as most of his fellow men that great scientific discoveries 

may have a more lasting effect upon history than mighty dictators. 

The underestimation of politics by men of science was surpassed at that 

time, a quarter of a century ago, only by the underestimation of science 

among politicians and the public. If the number of times that the name of 

Hitler cropped up in those days were to be compared statistically with the 

number of times the word ‘neutron’ was mentioned, the ratio of a million to 

one probably put the figure too low. So little are we ourselves, even in the 

'age of information', able to judge which contemporary events may prove in 

the end to be of real importance and an omen for the future. 

Only since the end of 1945, when the whole world was made aware of the 

discovery and technical development of atomic power, has it been possible 

to see the fission of the atom as a turning point in global history. What 

extraordinary coincidence that in the same twelve months the neutron was 

discovered (February 1932), Roosevelt was elected (November 1932), and 

Hitler took over the German government (January 1933). 

Seven fateful years were now to pass before physicists recognized the full 

significance of the neutron, seven years in which atoms had already been 

split with neutrons in Paris, Cambridge, Rome, Zurich, and Berlin without 

anyone suspecting the fact. The scientists themselves were not aware of it. 

From 1932 until the end of 1938 they simply refused to believe what their 

instruments told them, and therefore the statesmen in their turn fortunately 

did not learn the nature of the extraordinarily powerful weapon that lay 

within their reach. It is interesting to speculate what the consequences would 

have been if the chain reaction in uranium had been correctly interpreted, in 

Rome, in 1934, when it probably took place for the first time. Would 

Mussolini and Hitler then have been the first to develop an atom bomb? 

Would the atomic-armaments race have begun before the Second World 

War? Would that war, we may wonder, have eventually been fought out 

with atomic weapons on both sides? 

The physicist Emilio Segre had taken part in those successful but wrongly 

interpreted experiments in the Italian capital. He later made an attempt to 

answer such questions, which he, like many other specialists in atomic 

research, had often asked himself. Two decades afterwards, at the funeral of 

his teacher Enrico Fermi, he said: 'God, for His own inscrutable reasons, 

made everyone blind at that time to the phenomenon of nuclear fission.' It 

was no accident that the discovery of the neutron occurred in Rutherford's 

laboratory at Cambridge rather than elsewhere. At the Zurich Physics 

Congress in 1931 the announcement by the Germans Bothe and Pecker that 

they had observed a very strong, inexplicable radiation* on bombarding 

beryllium with alpha particles caused a very great sensation. Investigators in 

all countries immediately attempted to repeat the experiment to discover the 

nature of the radiation mentioned. Joliot-Curie and his wife solved the 

puzzle to some extent. No later than a month after they had published their 

first results, Chadwick, who had been working at this problem almost 

uninterruptedly, encouraged by Rutherford, announced that neutrons were 

involved. Their existence had been predicted by Rutherford no less than 

seventeen years previously. 

* The 'gamma rays'. 

Chadwick owed his rapid success in large part to the superiority of his 

measuring instruments, in particular a new amplifier which had just been 

invented. In 1932 no physics-research establishment in the world possessed 

such excellent instruments as the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. 

Atomic physicists can never perceive and examine the objects of their 

studies with the naked eye. Only scientific equipment can make those 

objects perceptible and measurable by the use of apparatus. These 

implements, without the aid of which no human action is practicable in the 

realm of the smallest possible dimensions, were still extremely primitive 

towards the end of the First World War. Investigators were accustomed to 

concocting them, with the help of their laboratory assistants, out of wire, 

wax, and glass apparatus which they blew themselves. The further they tried 

to penetrate into the unknown the heavier and more complex such equipment 

became. In 1919 C. D. Ellis, the English physicist, saw for the first time the 

experimental apparatus with which Rutherford had just performed his first 

transmutations of atoms. He wrote later:' The whole apparatus was contained 

in a small brass box and the scintillations were viewed with a microscope. I 

can remember being surprised, in fact mildly shocked, that the apparatus was 

not more impressive.' Less than fifteen years afterwards Ellis himself, who 

had meanwhile joined Rutherford's 'stable' at the Cavendish Laboratory, 

hardly ever used for his experiments anything but huge generators and new, 

highly sensitive measuring instruments. Workshops for practical atomic 

research began more and more to resemble factory assembly halls and the 

specialists themselves engineers. 

These new galleries of instruments were naturally expensive. Up to the 

end of the First World War the Cavendish Laboratory had never spent more 

than Pounds 550 a year on new apparatus. Gradually this figure rose until by 

the thirties it was already several times that amount. This brought about by 

degrees a change in the relation of atomic scientists to society at large, 

though it was only much later that they themselves became aware of it. 

Funds had formerly been provided annually by wealthy individuals for the 

growing expenses of the laboratories: by the Canadian tobacco trader McGill 

(who, by the way, thought smoking a frightful habit and forbade it in the 

laboratories he financed), the Belgian manufacturer of chemicals Ernest 

Solvay, and the large-scale German industrialist Carl Still, known as the 

'good angel of the Gottingen physicists'. These gifts were no longer 

considered sufficient, and even the millions of the Rockefellers, Mellons, 

and Austins now fell short. State intervention was found more and more 

necessary. Some governments, the British, for instance, were ready enough 

to help. Others proved more reluctant. In cases where public assistance had 

originally been insignificant the atomic specialists often applied with 

eventual success for larger subsidies. In those years it never occurred to 

them that their new patron, the state, might one day say: 'He who pays the 

piper calls the tune. 

Since the Cavendish Laboratory was at that time technically so much 

better equipped than any other experimental station in the world, atomic 

physicists expected the discovery of the neutron to be followed by further 

important news about the character of and the effects produced by this 

nuclear constituent. 

Their expectation was even more justified because Rutherford had 

managed to collect an altogether exceptional team of collaborators. 

One was the somewhat melancholy Aston, builder in 1919 of the 

prototype of the mass spectrograph, with which he first measured the mass 

of separate isotopes. Another was the invariably good-humoured Japanese 

Shimizu, whose new 'cloud chamber' automatically photographed the paths 

of atoms. P. M. S. Blackett was outstanding among the rest. A tall, rather 

stiff type of naval officer, he had only come to the Cavendish Laboratory to 

take a holiday course, but became so fascinated by the new studies that he 

stayed on to prove himself the most successful cartographer of the newly 

conquered territories through his interpretation of 440,000 atom tracks on 

cloud- chamber photographs. 

Nor should one forget the temperamental Australian Marcus Oliphant. nor 

that unrivalled expert in the handling of the new electrical instruments, John 

Cockcroft, nor Norman Feather, famous, in particular, for his almost 

superhuman patience. These men worked as a kind of subsection directed by 

the Russian physicist Pyotr L. Kapitza. In 1921 Kapitza had left his native 

land, then in the throes of civil war and famine, to join Rutherford at 

Cambridge. The Kapitza Club, consisting of some twenty young men, met 

once a week, outside the Laboratory, for a scientific bull session. On these 

occasions, Ham Bethe reports, Kapitza used to ask every two minutes, 'Why 

is that so?' 

All these young students of the atom were possessed by intense zeal for 

their work. Rutherford called them simply his 'boys'; he often treated them 

like a strict schoolmaster, but the truth was that he loved them like a father. 

Having no son himself he lavished all the vigilance, help, and affection he 

had to give on these aspiring young men. Whenever he suspected that one of 

his 'lads' was on the way to bringing some new discovery to light, he fussed 

over him from morning till night and even telephoned the Laboratory late at 

night to give him advice and warm encouragement as he sat watching his 

instruments. 

For a long time Kapitza was undoubtedly Rutherford's favourite. He 

admired the Russian's stubborn obstinacy, coupled with great mental agility, 

the speed at which 'Peter' could work, and his delight, bordering on the 

fanatical, in being busy. But above all Rutherford felt in Kapitza a kindred 

spirit, although he was almost twenty- five years his senior. It used to be said 

of Rutherford: 'He's a savage, a noble savage, perhaps, but still a savage.' Or 

again: 'Relations with Rutherford are not ordinary. One couldn't be friendly 

with a force of Nature.' Such observations also applied to Kapitza. He had 

the same capacity as his master for enthusiastic enjoyment of life, the same 

unbridled energy and imaginative power - to which he added, in the bargain, 

a streak of Russian eccentricity. 

Whether he was motoring at top speed along the quiet English country 

roads, leaping naked into a neighbouring stream, as he did at week-ends to 

the disgust of his puritanical hosts - frightening the swans with his imitation 

of rooks cawing - or spending several nights without sleep while he 

experimented, like a god hurling thunderbolts with a high-frequency 

generator, increasing the load till he set one of the cables on ~e, this son of a 

tsarist general invariably lived beyond the borderline of the conventional. He 

loved wrestling with machinery and defying danger. He once wrote to 

Rutherford, at that time travelling around the world, a typical letter about his 

experiments with a powerful new apparatus: 

I am writing you this letter to Cairo to tell you that we already have a 

short-circuit machine and the coil and we managed to obtain fields of over 

270,000 in a cylindrical volume of a diameter of 1 cm. and 4.5 cm. high. We 

could not go further as the coil burst with a great bang which no doubt 

would amuse you very much if you could hear it. The power in the circuit 

was about 13.5 thousand kilowatts ... approximately three Cambridge Supply 

Stations connected together ... the accident was the most interesting of all 

experiments ...we know just what an are of 13,000 amps is like ... 

Even when Kapitza was simply posing for an ordinary photo- graph, as he 

did in 1931 at the Physics Congress in Zurich, he had to be dramatic. He had 

himself photographed lying close to the wheels of a car, explaining: 'I just 

want to know what I should look like if I were being run over. 

Rutherford was tireless in securing new facilities for Kapitza's 'baby 

giants' of high voltage. On the formers recommendation a special laboratory 

was built for them by the Royal Society and the Department for Scientific 

and Industrial Research, a government organization set up after the end of 

the First World War. Named after the chemist and multimillionaire Mend, 

this establishment was finally opened in February 1933. The astonished 

participants in the opening ceremony beheld, carved on the facade, an 

extraordinary heraldic beast. It was a crocodile which had been chiselled in 

the stone at the special request of Kapitza by the renowned British sculptor 

Eric Gill. When Kapitza was asked what so utterly outlandish a creature was 

doing there, he replied: 'Well, mine is the crocodile of science. The crocodile 

cannot turn its head. Like science, it must always go forward with all- 

devouring jaws.' 'Crocodile', however, happened also to be the nickname 

invented by the Russian for Rutherford, as everyone in the Cavendish 

Laboratory knew except Rutherford himself. 

Kapitza was not at first given the opportunity to use his new laboratory. In 

1934 the Russian Academy of Science, when it moved from Leningrad to 

Moscow, elected him a member in spite of Stalin's opposition. Kapitza 

thereupon paid a visit to his native land. It was not the first time that this 

semi-emigrant had undertaken a homeward journey. But this time things did 

not go quite so smoothly. He was told, when he was about to return to 

Cambridge, that the Soviet Union 'could no longer dispense with his 

services, in view of the danger from Hitler.' Kapitza thus became a prisoner 

in his own country. Rutherford wrote to Moscow requesting that he should 

be allowed, in the interest of science, to return to his duties. The Russian 

government replied: 'Of course England would like to have Kapitza. We, for 

our part, would equally like to have Rutherford in the Soviet Union.' After 

this cleverly phrased refusal of his request Rutherford appealed to the British 

Prime Minister, Baldwin: 'Kapitza was commandeered as the Soviet 

authorities thought he was able to give important help to the electrical 

industry and they have not yet found out that they were misinformed.' But 

even Baldwin's subsequent intervention produced no effect. 

One of Kapitza's relatives, raising the question of his return with the 

Soviet ambassador in London, Maisky, concluded her appeal with the 

words: 'You won't be able to keep him anyhow. Our Pyotr has a hard head.' 

The diplomat is said to have assured the lady: 'But our Joseph has a still 

harder one.' 

As all these efforts proved fruitless, Rutherford took a step which showed 

both his immeasurable faith in the international character of science and his 

affection for his lost favourite. He determined to send on to Kapitza in 

Russia the entire installation of his new laboratory, over the equipment of 

which he had taken so much trouble. The British scientists Adrian and Dirac 

travelled to Moscow to arrange the transfer of all this valuable and bulky 

apparatus. It was shipped aboard a Soviet freighter in an English harbour and 

soon afterwards arrived at Leningrad all mixed up with a cargo of frozen 

meat. The Russian government, to win Kapitza over, not only paid Pounds 

30,000 for the dismantled Mond Laboratory but also built a brand-new 

institute for him in Moscow, in the style of an English gentleman's country 

seat. Kapitza resigned himself to his gilded cage. In 1936 he wrote to 

Rutherford: 'After all, we are only small particles of floating matter in a 

stream which we call fate. Ah that we can manage is to deflect our tracks 

slightly and keep afloat - the stream governs us.' 

Kapitza's enforced departure not only affected Rutherford very deeply. It 

also had a disrupting effect upon the Cavendish Laboratory as a whole, and 

during the next few years its magnificent team began to disintegrate, first 

Blackett went, then Chadwick and finally Oliphant. They accepted important 

appointments at other universities. Rutherford's own mighty frame, which 

had always been the very picture of health and strength, suddenly began to 

age, though he would never confess it. One day, while he was trying to insert 

a small, thin slip of gold leaf into his electroscope, his hands trembled so 

much that he had to ask his assistant, Crowe, to put it in for him. The same 

thing happened again a few days later. It worried Crowe, and he asked his 

chief: 'Nerves not too good again today, sir?' Rutherford retorted in his 

dreaded leonine roar: 'Nerves be damned! You're shaking the table!' 

On 14 October 1937 the learned scientist suffered a slight rupture after 

some strenuous work. A small operation, apparently perfectly safe, became 

necessary. But it turned out badly, and five days later the pioneer of 

experimental atomic research was dead. With him disappeared a scholar of 

the old breed whose desire to understand the nature of the world of atoms 

arose simply from love of truth. When, as early as 1932, after the great 

successes of his team, the newspapers were already beginning to prophesy 

possible future applications of atomic energy to practical purposes, 

Rutherford immediately rebuked them. 'It was not', he said, 'that the 

experimenters were searching for a new source of power or the production 

of rare or costly elements. The real reason lay deeper and was bound up with 

the urge and fascination of a search into one of the deepest secrets of 

Nature.' Feather, under Rutherford's direction at Cambridge, conducted some 

highly informative tests on the effects of neutrons, but the most interesting 

results of research after 1934 came from Rome. The Eternal City had for 

some years been developing into the capital of the world of physics, owing 

to the work of Enrico Fermi, then just over thirty. Fermi's decision to devote 

himself to atomic physics instead of, as before, to spectroscopy had been 

reached, quite casually, during a discussion with his team in the locker room 

of a tennis court. His subsequent success soon proved he was right. Even his 

first theoretical studies created a considerable sensation, especially among 

the younger generation of physicists. They made frequent journeys to Rome 

just to meet the Italian, who was to be taken seriously as a scientist despite 

all his boyish enthusiasm for sport. 

Fermi did not disappoint them. A typical reaction was that of Bethe, 

Arnold Sommerfeld's star pupil, who wrote to his teacher from Rome: 'Of 

course, I went to see and admire the Colosseum. But the best thing in Rome 

is undoubtedly Fermi. He has a marvellous faculty for immediately seeing 

the solution of any problem submitted to him.' In 1934 when Curie's 

successful generation of artificial radioactive elements became known 

through his conclusive report to the Acadamie des Sciences, Fermi had just 

experienced a setback. His latest article on beta rays had been declined by 

Nature, the London periodical, then considered the most important of all 

those dealing with natural science. He meant accordingly to try his hand for 

once, 'just for fun', as he said, at the sort of practical experiments Joliot had 

been undertaking. But Fermi, the 'Pope', as he was called by his even 

younger collaborators, resolved to make use, not of the alpha rays which the 

French had been employing, but of the new, more powerful projectile, the 

neutron. 

Fermi's able wife, Laura, has given a humorous account of how her 

husband and his pupils began in 1934, the 'year of miracles', a systematic 

bombardment of one element after an- other with neutrons. Results with the 

first eight elements tested were negative. But with the ninth element, 

fluorine, the Geiger • counter began to tick. Radioactivity had been 

artificially generated. The work was so exciting that d'Agostino, a young 

student of physical chemistry, who had originally only come from Paris to 

join the team as a guest for a few weeks, put off his departure for so long 

that his return ticket finally expired and he decided to stay for good. 

In the course of these experiments Fermi and his closest collaborators 

made two important discoveries. The first was the extraordinary 

circumstance that the radioactivity of a metal bombarded with neutrons was 

a hundred times as great when the neutrons had previously been slowed 

down by water or paraffin - the conjecture had been first cornered in the 

picturesque goldfish pond behind the Physics Building. Secondly, it was 

found that the bombardment of uranium, the heaviest of all metals, 

apparently gave rise to a new element, or perhaps even several new ones, the 

so-called artificial transuranic elements. The first discovery was later proved 

correct and had a decisive influence on the subsequent development of 

atomic physics. The second turned out to be an illusion. 

The truth was not that Fermi had created new transuranic elements with 

his neutrons. He had - and probably he was the first to do so - split the 

uranium atom. Fermi's work, which seemed to have reached its climax with 

the production of a new element having the ordinal number 93, made a deep 

impression on the scientific world. He had been able to demonstrate the 

powerful effects of the neutron, the new microscopic particle discovered by 

Chadwick, even if he could not for the time being reveal the effects of 

neutron bombardment - in reality of far greater and more revolutionary 

significance. 

Many laboratories now began to conduct experiments like Fermi's. Only 

one critical comment was heard in the midst of the general applause. At the 

Institute for Physical Chemistry of the University of Freibug im Breisgau, 

Ida and Walter Noddack, a young couple engaged in research, had been 

keeping a lookout for natural transuranic elements ever since 1929. Frau 

Noddack had discovered in 1925, when she was still an adolescent, the 

hitherto unknown element of rhenium. She and her husband were regarded 

as the leading authorities on the chemical analysis of the 'rare earths'. In 

1934 they received from a Czechoslovakian chemist named Koblic a 

specimen of a red salt he had extracted from the uranium mines in 

Joach imsthal. He believed it to be a transuranic element and wished to give 

it the name of 'bohemium'. The Noddacks proved conclusively, by chemical 

tests, that the Czech scientist's assumption was incorrect. Ida Noddack 

pronounced an equally unfavourable verdict on Fermi's 'transuranic 

elements'. She not only demonstrated that the Italian physicist had not really 

submitted in his chemical analysis any convincing evidence of his claim. 

She also advanced a bold hypo- thesis, which was first shown to have been 

justified at the end of 1938. For in 1934, more than four years before the 

discovery of the splitting of the uranium atom by Hahn and Strassmann, she 

wrote in the Zeitschrift fur angewandte Chemie (Applied Chemistry 

Magazine): 

It would be equally possible to assume that when a nucleus is demolished 

in this novel way by neutrons nuclear reactions occur which may differ 

considerably from those hitherto observed in the effects produced on atomic 

nuclei by proton and alpha rays. It would be conceivable that when heavy 

nuclei are bombarded with neutrons the nuclei in question might break into a 

number of larger pieces which would no doubt be isotopes of known 

elements but not neighbours of the elements subjected to radiation. 

When this criticism and the suggestion arising out of it reached Fermi in 

Rome he did not take them seriously. To suppose that the neutrons, 

possessing a strength of less than one volt, might have split the atomic 

nucleus which was able to withstand bombardment of a strength of millions 

of volts, seemed to him, as a physicist, an impossible hypothesis. He was all 

the more convinced that he was right when Otto Hahn, the most famous 

expert on radium in the world, agreed with him. 

At that time, in the laboratory of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin- 

Dahlem, Fermi's transuranic elements were being intensively studied under 

the direction of Hahn and his colleague from Vienna, Fraulein Lise Meitner. 

In numerous publications between 1935 and 1938 Hahn and Meitner 

described exhaustively the chemical properties of the new bodies which had 

come into existence as a result of bombardment by neutrons. Frau Noddack 

reports : 

I had just as lasting doubts of their identification of the separate 

transuranic elements through the latter's chemical properties as I had about 

Fermi's interpretation. My husband and I had known Hahn well for decades 

and he had often inquired about the progress of our work ... when in 1935 or 

1936 my husband suggested to Hahn by word of mouth that he should at 

least make some reference, in his lectures and publications, to my criticism 

of Fermi's experiments, Hahn answered that he did not want to make me 

look ridiculous as my assumption of the bursting of the uranium nucleus into 

larger fragments was really absurd. 

In order to understand why neither Fermi not the Hahn-Meitner research 

team took Frau Noddack's hypothesis seriously, one must realize that 

according to the ideas of physics current at the time only projectiles of a 

penetrating power so far not attained would be capable of forcing a way into 

the nucleus of a heavy atom and splitting it. Since Rutherford's first 

experiments the artillery of the besiegers of the atomic nucleus had frown in 

strength and multiplicity. In the United States, especially, atom- smashing 

equipment, such as the Van de Graff generators and cyclotrons, had been 

constructed. These machines were already capable of accelerating certain 

particles used as projectiles up to the enormous energy of nine million volts. 

Nevertheless, even they had only damaged, without breaking into, the 

protective walls with which Nature in her wisdom had encircled the atomic 

nucleus and the tremendous stores of energy it contained. The idea that 

neutrons, which carried no electrical charge at all might have been able to 

accomplish what could not be done with such heavily charged projectiles 

was too fantastic to be credited. It was as though one were to suggest to 

troops which had been vainly shelling an underground shelter with guns of 

the heaviest calibre for a long time that they should start trying their luck 

with ping-pong balls. 

And yet it was not only on technical grounds that the atomic scientists of 

the period 1935-8 so often overlooked the truth. We may ask, for example, 

what Italy's war against Abyssinia meant to Fermi, who was just then 

making such splendid progress with his studies. We know from the 

statements of his collaborators how greatly the work of his team was 

disturbed by the war, by the turning of world opinion against Italy and, 

arising from this intensification of feeling, by the closer watch kept by 

politicians upon all intellectuals, including those of the Institute in the Via 

Panispema. According to Segre the atlas in the Institute library soon started 

opening automatically at the page for Abyssinia. Instead of discussing 

bombardments with neutrons Fermi and his young men argued about the 

shelling of Abyssinian strongholds. The atmosphere was not one in which 

clear thinking and scientific self-criticism could thrive. 

The accounts of research, in their scientific sobriety, make no mention of 

the influence of such political or even private interference. When they are 

read today the course of this comedy of errors becomes clear, with all its 

wrong turnings and gropings, which none of those concerned could ever 

understand later. The reports, though, say nothing whatever about the people 

who participated in the work, how they lived or what they felt. 

The public remained unaware that between the two figures who played 

leading roles in the drama of the uranium experiments an intense dispute had 

developed. 

The friction started in October 1933 at the Solvay Congress in Brussels. 

Madame Joliot had given an account, with her husband, of her bombardment 

of aluminium with neutrons. What happened next is told by Joliot: 

Our report led to a lively discussion. Fraulein Meitner announced that she 

had made similar experiments but had not obtained the same results. In the 

end the great majority of the physicists present came to the conclusion that 

our experiments had been inexact. After the session we felt rather desperate. 

At that moment Professor Bohr approached us and said he considered our 

data extremely important. Shortly afterwards Pauli encouraged us in similar 

fashion. 

The Joliots, on their return to Paris, resumed their work. The report which 

Fraulein Meitner had criticized in Brussels became the foundation of the 

Joliots' most important discovery - artificial radioactivity. This did not 

improve relations between the laboratories in the rue d'Ulm and Berlin- 

Dahlem. Hahn even complained to Rutherford of the Joliots later on. The 

British scientist answered: 'I am sorry that I have unwittingly upset you by 

my reference: to the thorium-neutron transformations. Actually, I wrote my 

paper when I was in my cottage in Wiltshire on holiday, where I had no 

papers to refer to. I had glanced through the Joliots' paper and thought that 

the evidence was rather vague and I gave expression to that view in my 

address. I had for the moment forgotten that you had actually published your 

letter in Naturwissenschaften before their paper appeared and I quite agree 

that they ought to have specifically mentioned your definite statement about 

the 4 n + 1 series.... I shall make a point of putting the matter right when I 

have the opportunity.' 

It was due to such animosities that in Dahlem the studies published by 

Madame Joliot-Curie were much too casually designated as 'unreliable'. On 

one occasion, in 1935, Fraulein Meitner directed her pupil von Droste to 

repeat in Dahlem certain experiments which had been carried out in Paris 

with the bombardment of thorium . Madame Joliot-Curie had declared that 

the thoriumisotope sent out alpha rays under radiation. Droste did not find 

any such rays. Once more Fraulein Meitner believed she had convicted her 

rival of inaccuracy. And once more she was mistaken. 

Droste experimented not only with thorium, but also with uranium. If he 

had not, in the latter case, introduced a filter to avert particles with a range of 

under three centimetres, he would not only on that occasion have realized 

that Madame Joliof s results were as she had stated but would also have 

necessarily found, there and then, fission products from uranium. So near 

had experiment come, even at that date, to the discovery of uranium fission. 

Irene Joliot-Curie's next paper on transuranic elements appeared in the 

summer of 1938, with the Yugoslav Savitch as co-author. They mentioned a 

substance which did not 6it in with the pattern for these elements worked out 

meanwhile by Hahn and his collaborators. 

It was said in Dahlem, 'Madame Joliot-Curie is still relying on the 

chemical knowledge she received from her famous mother and that 

knowledge is just a bit out of date today.' Hahn considered it necessary to be 

tactful. He thought it desirable not to reveal his French colleague's 

negligence to the entire world in a scientific periodical. 'There is quite 

enough vexatious strain just now in the relations between Germany and 

France,' he said. 'Let us not help to increase it.' He accordingly wrote a 

private note to the laboratory in the rue d'Ulm suggesting that the 

experiments should be repeated somewhat more carefully. 

* After Madame Joliot-Curie's death in 1956 - from leukaemia, which she 

had contracted as a result of her work with radioactive matter - Fraulein 

Meitner composed a glowing obituary in memory of her colleague, in which 

she sought to elucidate the difficulties which had arisen between them thirty 

years before. She wrote: 'She seemed to be afraid of being regarded lather 

as the daughter of her mother than as a scientist on her own account. This 

fear may have influenced her attitude to strangers. She was also entirely 

indifferent to social conventions. She had a strong inner feeling of self- 

sufficiency which might be mistaken for a lack of amiability. 

But no reply to Hahn's note came from Paris. On the contrary, Madame 

Joliot committed a further 'sin'. She published a second article, based on the 

data of the first. Hahn refused to read it, in spite of being urged to do so by 

his assistant Strassmann. He was thoroughly disgusted with the 

unteachability of his Parisian colleague. Besides, he was being worried, that 

same summer of 1938, by a problem which had nothing to do with physics. 

Attempts were being made to deprive him of his alter ego. For over a quarter 

of a century Lise Meitner and her 'cockerel" had worked side by side. Their 

identities were so closely fused, even in their own minds, that Fraulein 

Meitner once absent-mindedly replied to a colleague who spoke to her at a 

congress: 'I think you've mistaken me for Professor Hahn. 

As an Austrian, despite the sudden discovery that she was 'not Aryan', 

Lise Meitner had been permitted to go on working at the Kaiser Wilhelm 

Institute after 1932. The Anschluss of March 1938 made the racial 

legislation of the Third Reich applicable to her case. Intervention by Hahn 

and Max Planck, who even went to Hitler himself, proved useless in saving 

their colleague for the Institute. She had to go. It was not even certain 

whether the government would allow her to leave Germany, so she was 

forced to slip across the Dutch frontier, disguised as a tourist, without saying 

good-bye to her former associates. Apart from Hahn, only two or three 

people in the Dahlem Institute knew that Lise Meitner would not come back 

from her summer holiday. 

That autumn Madame Joliot-Curie published a third article which 

summarized and enlarged her previous two. Since Fraulein Meitner's 

departure Strassmann had become Hahn's closest associate in the field of 

radium chemistry. He saw at a glance that no mistake had been made in the 

Curie laboratory but that on the contrary a remarkable new avenue of 

approach to the problem had probably been opened up. He rushed excitedly 

upstairs to Hahn and exclaimed with the greatest emphasis: 'You simply 

must read this report!' 

Hahn was adamant. 'I'm not interested in our lady friend's latest writings,' 

he answered, puffing quietly at his cigar. 

* Translator’s note: Hahn means 'cock' in German. 

Strassmann would not give in to this rebuff. Before Hahn could repeat it 

he gave his chief a succinct account of the most important points in this new 

performance. 'It struck Hahn like a thunderbolt,' he recollected later. 'He 

never finished that cigar. He laid it, still glowing, on his desk, and ran 

downstairs with me to the laboratory.' It proved very difficult to persuade 

Hahn that he, in common with investigators all over the world, had been 

following a false trail for years; but as soon as he bad recognized the fact he 

instantly turned in his tracks and made every effort to get at the truth. It was 

not easy to confess to a series of failures. To that admission, however, he 

owed, shortly afterwards, the greatest success of his career. In a most 

incessant work, for weeks on end, the experiments of Madame Joliot and 

Savitch were thoroughly tested with the most exact methods of radium 

chemistry. The process showed that the bombardment of uranium with 

neutrons did in fact produce a substance which, as the Paris team had stated, 

closely resembled lanthanum, The more precise analyses of Hahn and 

Strassmann, however, led to the chemically incontrovertible but physically 

inexplicable result that the real element concerned was barium, which 

occupies a position in the centre of the list and weighs a little more than half 

as much as uranium. 

The discovery was made only later that this at first incomprehensible 

presence of barium could be explained by the 'bursting', as Hahn called it, of 

the nucleus. At the time what Hahn and Strassmann had found in their 

chemical probings seemed so incredible to that that they jotted down these 

sceptical sentences, which have since become famous: We come to this 

conclusion. Our 'radium' isotopes have the properties of barium. As 

chemists, we are in fact bound to affirm that the new bodies are not radium 

but barium. For there is no question of elements other than radium or barium 

being present.... As nuclear chemists we cannot decide to take this step in 

contradiction to all previous experience ill nuclear physics. 

The two German atomic scientists perceived that they had made a notable 

discovery, even though it might not yet be explicable in terms of physics. 

The date was just before Christmas 1938 and it seemed important to Hahn to 

publish an account of his work as soon as possible. He took the unusual step 

of telephoning to Dr Paul Rosbaud, the Director of Springer Verlag, a 

personal friend, asking whether he could find room for some urgent 

information in the forthcoming number of Naturwissenschaften. Rosbaud 

agreed to do so. 

The paper, dated 22 December 1938, accordingly left Hahn's desk. Nearly 

twenty years later Hahn told the author: 'After the manuscript had been 

mailed, the whole thing once more seemed so improbable to me that I 

wished I could get the document back out of the mail box.' 

It was with such hesitations and doubts that the age of atomic fission 

began. 

As a demonstration against the racial legislation of the Third Reich, and 

yet at the same time no more than plain proof of a confidence that had now 

lasted for decades, Otto Hahn immediately dispatched his new data to his 

former collaborator, Fraulein Meitner, now an emigrant in Stockholm. The 

letter was already on its way before any other member of Hahn's department 

in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute heard anything about the new and still, for 

the present, quite inexplicable discovery. Hahn waited tensely to bear what 

his former partner would say to these astonishing new results, which 

contradicted all previous experience. He was a little afraid of what her 

answer might be. She had always been a stern critic of his work. Probably, 

he thought, she would tear these latest data to pieces. 

Lise Meitner received his letter in the small township of Kungely, near 

Goteborg. She had gone to this seaside resort, almost lifeless in winter, to 

spend her first Christmas in exile alone in a small family boarding-house. 

Her young nephew, the physicist O. R. Frisch, since 1934 himself a refugee 

working at the institute of Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, felt sorry for his aunt's 

loneliness. He determined to pay her a visit. He was there when Hahn's letter 

arrived in the quiet little provincial town. At once it greatly excited his 

aunt. If the radium chemistry analyses carried out by Wahn and 

Strassmann were accurate - and Fraulein Meitner, who knew the precision of 

Hahn's work, could hardly doubt it - then certain ideas in nuclear physics, 

hitherto taken to be unassailable, could not be true. She perceived even more 

clearly than had Hahn that something tremendous had unexpectedly come to 

light. 

Fraulein Meitner could hardly wait to discuss the multitude of questions 

and conjectures that arose in her mind. It seemed a bit of luck that her 

nephew, regarded as one of the leading lights in Bohr's circle, happened to 

be with her. But Frisch had not come to Kungely to 'talk shop' with his aunt; 

he had come for a holiday. 'It took her some time before she could make me 

listen, he reported later. To be precise, Frisch actually tried to run away 

from Lise Meitner's explanations. He buckled on a pail- of skis and would 

certainly soon have been beyond the I-each of his aunt if the ground had not 

been so hopelessly hat all round the town. She was able to keep pace with 

him and maintained a continuous flow of talk while they stamped through 

the snow. At last, by a bombardment of words, she pierced the blank wall of 

his indifference and released a chain reaction of ideas in his brain. 

Later that evening and the following days of a 'spoiled holiday, inspiring 

debates took place in the old-fashioned lounge of the boarding-house. Frisch 

described them in these words: 

Very gradually we realized that the break-up of a uranium nucleus into 

two almost equal parts ... had to be pictured in quite a different way. The 

picture is one. . ..of the gradual deformation of the original uranium nucleus, 

its elongation, formation of a waist and finally separation of the two halves. 

The striking similarity of that picture with the process of fission by which 

bacteria multiply caused us to use the phrase 'nuclear fission' in our first 

publication. 

That publication was somewhat laboriously composed by long- distance 

telephone (Professor Meitner had gone to Stockholm, and I had returned to 

Copenhagen) and eventually appeared in Nature in February 1939. ... The 

most striking feature of this novel form of nuclear reaction was the large 

energy liberated.... But the really important question was whether neutrons 

were liberated in the process, and that was a point which I, for one, 

completely missed. 

Frisch was then still somewhat uneasy about his discovery. He wrote to 

his mother: 'Feel as if I had caught an elephant by its tail, without meaning 

to, while walking through a jungle. And now, I don’t know what to do with 

it. 

The news of Hahn's discovery and its momentous significance for 

physics, as shown by Fraulein Meitner and Frisch, at first caused mainly 

perplexity among atomic scientists. When Frisch, on his return from 

Sweden, gave an account in Copenhagen of Hahn's work and of his own 

conversations with his aunt, Bohr struck himself a blow on the forehead. 

'How could we have overlooked that so long?' he cried. 

5 THE DECAY OF CONFIDENCE 1939 

FOR three hundred years most new discoveries which threw light on the 

darkness of Nature had been welcomed in the name of progress. But in 

January 1939 many scientists hesitated in alarm. The fear of war, like a 

heavy cloud, hung over the world. Only the surrender of the democracies at 

the Munich conference had once more preserved international peace. 

This sacrifice at Munich had done nothing to ease the tension. At that very 

moment a small group of initiated persons became aware of a source of 

power wholly novel, of superhuman dimensions. It was still possible, even 

then, however, to shade one's eyes, with the dark glasses of scepticism, from 

the dazzling and terrifying prospect of released atomic energy. As late as the 

beginning of 1939 Niels Bohr specified to his colleague Wigner, who had 

been working for ten years at Princeton, fifteen weighty reasons why, in his 

opinion, practical exploitation of the fission process would be improbable. 

Einstein assured the American reporter W. L. Laurence that he did not 

believe in the release of atomic power. And Otto Hahn, according to the 

young German physicist Korsching, exclaimed during a discussion with a 

few of his closest colleagues on the practical exploitation of his discovery: 

'That would surely be contrary to God's 

Up to that time all nuclear- fission experiments had been undertaken with 

such tiny quantities of uranium that there could be no question of the 

development of any considerable degree of power. The hopes and fears even 

then beginning to arise in the minds of atomic scientists could take shape 

only if it proved possible to increase to an enormous extent, as by the 

gathering force of an avalanche, the present miniature scale of the effects of 

splitting the atom. A chain reaction of this kind had been described as a 

theoretical possibility, as early as 1932-5, by Houtermans, Szilard, and 

Joliot-Curie. But it could be achieved in practice only if, after fission of a 

nucleus of uranium, there were invariably released a number of 

supplementary additional neutrons which would then split further nuclei. 

Until this all- important question had been thoroughly examined and its 

validity confirmed, most atomic physicists assured colleagues already 

wondering what would then happen that there could be no real grounds for 

anxiety. 

Parallel to investigations, half in hope and half in fear, of the possibility of 

a chain reaction, was an equally unusual political experiment, amounting to 

a new chapter in the history of ideas. Its author was Szilard, who had 

emigrated from England to the United States. As soon as he had heard from 

Bohr and Wigner about the experiments being conducted in Dahlem and 

Copenhagen, Szilard had his own experimental apparatus, left behind at 

Oxford, sent after him. He borrowed two thousand dollars from a friend 

named Liebowitz, a small New York manufacturer, as security for a gram of 

radium. Szilard had not yet received any university appointment in the 

United States, but he was granted special permission to work in the physics 

laboratory of Columbia University. After three days his first experiments 

seemed to indicate the possibility of an emission of additional neutrons. 

Szilard became more anxious than ever about the inevitable consequences of 

such experiments; no doubt they were also being carried out in Europe. His 

vivid imagination again outstripped events and he perceived with shocking 

clarity a possible race in the production of atomic armaments. 

Something had to be done. One of the .first people consulted by Szilard 

was Fermi. The Italian scientist had started on his journey to Stockholm, 

where the Nobel prize awaited him, in November 1938, with the firm 

intention of not returning to Fascist Italy. He was now working in the same 

university building as Szilard, and he and the young American Herbert 

Anderson were also studying the problem of neutron emission. Fermi at first 

unhesitatingly rejected the idea suggested to him by his Hungarian colleague 

that scientists should themselves impose a voluntary censorship on their 

work. He had, after all, just escaped from a country where censorship and 

secrecy regulations had crippled intellectual activity. 

The reactions of most of Szilard's other colleagues to his proposal were 

not much more encouraging. At first only three of them agreed with him: 

Wigner, Teller (who had been summoned in 1935, on the recommendation 

of his friend Gamow, to George Washington University in the American 

capital), and Weisskopf, just over from Copenhagen to accept an invitation 

to the University of Rochester. 

These four men were not impressed by the counter-argument that science 

had fought for centuries for the free exchange of ideas and should never lend 

its support to the opposite principle. They had been themselves, throughout 

their lives, devoted adherents of the maxims of liberty and uncompromising 

antagonists of militarism. It now seemed to them, nevertheless, that a highly 

exceptional situation existed. 

The world was asking itself how Hitler could afford to challenge the Great 

Powers. If his sources of raw materials and his production capacity were 

compared with his political adversaries' throughout the world, it was obvious 

that the Fuhrer, despite his temporary superiority in aircraft, and tanks, could 

never hope to be victorious. Or was there, perhaps, some unknown factor 

which might upset the confident calculations of the Allied Powers? The few 

physicists who were already aware at that period of the terrifying possibility 

of an atom bomb felt that they were justified in suspecting that it was the 

prospect of the employment of this extraordinary new weapon which 

constituted the unknown quantity, the x, in the 1939 power-politics equation. 

If this conjecture were correct, it could not only explain the steadily growing 

recklessness of Hitler's provocations, but might also actually mean that he 

was quite consciously heading for a war he possibly intended to win by 

playing the ace of the uranium bomb. If he alone possessed atom bombs he 

would be unconquerable, despite his economic weaknesses. The German 

dictator would then be in a position to enslave the entire world. What could 

be done to prevent his achieving this aim. 

Why did not the atomic-research scientists in the United States first 

attempt to discuss this fateful question with their colleagues in Germany:, 

Mutual trust within the family of atomic physicists was already too much 

undermined to permit it. It was known outside Germany, of course, that 

Hitler's government was on bad terms with physicists. The regime had been 

openly criticized by the Nobel prize winner von Laue; he remained in the 

country only because he believed that the few teaching appointments 

available abroad should be reserved for those whom Hitler had forced into 

exile. It was also known that Heisenberg and all the adherents of up-to-date 

physics had been attacked in 1937 by the Schwarze Korps as 'white Jews'.* 

It was known that a miniature war had broken out openly at the Wurzburg 

Physics Congress in 1934 between the faction of the so-called 'German 

physicists' and those of their colleagues who maintained that neither 

'German' nor 'Jewish' physics existed, that physics was either true or false. 

Nevertheless, physicists outside Germany considered this resistance by 

reasonable men of science too feeble to guarantee a possible secret pact 

between scientists whose aim it would have been to call a halt to the further 

development of atomic research. Above all, one could never be certain that 

German physicists, so long as they remained in Hitler's power, would not 

simply be compelled by blackmail or the use of brute force to serve the ends 

of National Socialism. Such was the opinion of the American physicist P. W. 

Bridgman. He announced in the periodical Science, al the end of February 

1939, that he intended henceforth, with regret, to forbid scientists from 

totalitarian countries access to his laboratory, and that he expected his 

colleagues to take similar steps. He wrote: 

I have had the following statement printed, which I hand to any 

prospective visitor who may present himself. 'I have decided from now on 

not to show my apparatus to or discuss my experiments with the citizens of 

any totalitarian state. A citizen of such a state is no longer a free individual, 

but may be compelled to engage in any activity whatever to advance the 

purposes of that state.... Cessation of scientific inter- course with totalitarian 

states serves the double purpose of making more difficult the issues of 

scientific information by these states and of giving the individual 

opportunity to express abhorrence of their practices. ' 

Amazingly few voices were raised at that time against this break with the 

traditions of science. The conviction was almost universal that the new, 

unprecedented methods of the dictators in contravention of the principles of 

humanity and liberty- methods which had only recently been demonstrated 

afresh by the occupation of Prague - must be countered by equally 

unprecedented measures. 

It thus happened that in the United States Szilard's idea gradually came to 

prevail. The self-imposed censorship of scientists was of course only to 

operate against supporters of the Axis Powers. Even Fermi, who had 

previously declared that he would have nothing to do with it, now agreed to 

the voluntary self-censorship. 

*Das Schwarze Korps was the official weekly of the SS, aggressive in 

tone and greatly feared. 

Szilard's group found it more difficult to obtain the consent of European 

atomic-research scientists to their unconventional idea of keeping all further 

work in nuclear physics a secret. Szilard had written to Joliot-Curie as early 

as 2 February 1939 to pre pare him for the measure in view: 'When Hahn's 

paper reached this country about a fortnight ago, a few of us at once got 

interested in the question whether neutrons are liberated in the disintegration 

of uranium. Obviously, if more than one neutron were liberated, a sort of 

chain reaction would be possible. In certain circumstances this might then 

lead to the construction of bombs which would be extremely dangerous in 

general and particularly in the hands of certain governments. 

Szilard's letter ended with an observation which showed the extent to 

which previous hopes of progress by scientists had degenerated, under the 

influence of the sinister possibilities of this development, into actual fear of 

progress: 'We all hope that there will be no or at least not sufficient neutron 

emission and therefore nothing to worry about.' It was as though he had 

expressed a wish for the experiments to fail. 

Szilard had told Joliot that he would send him a cable if agreement were 

reached to proceed with the voluntary withholding of research data. He had 

also requested to be informed in general terms of his correspondent's 

attitude, but he never heard from him about it. There was a very good reason 

for Joliot's silence. With his collaborators Hans von Halban and Lew 

Kowarski, Joliot was just on the point of experimental realization of the 

chain reaction to which Szilard's anxious communication had referred. He 

was determined not to be deprived, under any circumstances, of the credit 

for being the first with this discovery. When the experiment succeeded a 

month later, he did not entrust the account of it, as in the case of all his 

previous work, to a French periodical. He sent his report to the British 

magazine Nature because it usually published the work sent in to it more 

quickly than any other journal concerned with natural science. To make 

assurance doubly sure that this important communication should arrive in 

London without fail in time for the next issue, Kowarski travelled, on 8 

March, to the airport of Le Bourget, only an hour's journey from the centre 

of Paris, and personally supervised the document's deposit in the London 

mailbag. To such a race, for the sake of a few days, had atomic research 

already degenerated by the spring of 1939. A wholly new spirit of keen 

international competition had now arisen. 

As soon as Szilard realized that Joliot had apparently taken no notice of 

his letter, he and his friends redoubled their efforts, so as to stop the 

publication of any further studies. The British had been waiting to see what 

would come of the steps taken in the United States before committing 

themselves. Now they pledged their support to the movement. John 

Cockcroft, a former member of Rutherford's team, answered a letter from 

Wigner in the middle of April. He was still sceptical of the success of the 

scheme but said he was resolutely in favour of it. He wrote: 'Dirac has given 

me your message about uranium. Up to the present I have felt that it is very 

unlikely that anything usable can come out of this in the next few years. 

However, under the present circumstances we cannot afford to take any 

chances. 

On the other hand, Joliot-Curie still seemed indifferent to the whole affair. 

Not until Weisskopf had sent him a telegram of a hundred and fifty words, 

emphasizing the seriousness of the matter, did he reply from Paris, at last, by 

cable: 

RECEIVED LETTER SZILARD BUT NOT CABLE PROMISED STOP 

PROPOSITION OF 3 1 MARCH VERY REASONABLE BUT COMES 

TOO LATE STOP HAVE LEARNED LAST WEEK THAT SCIENCE 

SERVICE HAD INFORMED AMERICAN PRESS FEBRUARY ABOUT 

ROBERTS WORK STOP LETTER FOLLOWS JOLIOT HALBAN 

KOWARSKI. 

It was quite true, as Joliot stated, that some information had been given to 

the press. The release, however, was in such general terms that as a ground 

for their abstention from the movement the resort to it could only be 

regarded as prevarication. As a matter of fact Joliot-Curie had been 

influenced by a number of considerations. In the first place he had not taken 

Szilard's letter seriously simply because he had supposed it to be a solo 

performance by his Hungarian colleague. Weisskopf s telegram, which 

happened to arrive on 1 April, All Fools' Day, in Paris, had strengthened this 

impression that the proposal had been made unofficially by a minority of 

scientists. So important a matter, in the opinion of the formally minded 

French, should have been broached by the American Academy of Sciences 

instead of being raised by a few 'individualists' and 'outsiders'. Stronger than 

this psychological argument was still another reason about which one of the 

three members of Joliot' s team expressed himself freely: 'We knew in 

advance that our discovery would be hailed in the Press as a victory for 

French research and in those days we needed publicity at any cost, if we 

were to obtain more generous support for our future work from the 

government. 

The publication of Joliot' s views so increased the resentment among 

Szilard's American colleagues against the censorship to be imposed by 

themselves on their own work - a censorship to which in any case they had 

only agreed with reluctance - that Professor Rabi went to see Szilard and 

warned him that if he did not give way in this matter he could no longer 

count on the hospitality of Columbia University, where he had hitherto only 

been allowed to work as a guest. Szilard had to acquiesce, under protest, in 

the future publication of his own pioneering investigations into chain 

reactions in uranium. 

In the course of the controversy Wigner made a suggestion destined to 

have important consequences. He proposed that the American government 

should be informed of the 'uranium situation. ’ He argued that this step was 

necessary to enable the authorities to meet any sudden threat which might 

arise - meaning the development by Hitler of an atom bomb. 

From the end of April until the end of July 1939 Szilard and his friends 

were deeply concerned with the question of how best to impress upon the 

American government the importance of the latest researches in atomic 

science and their possible effects upon the technique of tear. The first 

attempt to interest a public authorities this matter had, to all appearance, 

utterly failed. On 17 March 1935, Fermi called on Admiral S. C. Hooper, 

Director of the Technical Division, Naval Operations, with a letter of 

introduction from Dean George Pegram of Columbia. The possibility of an 

atom bomb was discussed. But apparently the information offered by Fermi 

on this subject made no great impact upon the Admiral. At any rate, for the 

time being neither Fermi nor any other atomic scientist was invited to any 

further debate on the question. Curiously enough not even a report which 

appealed in the NEW York Times at the end of April, dealing with the 

spring meeting of the American Physical Society, aroused any interest 

among the authorities in Washington. And yet, no less a person than Bohr 

affirmed on that occasion in public that a bomb containing a minute quantity 

of uranium 235 bombarded by slow neutrons would be bound to set off an 

explosion powerful enough to blow up, at the lowest estimate, the entire 

laboratory and most of the surrounding town. 

Szilard, Wigner, Teller, and Weisskopf had to overcome both internal and 

external inhibitions before they could achieve con- tact with the American 

government. In the first place, as former Central Europeans, they felt very 

little confidence indeed, as a matter of principle, in any government, and 

least of all in military authorities. Secondly, not one of them was a native 

American. With the exception of Wigner, none of them had even been 

immigrants long enough to have obtained citizenship. 

While Szilard and his friends were still racking their brains to find means 

of attracting the attention of some really influential authority, they received 

confidential information that work was already progressing on the uranium 

problem in the Third Reich, with the knowledge and support of the German 

government. This news seemed to confirm their worst fears. 

The report was true. In April 1939 Dr Dames, head of the Department of 

Research in the Ministerium fur Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung 

(Ministry of Science, Education, and National Culture), had received a 

communication from two physicists, Joos and Hanle, mentioning the 

possibility of a 'uranium machine'. He called a conference at Berlin for 30 

April, attended by six German experts in atomic science. Hahn, the 

discoverer of nuclear fission, was not among the elect. His omission was 

formally justified on the ground that he was not a physicist but a chemist. 

But the true reason was that the top men knew perfectly well that Hahn was 

no friend of Nazism, and in scientific circles he was even said to have 

exclaimed: 'I only hope you physicists will never construct a uranium bomb. 

If Hitler ever gets a weapon like that I'll commit suicide.' 

At the first meeting in the building at No. 69 Unter den Linden netting at 

all was in fact said, for the time being, about an atom weapon. Those present 

simply discussed the possibility of employing nuclear fission to drive motor 

vehicles. After a survey by Joos of the position of atomic research, both 

abroad and at home, it was resolved to carry out an experiment of this kind. 

It was to be conducted as a joint undertaking by the leading physicists active 

in the held concerned. Those who participated in this session of 30 April 

were directed to keep the matter secret. But one of them, Mattauch, did not 

obey this order. That same evening he reported the discussions at the 

Ministry to Dr S. Flugge, one of Hahn's closest and most gifted 

collaborators. Flugge's reaction was the exact opposite of those of his 

colleagues across the Atlantic. It Seemed to him that immense risks would 

be run if a scientific discovery that might have such tremendous political 

consequences were kept out of the public view. He personally had not been 

sworn to secrecy. Consequently be wrote a detailed account of uranium 

chain reaction for the July number of Naturwissenschaften. This was 

followed, as further elucidation by an interview granted by Flugge himself, 

at his own suggestion, in more generally intelligible terms, on the same 

subject, to a representative of the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine 

Zeitung, a newspaper which the Nazis only tolerated with reluctance. 

Unfortunately Dr. Flugge's publicity only increased the alarm in America. 

People could not imagine even a line of print appearing in Germany without 

the express intention or consent of the government: ‘If the Nazis allow as 

much as that to be published about the uranium problem,' it was considered 

in the United States, 'they are certain to know a lot more about it. 

Consequently, we had better hurry. . . . ’ 

It was a false deduction. In the summer of 1939 one more chance, quite 

unexpected, arose for personal contact with the German atomic scientists. 

Heisenberg was then on a visit to the United States Pegram, chairman of the 

Physics Department of Columbia University, was aware of Szilard's and 

Fermi's efforts. He tried to induce the German physicist, by the offer of a 

professorship, to remain in America, but Heisenberg declined the offer so he 

would not have to desert the 'nice young physicists’ — such was the 

expression he used - entrusted to his charge back in Germany. He was sure, 

he added, that Hitler would lose the war. However, he wished to be in 

Germany during the coming catastrophe to help preserve what was valuable 

in his country. 

A further cautious attempt was made by Fermi at Ann Arbor, where he 

was lecturing that summer at the University of Michigan. When he met 

Heisenberg at the house of their Dutch colleague, Samuel Goudsmit, 'heir 

conversation inevitably turned to the fascinating problems raised by Hahn's 

discovery. 

Heisenberg said on a later occasion: 'In the summer of 1939 twelve people 

might Still have been able, by coming to mutual agreement, to prevent the 

construction of atom bombs.' He himself and Fermi, who were undoubtedly 

included among the twelve, ought then to have taken the initiative. But they 

let the opportunity go by. Their powers of political and moral imagination 

failed them at that moment as disastrously as did their loyalty to the 

international tradition of science. They never succeeded in achieving thought 

and action appropriate to the future consequences of their invention. Nor had 

they, in that critical situation, enough confidence in the legacies bequeathed 

by the past of their profession. 

'The fact that we physicists formed one family was not enough,' 

Weizsacker remarked after the war. 'Perhaps we ought to have been an 

international Order with disciplinary power over its members. But is such a 

thing really at all practicable in view of the nature of modem science?' 

6 THE STRATEGY OF PREVENTION 1939-42 

THAT summer the news which reached the United States about the 

progress made by the German uranium project became more and more 

alarming. In Berlin there had been a second meeting of nuclear physicists. 

This time it had been called by the head of the Research Division of the 

Army Weapons Department. Colonel Schumann had acted on the basis of 

information from the Hamburg physicist Harteck. This researcher had drawn 

attention at the end of April to the 'possibility, in principle, of the release of 

a chain reaction in uranium'. According to a later report by his associate, 

Diebner, he had recommended its investigation by the German War Office. 

A further item of news which reached the physicists in America by secret 

channels seemed to indicate that the Germans were really in earnest. They 

had suddenly forbidden all exports of ore from Czechoslovakia, which they 

had recently 

The only other place in Europe with any large stocks of uranium was 

Belgium, which obtained it from the Belgian Congo. Should not something 

be done at once, thought Szilard, to safeguard from seizure by Hitler this 

metal which had now become strategically so important? The American 

State Department did not yet realize that uranium might have any military 

significance at all - this rare metal had been used almost entirely for the 

production of luminous figures on dials and for the manufacture of pottery. 

It was then that it occurred to Szilard for the first time that Einstein might 

help. Einstein belonged to the small international group of friends, 

outstanding intellectually and musically, which the Belgian Queen Mother, 

Elisabeth, had gathered around her in the course of her life. It might perhaps 

be possible to convey a warning to the Brussels government through this 

connexion. An appointment was soon made with the father of the theory of 

relativity, who lived at Princeton, where Szilard's close associate Wigner 

also lived. Einstein was about to leave for his summer holiday on Long 

Island, but he had no objection to his two colleagues paying him a visit there 

to discuss their important project . 

Accordingly, Wigner and Szilard, one hot day in July 1939, set off for 

Patchogue on the south coast of Long Island. After a drive of two hours, 

they discovered that apparently they had been given the wrong address. 

'Perhaps I misunderstood the name Patchogue on the telephone,' Wigner 

said. 'Let's see if we can find some similar name on the map. 

'Could it be Peconic?' asked Szilard after some minutes of strained 

silence. 

'Yes, that was it,' Wigner answered. 'Now I remember!' 

At Peconic the two travellers made exhaustive inquiries as to the 

whereabouts of the cabin of a Dr Moore, whose small house Einstein had 

rented. A group of vacationers in shorts and brightly coloured bathing suits 

came sauntering along. 'No, we don't know Dr Moore's cabin,' they 

answered. Nor did the local inhabitants seem to have any information on the 

subject. 

The two men continued to drive around, though it seemed a hopeless 

venture. Suddenly Szilard exclaimed: 'Let's give it up and go home. Perhaps 

fate never intended it. We should probably be making a frightful mistake by 

enlisting Einstein's help in applying to any public authorities in a matter like 

this. Once a government gets hold of something it never lets go. ... 

'But it's our duty to take this step,' Wigner objected. 'It must be our 

contribution to the prevention of a terrible calamity. So the pair continued 

their search. 

'How would it be,' Szilard proposed eventually, 'if we simply asked where 

around here Einstein lives? After all, every child knows him.' 

The idea was immediately put to a practical test. A sun- burned little boy 

about seven years old was standing on a street comer absorbed in adjusting 

his fishing rod. 

'Do you know where Einstein lives?' Szilard asked him, more by way of a 

joke than in earnest. 

'Of course 1 do,' retorted the youngster. 'I can take you there if you like. 

The visitors had to wait for a short time on the open veranda before 

Einstein came out, wearing slippers, and escorted them to his study. Szilard's 

account of this first important conversation runs as follows: 

The possibility of a chain reaction in uranium had not occurred to 

Einstein. But almost as soon as I began to tell him about it he realized what 

the consequences might be and immediately signified his readiness to help 

us and if necessary 'stick his neck out', as the saying goes. But it seemed 

desirable, before approaching the Belgian government, to inform the State 

Department at Washington of the step contemplated. Wigner proposed that 

we should draft a letter to the Belgian government and send a copy of the 

draft to the State Department, giving it a time limit of a fortnight in which to 

enter a protest if it believed that Einstein should abstain from any such 

communication. Such was the position when Wigner and I left Einstein's 

place on Long Island. 

Szilard was now again confronted by the same obstacle which had been 

occupying his mind for weeks. How could he make sure of the attention of 

the American government? He discussed the problem with a number of 

friends, including Gustav Stolper, the German economist and former editor 

of the periodical Der duutsche Volkswirt (German Economist), who had 

emigrated to New York. Stolper had an idea. He was acquainted with a man 

who was known, though he was not himself a government official, to have 

the ear of President Roosevelt. This was the banker and scholar Alexander 

Sachs. This international financial- could always obtain entry to the White 

House, for he had often amazed Roosevelt by his usually astonishingly 

accurate forecasts of economic events. Ever since 1933 Sachs had been one 

of the unofficial but extremely influential advisers of the American 

President, all of whom had to possess, by F. D. R.'s own definition, 'great 

ability, physical vitality, and a real passion for anonymity'. 

Sachs at once supported Szilard's ideas, enthusiastically. During the next 

two weeks the two men drafted, in Sachs's office in the Wall Street 

investment firm of Lehman Brothers, a letter which went further in its terms 

than the document Einstein had originally been willing to sign. It was now 

intended that the draft should go not, as formerly planned, to the state 

Department, but to the White House. More rapid and energetic action was to 

be expected from the President than from the Secretary of State. The draft 

dealt with the point discussed with Einstein - the need for American 

negotiations with the Belgian government on the subject of the safeguarding 

of the stocks of uranium from the Congo. But in particular, a second point 

now added was a proposal for the financial support and acceleration of 

atomic research. The authors of the letter deliberately refrained from asking 

for any government assistance, but merely suggested that a confidential 

agent of the White House should be appointed to obtain the cooperation of 

private individuals and industrial laboratories in the secret project envisaged. 

On 2 August Szilard again drove out to Long Island. Wigner had by that 

time gone to California, so Szilard's driver was his young countryman 

Edward Teller, later to play a further important part in the fateful drama 

lived by the atomic scientists. Did Szilard already have the final text of the 

draft in his pocket that day? Both Teller and Einstein state that he had. 

Einstein always declared that he merely signed this document. Szilard, on 

the other hand, observes: 'So far as I remember, Einstein dictated a letter to 

Teller in German and I used the text of that letter as a basis for two more 

drafts, one comparatively short and one rather longer, both addressed to the 

President. I left it to Einstein to decide which he preferred. He chose the 

longer draft. I also prepared a memorandum as an enclosure to Einstein's 

letter. Both letter and memorandum were handed to the President by Dr 

Sachs in October 1939. 

This version of what took place seems the more probable to Dr Otto 

Nathan, who had known Einstein for many years and later acted as his 

executor. Teller, however, affirms positively: 'Einstein only signed his name. 

I believe that at that time he had no very clear idea of what we were doing in 

nuclear physics.' Sachs, too, states, not without a certain degree of cynicism: 

'We really only needed Einstein in order to provide Szilard with a halo, as he 

was then almost unknown in the United States. His entire role was really 

limited to that.' 

'I really only acted as a mail box. They brought me a finished letter and I 

simply signed it.' Such was the apology offered by Einstein after the Second 

World War to Antonina Vallentin, his old friend and biographer. He very 

soon began to regret his action. This gifted man of learning and great friend 

of peace explains further, clearly, in personal letters and notes which will 

probably be made public in future years, how through a paradox of fate he 

had decided to give the starting signal for the most horrible of all weapons of 

destruction. 

Einstein was of course at that time convinced that the government, which 

he had recommended take an active interest in the uranium problem in order 

to guard against possible surprise by a German atom bomb, would handle 

the tremendous new power entrusted to it with true wisdom and humanity. 

He acted on the assumption that the United States would never use such a 

bomb for any object other than self-defence against a similar weapon and 

even then only if its own Safety were imperilled to an extreme degree. But 

when six years later the first atom bomb was employed against Japan, a 

country already on the verge of capitulation, he felt both he himself and the 

atomic scientists who had worked on the construction of the weapon had 

been deceived. 

The tragedy of the decision taken by the pacific-minded Einstein deepens 

when one realizes, as is possible today, that the menace of a German 

uranium bomb, doubtless believed perfectly genuine by the eminent Scholar 

and those who influenced him, was in fact nothing more than a terrible 

phantom. 

Einstein said, with deep regret, after the war: 'If I had known that the 

Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I would never 

have lifted a finger.' The ability of the Third Reich to produce new weapons 

capable of deciding the issues of war was then greatly overestimated 

throughout the world. Subsequent investigations by Allied committees 

proved that on the outbreak of war the German leaders erroneously believed 

that they could achieve final victory with the weapons they already had. It 

was not until 1 942 that the development of new weapons attracted any 

attention in the Reich. The advantage held by the Allied Nations was by that 

time already so great that there was no longer any hope of reversing it. The 

most important new weapon developed by the Germans during the war, the 

V2 long-range rocket, came into use at a stage of the conflict when 

Germany's position had become quite desperate. 

The indifference of Hitler and those about him to research in natural 

science amounted to positive hostility. It had at a very early period cost the 

Fuhrer the goodwill of physicists. Only a handful of them, out of ambition or 

because they had failed to make their mark prior to the advent of the Third 

Reich, offered Hitler their full cooperation.* The great majority, however, 

were soon whispering to one another the inversion of a current Nazi slogan: 

'War must be harnessed to the service of science.' Hitler's attempt to raise 

Germany to the status of a global power had been too lightly undertaken to 

succeed. Such was the view of men who never expected an experiment to 

come to anything unless its foundations had been well and truly laid. It 

consequently became important to save from the imminent disasters ahead 

as much as possible of German research that had not yet been utterly ruined 

by the regime. After the war had been lost science would probably be one of 

the few items still standing to the credit of Germany on her balance sheet. 

Four factors combined to frustrate the construction of a German atom 

bomb. In the first place the absence of the eminent physicists driven into 

exile by Hitler proved a severe handicap. Second, the poor organization by 

the Nazis of research in the interests of war and its inadequate recognition by 

their government. Third, the insufficiencies of the technical equipment at 

hand for so complex a project. Finally (and too often overlooked so far), the 

actual personal attitudes of the German experts in atomic research counted 

against success. In the face of incomprehension by the authorities, they did 

nothing to overcome this obstacle. They did not push for the construction of 

such a bomb (in clear contrast to the German rocketeers, who finally 

conquered Hitler's indifference to 'guided missiles' and got 'their' V2 

weapons). On the contrary, these physicists were able successfully to divert 

the minds of the National Socialist Service Departments from the idea of so 

inhuman a weapon. 

Very little about this personal attitude has hitherto been revealed to the 

public. Most of those concerned have themselves preferred for the sake of 

discretion and tact to restrict mention of this delicate affair to a somewhat 

narrow circle. They con- tent themselves with emphasizing, when called 

upon to explain why no German atom bomb existed at the end of the war, 

the lack of interest among their political leaders and the technical difficulties 

which in fact became almost insuperable from the end of the year 1942 with 

the start of heavy Allied air attack. Heisenberg, who was in charge of the 

German uranium project, stated at the end of 1946, in the periodical 

Naturwissenschaften, that 'external circumstances' had relieved the German 

experts in atomic research from the need 'to take the difficult decision 

whether or not to produce atom bombs'. This is a fair statement, but it is 

really only valid from the summer of 1 942 on. But what happened before 

then? What did Heisenberg mean when he wrote in the same article: 

'German physicists worked consciously from the beginning to retain control 

of the project in view. They used their influence as experts on the subject to 

direct studies of it in the sense described in the present report'? 

At first the German 'U Project', as it was called by the authorities, made 

more rapid progress, in the purely administrative sense, than similar efforts 

in the Allied countries and the still- neutral United States. Although most of 

the physicists were called up for military service immediately after war had 

broken out, three or four weeks later the more important of them were 

returned to their institutes as 'indispensable'. As early as 26 September 1939, 

more than a fortnight before Alexander Sachs could obtain an interview with 

Roosevelt and show him Einstein's letter, nine nuclear physicists -Bagg, 

Basche, Bothe, Diebner, Fliigge, Geiger, Harteck, Hoffmann, and Mattauch- 

attended a meeting at the Heereswaffenamt (the Army Weapons 

Department) in Berlin. At this conference a detailed programme of work was 

drawn up and, as Diebner recollects, 'separate tasks were assigned to various 

study groups.' Such was the true origin of the so-called 'Uranium Verein' 

('Uranium Society'). Four weeks later a larger group met, by that time 

including Heisenberg and Weizsacker. One of the first questions to be 

decided was the degree of refinement of the uranium oxide required for 

experimental purposes. The specialist appointed to can-y out the chemical 

tests at Gottingen was, however, on military service. Some time passed 

before he could again be made available. Then it turned out that nearly all 

the uranium oxide in Germany had already been bought up by another Army 

department which refused to return it under any circumstances. The 

department, in fact, was hoping to be able to produce armour-piercing shells 

by the use of this heavy metal as an alloy. 

The first practical experiments, carried out at Feipzig, failed. The 

physicist Dijpel, in ignorance of the chemical properties of uranium, had 

applied a metal shovel to it and thereby caused spontaneous combustion. 

When he poured water on the flames they spread faster than ever. A fountain 

of glowing uranium shot up, twenty feet high, setting the ceiling of the 

laboratory on fire. The Feipzig Fire Brigade turned out in full strength, and 

as a result only a few people were slightly burned. Dijpel uttered a prophecy 

which at the time sounded merely melodramatic: 'Hundreds more will fall 

for the supreme goal - the atom bomb. 

In the autumn of 1939 the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics was made 

the scientific centre of the Uranium Society. Peter Debye, the director of the 

Institute, was a Dutchman who had been working unmolested in Germany 

ever since 1909. He was now required either to become a German citizen or 

at least to publish a book in favour of National Socialism to prove his 

reliability. He rejected these insolent demands with contempt and took 

advantage of an invitation to give some lectures in the United States to turn 

his back for ever on his second home. Shortly afterwards Heisenberg 

succeeded him in charge of the Institute, a post he held for the duration of 

the war. This decision on Heisenberg's part was much criticized by his 

physicist friends abroad. It seemed to them a startling confirmation of the 

suspicion they had entertained for some time that Heisenberg had made his 

peace with Hitler.* Even in Germany itself Heisenberg's conduct was 

bitterly resented by certain physicists. They believed then and still believe 

today that if he had kept unequivocally clear of National Socialism he would 

not only have encouraged all those scientists of ability who were opposed to 

Hitler but might also have inspired them, as a leading spirit, to undertake 

active resistance. 

Heisenberg's friend and colleague Weizslicker seeks to excuse him on !he 

ground that he had always been a man of cosmopolitan training and outlook 

who nevertheless loved his native land. He is alleged to have remained in 

Germany in order to contribute to the survival of German physics under the 

calamities he foresaw. 

But there was a further motive involved, perhaps the most important of 

all. Heisenberg only hints at it in his 1946 article. He and his closest friends 

wished, by controlling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, to keep the 

development of German atomic research in their hands. For they still feared 

at that time that other less scrupulous physicists might in different 

circumstances make the attempt to construct atom bombs for Hitler. II was 

considered certain not only in New York but also in Dahlem that the 

possession of such a weapon by a fanatical dictator who would stop at 

nothing would bring unimaginable misery upon the world. 

By the winter of 1939-40 Heisenberg had already completed theoretical 

studies laying down the difference in principle between a uranium pile, in 

which the chain reaction is controlled, and a uranium bomb, in which the 

avalanche of neutrons is allowed to accelerate to the point of explosion. On 

17 July 1940 Weizsacker committed certain ideas to paper, under the 

heading 'A possible method for the production of power from U 238'. They 

showed that an entirely new substance, which could be used ‘as an 

explosive', might arise in a uranium pile. But he did not at that time call this 

substance plutonium, as did his colleagues in the Anglo-Saxon countries. He 

simply called it 'Element 93' though he still retained a doubt whether it ought 

not really to be 'Element 94'. Such ideas did not, however, go beyond the 

most intimate circle of Heisenberg’s collaborators; they prudently refrained 

from passing on their preparatory theoretical studies on this theme. They 

were determined not to attract the attention of even their closest associates to 

the possibility of an atom bomb. Whenever suggestions pointing in that 

direction did nevertheless occasionally emanate from other physicists, they 

were not indeed rejected by Heisenberg as impossible in principle, but 

merely labelled unrealistic: 'At present we can see no practicable technical 

method of producing an atom bomb during the war with the resources 

available in Germany. But the subject, nevertheless, must be thoroughly 

investigated in order to make sure that the Americans will not be able to 

develop atom bombs either.' Such was the reason given, by this extremely 

influential group within the Uranium Society, for their merely expectant 

attitude. On the other hand, it was still considered necessary for the uranium 

project to retain, in the eyes of the government, enough of its highly 

promising character to justify the release of young physicists from military 

service. So this somewhat dangerous game, a source of mistrust and 

misunderstanding, continued, with its alternate postponements and promises. 

In addition to Heisenberg and Weizsacker, a third physicist, working in 

Germany during the years 1940 and 1941, had discovered that a uranium 

bomb could probably be manufactured very soon after a previous production 

in a uranium pile of a new explosive element. It was the man who had 

participated in the discovery of thermonuclear processes in the sun, Fritz 

Houtermans. 

On Hitler’s accession to power he had emigrated and thereafter been 

caught in the vortex of espionage psychosis that affected Soviet Russia in 

1937. But he had been clever enough to postpone his 'liquidation' by the 

Russian secret police through an adroit move on the chessboard of intrigue. 

He soon found that his examiners were not convinced by his protestations of 

innocence. In fact, they took no account of them whatever and simply went 

on torturing him. On one occasion he was beaten up for seventy-two hours 

on end, having all his teeth knocked out in the process. He accordingly 

contrived a trick. He told himself: 'The officials in charge of the 

investigation are only concerned to produce their quota of such and such a 

number of confessions. I'll let them have what they want. But I shall insert a 

little time bomb in my statement. It may perhaps actually secure my release 

from prison.' He proceeded to 'confess' that he had in fact, as the secret 

police suspected, practised espionage and sabotage against the Soviet Union, 

using for the purpose a certain small apparatus which he had himself 

invented in secret. Houtermans not only gave an accurate description of the 

instrument in question but also prepared detailed blueprints of its design. He 

alleged that it had enabled him to identify precisely, From the ground, the 

speed of Soviet aircraft, and thus to pass on important armament secrets to 

the Germans. The captive physicist was gambling on the chance that the 

plans he submitted might be laid before his former colleague Kapitza for 

investigation. The latter, or indeed any other expert, would then immediately 

perceive that Houtermans's 'invention', in the form given, was perfectly 

senseless scientifically, and that consequently his entire confession had been 

untrue and must in all probability have been extorted from him by ill- 

treatment. In this way Houtermans not only gained a temporary respite from 

the attentions of his examiners but also a chance that his Case might possibly 

be accorded fresh consideration by external authority. 

In the spring of 1940 Houtermans was conditionally released. It is not 

known whether he owed his freedom to the petitions of well-known foreign 

physicists or to intervention by Kapitza. He was handed over, at Brest- 

Litovsk, to the Gestapo, who at first locked him up again. But eventually, on 

the intercession of von L3ue, he was paroled subject to the proviso that he 

remain tinder observation by the Gestapo during the war and did not engage 

in any state or university research project. Houtermans had only been at 

liberty for a few days in Berlin when he learned the strictly kept secret of the 

existence of the Uranium Society. He instantly guessed what object the 

group in question probably had in mind, though owing to the years he had 

spent in prison he had not been able to keep in touch with the latest 

developments of atomic research. He himself had called attention, as early as 

1932, to the possibility of a chain reaction and had worked, up to the time of 

his arrest in the Soviet Union, at the further elucidation of such problems. In 

1937 he had actually lectured on neutron absorption to the Soviet Academy 

of Sciences. If the Communist secret police had not just then carried him off 

in the midst of his studies, it is quite possible that atomic fission and chain 

reaction would have been first discovered in Soviet Russia. 

On hearing that Heisenberg and Weizsacker were now seriously 

Investigating the question of a practical application of the chain reaction 

Houtermans was profoundly shocked. He consulted von Laue. The Nobel 

prize winner consoled him with the remark: 'My dear colleague, no one ever 

invents anything he doesn't really want to invent.' 

Since Houtermans was prohibited from working in any state- controlled or 

university laboratory, he applied, in May 1940, to the well-known inventor 

Baron Manfred von Ardenne, who was carrying out studies on behalf of the 

Post Office in his private research institute at Lichterfelde near Berlin. It is 

characteristic of the rivalry at that time prevailing among the various 

government offices of the Third Reich that in addition to the Ministry of 

Education and the War Office even the Post Office was engaged on atomic 

research. Ohnesorge, the Postmaster General, probably believed that he 

would rise enormously in his Fuhrer's estimation if he of all people, though 

in charge of a civilian department, were to present Hitler one day with a 

'miracle weapon'. But when in 1944 the long-yeamed-for moment at last 

arrived and Ohnesorge, at a meeting of the Cabinet, started to hold forth 

about the present position of his studies in connexion with the provision of a 

uranium bomb, Hitler interrupted him with the contemptuous observation: 

'Look here, gentlemen! You are all racking your brains to discover how we 

are going to win the war and, lo and behold, here comes our Postmaster, of 

all people, with a solution of the problem?’ So far as the Fuhrer was 

concerned, that settled the matter. 

Houtermans did not dare to refuse point-blank the order of his new chief, 

von Ardenne, to apply himself to the uranium problem. Averse as he was to 

undertaking any sort of war work, his bitter experiences in the Soviet Union 

had taught him that in such cases the safest thing to do was to 'play ball', to 

make a pretence of cooperation. He had to take care to keep memoranda 

composed in the course of the work locked away in secret safes. 

In September 1940 Houtermans completed his first study of the uranium 

problem. His notes already at that time referred to the use of uranium piles to 

generate microscopically small quantities of Element 93 or 94. By July 1941 

it was perfectly clear to him that it would be possible to produce an atom 

bomb provided that ponderable amounts of that substance - later called 

plutonium - could be generated in the uranium pile. Houtermans, however, 

did not report on this aspect of his work, since he did not wish to call the 

attention of the state authorities to the possibility of the construction of atom 

bombs. Moreover, he requested Dr Otterbein, through whom the Post Office 

kept in touch with the Uranium Society, to see to it that for the present there 

should be no publication of his studies in the secret reports of the Army 

Weapons Department. By making further inquiries from time to time he was 

able to make sure that his notes continued to repose in a post-office safe. It 

was not until he learned in 1944 that the Hamburg physicist Harteck, 

independently of himself, had suggested the same possibility, that 

Houtermans consented to restricted publication of his article.* At this period 

Of daily air raids on the country there was in any case no longer any 

question of the German project succeeding. Such is the explanation of the 

fact that at the end of the war one of the most important publications relating 

to German nuclear research was found among the secret 'Research Reports 

of the Post Office'. It was entitled: 'Problem of the Release of Nuclear Chain 

Reactions.’ 

Houtermans, despite his own political peril, naturally got into direct 

communication with Heisenberg and Weizsacker soon after his release by 

the Gestapo. He wanted to learn from their own lips just what the object of 

the Uranium Society was. He received the consoling information that every 

effort was to be concentrated on the problem of a 'uranium machine' with the 

intention of progressively diverting the attention of the government 

departments from the possibility of the bomb. In the winter of 1941 he had a 

further confidential interview with Weizsacker. He informed him of his own 

studies with Ardenne and said that "ii: had kept quiet about the possibilities 

which those studies had established of the construction of an atomic 

weapon. Houtermans' confession encouraged his companion himself to be 

more frank than before. After a long discussion the two men agreed that the 

first and most important task of 'uranium policy' must be to keep the 

departments in the dark about the now imminent feasibility of manufacturing 

such bombs. Heisenberg and Weizsacker also assured Houtermans that they 

would treat his own studies accordingly if they ever came across them 

officially. 

In addition to these three men there were at that time at least ten other 

prominent German physicists who had agreed that they must try to avoid 

working with Hitler's war machine or to make only a pretence of doing so. 

The names of German physicists unwilling to supply Hitler with 

supplementary armaments were deposited, after the war had begun, in 

Sweden - with Professor Westgren - and in Holland - with Professor 

Burgers. It was considered that an open strike of research workers would be 

dangerous, as it would leave the field open for unscrupulous and ambitious 

persons. So long as a policy of delay and postponement proved practicable, 

it was resolved that the risk should be taken. But at least some atomic 

scientists considered that when such a course could no longer be followed it 

would be their duty to take an active part in politics. They therefore kept in 

touch with the party of conspirators led by General Beck and the Chief 

Burgomaster of Leipzig, Gardeler. 

These physicists, some of whom had decided upon a policy of passive 

resistance only after an extremely hard struggle with their conscience, did 

not form by any means an organized and compact body. They just knew who 

'belonged'. If a newcomer attached himself to the circle, he was discreetly 

sounded. The process began with the exchange of harmless political jokes, 

continued with certain criticisms, at first mild, of the regime and gradually 

approached more and more dangerous topics. The well-known nuclear 

physicist Haxel remembers: 'By slow degrees more and more pledges of 

mutual confidence were given on both sides till eventually each of us, so to 

speak, carried the other's life in his hands. At that moment we began at last 

to talk freely together. 

The favoured meeting spot for the heretical German atomic scientists was 

either the Berlin office of Dr Paul Rosbaud, the publisher of scientific books 

and periodicals, or his modest home in the suburb of Teltow. Rosbaud, a 

temperamental Austrian who knew most of his authors intimately, showed a 

courage bordering upon recklessness in dealing with the Gestapo. If anyone 

may claim to have been the soul of passive resistance of German scientists to 

Hitler, it is this warm-hearted man. In the midst of war he upheld not only 

with words but also with deeds the idea of the solidarity of all men of good 

will. He had a habit, for example, of entering, as often as he could manage it 

- 'by mistake'-the compartments on the metropolitan railway reserved for 

foreigners on forced labour. There he would secretly distribute provisions or 

other small gifts. In the middle of the war he arranged for the French 

physicists Perou and Piattier to be allowed to translate into French, for the 

firm of Julius Springer, a famous German book on physics. Permission was 

obtained for them to be released from their prison camp to undertake the 

task. But Rosbaud had previously also obtained Joliot- Curie's consent, to 

prevent the French officers from being later charged with collaboration on 

account of their work as translators. 

Many channels of communication remained open, even during the war, 

between Joliot and the German physicists hostile to the Nazis. In the summer 

of 1940 Wolfgang Gentner, who had worked with Joliot-Curie in peacetime, 

took over his former chiefs institute, on behalf of the German military 

authorities, in occupied Paris. But he only did so after Joliot had expressly 

signified his assent to this proceeding. The two atomic scientists, whose trust 

in each other had not been in the least diminished by the war, then sat down, 

as they often had in former days, on the terrace of a cafe in the boulevard 

Saint-Michel. There they drew up, on the back of a menu, the draft of a 

solemn agreement to the effect that Joliof s laboratory was not to be used in 

any circumstances for research in the interests of the war. On many 

subsequent occasions Gentner found himself obliged to intervene personally 

to save Joliot - and also Paul Langevin - from the clutches of the SS. At last, 

in 1943, he was recalled from Paris on account of the 'weakness' he had 

shown. He was re- placed by a Nazi firebrand, who later had to be hunted for 

by the police in connexion with diamond smuggling. 

On a number of occasions the question arose among the pacifist German 

atomic scientists whether, and, if so, how, information should be conveyed 

to the other side as to the condition of German research work and the real 

intentions of the Uranium Society. Houtermans, who had suffered in the 

dungeons of the Stalinist secret police, entertained no doubts whatever on 

the matter. He argued that 'every decent man confronted by a totalitarian 

regime ought to have the pluck to commit high treason.' Heisenberg was 

probably incapable of taking up so radical an attitude. He was one of those 

people, according to Weizsacker, 'who had been so deeply shocked by the 

terror and cynicism with which the Nazis had started the war, that while, on 

the one hand, they could not bring themselves to desire a German victory, on 

the other hand they could wish as little for a German defeat, with all its 

frightful consequences.' 

Although Heisenberg may not have longed for the eventual German 

collapse, he was convinced, purely as a matter of logic, that Germany must 

lose. As he put it later in conversation: 'For Germany the war was like an 

end game in chess in which she possessed one castle less than her adversary. 

The loss of the war was as certain as the loss of an end game under these 

conditions.' 

What could be done at this stage to lighten the shock of collapse and make 

the closing phase of the war less dreadful for Germany? Such, in all 

probability, was the question Heisenberg put to his conscience at the time 

when he made up his mind to discuss the atom bomb with an influential 

foreign friend. It might be possible, by passing on the negative secret that the 

Germans did not intend to construct an atom bomb, to stop the British or 

Americans doing so - if they had any intention to use such a weapon against 

Germany - and thus save the country the horrors of atomic bombardment. 

Such considerations may have prompted, at the end of October 1 94 1 , a little- 

known peace feeler. By the expedient of a silent agreement between German 

and Allied atomic experts, the production of a morally objectionable weapon 

was to be prevented. 

Heisenberg had at that period been invited to give a lecture in occupied 

Copenhagen. He naturally looked up his old teacher and friend Niels Bohr 

on that occasion. Although Bohr, being half-Jewish, was in personal danger, 

he had remained in the Danish capital. He realized that his presence was the 

only protection that could be given to the 'non- Aryan' members of his 

Institute. He had repeatedly been urged by Allied agents to escape, but he 

had told them emphatically that he would stay in Copenhagen as long as it 

proved at all practicable. Bohr's correspondence with foreign countries was 

even more eagerly scanned by his friends than by the Nazi censors. In a 

telegram which he sent to Frisch in England shortly after the occupation of 

Copenhagen Bohr had asked after 'Miss Maud Rey at Kent'. The recipient 

could not remember ever having even heard of such a lady. He accordingly 

hit upon the idea that the words probably represented an anagram for 'radium 

taken'. He drew the reasonable conclusion that Bohr had wished to convey 

surreptitiously the information that the Germans had confiscated the stocks 

of radium in his Institute. As a matter of fact it was found very much later 

that Bohr had meant precisely what he had written in the telegram. 'There 

was no secret message. He had really only been asking after an old friend. 

But the lady's name had been somewhat garbled in dispatch. The British 

physicists, however, who had been busy with their own atom project ever 

since 1940, 1 knew nothing about that mistake at the time. 

They determined, on the receipt of the message, to give their plan, in 

honour of their master, the code-name MAUD. 

Shortly afterwards Bohr asked on a postcard, for news of an old pupil of 

his named 'D. Burns'. On that occasion, too, a secret message of profound 

importance was conjectured to be concealed beneath the words. It was 

supposed that Bohr wished to inform his Allied colleagues that his studies 

had led him to discover- that 'D' (deuterium or heavy hydrogen) is 

inflammable. 

The German physicists knew that Bohr, if he cared to do so, could at once 

establish the best possible relations between themselves and the atomic 

scientists who were working in Britain and the United States. For this reason 

he would be the ideal mediator. 

But unluckily the important interview in Copenhagen between Heisenberg 

and Bohr was ill-starred from the beginning, it had been reported to Rohr 

that Heisenberg had defended, at a reception given in his honour shortly 

before, the German invasion of Poland. The fact was that Heisenberg in 

order to disguise his true sentiments, was in the habit of expressing himself 

quite differently in society, especially abroad, from the way in which he 

called in private. But Bohr, that fanatical devotee of truth, neither could nor 

wished to recognize such a double game, learned in the hard school of 

totalitarian compulsion. Accordingly, when Heisenberg came to see him, he 

at once assumed an extremely reserved and even chilly attitude towards the 

pupil who had once been his favourite. 

Heisenberg began by entreating Bohr to realize the coercive pressure 

which had been brought to bear on the German physicists. Then he gradually 

and cautiously steered the conversation towards the question of the atom 

bomb. But unfortunately he never reached the stage of declaring frankly that 

he and his group would do everything in their power to impede the 

construction of such a weapon if the other side would consent to do likewise. 

The excessive prudence with which both men approached the subject caused 

them in the end to miss it altogether. When Heisenberg asked whether Bohr 

considered it probable That such a bomb could he constructed, the latter, 

who had heard nothing more since April 1940 about the progress - which 

had of course been kept secret - of atomic research in Britain and America, 

replied in guardedly negative terms. Thereupon Heisenberg nerved himself 

to assure the other with all the emphasis at his command that he knew it to 

be perfectly possible to produce such a weapon and that it could actually be 

manufactured, if a very great effort were made, within a very short time. 

Bohr himself was much troubled by Heisenberg's account of the position, 

so much so that he paid less than the right amount of attention to 

Heisenberg's remarks later about the dubious moral aspect of such a weapon. 

When Heisenberg took leave of his master he had the impression - which 

later events were to prove correct - that the conversation had made matters 

worse rather than better. Bohr's mistrust of the physicists who had remained 

in Hitler's Germany had not been lessened by his pupil's visit. On the 

contrary, he was now convinced that the men in question were concentrating 

intensively and successfully on the manufacture of a uranium bomb. 

To correct this false impression, a second German atomic physicist 

travelled to Copenhagen, shortly afterwards, to see Bohr. Meanwhile the 

latter's suspicions had deepened to such an extent that when young Jensen 

frankly stated what Heisenberg, in his excessive prudence, had only hinted 

at, Bohr merely believed his visitor to have been sent as an agent 

provocateur. 

As soon as the occupation of Bohr's Institute became imminent, he 

escaped, in 1943, to England via Sweden, making the journey under 

dangerous conditions. On his arrival in England, as a result of these 

interviews, he proceeded to encourage the Angle- American authorities in 

their efforts to anticipate Hitler in the construction of an atom bomb. 

* The first written reference by Heisenberg to this interview was made in 

the following letter to the author: 

As far as I remember, a] though I may be wrong after such a long time, the 

conversation came about as follows. My visit to Copenhagen took place in 

autumn 1941 actually I think it was at the end of October. At this time we in 

the Uranverein, as a result of our experiments with uranium and heavy 

water, had come to the following conclusion: 'It will definitely be possible to 

build a reactor from uranium and heavy water which will provide energy. In 

this reactor (in accordance with theoretical work of von Weizsacker) a 

decay product of uranium 239 will be produced which will be as suitable as 

uranium 235 as an explosive in atomic bombs. " We did not know a process 

for obtaining uranium 235 with the resources available under wartime 

conditions in Germany, in quantities worth mentioning. On the other hand, 

as the production of the atomic explosive can only be accomplished in huge 

reactors which have been working for years, we were convinced that the 

manufacture of atomic bombs was possible only with enormous technical 

resources. We knew that one could produce atom Bombs but overestimated 

the necessary technical expenditure at the time. This situation seemed to us 

to be a favourable one, as it enabled the physicists to influence further 

developments. If it were impossible to produce atomic bombs this problem 

would not have arisen, but if they were easily produced the physicists would 

have been unable to prevent their manufacture. This situation gave the 

physicists at that time decisive influence on further developments, since they 

could argue with the government that atomic bombs would probably not be 

available during the course of the war. On the other hand there might be a 

possibility of carrying out this project if enormous efforts were made. 

Further developments proved that both attitudes were to the point and fully 

justified - as the Americans for instance actually could not employ the 

atomic bomb against Germany. 

Under these circumstances we thought a talk with Bohr would be of value. 

This talk look place on an evening walk in a district near Ny-Carlsberg. 

Being aware that Bohr was under the surveillance of the German political 

authorities and that his assertions about me would probably be reported to 

Germany, I tried to conduct this talk in such a way as to preclude putting my 

life into immediate danger. This talk probably started with my question as to 

whether or not it was right for physicists to devote themselves in wartime to 

the uranium problem - as there was the possibility that progress in this 

sphere could lead to grave consequences in the technique of war. Bohr 

understood the meaning of this question immediately, as I realized from his 

slightly frightened reaction. He replied as far as I can remember with a 

counter-question: ' Do you really think that uranium fission could be utilized 

for the construction of weapons?' I may have replied: 7 know that this is in 

principle possible, but it would require a terrific technical effort, which, one 

can only hope, cannot be realized in this war.' Bohr was shocked by my 

reply, obviously assuming that I had intended to convey to him that Germany 

had made great progress in the direction of manufacturing atomic weapons. 

Although I tried subsequently to correct this false impression I probably did 

nor succeed in winning Bohr's complete trust, especially as I only dared to 

speak guardedly (which was definitely a mistake on my part), being afraid 

that some phrase or other could later be held against me. I was very 

unhappy; about the result of this conversation. 

Heisenberg, however, says that he is unable today to recollect the precise 

wording of this talk. If one could interpret the content of this conversation in 

psychological terms, it would depend on very fine nuances indeed. As 

neither of the two participants possesses a stenographic record, Heisenberg's 

notes, done from memory- with all their reservations-are the best existing 

source. 

7 THE LABORATORY BECOMES A BARRACK 1942-45 

It seems paradoxical that the German nuclear physicists, living under a 

sabre-rattling dictatorship, obeyed the voice of conscience and attempted to 

prevent the construction of atom bombs, while their professional colleagues 

in the democracies, who had no coercion to fear, with very few exceptions 

concentrated their whole energies on production of the new weapon. 

Fifteen years later a German scientist tried to explain this situation in the 

following words: 'We were really no better, morally or intellectually, than 

our foreign colleagues. But by the time the war began we had already 

learned from the bitter experience of nearly seven years under Hitler that one 

had to treat the state and its executive organizations with suspicion and 

reserve. The citizens of totalitarian countries are rarely good patriots. But 

our colleagues elsewhere had at that time complete confidence in the 

decency and sense of justice of their governments.' The speaker hesitated for 

a moment and then added: 'I doubt, incidentally, whether exactly the same 

situation prevails in those countries today.' 

On the outbreak of war there was a general movement among scientists in 

the nations threatened by Hitler to support their governments. This was a 

magnificent vote of confidence in the justice and moral responsibility in 

practice of the democratic system. It was all the more astonishing because 

the scientist is not at heart an ideal citizen but one never satisfied, eternally 

striving for what is new. It is his nature to call in question the existing order 

of things and seek for new and improved solutions of problems. This 

tendency of scientists to criticize and amend could be much better 

understood by a democratic government than by a rigidly authoritarian and 

totalitarian regime. In fact it was of positive advantage to a democracy. It 

was invariably true at that time that the conservative element was chiefly 

represented by the military authorities. Their opposition to ail new weapons 

was great, hut never so strong as in the atom project. American nuclear 

physicists were still chuckling, years later, over stories illustrative of the 

widespread mistrust and short-sightedness at first evident among the 

representatives of the armed forces about the plans of 'those fools'. Senior 

officers who had grown grey in the service of their country gave those whom 

they interviewed and to whom they were bound to listen in obedience to 

commands from above clearly to understand that they had little more respect 

for their visitors than they had for other crazy inventors who were 

smothering the Army and the Navy with designs for every conceivable type 

of wonder- working weapon, most of them utterly impracticable. 'Only the 

other day', an American officer growled at a group of atomic scientists 

during one such conference, 'someone sent me another of those death-ray 

generators. I tried the thing out on our regimental mascot, a he-goat. The 

brute's still as lively as ever!' 

Nevertheless, the nuclear physicists gradually succeeded, with the help of 

civilian officials and politicians, in overcoming the resistance of the Colonel 

Blimps. Their success proved most rapid in France. After the outbreak of 

war, when Joliot-Curie called on the Minister of Munitions, Raoul Dautry, 

and told him about the possibility of atomic weapons, Dautry, a former 

industrialist who had always previously kept his eyes open for the 

acquisition of new technical devices, positively reproached his visitor for not 

having come to see him before. Joliot's account of the significance of 

uranium and heavy water in atomic research caused Dautry to act at once. At 

the time of the German invasion France not only possessed larger stocks of 

uranium oxide than any other country in the world, but also all the heavy 

water existing in Europe - only 185 kilograms (36 cwt) in all, which had 

been bought from the Norwegian firm Norsk Hydro in March 1940 by the 

French special commissioner Jacques Allier and brought to France by air in 

twelve sealed aluminium containers. 

On 16 May 1940, the telephone rang in the office of Henri Moureux, 

Deputy Director of the Nuclear Chemistry Laboratory at the College de 

France. Joliot-Curie was on the line. He requested his collaborator to come 

and see him immediately. On his arrival he announced with visible 

excitement: 'The front has been penetrated near Sedan. Dautry has just 

telephoned to me. The heavy water will have to be taken to a safe place at 

once.' That same night the containers of the valuable 'Product Z', as it was 

known in code, were sent to central France. They were stored in the 

underground depositories of a branch of the Bank of France at Clermont- 

Ferrand. 

On 10 June 1940, Joliot and his closest associates had already begun 

burning all the papers which gave any indication of the state of his atomic 

research, to leave the Germans, already quite near Paris, no information 

about his work. It was a precautionary measure which unfortunately proved 

useless. A few days later copies of these documents, together with many 

other files of the French War Office, fell into the hands of German troops at 

Charitesurloire. 

Joliot stayed in Paris. He did not want to be separated from his precious 

laboratory apparatus, which included a recently completed cyclotron, the 

first ever made in Central and Western Europe. He entrusted to his 

collaborators Halban and Kowarski, who had set up a temporary refuge for 

the nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry centre in the villa Clair Logis at 

Clermont- Ferrand, the task of transferring the heavy water to England via 

Bordeaux. Halban tells the story: 

One night we deposited our valuable consignment for safe keeping in the 

State Prison at Riom. The place in the prison which was most secure from 

intrusion was the death cell, which was cleared for the time being to make 

room for our water bottles. The dislodged convicts under sentence of death 

themselves carried the heavy containers into the cell. Next morning the 

Governor of the prison, probably already in fear of the new masters, refused 

to release the deposited articles. Dautry's special commissioner had to 

threaten him with a drawn revolver before he would give them up. Then we 

were able to continue our journey. 

After many hazardous incidents the heavy water reached Bordeaux and 

was put aboard the British collier Broompark. The fugitive atomic experts 

were aided by the Earl of Suffolk, Scientific Attach- at the British Embassy 

in Paris. This adventurous English peer had once, in his youth, run away 

from home and signed on aboard ship. He had learned carpentry in those 

days and it now stood him in good stead. In great haste he built a seaworthy 

raft aboard which the aluminium canisters containing the precious Product Z 

were securely stowed, together with industrial diamonds valued at 23 million 

pounds sterling. Halban and Kowarski solemnly promised the Earl that if the 

Broompark came to grief for any reason whatever, by striking a mine or 

being hit by air bombardment, they would get the raft out of the hold, launch 

it and, come what might, stick to it in the open sea. But this precaution 

eventually proved to have been unnecessary. The ship, with its strategically 

important cargo, reached England in safety. A vessel which left Bordeaux at 

the same time as the collier was sunk, and Joliot tricked the German counter- 

espionage into believing that the heavy water had been aboard the lost ship. 

Work on the problem of atomic fission had begun also with government 

support in England. No sooner had George P. Thomson, Professor of 

Physics at the Imperial College in London, read in lecture, in the spring of 

1939, the studies by Joliot and his associates on the phenomena of neutron 

emission, than he got into touch with Henry (now Sir Henry) Tizard, who 

had been in charge of the Research Department of the Royal Air Force since 

1934. With Tizard's recommendation Thomson called at the Air Ministry. 

He reported later that he had felt like a character in a third-rate thriller while 

he was explaining to the officials at the Ministry what tremendous 

consequences these discoveries might have for the development of power in 

industry and war. His sensational revelations were however taken quite 

seriously and he was offered, though in somewhat sceptical terms, a ton of 

uranium oxide and a small sum of money to assist him in his researches. 

This ready response may have been influenced by certain information which 

had been received concerning the meeting of German atomic experts at the 

Reich Ministry of Education. The news had been brought from Berlin by the 

English physicist R. S. Hutton in the middle of May. It is true that Thomson 

was informed, on the outbreak of war, that he could expect no priority of 

supplies for his experiments. There were more urgent matters to be dealt 

with just then. 

It was mainly foreign physicists not cleared by security who were 

consulted about the work on atomic fission, regarded as 'not essential to the 

war effort', which was being directed by British subjects, Thomson, 

Chadwick, and Feather. The first of these foreigners were Frisch, who had 

just escaped from Copenhagen to England, Rudolf Peierls, Joseph Rotblat, 

Franz Simon, and eventually, after their flight from France, Halban and 

Kowarski. The best-known refugee physicist, Max Bom, was teaching in 

Edinburgh. His wife, a Quaker, had persuaded him to have nothing to do 

with any war work. Shortly afterwards one of his most talented students 

joined Peierls's team. This was Klaus Fuchs, a German parson's son who had 

fled to England via Paris. He took a leading part in the calculations of the 

critical size of the bomb. 

In the United States only very slow progress was at first made in the field 

of atomic research. It was nearly ten weeks before Alexander Sachs at last 

found an opportunity, on 1 1 October 1939, to hand President Roosevelt, in 

person, the letter com- posed by Szilard and signed by Einstein at the 

beginning of August. In order to ensure that the President should thoroughly 

appreciate the contents of the document and not lay it aside with a heap of 

other papers awaiting attention, Sachs read to him, in addition to the 

message and an appended memorandum by Szilard, a further much more 

comprehensive statement by himself. The effect of these communications 

was by no means so overpowering as Sachs had expected. Roosevelt, 

wearied by the prolonged effort of listening to his visitor, made an attempt to 

disengage himself from the whole affair. He told the disappointed reader that 

he found it all very interesting but considered government intervention to be 

premature at this stage. 

Sachs, however, was able, as he took his leave, to extort from the 

President the consolation of an invitation to breakfast the following morning. 

'That night I didn't sleep a wink,' Sachs remembers. 'I was staying at the 

Carlton Hotel. I paced restlessly to and fro in my room or tried to sleep 

sitting in a chair. There was a small park quite close to the hotel. Three or 

four times, 1 believe, between eleven in the evening and seven in the 

morning, I left the hotel, to the porter's amazement, and went across to the 

park. There I sat on a bench and meditated. What could 1 say to get the 

President on our side in this affair, which was already beginning to look 

practically hopeless? Quite suddenly, like an inspiration, the right idea came 

to me. I returned to the hotel, took a shower and shortly afterwards called 

once more at the White House. 

Roosevelt was sitting alone at the breakfast table, in his wheel chair, when 

Sachs entered the room. The President inquired in an ironical tone: 

'What bright idea have you got now? How much time would you like to 

explain it?' 

Dr Sachs says he replied that he would not take long. 

'All I want to do is to tell you a story. During the Napoleonic wars a 

young American inventor came to the French Emperor and offered to build a 

fleet of steamships with the help of which Napoleon could, in spite of the 

uncertain weather, land in England. Ships without sails? This seemed to the 

great Corsican so impossible that he sent Fulton away. In the opinion of the 

English historian Lord Acton, this is an example of how England was saved 

by the short-sightedness of an adversary. Had Napoleon shown more 

imagination and humility at that time, the history of the nineteenth century 

would have taken a very different course.' 

After Sachs finished speaking the President remained silent for several 

minutes. Then he wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to the 

servant who had been waiting at table. The latter soon returned with a parcel 

which, at Roosevelt's order, he began slowly to unwrap. It contained a bottle 

of old French brandy of Napoleon's time, which the Roosevelt family had 

possessed for many years. The President, still maintaining a significant 

silence, told the man to fill two glasses. Then he raised his own, nodded to 

Sachs, and drank to him. 

Next he remarked: 'Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't 

blow us up?' 

Precisely. 

It was only then that Roosevelt called in his attache, General 'Pa' Watson, 

and addressed him - pointing to the documents Sachs had brought - in words 

which have since become famous: 

'Pa, this requires action !' 

The success of American atomic research during the war, which 

astonished the world, coloured later descriptions of the subject. What was 

seen in retrospect as a difficult but straight road leading to its goal was really 

a labyrinth of winding streets and blind alleys. 

Teller criticizes as follows one of these excessively rosy views of the 

early history of the American atom bomb: 'There is no mention of the futile 

efforts of the scientists in 1939 to awaken the interest of the military 

authorities in the atomic bomb. The reader does not learn about the dismay 

of scientists faced with the necessity of planned research. He does not find 

out about the indignation of engineers asked to believe in the theory and on 

such an airy basis to construct a plant.' 

Wigner remembers the resistance. 'We often felt as though we were 

swimming in syrup,' he remarks. Boris Pregel, a radium expert, without 

whose disinterested loan of uranium the first experiments al Columbia 

University would have been impossible, comments: 'It is a wonder that after 

so many blunders and mistakes anything was ever accomplished at all.' 

Szilard still believes today that work on the uranium project was delayed for 

at least a year by the short-sightedness and sluggishness of the authorities. 

Even Roosevelt's manifest interest in the plan scarcely accelerated its 

execution. Sachs knew his way pretty well about the jungle of bureaucratic 

intrigue. At first he succeeded in preventing the Army or Navy from 

monopolizing the project. He proposed that Briggs, the director of the 

National Bureau of Standards, should be put in supreme control of the plan. 

But Briggs, though able enough, was a sick man, due at the time to undergo 

a serious operation. He could not take such energetic action as might often 

be necessary. It seemed for a while as though both he and the entire 'Project 

S-I', as it was provisionally called, would take leave of their precarious lives 

simultaneously. But Briggs recovered and S-I, too. 

Before the end of June 1940 there was no hope of obtaining any funds 

from the government for atomic research. On the contrary, criticism of a 

'plan that had no prospects of success mounted in volume. A second letter 

from Einstein, dated 7 March 1 940, called attention to the 'intensification of 

German interest in uranium since the beginning of the war'. But this 

communication did little good. It was not until the reports on the progress of 

British atomic research, which Dr R. H. Fowler sent regularly to Briggs after 

July 1940, on the instructions of his government, became more and more 

positive that the official interest of Washington revived. By July 1941 a 

memorandum by the Thomson committee, basing its opinion on the work 

being done in Britain, had declared that it seemed 'quite probable that the 

atom bomb may be manufactured before the end of the war.' And so at last, 

on 6 December 1941, just one day, as it happened, before the Japanese 

attack on Pearl Harbour and America's official entry into the war, the long- 

delayed decision was taken to apply substantial financial and technical 

resources in earnest to the construction of the weapon. 

It was the scientists of European origin who devoted themselves with the 

greatest determination to the project. During its early stages they were 

severely handicapped by being 'aliens' or even, like Fermi, who came from 

Italy, 'enemy aliens'. The trouble became so serious that Wigner, offended 

by the mistrust he encountered, informed Briggs in writing that in these 

circumstances he would unfortunately be obliged to withdraw from any 

work concerned with atomic-research development. His grievances were 

later satisfied and he became one of the most important collaborators in the 

plan. The British were much more generous in this respect. After some 

preliminary hesitation they treated the scientists who had taken refuge with 

them as entitled to the same rights as themselves. Weisskopf remembers that 

as a former Austrian he only obtained permission from the American 

authorities with difficulty to attend a special conference with three English 

gentlemen. The three visitors, when they arrived from London, turned out to 

be Halban, Peierls, and Simon, who had all been, like Weisskopf himself, 

Central Europeans until a short time before. 

The countless administrative and technical obstacles which blocked the 

road to the release of atomic energy were finally overcome simply and 

solely by the determination and obstinacy of the scientists resident in the 

Anglo-Saxon countries. They did much more than obey orders. They 

repeatedly took the initiative in bringing that mighty weapon into the world. 

Their initiative was perhaps the most important 'raw material' used in the 

achievement of atomic power, but their enthusiasm, which surmounted every 

difficulty and was founded upon a passionate belief in the justice of the 

Allied cause, did not bring them much appreciation. 

Many scientists were inspired at that time by the honest conviction that 

this was the best, in fact the only, way to prevent employment of the atomic 

weapon during the current war. 'We must have some counter-measure 

available to meet any possible threat of atomic warfare by Germany. If we 

only had such a thing both Hitler and ourselves would be obliged to 

renounce the use of such a monstrosity.' So said the few who were in on the 

secret. 

The notion that the Germans already had a dangerous start in the atomic- 

armaments race had become so deep rooted that it was treated as a certainty. 

'We were told day in and day out that it was our duty to catch up with the 

Germans,' recalls Leona Marshall, one of the few women in the project. 

There was never any doubt of this hypothesis. It silenced scruples that 

occasion- ally cropped up. In 1941 the chemical expert Professor Reiche, 

who had escaped from Germany a few weeks before, arrived at Princeton. 

He brought a message from Houtermans to the effect that the German 

physicists had hitherto not been working at the production of the bomb and 

would continue to try, for as long as possible, to divert the minds of the 

German military authorities from such a possibility. This news was passed 

on from Princeton to Washington by another scientist who had emigrated to 

America, the physicist Rudolf Ladenburg. But it does not seem ever to have 

reached those actually engaged on the atomic project. A year later Jomar 

Bran, former technical manager of the heavy- water works at Rjukan in 

Norway, who had fled to Sweden after the occupation by German troops in 

1940, stated that he had been told by Hans Suess, the German atomic expert 

employed there, that production at Rjukan could not attain the dimensions 

important for war purposes in much less than five years. The Rjukan factory 

was, however, destroyed in a heroic but actually pointless raid carried out by 

Allied Commando troops and aircraft. 

Was it possible that such reports were simply not believed, or did people 

not want to believe them? Otherwise, would not the zeal and speed of the 

work of those engaged on Project S-I have diminished? 

In 1942 the Allied atomic project entered an entirely new phase. 

Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to concentrate the work of the British and 

American research teams in Canada and the United States. In the United 

States supreme control of atomic research was transferred from the scientists 

to a Military Policy Committee consisting of three members of the Armed 

Forces: General Styer, Admiral Purnell, and General Leslie Groves, and only 

two professional investigators, Dr Vannevar Bush and Dr James Conant. 

After 13 August 1942, the whole plan became known under the code name 

of either the D SM (development of substitute materials) or the 'Manhattan 

Project'. From then on the atomic experts were simply designated 'scientific 

personnel' and obliged to submit to the strict rules of military secrecy. It was 

probably the first time in history that so brilliant a group of minds had 

voluntarily undertaken to adopt a mode of work and existence so unlike their 

normal way of life. They accepted as obvious the rule that they were to 

publish no more of their discoveries until after the war. They had 

themselves, after all, been the first to propose, even before the war, that 

secrecy should be maintained. But the military authorities went much further 

than this prohibition They erected invisible walls round every branch of 

research, so that no department ever knew what any other was doing. Barely 

a dozen of the total number of some 150,000 persons eventually employed 

on the Manhattan Project were allowed an over-all view of the plan as a 

whole. In fact only a very small number of the staff knew that they were 

working on the production of an atom bomb at all. For example, the majority 

of workers at the computing centre in Los Alamos had for long no idea of 

the real purpose to be served by the complicated calculations they carried 

out on the computing machines. This ignorance prevented their taking any 

genuine interest in the job. At last Feynman, one of the young theoretical 

physicists, managed to obtain permission to tell these people what was going 

to be done at Los Alamos. Thereupon the services rendered by the 

department reached a considerably higher standard and some of the staff, 

from that time forward, worked overtime of their own accord. 

In cases where the exchange of views between members of separate 

branches was found absolutely necessary special sanction for this step had to 

be obtained in the first place from the military directorate. The physicist 

Henry D. Smyth, subsequently author of the official report on the entire 

project, became involved, owing to these regulations, in a conflict of an 

unusual nature. Since he was in charge of two departments simultaneously, 

he would have been able, strictly speaking, to talk to himself only after- 

having obtained prior permission to do so. 

This so-called ' compartmentalization ' was decreed in spite of the fact that 

intensive security measures had already been taken by police investigation, 

cross-examination, and questionnaires to check the previous private and 

political activities as well as the personal reliability of every collaborator in 

the plan, all of whose movements were subjected to a system of observation 

thought out to the smallest detail. Every inhabitant of the three 'secret cities' 

- Oak Ridge, Hanford, or Los Alamos - could only receive or- dispatch 

correspondence through the censorship. If any passage in such a letter 

displeased one of the censors, he was nor satisfied with the usual procedure 

of cutting out certain undesirable words. He simply returned the letter to the 

sender for redrafting, the object being to prevent the recipient at all costs 

from being mystified in any way. Telephone conversations were regularly 

listened to by a third party, and hotel porters in the neighbourhood of each 

project were employed as counter-espionage agents. 

The most prominent of the atomic experts were provided with official 

bodyguards who followed them everywhere. In addition, a special watch 

was kept upon those who were not regarded,, on political or any other 

grounds, as 100 per cent reliable. Agents followed in their footsteps. 

Microphones were concealed in their offices and private residences to record 

their conversations. The head of the security division of the Manhattan 

Project, John Lansdale, Jr, admitted after the war that certain other methods 

of supervision and tricks were employed which have not been disclosed even 

today. 

He considered them, however, so dishonourable that he only referred to 

them, when generalizing on the subject, as 'nasty things'. The scientists 

themselves were actually asked to render active assistance in the spinning of 

this web of prying. In addition to keeping silence about their work it was 

supposed to be their duty to tell lies to third parties about what they did and 

where they lived. Not even their closest relatives were to be given the merest 

hints as to where and in what business they were employed. Counter- 

espionage turned every husband working in one of the laboratories into a 

Lohengrin who had to tell his Elsa, 'You must never ask me any questions.' 

Some of the scientists, naturally enough, would not allow the shadow of 

'security' to fall between them and their nearest and dearest. Wives who were 

in on the secret then had the difficult task of behaving, in the company of the 

wives of other physicists who submitted to the rule, as if they were equally 

unsuspecting. The leading spirit in the management of the Manhattan Project 

was a professional soldier named Leslie Richard Groves. He was forty-six 

years old when he was entrusted, on 17 September 1942, with the 

administration of atomic research. There was one thing that worried 'Greasy' 

Groves, as he had been known at West Point Military Academy. Throughout 

his professional career he had only held desk commands. For this reason he 

had remained a lieutenant for sixteen years and had only been appointed to 

the provisional rank of colonel since the outbreak of war. He had at last, on 

the eve of his nomination as head of the Manhattan Project, been offered an 

active service command, and was accordingly by no means delighted when 

his immediate superior sent for him and told him he had now been selected 

for a post at home, though it was the biggest job of the war and might be 

destined to make the decisive contribution to victory. General Groves - for 

this appointment bestowed upon him, by way of consolation, the rank he had 

been waiting for so long - had been considered for the position he was now 

to occupy because he had more experience of supervising building 

construction than any other officer in the Army. He had been in charge of 

the erection of a number of barracks. But in particular he had directed that of 

the gigantic new War Department Pentagon. He was now to conjure into 

being the secret 'atom cities', with their laboratories, and administer them. 

Both externally and internally they assumed, under his direction, the aspect 

of barracks. 

When Groves assembled his staff at Los Alamos for the first time, he 

began his speech - as was soon afterwards generally reported in the town- 

with the words: 'Your job won't be easy. At great expense we have gathered 

here the largest collection of crackpots ever seen. Groves did not always 

trust the official tests and supervision imposed on the scientists. In one case 

he arbitrarily demanded of the War Department the instant internment, as an 

enemy alien, of a scientist of non- American origin who was working in Los 

Alamos, though the General admitted that he had not the least evidence 

against the man. When he was asked, accordingly, on what grounds he made 

his application, he answered that his 'intuition' was good enough. He couldn't 

accuse the man of disloyalty or treason, Groves said, but just didn't trust him 

and considered him a detriment to the project'. 

The Secretary of War adhered to the general rule in democratic countries 

that no one may be accused or condemned on insufficient evidence. He 

refused to sanction the 'protective custody’ proposed by Groves. Groves 

regarded this decision as simply one more proof of the credulousness and 

laxity of the civil authorities. He later claimed that whenever possible he 

acted on his own responsibility, against the will of Washington. In 1954 he 

boasted: 'I was not responsible for our close cooperation with the British: I 

tried to make it as difficult as possible. 

The enterprising General and those whose enterprise was confined to the 

atomic field were too diverse in character to be able to come to any genuine 

mutual understanding. Groves felt - as he still feels -that they underestimated 

his intelligence. Accordingly, he repeatedly tried to prove to them that his 

ability was at least equal to theirs even in their own sphere. 'The first time 

we had any serious discussion', he relates, 'in the newly established 

Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, I caught the gentlemen in a mistake in 

arithmetic. They sure didn't fool me. There were a few Nobel prize winners 

among them. But I showed them, just the same, where they were wrong and 

they couldn't deny it. They never forgave me for that.' 

In reality 'Gee Gee', as his irreverent recruits with high intelligence 

quotients called him, was by no means despised, but rather admired, by 

those very persons. It was not so much his mathematical gifts, of which he 

himself was so proud, that they appreciated, as his undeniable tenacity and 

stubbornness. The atomic scientist Philip Morrison states: 'For a time I 

worked next door to one of his many offices and was amazed one day to 

hear him discuss the need for the acquisition of a tennis net with the same 

seriousness and for just as long as that for the expenditure of a million 

dollars on some experiment of quite uncertain prospects. In the end he 

refused to throw away the few dollars required to buy the tennis net but 

sanctioned the million to finance the experiment. I believe he would have 

fenced in the moon if he had been told it would facilitate our project. 

It was not always easy for Groves to defend his decisions, which often 

seemed pointless. 'Why build a road with eight traffic lanes to the plutonium 

works at Hanford?' asked the roadmen, who were miserably housed in 

adjoining barracks. 'It's sheer waste of money!' But Groves could not tell 

them that his road, though admittedly expensive, was a security measure. 

Two or four lanes would have been enough for ordinary traffic. In the case 

of an explosion, always possible, the eight lanes would only just suffice to 

rescue the men at work and the families living near as quickly as possible 

from the radioactive fumes. 

Groves also occasionally took a false step, as was inevitable in the 

performance of so great and novel a task. His critics are able to list quite a 

number- of such erroneous decisions, taken too hurriedly or without 

considering all the factors involved, but the General is even today, in his 

disarming naivete, convinced of the contrary. 'You ask me why I haven't 

yet written my memoirs'." said he to a visitor eleven years after the war. 

'Well, it's simply because I was always right. And no one would ever believe 

that al- even for-give me for it.’ 

The scientists only pretended, of course, right from the start, to observe 

the con7pal-tmentalization which Groves was so particularly anxious to 

maintain. After the war Szilard gave the following account of the matter to a 

committee of Congress: 'These kinds of rules could not be obeyed if you 

wanted to obey them. But we did not want to obey them because we had to 

choose between obeying these rules and sabotaging or slowing down our 

work, and we used common sense in place of obeying rules. Hardly a week 

passed that somebody did not come to my office at Chicago from 

somewhere, wanting to convey a piece of information to which I was not 

entitled. They usually did not ask me to conceal the fact that I came into 

possession of this information. All they asked was that I conceal from the 

Army the fact that they were the persons who had given it to me. ' 

Szilard had been the first, in former days, to advocate that secrecy - of 

course only to a reasonable extent-should be maintained about scientific 

data. But he now became one of the first to be caught in the network of 

censorship regulations. A minor war flared up between Szilard and Groves, 

and it did not come to an end till long after the close of the Second World 

War. 'Sure,' Groves admitted, ‘we should never have had an atom bomb if 

Szilard had not shown such determination during the first years of the war. 

But as soon as we got going, so far as I was concerned he might just as well 

have walked the plank !' 

Bohr found it particularly difficult to obey the secrecy regulations. After 

his escape from Denmark he was treated less as a man than as an 

extraordinarily valuable secret weapon which must on no account fall into 

the hands of the enemy. Accordingly, when this dangerously intelligent 

'consignment' was flown across the North Sea in a Mosquito, Bohr was 

given a seat just over the bomb bay, so that by turning a handle he could he 

dropped into the sea, a manoeuvre which would be cancelled out at once in 

the case of a German attack. Bohr arrived in London more dead than alive. 

For in his absorption in some problem of physics he had not heard the pilot 

tell him to put on his oxygen mask. Consequently when the plane reached a 

great height, he fainted. 

When Bohr, accompanied by his son Aage, landed in New York, two 

British detectives were with him. Unknown to the detectives, two secret- 

service men from the Manhattan Project organization joined the protective 

party, along with two officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bohr, 

the champion of freedom and straightforward dealing, was not pleased at 

being supervised by half a dozen watchdogs. He tried as often as he could to 

get away from them. It was really not easy for them to keep him 

unobtrusively in view, for he generally crossed the New York streets at 

prohibited places, obliging no fewer than six guardians of the law to join 

him in breaking traffic regulations. 

Bohr could never get used to being called in the United States, on security 

grounds, by the name of 'Nicholas Baker'. Immediately after his escort had 

reminded him once more of this precaution he encountered, in the elevator 

of a skyscraper, the wife of his old colleague Halban. However, this lady had 

been divorced since their- last meeting. 'Are you not Frau von Halban?' Bohr 

inquired courteously. She retorted sharply: 'No, you are mistaken. My name 

is Placzek now.' But on turning to race him she exclaimed in astonishment: 

'But surely you are Professor Bohr!' He replied with a smile, placing his 

finger on his lips: 'No, you are mistaken. My name is Baker now. 

Before Bohr arrived for the first time in Los Alamos, Groves went to meet 

him. The General lectured him in the train, for twelve hours, on what he was 

and was not to say henceforth. Bohr kept on nodding. But once more Groves 

was disappointed. 'Within five minutes after his arrival', the General reported 

later, in describing this prize specimen of his collection of 'crackpots', 'he 

was saying everything he promised he would not say. 

The enfant terrible amongst the atomic scientists was the theoretical 

physicist Richard Feynman, as young as he was gifted. To enrage the 

censors he instructed his wife to send him letters to Los Alamos which were 

tom into hundreds of small pieces. The officials charged with the checking 

of correspondence were obliged to fit all the fragments of this jigsaw puzzle 

together again. It also afforded Feynman great amusement to work out the 

combination numbers of the steel safes in which the most important data of 

research were kept. In one case he actually succeeded, after weeks of study, 

in opening the main file cupboard at the records centre in Los Alamos while 

the officer in charge of it was absent for a few minutes. Feynman contented 

himself, in the brief period during which he had all the atomic secrets at his 

disposal, with placing in the safe a scrap of paper on which he had written, 

'Guess who?' He was then able to feast his eyes on the horror of the security 

official as the latter perused the message which had found its way into the 

innermost sanctum of the Manhattan Project in some manner he was utterly 

unable to understand. 

Groves could pardon Bohr his transgression of the sacred security 

regulations. He was even prepared to overlook Feynman's tricks, for they 

had the advantage, in his view, of keeping the security officials 'on their 

toes'. But the distinguished American scientist Edward U. Condon, one of 

the pioneers of experimental physics in the United States, excited a wrath in 

the General that remained implacable. Groves himself had invited Condon, 

in the summer of 1943, to act as his deputy in Los Alamos, working side by 

side with J. Robert Oppenheimer, then recently appointed head of the new 

bomb laboratory. Condon had acted as adviser to big industrial firms and 

possessed practical experience in dealing with questions of production, a 

qualification outside the province of the university-trained Oppenheimer. 

Simply because Condon did possess this experience he saw at once that 

compartmentalization was not practicable in Los Alamos without injury to 

the work. He therefore drew up rules of his own which demolished the 

artificial barriers erected between the separate departments. This step was 

regarded by Groves as downright insubordination. He caused Condon to be 

transferred elsewhere. The General considered that he could deal more easily 

with Oppenheimer in isolation, for his influence over the latter was 

uncommonly effective. The other atomic scientists could not understand at 

the time why this was so. It was not until much later that they found out the 

explanation. 

8 THE RISE OF OPPENHEIMER 1939-43 

AT the time of Robert Oppenheimer's final appointment in July 1943 to 

the directorship of Los Alamos laboratory he was in his fortieth year. For 

many people this year is the most important of their lives. It is then that they 

draw up their first real balance sheet. Then, perhaps, for the first time they 

seriously put to the judge who presides in the mind of each one of us the 

question: 'How much of what r wanted to do in my youth have I actually 

accomplished? How much have I failed to do?’ 

Oppenheimer might well have been satisfied with what he had so far 

achieved. In the world of atomic research he was regarded as a theorist to be 

taken seriously. In university circles he was considered a particularly 

successful and popular teacher. The young man who had graduated with 

distinction under Max Bom at Gottingen in 1927 found, when he returned 

home after two years' further study in Leyden and Zurich, that his high 

scientific reputation had preceded him. He was courted by a number of big 

universities. After some hesitation he decided to accept the offer of the 

University of California at Berkeley. When the dean of his faculty asked him 

what had caused him finally to decide in favour of them he answered, 

greatly to the other's astonishment: 'Just a few old books. I was enchanted by 

the collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French poetry in the 

university library. 

Oppenheimer taught not only at Berkeley but also at the California 

Institute of Technology in Pasadena. As soon as he ended a course of 

lectures at the university most of his students would follow him, for the 

ensuing term, to this second seat of learning near Los Angeles. Despite his 

youth, 'Oppie', as they called him, had come to be looked upon as a master 

and model by the rising generation of physicists in America, just as the great 

men of atomic research in Europe had been regarded by himself only a few 

years before. The veneration felt by the students for their hero was so great 

that consciously or unconsciously they imitated many of his personal 

peculiarities. They held their heads a little on one side just as he did. They 

coughed Slightly and paused significantly between successive sentences. 

They held their hands in front of their lips when they spoke. Their ways of 

expressing themselves were often difficult to understand. They were fond of 

making obscure comparisons which Sounded most pregnant and sometimes 

actually were so. Oppenheimer, himself a confirmed smoker, had the habit 

of clicking open his lighter and jumping up whenever anyone took out a 

cigarette or pipe. His students could be recognized from afar in the campus 

cafeterias Of Berkeley and Pasadena by their custom of darting about from 

time to time, like marionettes on invisible strings, with tiny flames between 

their fingers. 

Yet, unlike Rutherford, Bohr, and Born, who had been both great teachers 

and great discoverers, Oppenheimer had not hitherto brought any epoch- 

making new ideas to light. He had certainly gathered a loyal circle of 

associates about him. But he had not yet established his own school of 

thought in physics. The many scientific papers he published in the 

periodicals of various countries unquestionably constituted valuable sections 

to the growing edifice Of modem physics. But they laid no new foundations 

for it. 

Oppenheimer's friends believed he was worried at not having climbed to 

the highest peaks of creative work in physics like Heisenberg, Dirac, Joliot, 

and Fermi, who were about the same age as himself. His achievements 

might be considered exceptional by the academic world. But in his own 

more critical eyes he had not done enough. And since he was aware that, as 

past experience had shown, it was nearly always only the young who were 

still capable of radical thinking, who hit on really new ideas, he was bound, 

as his fortieth year approached, to consider that he had failed to realize his 

highest hopes. 

At this stage he was suddenly offered an opportunity to accomplish 

something exceptional in quite another direction. He was invited to take 

charge of the construction of the mightiest weapon of all time. 

Oppenheimer had been thinking about the atom bomb ever since he had 

first heard, during a lecture by Bohr, of uranium fission and the vast 

quantities of energy it liberated. At a gathering in Washington in 1939 the 

Danish scientist had referred to the work of Hahn. But he had also drawn 

attention in particular to the deductions from it in the sphere of physics made 

by Frisch and Meitner. The information caused such a sensation that some 

physicists in the audience did not even wait to hear the end of the exposition 

but mshed straight off to their laboratories to reconstmct the experiments 

mentioned. A telegram containing a summary of Bohr's explanations was 

also sent to the physics department of the University of California. The 

German physicist Gentner, who was then working as a guest at the radiation 

laboratory at Berkeley, recollects that the very same day Oppie started on a 

rough calculation of the critical mass which could bring about explosion. 

Nearly two years passed, however, before Oppenheimer was invited for 

the first lime to participate in the secret initial studies of the uranium 

problem. In the autumn of 1941 he attended, at the request of the Nobel 

prize winner A. H. Compton, the two- day session of a special committee of 

the National Academy of Sciences, called to advise on the military 

application of atomic energy. 

After this first contact with a complex of questions which were in the end 

to decide his destiny Oppenheimer at first re- turned to his teaching duties. 

But from that time on he could never rid his mind of the problems raised by 

the new weapon. In addition to his academic obligations he devoted much of 

his leisure to estimating how much uranium 235 might be necessary to cause 

atomic explosion. He was engaging in the same calculations Rudolf Peierls 

and his assistant Klaus Fuchs were carrying out at about the same time on 

the other side of the Atlantic, in England . 

Oppenheimer also began, on his own initiative, to work in association 

with the Radiation Laboratory of his university. This group was directed by 

Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron. They were experimenting 

with an electromagnetic method of separating uranium 235, in which a chain 

reaction can be brought about, from uranium 238, which is not susceptible of 

fission. Oppenheimer proceeded, with the aid of two students, to make a 

discovery which reduced the costs of this method by between 50 and 75 per 

cent. 

Compton was so impressed by Oppenheimer's work, which no one had 

specially requested him to carry out, that at the beginning of 1942, when the 

American efforts to construct an atom bomb started on a grand scale, he 

asked Oppenheimer to give all his time to the project. In July of that year, 

during the summer vacation, Oppenheimer assumed the direction of a small 

group which discussed for a few exciting weeks the theoretical nature of the 

best kind of 'FF- (fast fission) bomb'. During these discussions, incidentally, 

mention was made for the first time, in definite terms, of a hydrogen bomb. 

But the question of its practical realization was shelved for the time being 

because it involved too many unknown factors. 

Compton again expressed his great satisfaction with Oppenheimer's 

reports of progress. The latter's predecessor in charge of the group studying 

theory had been an excellent scientist but a bad organizer. 'Under 

Oppenheimer', Compton recalls, 'something really got done, and done at 

astonishing speed. 

Oppenheimer came to the conclusion, in the course of his connexion with 

the atom-bomb project, that the efforts of the various laboratories scatter-ed 

all over the vast territory of the United States, as well as throughout England 

and Canada, would have to be concentrated at one particular spot; otherwise 

duplication of proceedings and confusion would be bound to result. He 

considered that a group of laboratories should be established at one place 

where collective work would be done tinder the direction of a single man by 

theoretical and experimental physicists, mathematicians, armament experts, 

specialists in radium chemistry and metallurgy, and technicians dealing with 

explosives and precision measurement. 

Oppenheimer's idea found considerable support. As he was not only the 

spiritual father of the proposed new super laboratory but had also proved 

himself to be so outstanding as head of a team, Compton suggested that he 

should take charge of the experimental establishment in view, though it was 

not yet in being. It was in the autumn of 1942 that General Groves first 

became associated with Oppenheimer. In order to save as much as possible 

of the time of the extremely busy chief of the Manhattan Project, it, was 

arranged that he and his two closest military collaborators, Colonels Nichols 

and Marshall, should meet the scientist in a reserved compartment of the 

luxurious train that ran regularly between Chicago and the West Coast. 

In such cramped quarters, to the clatter of wheels over the rails, the first 

plans were laid for the new laboratory, the cradle of the still-unborn atom 

bomb. The train that thundered through the darkness of the night on that 

occasion was, significantly, the Twentieth Century Limited. 

Where was the new laboratory to be set up? The first place suggested was 

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where a start had already been made, some months 

before, with the building of factories to product: explosives for the bombs. 

But that secret city lay dangerously near to the Atlantic coast, where German 

submarines were known to be in the habit of cruising and occasion- ally 

putting spies ashore. Two German agents had recently been picked up not 

far from Oak Ridge. They had not, incidentally, had the jeast intention of 

spying on the vast atomic establishments then in course of erection, but were 

only interested in contacting a certain German- American at the aluminium 

factory in Knoxville close by. 

Nevertheless, this affair may have contributed to the decision of 

Washington to locate the second secret factory town for fissile material, the 

great plutonium works, far away at Hanford. Similar considerations led to 

the choice of a lonely region, which could be acquired comparatively 

cheaply, a long way from the Atlantic coast, for 'Site Y’, the provisional 

code name for the future birthplace of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer had at 

first suggested a site in California. But Groves, after- inspecting the place, 

thought it unsuitable, too close to an inhabited district. The possibility had to 

be taken into account that preliminary experiments might lead to a premature 

explosion which would release dangerous radioactivity and imperil the civil 

population. 

Oppenheimer then remembered a remote spot where he had once been 

educated as a boy, the rustic boarding school at Los Alamos, New Mexico. 

He had often in former days facetiously told his friends: 'My two great loves 

are physics and New Mexico. It's a pity they can't be combined.' But now it 

seemed, surprisingly enough, that this rather improbable combination might 

after all be brought about. 

The Los Alamos Ranch School for- Boys had been founded in 1918 by a 

retired officer named Alfred J. Connell. It stood at a height of over-7,000 

feet above sea-level, on a flat tableland, a mesa forming part of the Pajarito 

(Little Bird) plateau of the Jemez Mountains. The scented pine woods and 

canyons of the region still swarmed, even after the First World War, with all 

sorts of winged and four-footed game. But the Indians who had once hunted 

there had long since abandoned their cave dwellings in the reddish-violet 

cliffs. They had migrated to villages of clay huts on lower ground. Only their 

'holy places' had been left behind on the mesas. 

One of these consecrated spots of ground was also to be found on the Los 

Alamos mesa. When the founder of the Ranch School leased the surrounding 

land from its Indian owners he agreed not to build on the little piece of 

ground in question and to make no road through it. The area was protected 

by a low hedge. Probably in former times a kiva, the religious edifice of the 

Indians, had stood on it. One night in the autumn of 1942 some schoolboys, 

as a joke, threw a few empty food tins over :he hedge. When Major Connell 

noticed them the next morning he had sinister forebodings. But for a while 

nothing occurred. Two or three weeks later, however, a car with a uniformed 

driver at the wheel came up the steep road to the mesa. As a rule only 

relatives of the boys or tradesmen took the trouble to visit Los Alamos, if 

tourists came they generally alighted and had a look round. 

That car didn't stop. It drove slowly across the plateau and then turned. 

Groves, Oppenheimer, and two of the General's adjutants were in it. 'We 

didn't want to get out', Groves relates, ‘as otherwise we should have had to 

give some reason why we were inspecting the place. In any case, it was 

bitterly cold. I remember that detail very well, for nearly all the boys were 

wearing short pants and I thought they must be freezing. On the return 

journey I stopped the car a few times to see whether the very sharp bends in 

the road could be negotiated by heavy traffic. Then we drove back to 

Albuquerque, our starting point. 

The utter isolation of the place appealed to Groves. He believed at the 

time that only about a hundred scientists and their families would be 

occupying the 'Hill', with the addition, perhaps, in the course of time, of a 

few engineers and mechanics. He was not worried about the lack of 

residential accommodation - there was nothing available but the school 

buildings - by the difficult road up to the spot or the scanty supply of water. 

How wrong the infallible General's forecast was is proved by the fact that 

within a year of his first reconnaissance of Los Alamos 3,00 people were 

working and living there. A year later the figure had risen to 6,000. 

Groves proceeded to take very rapid action. Under current wartime 

emergency legislation the headmaster of the Ranch School could do nothing 

to prevent the mesa and all its buildings being requisitioned for war 

purposes. He vacated Los Alamos, sent the boys home, and cashed his 

indemnity cheque. Shortly afterwards he died, of a broken heart, as it was 

rumoured, in Santa Fe, the nearest town to Los Alamos. 

On 25 November 1942, the Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, 

ordered the acquisition of Los Alamos. A few days later the first labour 

gangs arrived at the hill to excavate the ground for the foundations of the 

workshops of the 'Technical Region'. In March 1943 the first atomic 

scientists appeared. By the following June instruments scraped together from 

university laboratories had been hauled up the narrow road and new 

discoveries in nuclear physics immediately began to be made at Los Alamos. 

As soon as Groves had decided on Oppenheimer's appointment, he found 

himself being criticized for it. 'I was reproachfully told', he recalls, 'that only 

a Nobel prize winner or at least a somewhat older man would be able to 

exercise sufficient authority over the many "prima donnas" concerned. But I 

stuck to Oppenheimer and his success proved that I was right. No one else 

could have done what that man achieved.' 

The General was accustomed to demanding a good deal from his 

subordinates, but Oppenheimer threw himself into his task with such 

enthusiasm that even Groves was afraid he might overtax his strength. He 

had ordered the findings of the doctors, who had made a thorough 

examination of Oppenheimer, to be passed on to him, and knew he had been 

suffering from tuberculosis for years. 

It seemed as though unsuspected physical resources had come to 

Oppenheimer's aid in those weeks. The first thing he had to do was to travel 

about the country by air or by rail to persuade other physicists to join him at 

the new secret laboratory on the edge of the desert. In the course of his 

recruitment tour he had first to dispose of the prejudices of many of his 

colleagues against Project S-I. During the two years and more it had taken 

people to make up their minds, while the atomic project stuck fast in a 

deadlock of overlapping authorities, the opinion had gone round among 

physicists that nothing good could ever come of the affair. In order to silence 

such doubts Oppie often went further than he should have gone on security 

grounds in his descriptions of the new studies and aims. 

At that time he believed, in common with the most able of the specialists 

concerned, for example Hans Bethe, that the bomb could be ready within 

about a year. It is true that he could give no guarantee that the new weapon 

would be able to do its job. It might possibly turn out to be a dud. Nor did he 

conceal the fact that those who agreed to go to Los Alamos would have to 

sign, on security grounds, a more or less binding contract to remain there for 

the entire duration of the war. He added that they and their families would be 

cut off, as never before, from the outside world, and would be living in less 

than comfortable conditions. 

In spite of Oppenheimer's frank admission of the many difficulties 

involved his recruiting campaign had an unexpectedly great success. His 

remarkable capacity for seeing the other point of view enabled him to find 

the right answer to the doubts expressed. Some physicists he terrified by the 

prospect of a German atom bomb. Others he attracted by his descriptions of 

the beauty of New Mexico. But to all he imparted the feeling of how 

exciting it would be to participate in the pioneering work to be carried out in 

this still-quite-novel field of research. 

Probably, however-, many of those he approached, who were mostly very 

young, agreed to his request for one reason above all, that it was 

Oppenheimer who was to be their chief. His personal magnetism, hitherto 

only exercised upon his students, both male and female, now proved equally 

irresistible in wider circles. It was only seldom that one came across such 

inspiring personalities in the learned world. Oppenheimer bore no 

resemblance to the dry-as-dust specialist. He could quote Dante and Proust. 

He could refute objections by citing passages from the works of Indian sages 

which he had read in the original. And he seemed to be aflame with an 

inward spiritual passion. It would be extraordinarily stimulating to work in 

such close and intense association as would never have been possible in 

times of peace with this and other outstanding atomic-research experts. 

Oppenheimer in fact possessed, as one of the victims subsequently put it, in 

it-reverent but striking fashion, 'intellectual sex appeal'. 

Accordingly, in the spring of 1943 some highly unusual tourists began 

slowly filtering into the sleepy city of Santa Fe, the former seat of the 

Spanish viceroys who had ruled Mexico centuries ago. The visitors did not 

take the usual interest in historical monuments or silver jewellery. And all 

of them appeared to be in a desperate hurry. They had been delayed, during 

their journeys from the eastern states or the Middle West, by the sudden 

intervention of troop movements, by missed connexions or muddled flying 

schedules. They were consequently behind the times specified by their 

marching orders, instructions to report at No. 109 East Palace, Santa Fe. 

Thence they had been told that they would be transported to their secret 

destination, Site Y, thirty-five miles away. 

The newcomers expected to he received in one of those prosaic office 

buildings generally occupied by officials throughout the world. But they 

found themselves instead, after reaching the address given them, standing at 

a wrought-iron gate, centuries Old, which opened on to a small, picturesque 

courtyard of Spanish type. This situation was so unexpected and out of the 

ordinary that it acted on their senses like an enchantment. 

At the other end of the patio, from which a subterranean passage had led 

to the governor's palace three hundred years before, a French window led to 

a rather small room. Here the new arrival would be welcomed like a long- 

lost son by motherly Dorothy McKibben. She would immediately set the 

nervous and overtired newcomer at his ease. Even the most distressed of 

the Ph - s (it was forbidden, on grounds of security, even to mention 

their telltale calling) soon began to relax, while the patient, good natured 

Dorothy smilingly submitted to his questions. ‘Have my instruments 

arrived yet? We were told our furniture would be waiting for us. Is that 

right? Where shall I be living? What’s that? No bus to site Y before 

tomorrow morning? But I cut short a lecture so as to be here in good time! ’ 

Mrs. McKibben had an answer ready for all such inquiries and comments. 

She had arranged for the new arrivals to be lodged for the time being in 

'guest ranches* in the neighborhood of Santa Fe, which had hitherto only 

been used by visitors on vacation, for up on the Hill, where room could only 

be found to house the delicate apparatus, no living quarters for the scientists 

were yet available. Mrs. McKibben took steps to track down mislaid luggage 

and lost children. The newcomers learned from her that in future their 

address would be simply 'United States Army Post Office Box 1663, and 

that either pseudonyms or numbers would henceforth be substituted for their 

names on their identity paper's. 

In particular, they were all strictly enjoined never to address one another 

by professional titles such as 'Doctor' or 'Professor' in Santa Fe, because the 

citizens might notice how many university men had all of a sudden come 

among them. When Teller arrived, he asked his colleague Allison, who had 

come to meet him, the name of the person represented by the statue in front 

of Santa Fe Cathedral. 'It's Archbishop Lamy, Allison whispered. 'But if 

anyone asks you who it is, you'd better say Mr Lamy. Otherwise you'll have 

Dorothy on your trail right away." 

"Although everyone was pressed for time, for there was not a day to be 

lost,' Dorothy McKibben remembers, 'it all began like a great, glorious, and 

exciting adventure.' She is still to be found, after the passage of some fifteen 

years and the explosion of some dozens of uranium and hydrogen bombs, 

sitting in the same office as before, surrounded by big framed photographs 

of those formerly under her wing. 'They all look so very serious today,’ she 

remarks. 'In those days they were not only younger but also more hopeful 

and enthusiastic. Probably it was not until much later that they realized the 

terrible seriousness of their undertaking." 

Every morning buses drove up to the various ranches in order to collect 

the newly arrived experts and transport them to their work high up on the 

mesa of Los Alamos. The drivers sometimes forgot to call at one of the 

farms. Then the telephone at 109 East Palace would ring, to receive the 

answer; 'Sorry! I hope we shall be able to find some sort of transport for you 

during the day. If not, I'm afraid you'll just have to go on practicing your 

riding for a while! Even men who had never in their jives mounted a horse 

or put on riding breeches soon began to get used to living like pioneers in 

that remote, sunny region. While they waited for a normal existence to be 

organized on MIC hill 'hey often cooked and ate out of doors, as if on a 

picnic. They made exploratory excursions with packhorses and tents to the 

canyons, in which some of the most secret testing installations were to be set 

up. The European scientists in particular, m those occasions, fell like 

characters in a Wild West novel. On Sundays they went for very long walks. 

Bethe and his wife even climbed some of the hitherto untouched peaks that 

surrounded Los Alamos, 

Oppenheimer, especially, seemed to be in his element. He had often in 

former days spent his holidays, with his brother Frank, at a lonely farm not 

far from Los Alamos, where they both, at that time, used to live like 

cowboys. Oppie was now to be seen, if he did not happen to be away on one 

of his frequent tours, scrambling about over one of the various building sites. 

He would be sunburned as a native and clad in blue jeans, silver-studded belt 

and a garishly checked shirt. At Berkeley he had been in the habit of getting 

up as late as possible, insisting on starting no lecture earlier then eleven 

o'clock. But here in New Mexico he rose at daybreak. The indefatigable 

Oppie knew not only all the scientists, but also most of the labourers, by 

their first names. A decade and a half later they still used to ask Mrs. 

McKibbcn after 'Senor' Oppenheimer. 'Practically everyone', she says, 'who 

took part in the building work at Los Alamos would have risked his life for 

him.' 

The holiday mood prevailing at Los Alamos during those weeks could 

even be noticed at the scientific meetings, where Oppenheimer as a rule took 

the chair. The rigid organization into divisions and groups was a later growth 

which had not yet begun at that time. It gradually arose during sessions of 

the special committees. In one of the more important initial discussions, it 

happened, for instance, that Edward Teller described the bomb's most 

intimate mechanism — two hemispheres brought into contact at a given 

moment, till the mass reached the critical point and exploded - in the form of 

a limerick. Like most verses of the kind, it would not only rhyme but be 

thoroughly naughty. Such was the carefree spirit in which work began on the 

most terrible of all weapons. 

9 FISSION OF A MAN 1943 

BEFORE Oppenheimer, in 1942, became an official collaborator in the 

secret atomic project as a result of his appointment to the Metallurgical Lab, 

he was obliged, like all the rest, to fill in a long questionnaire. In this form 

he had acknowledged his membership in a number of left-wing 

organizations. His political Interests had been aroused for the first time in 

1933, after Hitler's accession to power, when some members of his family 

and some of his professional friends fell victims to the 'German Revolution'. 

Until then, like most of his scientific colleagues, he had troubled himself so 

little about events outside his technical, literary, and philosophic 

preoccupations that he hardly ever read a newspaper or listened to the radio. 

Oppenheimer's attention to politics increased as a result of the civil war in 

Spain and a personal encounter. In 1936 he had begun to pay court to a girl 

student of psychiatry named Jean Tatlock. Her father was Professor of 

English Literature at Berkeley. Jean was regarded as a devoted Communist. 

Through her Oppenheimer met some of the more prominent Communists in 

California. He began to read books about Soviet Russia, and to reflect on the 

influence which political and economic events, such as the great Depression 

just coming to an end, might have upon human life. 

In 1937 Oppenheimer inherited great wealth on the death of his father and 

began regularly to subscribe large sums in support of leftist causes. He also 

occasionally wrote brief anonymous pamphlets on the subject of 

contemporary events, printed them at his own expense and had them 

distributed by a group of anti-fascist intellectuals, including a number of 

Communists. Oppenheimer states, with regard to his relations with Jean 

Tatlock: 'We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of 

ourselves as engaged. But in 1939, after the marriage had been several times 

planned and then again postponed, the scientist met a pretty brunette 

employed on experiments with fungi at the famous Plant Research 

Laboratory in Pasadena. Bom Katharina Puening-and a relative of General 

Keitel- she had lived in Germany up to the age of fourteen and had just 

contracted a second marriage with an English medical doctor named 

Harrison. She and Oppenheimer fell so passionately in love that as soon as it 

could be arranged she freed herself from ail her previous connexions. The 

couple married in November 1940, ignoring the scandal thereby caused at 

Berkeley and Pasadena among the friends and relatives of their forsaken 

partners. 

Oppenheimer dropped his associations with Communism almost at the 

same time as he terminated his relations with Jean Tatlock. Reports by his 

colleagues Placzek and Weisskopf at the end of 1938 on their experiences in 

Russia in the thirties had made a very deep impression on him. Both 

Oppenheimer and his wife - who also had a left-wing past - gradually tried 

to shake themselves free of acquaintances who remained loyal to the Party, 

in August the couple bought a house. That same year their first son, Peter, 

was bom. 

It proved difficult to make a radical break with the past. There were quite 

a number of people close to Oppenheimer who either sympathized with 

Communism or in some cases actually belonged to the Party. They included 

at least a few who had originally owed their interest in the ideas of the 

extreme left to Oppenheimer himself. Was he now simply to drop them? 

A similar situation prevailed in his private life. Jean Tatlock was still in 

love with him. After the cessation of their relations she had submitted to 

psychoanalytic treatment. Although herself a psychiatrist, the could not rid 

the innermost recesses of her mind from thoughts of Oppenheimer. Even 

after her marriage she wrote to him, visited him at his house, near her 

father's, and tried to i-each him by telephone whenever she felt greatly 

excited or depressed. On certain occasions Oppenheimer consented to meet 

her, either out of pity, or a sense of guilt, or because he had himself not yet 

fully recovered from the wreck of a friendship that had lasted for years. 

In June 1943 Oppenheimer escaped from the overwhelming burden of the 

duties imposed upon him in connexion with the building work at Los 

Alamos and, in compliance with one of his former fiancee’s urgent requests, 

went to see her at her house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Late that 

afternoon they went out for drinks to the Top of the Mark, overlooking the 

city and the bay. 

Oppenheimer had to tell Jean Tatlock that during the next few months, or 

possibly even for years, he would not be able to meet her; he was compelled 

to leave Berkeley for a time, with his wife and child. He added that he was 

forbidden to say what the nature of his official task was or to name the place 

to which he was being transferred. 

Seven months after that last meeting Jean Tatlock took her own life. 

The movements of Oppenheimer and his former fiancee in San Francisco 

on 12 and 13 June were all kept under continuous observation by agents of 

the counter-intelligence branch of the Army, G2. They watched 

Oppenheimer accompany the young woman to her house in the evening. 

They knew that he spent the night there and that she drove him to the airport 

the following morning. The whole story was committed to paper down to the 

last detail and incorporated as 'damaging information' in a comprehensive 

report. Ever since the end of May 1943 the scientist appointed to take charge 

of the atom-bomb laboratory had been the unsuspecting object of special 

investigation by the authorities. The security people did not trust him. They 

wanted to find out whether he might not still be keeping up his previous 

association, even now, with Communists. The visit to San Francisco at last 

gave Colonel Boris Pash, Deputy Chief of Staff of the G2 division in 

California, the 'ammunition' he needed. 

On 29 June 1943 Pash forwarded to the War Department in Washington a 

report summarizing the 'results of supervision since arrival in San Francisco'. 

In that report he expressly stated his suspicion that the 'subject', as he 

invariably called Oppenheimer, in the usual style of police detectives, might 

be passing on to the Communists the scientific data obtained at Los Alamos 

before reporting them, if in fact he did so, to the government of the United 

States. This could very well be done through 'contacts' like Jean Tatlock, 

who would then play her part by passing the information to the Party. Pash 

urged that every effort should be made to dismiss the 'subject' at the earliest 

possible date and replace him by someone else. 

The report was sent on to Groves in the middle of July with the intimation 

that for security reasons Oppenheimer's appointment to take charge of Los 

Alamos could not be confirmed. The General was dumbfounded. He was 

himself anything but sympathetic to Communists, and was even then 

engaged, as he declared later, in doing all he could to prevent their 

infiltration into the Ma nh attan Project. As early as this, in fact, he supported 

the view that the country and the government trusted their Russian ally too 

implicitly. 

And now it turned out that his closest, most indispensable collaborator 

was a Red! He sent for Oppenheimer. The latter immediately assured him 

that he had long since broken with the Communists. 

Groves wondered whether he could believe in this change of 

Oppenheimer's opinions, but he felt bound to do so. Oppenheimer had only 

recently once more proved himself indispensable in dealing with the 

material difficulties which were threatening to damp enthusiasm at Los 

Alamos where the residential barracks erected on the mesa by units of the 

Army Pioneer Corps proved cramped, uncomfortable, and exposed to the 

risk of lire. The streets became by turns, according to the weather, full of 

dust or seas of mud. Only a single small group of pines had escaped the 

bulldozers. They had been rescued from the fate of the rest by a sit-down 

strike organized by Micci, Edward Teller's wife. When the men returned 

home tired after the day's work their wives, who for the most part were also 

obliged to do professional work, complained of the lack of domestic servants 

and unsatisfactory supplies of food. Oppenheimer managed to raise their 

spirits. He studied each individual problem himself, promised improved 

conditions and stressed the fact, in particular, that such small vexations, after 

all, counted for little in comparison with the importance of the job they were 

all doing. 

Groves felt he could not do without this man, whether as scientist or 

organizer. He determined to keep him under his personal supervision. A War 

Department directive had ordered him not to lose a single day in producing 

the new weapon. Consequently he had been given unusual plenary powers, 

overriding all other decisions and regulations. He now detennined for the 

first time to make use of this authority. On 20 July 1 943 he sent the 

following telegram: 

WAR DEPARTMENT, OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF ENGINEERS, 

Washington, July 20, 1943 

Subject: Julius Robert Oppenheimer. 

To: The District Engineer, United States Engineer Office, 

Manhattan District, Station F, New York, N.Y. 

I. In accordance with my verbal directions of 1 5 July it is desired that 

clearance be issued for the employment of Julius Robert Oppenheimer 

without delay, irrespective of the information which you have concerning 

Mr Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project. 

L. R. GROVES, 

Brigadier-General, CE 

This step seemed at first sight to settle the question of Oppenheimer's 

offending past. The General had cut the knot with a slash of his sword. 

Oppenheimer's gratitude knew no bounds. He had been reluctant all his life 

to put his whole heart into any single cause. His exceptional intelligence and 

clear-sightedness had always shown him simultaneously the opposite of 

every view and the drawbacks of every undertaking. Consequently, despite 

his sympathy with Communism, he had never been a member of the Party. 

His great fear, more than anything else, was that he might become an 

accomplice and tool of a single one-sided idea, the politics of a single 

country; such a course invariably meant compromise, support for a principle 

which could not bear the light of absolute honesty and intellectual integrity. 

Robert Oppenheimer, however, had now decided to devote himself 

entirely to the service of his native land. For the first time he believed that he 

had both feet on the ground of something real. That reality had been 

fashioned out of coarse material, no doubt. Rough, simple men like Leslie 

Groves had the biggest say in it, but they were ready to listen to the advice 

of a superior mind. Oppenheimer had come down from the rarefied air of the 

heights. He was no longer just an 'unpractical' and 'rootless' intellectual. 

Now he finally, finally, finally belonged. He had always shied away from 

'complicity'-a term he used frequently - more than anything else he had 

feared that he might become the tool. 

It must have been as a result of such newly discovered patriotic 

sentiments that Oppenheimer paid a certain call at the end of August 1943, 

only a few weeks after Groves had taken his part with such impressive 

consequences. Happening to be at Berkeley, the scientist entered the office 

of the security agent, Lyle Johnson, established in one of the university 

lecture rooms. He intended to reveal a certain occurrence which he had kept 

a secret for months. The immediate cause of his visit was to talk about one 

of his former pupils, named Rossi Lomanitz, who had got into trouble. 

Oppenheimer had in the past persuaded the young man to join in the work, 

despite his conscientious scruples against participating in the production of 

the atom bomb. Lomanitz was now on the point of being expelled from the 

organization for pacifist and Communist propaganda. Oppenheimer 

proceeded to ask Johnson for permission, if that were not contrary to 

security regulations, to talk to Lomanitz and 'bring him to his senses.' This 

inquiry seems only to have been a pretext for Oppenheimer's visit, for in the 

course of further conversation he suddenly made certain astonishing 

statements. He had known for some time, he said, that the Russians were 

trying to obtain information about the American atom-bomb project. 

Oppenheimer added that an Englishman named George Eltenton, who had 

worked in the Soviet Union for vive years before the war, had approached a 

certain personage, whose name he with- held, and asked the individual in 

question to get in touch, on his behalf, with physicists at work on the 

Manhattan Project. 

Johnson listened attentively. He considered the information particularly 

important. For he himself, together with his immediate superiors, Colonels 

Pash and Lansdale, had been on the trail, ever since the end of February, of a 

Communist espionage organization which they assumed to be sending 

reports on the progress of American atomic armament. Three persons under 

suspicion in this connexion, including the Lomanitz whose conduct was at 

present a subject of dispute, were pupils of Oppenheimer. 

The counter— intelligence branch still resented the fact that Groves had 

simply shrugged off their warnings about Oppenheimer, and did not believe 

for a moment that the man who had been put in charge of Los Alamos 

against their will had any patriotic motive in deciding to give them this 

belated information on the subject of attempted Soviet spying. They 

suspected that Oppenheimer had been told by his former pupils that their 

behaviour was already under investigation. He had only 'confessed’ the 

security men supposed, in order to anticipate an inquiry bound to be made, 

sooner or later, into his own activities. 

The counter-intelligence pretended, from that time on, to regard him as a 

friendly witness. But they treated him, in reality, as if he were already in the 

dock, and made constant efforts to involve him in contradictions. 

Johnson began by requesting Oppenheimer, with the greatest courtesy, to 

talk the whole matter over, once more, in detail with his own chief, Colonel 

Rash. Boris Rash was the son of the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox 

Church in the United States. He was a huge fellow, who had only recently 

been appointed a specialist in 'Communist infiltration'. Prior to that 

appointment he had been a football coach at Hollywood High School. His 

Russian origin was enough to qualify him for this wartime post. Pash 

possessed a considerable measure of reckless daring which had got him into 

serious trouble. In order to teach certain officers to take greater care of 

military documents he instructed some of his subordinates to break into their 

quarters and make away with some highly confidential papers. A certain 'big 

shot' took this proceeding in very bad part and very nearly had Rash 

dismissed. Rash, accordingly, had every reason at this time for wishing to 

prove himself a success. 

When Oppenheimer first met him face to face, Pash already knew a good 

deal about him from the reports of his agents, as well as from the clandestine 

photographs and films they had taken. The Colonel had hidden microphones 

in his office before the interview began and had also placed a tape recorder 

in the next room. Every word of the long conversation that followed between 

the inquisitor and his witness was taken down without Oppenheimer's 

knowledge. 

When Dostoyevsky invents dialogue of this kind it is full of deep thought 

and brilliant phrasing. But how different it sounds in real life. The words 

seem utterly devoid of significance. They are intended to mean something, 

certainly. But at the same time they serve to veil that meaning. There is a 

great deal of mere chatter, to avoid having to come to the point. There is a 

great deal of stammering and hesitation, for neither side wants to state the 

plain truth. 

The conversation began with an exchange of ordinary courtesies. 

Pash; This is a pleasure, because I am interested to a certain extent in 

activities and I feel I have a certain responsibility in a child which I don't 

know anything about. General Groves has more or less, I feel, placed a 

certain responsibility in me and it's like having a child, that you can't see, by 

remote control. I don't mean to take much of your time - 

Oppenheimer: That's perfectly all right. Whatever time you choose. 

Pash: Mr Johnson told me about the little incident, or conversation, taking 

place yesterday in which I am very much interested and it had me worried 

all day yesterday since he called me. Oppenheimer behaved at first,, at this 

stage, as though he did not understand what Pash wanted to see him about. 

He began again to tell the story of the difficulties his pupil Lomanitz was 

having with the authorities. But Bash at once steered the conversation round 

to the subject which Oppenheimer wanted to avoid, that of his disclosures 

about the alleged Soviet attempts at espionage. Bash wanted to know the 

name of the intermediary approached by Eltenton. Oppenheimer did not 

answer that question. Instead of doing so he went on to say, evidently 

irritated and hoping to divert Bash's attention, that the unknown 

intermediary referred to had already been talking to three atomic scientists. 

Pash: Yes. Here's the thing - we of course assume that the people who 

bring this information to you are 100 per cent with you and therefore there is 

no question about their intentions. However, if- 

Oppenheimer: Well, I’ll tell you one thing - 1 have known of two or three 

cases, and I think two of the men were with me at Los Alamos - they are 

men who are very closely associated with me. 

Pash: Have they told you that either they thought they were contacted for 

that purpose or they were actually contacted for that purpose? 

Oppenheimer: They told me they were contacted for that purpose. 

Pash: For that purpose. 

Oppenheimer: That is, let me give you the background. The background 

was - well, you know how difficult it is with the relations between these two 

allies, and there are a lot of people who don't feel very friendly to Russia, so 

that the information - a lot of our secret in- formation, our radar and so on - 

doesn't get to them, and they are battling for their lives and they would like 

to have an idea of what is going on and this is just to make up, in other 

words, for the defects of our official communication. That is the form in 

which it was presented. 

Pash: Oh, I see. 

But this further information did not produce the effect Oppenheimer 

probably desired. His explanation merely increased Pash's interest in the 

unknown intermediary. He repeatedly brought the conversation back to this 

point. Pash: Well, now I may be getting back to a little systematic picture. ... 

These people whom you mentioned, two are down there with you now. 

Were they contacted by Eltenton direct? 

Oppenheimer: No. Pash: Through another party? 

Oppenheimer: Yes. 

Pash: Well now, could we know through whom that contact was made? 

Oppenheimer. I think it would be a mistake, that is, I think I have told you 

where the initiative came from and that the other things were almost purely 

accident and that it would involve people who ought not to be involved in 

this. 

Oppenheimer declined to allow Bash to wheedle any more out of him. He 

steadily refused to name the person who had taken the message, though this 

was what Pash obviously longed to know. But he did assure the agent that in 

Los Alamos at any rate, where Oppenheimer himself was in charge, no 

Communist agitation or espionage was to be feared. In a slightly 

melodramatic phrase, which smacked more of the official than of the man he 

had hitherto been, the Director of the Los Alamos establishment solemnly 

declared: 'If everything were not proceeding according to plan and in due 

order down there I shouldn't object in the slightest to being shot.' 

But the counter-intelligence branch was not satisfied with such rhetorical 

protestations of loyalty. Oppenheimer's refusal to take another step along the 

path of denunciation, which he had already entered, made him all the more 

suspect. Ten days after his interview with Oppenheimer, Pash sent to his 

chief at the Pentagon, Colonel Lansdale, the following description of the 

judgement he had formed of the scientist: 

This office is still of the opinion that Oppenheimer is not to be fully 

trusted and that his loyalty to the Nation is divided. It is believed that the 

only undivided loyalty that he can give is to science and it is strongly felt 

that if in his position the Soviet government could offer more for the 

advancement of his scientific cause he would select that government as the 

one to which he would express his loyalty. The suspicion of the intelligence 

agents that Oppenheimer had not so far been completely frank in his 

conversations with them was well founded. He had been lying. He had been 

hiding some thing from them. They assumed that the 'something' in question 

concerned the connexion which they supposed him to be still maintaining 

with the Communist Party or even with the Soviet espionage organization. 

But Oppenheimer had in actual fact broken off his former erratic relations 

with Communism. What he most feared in present circumstances was that 

the authorities might dismiss him in spite of this fact, if they gradually 

obtained more and more information about his left-wing activities in the 

past. For he would then lose his important new appointment and be driven 

back into no man's land. 

But the men in the counter-intelligence branch were not to be put off by 

mere hints. They wanted to know the whole truth. That, however, was just 

what Oppenheimer, in his mental condition at that time, could not tell them. 

For its chief result would have been to incriminate himself and thus once 

more seriously endanger his position as Director at Los Alamos. 

In point of fact only one scientist, not three, had been approached by the 

unknown intermediary. And the name of that scientist was Robert 

Oppenheimer. 

What had actually happened was that towards the end of the year 1 942 or 

not long after the beginning of 1943 - the precise date has never been 

ascertained - the Oppenheimers, who were then living at their house, 'Eagle 

Hill', in Berkeley, were visited by a neighbouring married couple, the 

Chevaliers. 

Oppenheimer had known Haakon Chevalier, a lecturer in Romance 

languages at the University of California, since 1938. The atomic physicist 

had very soon struck up a genuine friend- ship with this colleague from 

another faculty and two years older than himself. Their amicable relations 

arose in spite or possibly just because of the fact that Chevalier was so 

entirely different from Oppenheimer. The tall, broad-shouldered man, with 

his Norwegian Christian name and French surname, radiated so much simple 

enthusiasm and cordiality that Oppenheimer confided more in Chevalier 

than he did in anyone else. Oppenheimer could argue and speculate for hours 

on end with physicists like Robert Serber and Philip Morrison, who were his 

personal friends. But with Chevalier he felt that he could either remain silent 

or talk, with some slight degree of nostalgia, about distant Europe and its 

poets. 

Chevalier himself had been bom in the little town of Lakewood, New 

Jersey, but he had returned with his parents to France, his father's country, 

when he was two years old. Later he went to Norway, from which his 

mother came. Many people there still remembered his grandfather, a corn 

merchant, and friend of Grieg and Ibsen. In 1914, on the outbreak of war in 

Europe, the family had returned to the United States. When the war ended 

Haakon was a dreamy youth of eighteen, a poet and also something of a 

wanderer like Knut Hamsun. From love of adventure and a desire to see the 

world he had gone to sea. It was not until he had served 'one year before the 

mast' that the young man, still avid for experience, had sat down again in the 

schoolroom and soon proved himself a brilliant expert on French literature. 

With Haakon Chevalier it was possible for Oppenheimer to escape from 

physics, to discuss Anatole France or Proust, his favourite author, or else 

simply to try out recipes for exotic and highly seasoned dishes which the two 

men prepared together in Oppenheimer's kitchen. 

Such associations are often broken when one of two friends marries. But 

in this case the relationship became even closer after marriage. Chevalier 

and his wife, Barbara, were among the new people who stood by Robert and 

Katie Oppenheimer when In November 1940 the marriage between these 

two caused so much gossip and excitement. 

As a bachelor Oppenheimer had lived in two rooms opening on to a broad 

terrace. It was generally extremely cold and un- comfortable there. He used 

to leave the windows open day and night because of the tuberculosis from 

which he suffered for Scars. But on his marriage he began to look around for 

a home of his own. Chevalier was of assistance to Oppenheimer in that 

connexion. He himself lived in an old English country house which had been 

transported in its entirety to the distant California coast for the San Francisco 

World's Fair in 1915. This museum piece had been bought, when the 

exhibition closed, by a lady who had transferred it, with immense toil and 

trouble, to the top of a hill overlooking Berkeley. She also had a second 

house close by, a long, white stucco building of Spanish type, with a 

spacious and cosy living room, that had a painted wooden ceiling, a tiled 

floor of brownish-red earthenware and a large fireplace. A steep road led up 

to the house, perched, like an eagle's nest, on the brink of a precipice. 

This dwelling on Eagle Hill, surrounded by tall cypresses, became one 

evening the scene of a certain conversation between Robert Oppenheimer 

and Haakon Chevalier destined to exercise a fateful influence on the future 

lives of them both. At the time they considered the conversation so 

unimportant that neither could afterwards remember exactly what words 

were used. While the two wives were talking together in the living room, 

Chevalier had followed his host into the small kitchen which adjoined it. 

Oppie began to mix Martinis. Chevalier proceeded to inform him that he had 

recently been talking to a man they both knew named George Eltenton. 

Eltenton had complained to him that in spite of the fact that the American 

and Soviet governments were allied no interchanges of new scientific in- 

formation took place between the scientists of the two countries. He went on 

to ask Chevalier whether it would not be possible to persuade Oppenheimer 

to pass on scientific data in a private capacity. Oppenheimer reacted to 

Eltenton's suggestion in the manner Chevalier had foreseen. 

So far as Chevalier remembers Oppenheimer exclaimed: 'That's not the 

way to do these things!' According to Oppenheimer's own subsequent 

statement his answer was even more pointed. He believed he had retorted: 

'That would be a frightful thing to do!' and 'But that would be high treason!' 

This was the end of the conversation. Since the two men were in full 

agreement on the subject it was never again raised between them. They 

returned to the big room and drank their cocktails. 

But while the Chevaliers were on their way home that evening Haakon's 

wife remarked: 'I don't know why, but somehow I don't trust Oppie. 

It was a presentiment, nothing more. Chevalier took no notice of his wife's 

warning at the time. Counter-intelligence continued to harry the atomic 

scientist. As Boris Pash had not succeeded in learning anything more 

definite about the unknown intermediary or the three scientists he had 

allegedly approached for information, Oppenheimer was summoned to 

Washington. The authorities hoped that a more adroit inquisitor than the 

somewhat clumsy Pash might contrive to worm the secret of the 

middleman's identity out of him. On 12 September 1943 a fresh cross- 

examination of Oppenheimer began in an office at the Pentagon, conducted 

on this occasion by Colonel John Lansdale, Jr, himself, the able Chief 

Security Officer for the entire atomic project, then only just thirty-one years 

of age. Once more preliminary measures were taken to ensure registration of 

the conversation by means of a concealed microphone connected with a tape 

recorder. Lansdale proceeded to show a good deal of ingenuity in his efforts 

to crack open Oppenheimer's secret. He must have received the impression 

from a previous encounter with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, which had 

taken place exactly a month before and was the first time they had met, that 

the other's defences could be broken down by flattery. Accordingly, 

Lansdale immediately made for this weak spot. 

Lansdale: Well, now, I want to say this - and without intent of flattery or 

complimenting or anything else - that you're probably the most intelligent 

man I ever met and I'm not sold on myself that I kid you sometimes, see? 

And I'll admit freely that at the time we had our discussion at Los Alamos I 

was not perfectly frank with you. My reasons for not being are immaterial 

now. Since your discussion with Colonel Pash I think that the only sensible 

thing is to be as frank with you as I can. I'm not going to mention certain 

names, but I think that you can give us an enormous amount of help, and as I 

talk you will realize, I think, some of the difficulties that have beset us. 

Oppenheimer: There are some, I think, that I know already. 

Lansdale. That's right. Now, I will say this, that we have not been, I might 

say, asleep at the switch, to a dangerous extent. We did miss some things, 

but we have known since February that several people were transmitting 

information about this project to the Soviet government. 

Oppenheimer: I might say that I have not known that. I knew of this one 

attempt to obtain information which was earlier, or I don't, I can't remember 

the date, though I've tried. 

Lansdale: Now, we have taken no action yet, except with respect to 

Lomanitz. 

Oppenheimer: Are they people who would be in a position to transmit 

substantial information? 

Lansdale: Yes, I'm so informed, L don't know personally, of course. 

Oppenheimer: Well, Lomanitz by virtue of being a theoretical physicist 

would probably have a rather broad knowledge of the things he is working 

on. 

The hearing thus began to the advantage of the questioner. Four weeks 

previously Oppenheimer had still been trying to protect and defend his pupil 

Lomanitz. But now he had ceased to do so and even seemed ready to give 

information which might damage him. Nevertheless, these promising signs 

proved to be deceptive. As soon as Lansdale approached the topic of the 

Eltenton affair, he was met by the same blank wall that Pash had previously 

found insurmountable. Lansdale, accordingly, started dropping his ballast 

overboard. He said he would be prepared to remain in ignorance of the 

names of the three scientists. But he added that he absolutely must have the 

name of the intermediary, so as to be able to prevent similar attempts at 

contact in the future. But even then he could not convince Oppenheimer of 

the necessity of this disclosure. 

Oppenheimer: I've thought about it a good deal because Bash and Groves 

both asked me for the name, and I feel that I should not give it. I don't mean 

that I don't hope that if he's still operating that you will find it. I devoutly do. 

But I would just bet dollars to doughnuts that he isn't still operating. 

Lansdale: I don't see how you can have any hesitancy in disclosing the 

name of the man who has actually been engaged in an attempt at espionage 

to a foreign power in time of war. I mean, my mind just doesn't ran along 

those channels, and - 

Oppenheimer: I know, it's a tough problem, and I'm worried about it a lot. 

Lansdale: I can understand personal loyalty, yet you say he's not a close 

friend of yours. May I ask, do you know him as a Communist? 

Oppenheimer: I know him as a fellow traveller. Lansdale called twice 

more upon Oppenheimer to reveal the name of the mysterious unknown 

middleman. Twice more the request was refused. The refusal was all the 

more astonishing on account of the thoroughly cooperative attitude of the 

man under examination with respect to other persons about whom Lansdale 

asked him. Oppenheimer neither made any secret of the Communist 

sympathies of the wife of his friend Robert Serber nor did he flatly decline 

to answer another suggestion put to him by the counter-intelligence agent in 

the following terms: 

Lansdale: Could you get information about who is and who isn't a 

member of the Party? 

Oppenheimer: I don't know whether I could now. At one time I could 

have. I never tried to. 

Lansdale.- Would you be willing to? 

Oppenheimer: Not in writing, I think that would make a very bad 

impression. 

Lansdale: No, not in writing. 

Oppenheimer: I don't know anyone at Los Alamos who could give 

information of that kind. I could get partial information. Lansdale tried one 

last trick. After assuring Oppenheimer, 'Don't think it's the last time I'm 

going to ask you, because it isn't,' he continued: 

Lansdale: Well, I want to say that personally I like you very much and I 

wish you'd stop being so formal and calling me Colonel, 'cause I haven't had 

it long enough to get used to it. 

Oppenheimer: I remember at first you were a captain, I think. 

Lansdale: And it hasn't been so long since I was a first lieutenant and I 

wish I could get out of the Army and back to practising law, where I don't 

have these troubles. 

Oppenheimer: You'" got a very mean job and - 

Lansdale: I want you to know that 1 like you personally and believe me 

it’s so. I have no suspicions whatsoever and t don't want you to reel 

Oppenheimer: Well, I know where I stand on these things. At least I'm 

"Of worried about that. It is, however, as you have asked me, a question of 

some past loyalties I should regard it as a low trick to involve someone 

where I would bet dollars to doughnuts he was involved. 

Lansdale. O.K., sir. 

That 'O.K.' did not mean the matter was settled. Lansdale the slightest 

reference, in the memorandum to Groves which he drew up after the 

hearing, to the personal liking for and confidence in Oppenheimer which he 

had ex- pressed so volubly at the interview. On the contrary he urged that 

greater pressure should be brought to bear on the scientist with "he object of 

forcing him at all costs to disclose the name required. The papers relating to 

the case which lay on General Groves's desk included an exhaustive critical 

study of Oppenheimer's character by the intelligence agent Peer de Silva. It 

culminated in a remarkable suggestion. In September 1943 de Silva had 

written: 

It is considered that Oppenheimer is deeply concerned with gaining a 

worldwide reputation as a scientist and a place in history as a result of the 

DSM project. It is also believed that the Army is in the position of being 

able to allow him to do so or to destroy his name, reputation and career, if it 

should choose to do so. Such a possibility, if strongly presented to him, 

would possibly give him a different view of his position with respect to the 

Army, which has been, heretofore, one in which hr has been dominant 

because of his supposed essentiality. 

'The head of the Manhattan Project acted in precise conformity with this 

proposal when some weeks later, in December 1943, he himself examined 

Oppenheimer, in private. He frankly told the Los Alamos chief that he 

would now have to order him to reveal the name which he had been keeping 

secret unless Oppenheimer himself chose, at this late stage, to reveal it of his 

own accord. The latter had already informed the General, two months 

before: ‘General, if you order me to tell this, I will tell you.' At the time 

Groves had not insisted. But now he had decided not to wait any longer. 

In this situation Oppenheimer could have taken up the attitude that his 

duties at Los Alamos were purely scientific and that he was not bound to act 

as an informer on behalf of counter- intelligence or even to obey orders as a 

soldier. If the authorities refused to concede this point he could always have 

resigned. Fortunately, there was no such thing in the United States as torture 

and the arrest of relatives, such as was practised in the totalitarian countries 

in dealing with obstinate persons. Consequently, if Oppenheimer had really 

wished to do so he could have perfectly well gone on withholding all 

information about Chevalier, of whose innocence he was convinced. But he 

gave in, and at last disclosed the name of the man whom he had himself, as 

he admitted later, so deeply incriminated by his exaggeration of what had in 

fact occurred. He thus finally did what he had been vainly urged to do for 

months, so saving himself and his career. Within a very short time that 

career was to take him to the pinnacles of fame and power. 

No one except Oppenheimer himself and the officials dealing with his 

case had any idea at that time, in the middle of the war, of the personal trial 

which the Los Alamos Director had undergone. Chevalier himself knew 

nothing of it, though soon afterwards, without realizing that his friend had 

betrayed him, he was dismissed from his tutorial post for unknown reasons. 

It was not until more than ten years later, after he had been driven into exile 

and was still without an appointment, that he finally learned who had 

informed against him and thus brought his academic career to an end. 

10 

THE PURSUIT OF BRAINS 

1944-5 

IN December 1 942 the atomic scientists working in the Metallurgical 

Laboratory at the University of Chicago heard that Hitler was going to risk 

his first air raid on the United States on Christmas Day. The rumour stated, 

moreover, that the object of the attack would be the great city itself, with its 

population of millions. Chicago was at that time the centre of American 

atomic research. The whisper went round that the Germans would probably 

drop, not the usual bombs, but great quantities of radioactive dust to poison 

the air and water of the city. This story, noted down by Sam Goudsmit, was 

so generally believed that certain physicists sent their families into the 

country, while military posts distributed Geiger counters. 

It was no accident that such tales began to circulate the very week after 

the first primitive uranium reactor, designed by Fermi had been started in the 

windowless cellars below the grandstands of Stagg Field. The practical 

realization of a controlled chain reaction in the uranium pile was a brilliant 

scientific achievement. The rumours about radioactive 'death dust' were the 

dark shadows cast by that event. In future it would be possible to produce 

artificially, in the uranium-burning ovens now proved to be technically 

feasible, tons of dangerous radioactive matter which only occurred in 

microscopic quantities in nature. 

If a uranium reactor of this kind had now at last been produced in 

Chicago, after the American atomic project had got off to such a slow start, 

it must also have long since been constructed somewhere in Germany, the 

Allied nuclear physicists believed. They had never ceased to live in terror of 

Hitler's advantage in the atomic armaments race. It was to be assumed that 

the Germans had already enough radioactive matter in their piles to poison 

all the large cities of their enemies. 

As a precaution against these and other surprises to be expected from the 

German armament laboratories the American high command instituted in the 

autumn of 1 943 a special intelligence unit, to be disembarked with the first 

troops invading Europe, for the purpose of collecting specific information on 

the state of German atomic armament. This top-secret special division was 

given the somewhat transparent code name of 'Alsos'. The word is a literal 

translation into Greek of the name 'Groves'. Its members, contrary to all the 

principles of espionage, were actually rendered recognizable by a unique 

badge, consisting of the alpha sign in white, transfixed by red forked 

lightning to symbolize atomic power. 

In November 1943 Colonel Boris Pash was appointed to command Alsos. 

He was at last able to hand over the unsatisfactory and obscure 

'Oppenheimer affair' to others and devote himself to more interesting tasks. 

The first discoveries made by Pash in Europe after ransacking documents at 

the University of Naples were so few and far between that he was recalled. It 

was decided that he should share his command on his next mission with an 

atomic-research scientist. Such a team would probably acquire more 

interesting information. The choice fell on Samuel A. Goudsmit, the well- 

known Dutch experimental physicist, whose hobby had long been the study 

of the latest methods of criminal investigation. 

Goudsmit was working on the radar project of the Massachusetts Institute 

of Technology. He had no idea why he had been selected for the mission in 

question. Later on, while examining a file dealing with prospective 

candidates for appointment to the Alsos mission, he came across a 

confidential evaluation of his own character, which had got there by mistake. 

It simply stated that he had 'certain valuable qualifications' for the post and 

certain disadvantages, Goudsmit observes that he immediately guessed what 

the disadvantages were and adds that the advantages were probably that in 

the first place, although a nuclear physicist, he had not yet been employed on 

the Manhattan Project. Consequently, if he happened to be captured by the 

enemy during the fighting in Germany, no important atomic secrets could be 

extracted from him. In the second place he spoke fluent French and German. 

He had worked in Leyden under Ehrenfest, a pupil of Bohr, and then, during 

the twenties, for some lime at Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen. There, while 

still a very young man and before obtaining his doctor's degree, he had made 

one of the most important discoveries of modern physics, the so-called 'spin' 

of electrons. 

Goudsmit had been nicknamed 'Uncle Sam' in the family circle of atomic 

experts, though he was not so Americanized as all that, despite his residence 

since 1927 in the United States. He was more cheerful and genial and far 

more versatile than the other physicists. In addition to his passion for 

criminology, he was a first-rate Egyptologist, collected scarabaei and told 

stories brilliantly. But he was above all a warm-hearted and modest man, 

revered by his pupils and loved by his friends. 

'Many physicists only have high-voltage current in their veins,' said 

someone who had known him a long time. ‘But Sam has blood. He knows 

that the world contains other interesting things besides equations and 

cyclotrons.' It was typical of Goudsmit that he gave the following advice to a 

young nuclear physicist who wanted to go to an atom-bomb test in Nevada. 

'If you want to see a show, why don't you buy a ticket to one of the current 

Broadway musicals? That might help you more with your work than going 

west. Pauli won the Nobel prize by going to the theatre, you know. He was 

watching a revue in Copenhagen when the exclusion principle came to him.' 

Colonel Pash, military head of the Alsos mission, accompanied the very 

first Allied troops that entered Paris at the end of August 1944. Only two 

days later Goudsmit and his scientific personnel followed. As civilians they 

were obliged to keep a little behind the front-line troops. Their first objective 

was the occupation of the College de France, where Joliot-Curie's laboratory 

was situated. He had not left France since the German invasion. Many 

Frenchmen considered him, in those days, a collaborater. He was regarded 

as a traitor for having handed over his laboratory intact to the Germans, in 

1940. But in reality this apparent capitulation merely served to camouflage 

the scientist's extremely active participation in the French resistance 

movement. After the departure of Wolfgang Gentner the laboratory be came 

an arsenal for the Paris maquis although-or perhaps even because - other 

buildings in the group comprising the College de France were used as 

offices by the German Military Government. Joliot' s quarters were never 

searched, for the simple reason that no one dreamed the scientist capable of 

such mad audacity. He had himself taken part in the last few days of street 

fighting for the liberation of the city. The man who had discovered, through 

his studies of neutron emission and chain reaction, some of the most 

important of the necessary pre-conditions for construction of the atom bomb 

used the most primitive form of bomb imaginable in defence of the 

barricades - ordinary beer bottles -led with gasoline and fitted with fuses. 

Joliot was unable to supply any interesting information about the German 

atom bomb. Moreover, the authorities in Washing- ton advised the greatest 

caution in dealing with him, for, a week after the liberation of Paris, Joliot 

declared that during the war he had transferred his allegiance from the Social 

Democrats to the Communists. 

The Allied armies marched on to the invasion of Germany. It was hoped 

that they would very soon occupy Strasbourg, where, it was understood from 

Alsatians, several laboratories attached to the University were engaged on 

atomic research. The advance was held up, but the Alsos mission did not 

remain in- active. One of its members, Captain Robert Blake, accompanied 

the daring dash of a detachment in Holland, the first to reach the Rhine. He 

ventured into the middle of the river under heavy fire and -led some 

receptacles with the grey-green water. The bottles were sent back by special 

messenger to the Paris head- quarters of the Alsos group and thence by the 

quickest possible route to Washington. It was believed that the Germans, if 

they possessed a uranium burner, would probably have had to use for 

cooling purposes water from a river flowing for a short part of its course 

through the 'pile'. The Americans themselves had used the Columbia River 

for their plutonium pile at Hanford. If that were so, it would be possible for 

chemical analysis to detect traces of radioactivity in the water taken from the 

river and thus enable the Alsos organization to get on the trail of the German 

project. The major who arranged the forwarding of the water from the Rhine 

to Washington facetiously added to the consignment a bottle of the best red 

wine from Roussillon for unsocial sampling writing on the label: 'Test this 

for activity too !' 

Within a week a cable in code, addressed to the Alsos mission, was 

received from General Groves's office. It read: 'Water negative. Wine shows 

activity. Send more. Action.' The people in Paris laughed, telling one 

another: 'Well, they must have liked the stuff!' No one dreamed that the 

cable meant anything more than an amicable participation in the major's 

little joke. But soon another cable followed the first. 'Where are those wine 

bottles?' it demanded in deadly earnest. A secret German laboratory 

somewhere near the famous French vineyards was suspected and the matter 

had to be investigated at once. Consequently the people in Washington had 

evidently not under- Stood the joke. They must have poured that excellent 

Roussillon into test tubes and adulterated it with chemicals instead of 

drinking it. 

At that particular moment Goudsmit was reluctant to send any of his 

collaborators on a wild goose chase into the vineyards of southern France. 

But all his attempts to convince Washington that it had misunderstood a 

simple, harmless jest came to nothing. The Pentagon insisted on its orders 

being carried out. Accordingly, Major Russel A. Fisher and Captain Waiter 

Ryan were sent to Roussillon on Special service. Before they started they 

were grimly warned by Goudsmit: 'Do a complete job. Don't be stingy with 

the confidential funds. And above all be sure that for every bottle of wine 

you locate you secure a file copy for our office in Paris.' 

The two intelligence agents were taken by the French wine growers for 

scouts acting on behalf of American export firms. Whenever they made 

inquiries for radioactive Roussillon they received enthusiastic hospitality. 

They spent ten hilarious days. Then they returned to Paris with several 

basketfuls of red wine, grapes, and samples of soil. 

The agreeable experiences of Goudsmit, the physicist whom war had 

turned into a scientific intelligence agent, were in the minority. Wherever he 

turned he found the traces of distress and death in the scientific sphere as 

elsewhere. Great numbers of distinguished men of science had been 

imprisoned by the Nazis or deported. A typical case was that of the French 

physicist Georges Bruhat. His pupil Claude Roussel had hidden certain 

American pilots, who had been shot down, near the ecole Normale 

Supereure. When the Gestapo began to suspect Roussel, Bruhat declined to 

betray his pupil and was punished by being sent to Buchenwald. There he 

continued to lecture to his fellow prisoners on astronomy until at last he died 

of starvation. 

An even worse fate overtook the Alsatian Holweck, who had invented a 

new kind of machine-gun, with a specially rapid action, for the French 

Army. He was tortured to death by the Gestapo in the attempt to force him to 

reveal the secret of his invention. 

The case of two Dutch physicists, which gave Goudsmit a difficult 

problem of conscience to solve, was of a different order. They had both 

escaped to England during the war and performed 149 valuable services on 

behalf of the exiled Dutch government. The head of the Alsos mission found 

proof, in captured German documents, that before making their escape, both 

had worked, to keep their families alive, for the benefit of the German 

armament industry. Ought he to, could he possibly, report this political 

offence by people who had once been his compatriots? He decided not to do 

so. 

Finally, Goudsmit had one experience of a highly personal nature. 

Immediately after the liberation of Holland he had hurried to the Hague in 

the hope of finding some trace of his parents there. He had not heard from 

them since March 1 943 . 

It was a melancholy home coming. 'The house was still standing,' he 

recalls. 'But as I drew near to it I noticed that all the windows were gone. 

Parking my jeep around the comer so as to avoid attention I climbed through 

one of the empty windows. ... Climbing into the little room where I had 

spent so many hours of my life I found a few scattered papers, among them 

my high- school report cards that my parents had saved so carefully through 

all these years. If I closed my eyes I could see the house as it used to look 

thirty years ago. Here was the glassed-in porch which was my mother's 

favourite breakfast nook. There was the corner where the piano always 

stood. Over there had been my bookcase. What had happened to the many 

books I had left behind? The little garden in back of the house looked sadly 

neglected. Only the lilac tree was still standing. As I stood there in that 

wreck that had once been my home I was gripped by that shattering emotion 

all of us have felt who have lost family and relatives and friends at the hands 

of the murderous Nazis - a terrible feeling of guilt. Maybe I could have 

saved them. After all, my parents already had their American visas. ... If I 

had hurried a little more, if I had not put off one visit to the Immigration 

Office for one week, hi had written those necessary letters a little faster, 

surely I could have rescued them from the Nazis in time.' 

Not long afterwards Goudsmit made a second shocking discovery. In the 

course of his search for documents dealing with the German uranium project 

he came upon a list of those condemned to death by the SS. It included the 

names of his parents. 'And that is why', he writes, 'I know the precise date 

my father and my blind mother were put to death in the gas chamber. It was 

my father's seventieth birthday. On 15 November 1944, Strasbourg fell to 

General Patton. Once more Colonel Pash was among the first troops to 

march into the town. He and his special detachment occupied the Physics 

Institute forming part of the medical faculty of the University. A great many 

documents were found and four German physicists were captured. When 

Goudsmit came to cross-examine them, he felt, he says, somewhat 

embarrassed. After all, they were colleagues, whom Pash, to prevent any 

kind of collusion, had placed in separate cells of the town jail. 'Yet I felt 

uncertain of myself,' Goudsmit writes, 'and even somewhat embarrassed in 

their presence, especially at the prospect of calling on a colleague in jail. 

How was I certain he deserved to be in jail? Or was this just normal in war?' 

The situation was so painful to him that he did not immediately tell the 

German scientists that he was a physicist. The prisoners, for their part, 

declined to make any statement; they had no intention of revealing anything 

about their work to an enemy. Goudsmit had never realized so clearly before 

as he did in that Strasbourg prison what the war had done to science and 

scientists and how fundamentally different, in fact quite antagonistic, the 

rules were which governed scientific life and the practice of warfare. On the 

one side frankness and international friendship prevailed, on the other 

secrecy and compulsion. 

Goudsmit had hoped to capture Weizsacker, who had recently been made 

Professor of Theoretical Physics at Strasbourg. He had been away from the 

University for the last three months, but he had left many of his papers 

behind. Goudsmit and one of his assistants sat far into the night, by 

candlelight, over these letters and documents. The hollow booming of 

artillery fire from the other side of the Rhine and the muttered exclamations 

of the G.I.s who were playing cards in the same room formed a background 

accompaniment to the exertions of the two scientific detectives, as they 

searched among the hints and casual remarks in Weizsacker's 

correspondence for clues to the state of German atomic research. Suddenly 

and almost Simultaneously they both uttered a triumphant shout. There it 

was, the thing they had been looking for month after month! A whole bundle 

of papers dealing with the German uranium project had come to light! 

It was unequivocally clear from the papers found by Goudsmit in 

Weizsacker's Strasbourg office that the Germans, who had always been 

supposed to be ahead in atomic research, were in fact at least two years 

behind the Allies in this held. They had no factories yet for the production of 

the U 235 or Pu 239 (plutonium) needed for chain reaction in the bomb. Nor 

had they any uranium burners comparable with the American apparatus for 

that purpose. 

The date of the turning point in German atomic research had been 6 June 

1942. On that day Heisenberg had given Speer, the Minister of Supply, and 

his staff an account of the situation with regard to his own studies. 

Heisenberg himself reports: 

Definite proof had been obtained that the technical utilization of atomic 

energy in a uranium pile was possible. Moreover, it was to be expected on 

theoretical grounds that an explosive for atomic bombs could be produced in 

such a pile. Investigation of the technical sides of the atomic-bomb problem 

- for example, of the so-called critical size - was, however, not undertaken. 

More weight was given to the fact that the energy developed in a uranium 

pile could be used as a prime mover, since this aim appeared to be capable 

of achievement more easily and with less outlay..:. Following this meeting, 

which was decisive for the future of the project, Speer ruled that the work 

was to go forward as before on a comparatively small scale. Thus the only 

goal attainable was the development of a uranium pile producing energy as a 

prime mover - in fact, future work was directed entirely towards this one 

aim. 

Speer's decision put an end to the nightmare which had been afflicting 

Heisenberg and his collaborators. Till then they had never ceased to fear that 

another research team - for example Diebner's group, which worked in 

Thuringen - might be able to induce Hitler, after all, to embark on the 

construction of atom bombs. But probably those who were in favour of such 

a thing would in any case have had their plans wrecked by Hitler's short 

sightedness. For that 'leader of genius' had given the order in 1942, when he 

believed final victory to be imminent, that no armament projects were to be 

set on foot which could not guarantee the production of weapons ready for 

use in the field within six weeks. Weizsacker refers in the following terms to 

the inadvertent but welcome support he and other passivists received from 

the head of the Army weapons department: 'I remember that Schumann, a 

bad physicist but an extremely skilful tactician, once strongly advised us 

never to breathe a word about atom bombs to the high-ups if we could 

possibly avoid it. He said: "If the Fuhrer hears about it he'll ask 'How much 

time will you need ? Six months ?' And then, if we haven't got the atom 

bomb in six months, all hell will break loose!" ' 

In 1 942 Heisenberg and his friends won a domestic victory. In the small 

town of Seefeld in the Tyrol a dispute arose between the adherents of the 

'German Physics' promoted by the Nazis, and the modernists. It was 

compared by the participants with the religious disputations of past 

centuries. The contest ended with the triumph of the modems, who had not, 

before then, been officially recognized by the Third Reich, 

A handwritten Summary of the arguments used was found by Goudsmit 

among Weizsacker's other papers. The document, in- tended for the political 

authorities, represents a compromise to which even a great mind like 

Weizsacker's did not scorn to resort. He began by using the language of 

official propaganda. He wrote: 'The opinion was however expressed at the 

Seefeld meeting that the transference, mainly contrived by the Jewish Press 

propaganda of the Weimar period and the Jewish followers of Einstein, of 

the relativity theory in physics to problems concerned with views of the 

world in general, should be rejected. ...' But after jotting down this sentence 

Weizsacker must have felt repelled by it, for he crossed out the passages 

about 'Jewish Press propaganda' and 'the Jewish followers of Einstein'. Yet 

on reading the passage through again he apparently found the excisions too 

risky, as he placed a row of dots under one, at any rate, of the two adjectives, 

'Jewish', to show that it was to stand. 

This reluctance by Weizsacker to come down firmly on one side caused 

Goudsmit to doubt whether he had really been actively opposed to Hitler. I" 

fact, even today Goudsmit is still convinced that Heisenberg and Weizsacker 

would have constructed atom bombs if they had been in a position to do so. 

Other physicists, too, both in and out of Germany, have still not quite 

forgiven Weizsacker for the diplomatic skill which he alleged he was 

obliged to practise in order to keep his real sentiment secret. Their 

resentment has led them, moreover, to forget what he, in his cautious 

manner, actually did in the struggle against Hitler. 

The Alsos mission could not rest content with the discovery of 

Weizsacker's papers. For it was thought in Washington that the papers might 

have been deliberately left behind, as a typical German stratagem. It was 

considered that until all important physicists had been arrested and all 

laboratories occupied some doubt must still remain as to whether work 

might not still be going on somewhere in Germany on atom-bomb 

production. Goudsmit always insisted that no one but Heisenberg could be 

the brain of the German uranium project. The American military authorities 

dryly suggested that possibly other German physicists of whom Goudsmit 

had never heard might be secretly working on a weapon of this kind. But he 

repudiated their scepticism with the facetious retort:' A paper-hanger may 

perhaps imagine that he has turned into a military genius overnight, and a 

traveller in champagne may be able to disguise himself as a diplomat. But 

laymen of that sort could never have acquired sufficient scientific 

knowledge, in so short a time, to be able to construct an atom bomb. 

Consequently Heisenberg continued to be the most important 'military 

objective' of his old friend Goudsmit. Wherever Heisenberg might be, there 

too must be the main laboratory for the German atomic-armament plans. But 

where was he? 

In the winter of 1943-4 Heisenberg and some of his collaborators had 

built a small model reactor in one of the cellars of his Dahlem Institute. The 

apparatus worked on one and a half tons of uranium and the same weight of 

'heavy water'. The data furnished by this reactor had to be taken down, for 

the most part, during severe air raids. Since reliable work under these 

conditions proved practically impossible the whole Institute was gradually 

transferred to the little town of Hechingen, in a supposedly safe area, near 

the Swabian Alps, overlooked by the ancestral home of the Hohenzollems. 

The tall boiler house belonging to a Stuttgart brewery, where enormous beer 

vats had hitherto been stored, was papered from floor to ceiling with silver 

foil and provided with a high-voltage plant. Offices and workshops were 

established in the wing of a textile mill. 

The next step was to find an even safer place for the construction of a new 

uranium burner. The Munich professor Waiter Gerlach, though hostile to the 

regime, had taken over, shortly before the end of the war, control of the 

nuclear-physics division of the Research Council of the Reich. He 

remembered that as a lecturer at Tubingen he had known the picturesque 

little town of Haigerloch, situated on two precipitous heights over the River 

Eyach. Like many of his colleagues he had often paid a visit to it in lilac 

time. The innkeeper at the 'Swan' made no difficulties about leasing to him a 

storeroom hollowed out in the rock of the steep hill on which the Castle 

stood. There, in February 1945, the construction of a new German pile was 

begun. 

In all Germany there were few such operatically romantic sites as 

Haigerloch. The saga writer Gustav Schwab was of the opinion, after an 

excursion to this rugged scenery, that 'this town is really absurd.' The 

patriotic Pfeiffer composed the following couplet: 

‘He summons up the Fiend and cries, 

Come, here let Haigerloch arise!' 

At this spot, which had hardly changed since the Middle Ages, the most 

modern of German power stations was now built - an atom burner 

containing cubes of uranium and heavy water, with a graphite jacket. Every 

morning the Physicists cycled in from Hechingen, some ten miles away, to 

their work in the electrically lit underground chamber in the rock. During the 

period of waiting for the moment at which the reactor would begin to send 

out rays and deliver power Heisenberg went up to the half-Gothic, half- 

baroque church attached to the Castle above and played Each fugues on the 

organ. 

"It was the most fantastic period of my life,' one of those who took pal-t in 

the experiments recalls. 'I have never so often been obliged to think of 

Gounod's Faust and Weber's Freischutz as I was in that extravagantly 

romantic setting.' But the tests carried out led to only partial results. For 

there was not enough uranium for the point to be reached at which the chain 

reaction builds up 'critically'. The consignments of uranium cubes from 

Berlin and from Ilm in Thuringen - where another uranium burner had been 

constructed under Diebner's directions - could not get through, by that time, 

as far as Haigerloch. 

As soon as the Alsos organization learned where Heisenberg had taken 

refuge Colonel Pash proposed that a parachute detachment should precede 

the Allied armies to Hechingen and Haigerloch, drop on the atomic scientists 

at work there, and make sure' of them and their notes. But Goudsmit had 

mean- while come to the conclusion, as a result of the papers that had been 

discovered and the examination of witnesses, that such a step was quite 

unnecessary. As he truly prophesied, 'There is so little danger in what is 

going on at Hechingen and Haigerloch that I consider the German project 

not worth even the sprained ankle of a single Allied soldier. 

After the front had collapsed Pash was less afraid of the Germans than of 

the French, whose occupation zone happened to include Hechingen. He was 

determined to steal a march on them. Hastily assembling a small unit of 

shock troops, together with two tanks, a few jeeps and some heavy transport, 

he 'captured' Hechingen an 22 April 1 945 at half past eight in the morning, 

eighteen hours before General de Lattre's troops marched in. Pash's T 

(technical) Group occupied Haigerloch the same day. There a last-minute 

attempt had been made to get the uranium cubes away into safety by putting 

them on an ox-cart and hiding them in a barn under the hay. But one of the 

German atomic scientists - actually a man who had always been fond of 

seasoning his conversation with patriotic maxims - was anxious to gain the 

good graces of the new masters without delay. Consequently he revealed the 

hiding place. Some of the uranium had, as a matter of fact, been previously 

spirited away by young Hechingen peasants, who subsequently tried to sell it 

to the French occupation authorities. But they were arrested by the French 

and given heavy sentences for theft. A few days later the remains of the 

uranium burner in the rock chamber were blown up by an Allied detachment 

in the absence of such instructions from Goudsmit and much to his 

annoyance. 

In the course of the activities of the Alsos mission the group captured 

eight members of the two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, for physics and 

chemistry respectively. They included Otto Hahn, the discoverer of nuclear 

fission, the Nobel prize winner Max von Laue, and also C. F. von 

Weizsacker. But Heisenberg could not be found. He had mounted a bicycle 

at three in the morning and made off in the direction of Upper Bavaria, 

where his family was living. He wanted to be with them at that period of the 

last of the fighting. On the way he was nearly arrested by a fanatical SS man. 

Fortunately the latter allowed himself to be bribed with a package of Pall 

Mall cigarettes which in some roundabout fashion had found its way into 

Heisenberg's possession from the supplies belonging to Marshal Pitain, who 

had been interned in the castle of Sigmaringen, not far from Hechingen. 

Colonel Pash and Goudsmit had again failed to run down the prize quarry 

they were after. By way of consolation, however, they discovered in the 

office of the 'one that got away' a photograph of Heisenberg cordially 

shaking hands with none other than Goudsmit himself. The date was 1939, 

the occasion of the last visit of Heisenberg to America and the place the 

home of the present chief of the Alsos mission at Ann Arbor. 

Another senior officer of the Army Intelligence Service, General 

Harrison, had taken part in the capture of Hechingen. His emotions, when he 

examined this 'remarkable photograph', were very mixed. Goudsmit reports: 

'The Colonel and the General entered Heisenberg's office. He was not there. 

But the first thing they saw, to the consternation of the General, was a photo 

of Heisenberg and myself standing side by side. ... Egged on by Colonel 

Pash the General almost began to believe that I could not be trusted and that 

I had close contact with the enemy. I could have helped him out, I suppose, 

but that didn't seem quite the moment to explain about the international 

"lodge" of the physicists. 

II ATOMIC SCIENTIST VERSUS ATOMIC BOMB 1944-5 

SHORTLY after Goudsmit had discovered Weizsacker's papers dealing 

with the German atomic project he went for a walk with a major who had 

been attached to the Alsos group in the capacity of liaison officer with the 

War Department. 

'Isn't it wonderful', Goudsmit remarked, 'that the Germans have no atom 

bomb? Now we won't have to use ours.' 

The professional soldier's retort shocked Goudsmit, for, out of his many 

years' experience of the military mind, he prophesied: 'Of course you 

understand, Sam, that if we have such a weapon we are going to use it.' 

Thoughts similar to Goudsmit's troubled the atomic scientists who read at 

General Groves's head office, in their capacity as experts, Goudsmit's 

detailed reports from the seat of war. Each report of the Alsos agents, who 

by this time had captured in Heidelberg, Celle, Hamburg, and the city of Ilm 

in Thuingen all the members of the Uranium Society, including finally even 

Heisenberg himself, found at his house near Urfeld, made it clear that the 

Germans really did not possess any atom bombs. They had not even created 

the preliminary practical conditions for the construction of such a weapon. 

The Alsos mission's reports of the non-existence of a German atom bomb 

were naturally 'top secret'. But no security measure, however strict, could 

stop this amazing news from going the rounds of all the Allied laboratories, 

where it was eagerly discussed. 

The reports confronted the atomic scientists, intellectually and 

psychologically, with an entirely new situation. The assumptions on which 

they had started work were no longer valid. Could any further work on the 

bomb be politically and morally justified at all now? Of course not! For the 

Japanese, who were at present the only serious adversaries the Allied 

Nations had left, were in no position, it was known for certain, to develop 

any such weapon. 

On the other hand it would have been contrary to the spirit of modem 

science and technology to refrain voluntarily from the further development 

Of a new held of research, however dangerous it might be for the future, and 

leave it only half explored. New grounds had therefore to be provided for the 

political and moral justification of the continuance of work, even under these 

changed conditions, in the atomic-research laboratories. Such arguments 

were soon forthcoming. They ran somewhat as 

'If we don't now develop this weapon and demonstrate to the world, by 

public experiment, its appalling nature, sooner or later some other 

unscmpulous power will attempt, unobtmsively and in all secrecy, to 

manufacture it. It will be better for the future peace of the world if humanity 

at least knows where it stands.' Such was the attitude, for instance, of Niels 

Bohr in the confidential discussions which arose. But an even stronger 

argument for justifying further research went as follows 'Humanity needs the 

new source of power which we have discovered and developed. All we have 

to do is to take care that in future it shall be used for peaceful purposes 

instead of for destruction.' 

Such problems, were most intensively debated in the Metallurgical 

Laboratory of the University of Chicago. Since, after ]944, the main task of 

development had been transferred to Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos, 

time could be given in Chicago, where the atomic project had registered its 

first important results, to the consideration of the actual consequences to be 

expected from the new invention. It was among the Chicago scientists, too, 

that the first protests were heard later against the proposal to use the bomb in 

the War against Japan. They were also the first to consider thoroughly the 

possibilities of the international control and peaceful development of atomic 

power. 

It was in Chicago, as early as the summer of 1944, that a committee of 

atomic scientists was formed under the chairmanship of Zay Jeffries, who in 

peacetime had been one of the directors Of General Electric. The committee 

composed a number of reports on the potentialities and perils of the new, 

epoch- making discoveries. These reports were submitted to General Groves 

on 28 December 1944 under the title of 'Nucleonic Prospects '. 

Independently of this committee Bohr had, since the beginning Of 1944, 

been studying the political problems involved in the peaceful development 

of atomic discovery of the 'new power'. The great Danish scholar did not 

share the current optimism with regard to the future relations between the 

chief partners in the alliance opposed to the Axis. He foresaw that there 

might be friction and conflict between East and West after the war. 

Agreement among the three great powers, the United States, Britain, and 

Soviet Russia, as to common control of all applications of atomic energy 

seemed to Bohr more easily attainable before completion of the atom bomb 

or its actual employment in war. 

On 26 August 1944, at four o'clock in the afternoon, Bohr was received 

by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House. His object was to discuss 

these questions, likely to be matters of life and death in the very near future, 

on the basis of a detailed memorandum which he had addressed to President 

Roosevelt and to Churchill on 3 July. The scientist intended to point out that 

the new power might make an important contribution to reconciliation of the 

mutually opposed standpoints of Bolshevist Russia and its partners, whose 

political and economic organizations were so different. He had suggested 

that, in order to initiate preliminary and for the time being unofficial 

contacts, the international relations between scientists, which had been only 

temporarily interrupted, should now be utilized. Bohr hoped for the rise of a 

family of nations through the spirit of a reunited family of atomic scientists. 

The course that this conversation took is unknown. For Roosevelt made it 

a rule never to record such private interviews. And Bohr himself still feels, 

even today, that it is his duty to keep the secret. It is clear, nevertheless, that 

the President did not agree to Bohr's suggestion. He may have considered it 

premature. Or it may simply have been the case that Bohr, who could be 

extraordinarily persuasive in long conversations, did not manage to convey 

his meaning definitely enough at a brief meeting. 

The latter hypothesis seems plausible on the evidence of the account given 

by the physicist Lord Cherwell, Churchill's scientific adviser, of a similar 

interview granted by the British Prime Minister to Bohr. He recalled that 

Churchill listened to the scientist for half an hour in silence. But at the end 

of that time he suddenly stood up and broke off the audience, before Bohr 

had finished his low-toned and circumstantially detailed explanations. The 

Prime Minister is then said to have turned to Cherwell and asked, with a 

shake of the head: 'What is he really talking about? Politics or physics?" 

Alexander Sachs felt himself, like Bohr, that he shared responsibility for 

the development of the atom bomb. After Bohr had taken the above- 

mentioned action Sachs tried to persuade the American President to commit 

himself as soon as possible to a definite attitude with regard to the new 

weapon. Roosevelt's 'anonymous adviser' had talked the President, five years 

previously, into giving the signal for the start of its construction. He now 

drew up a memorandum, which he read out to Roosevelt in December 1944, 

dealing with the first use to be made of it. After a long discussion the two 

men agreed on the following conclusions, here given in the version 

submitted by Sachs to Robert P. Patterson about a year afterwards. 

Following a successful test, there should be arranged (a) a rehearsal 

demonstration before a body including internationally recognized scientists 

from all Allied countries and, in addition, neutral countries, supplemented by 

representatives of the major [religious] faiths; (b) that a report on the: nature 

and the portent of the atomic weapon be prepared by the scientists and other 

representative figures; (c) that thereafter a warning be issued by the United 

States and its allies in the Project to our major enemies in the war, Germany 

and Japan, that atomic bombing would be applied to a selected area within a 

designated time limit for the evacuation of human and animal life; and 

finally (d) in the wake of such realization of the efficacy of atomic bombing 

an ultimatum demand for immediate surrender by the enemies be issued, in 

the certainty that failure to comply would subject their countries and people 

to atomic annihilation. 

Did Alexander Sachs only imagine that Roosevelt had agreed to this plan 

of December 1 944? At any rate the President never seems to have mentioned 

to Stimson, his Secretary of War at the time, the existence of this draft of a 

directive to govern the use of the atomic bomb, though the problems 

concerned were exhaustively discussed between Roosevelt and Stimson later 

on. Stimson, one of the few politicians who knew anything about the work 

being carried out on the bomb, saw the President for the last time on is 

March 1945. On that occasion the talk was chiefly of 'X', as Stimson 

sometimes designated the new weapon for security reasons in written 

documents. He noted in his diary: 'I went over with him the two schools of 

thought that exist in respect to the future control after the war of this project, 

in case it is successful, one of them being the secret close-in attempted 

control of the project by those who control it now, and the other being 

international control based upon freedom of science. I told him that those 

things must be settled before the projectile is used and that he must be ready 

with a statement to come out to the people on it just as soon as that is done. 

He agreed to that.' 

General Groves, for his part, had no doubt whatever that the bomb would 

be used for war purposes as soon as it was ready. At the beginning of 1945, 

when several atom bombs were expected to become available within a few 

months, the head of the Manhattan Project reported to his immediate 

superior, General George Marshall Chief of Staff. Groves proposed that 

detailed plans for the employment of the bomb in war should now be drawn 

up and suitable senior officers entrusted with the direction of these 

preliminary studies. But Marshall had been so satisfied with the services so 

far rendered by Groves that he replied, so Groves relates: 'Can't you see to 

all that yourself?' 

This reply was more than a question. It was an order. 'GG' was only too 

glad to obey it. He had long since outgrown his status as a military manager 

specializing in building construction. He now considered himself to be a 

practical nuclear physicist, capable of making scientific decisions, as well as 

a diplomat (working, for instance, against the policy planned by his 

government of collaborating with the British on atomic problems). He 

intended henceforth to be also a strategist and - since employment of the 

atom bomb in warfare would raise questions of the highest political 

importance - a statesman into the bargain. 

Certainly up until now his performance had seemed gigantic. Cinder his 

direction factories had arisen at Oak Ridge that were longer than those to be 

found anywhere else in the United States. Works inspectors had to use 

bicycles to patrol them. At Hanford 60,000 labourers had built one of the 

largest chemical works in the country. At Los Alamos seven divisions were 

employed on the mysterious 'end-product'.* Literally thousands of new 

inventions and patents had been developed in the course of the work. The 

description alone of the most important new processes developed at Hanford 

would have filled thirty stout volumes. Was the practical application of the 

result of years of strenuous efforts by 150,000 people, the introduction of a 

weapon that had involved the expenditure of two billion dollars, now to be 

voluntarily renounced ? General Groves did not even trouble to discuss the 

idea. In his view it was too silly to consider. An atomic scientist who was 

working in close contact with him at that time states that from 1 945 on 

Groves gave the impression of being obsessed by one intense fear, that the 

war would be finished before his bomb could be. Accordingly, even after the 

capitulation of Germany he continued to exhort his collaborators with the 

incessant slogan: 'We must not lose a single day. 

As early as the spring of 1945 a study group within the Manhattan Project 

was given the task of selecting a target for the first employment of the bomb. 

The group comprised mathematicians, theoretical physicists, specialists on 

the effects of explosions and meteorological experts. This team, mainly 

composed of scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, came to the 

conclusion, according to a report published later in a limited edition by the 

Manhattan Engineer District, that targets for this peculiar type of bomb must 

satisfy the following conditions: 

(a) Since the atomic bomb is expected to produce its greatest amount of 

damage by primary blast effect and next greatest by fires, the targets should 

contain a large percentage of closely built frame buildings and other 

construction that would be most susceptible to damage by blast and fire; 

(b) the maximum blast effect of the bomb is calculated to extend over an 

area of approximately one mile in radius. Therefore the selected targets 

should contain a densely built-up area of at least this size; 

(c) the targets selected should possess high military and strategic value; 

(d) the first target should if possible be one that has escaped earlier 

bombardments, so that the effect of a single atomic bomb can be ascertained. 

It was further resolved that four Japanese cities should be deliberately 

spared bombardment by the American formations which by 1945 could 

reconnoitre any target they pleased in Japan with practically no resistance. 

This deceptive period of grace was granted these four cities so they could be 

doomed to a ruin all the more dreadful by the new bomb. 

On the short list of targets for the atom bomb, in addition to Hiroshima, 

Kokura, and Nigata, was the Japanese city of temples, Kyoto. When the 

expert on Japan, Professor Edwin O. Reischauer, heard this terrible news, he 

rushed into the office of his chief, Major Alfred MacCormack, in a 

department of the Army Intelligence Service. The shock caused him to burst 

into tears. MacCormack, a cultivated and humane New York lawyer 

thereupon managed to persuade Secretary of War Stimson to reprieve Kyoto 

and have it crossed off the black list. By the spring of 1945 pilots at 

Wendover airfield in Utah were being trained for the first raid with atomic 

bombs. At the same time Leo Szilard, whose initiative had set in motion the 

construction of this weapon, made a last attempt to recapture and seal up 

again in its bottle, before it could do any harm, the sinister 'djinn' which he 

himself, like the fishermen in the Arabian Nights, had released. Later he 

gave a remarkably frank account of his feelings in those months: 'During 

1943 and part of 1944 our greatest worry was the possibility that Germany 

would perfect an atomic bomb before the invasion of Europe. ... In 1945, 

when we ceased worrying about what the Germans might do to us, we began 

to worry about what the government of the United States might do to other 

countries. 

There had been a complete reversal of the situation. In the summer of 

1939 Szilard had visited Einstein in order to obtain his assistance in 

persuading the government to construct an atom bomb as a preventative 

measure. Now, more than five years later, he again approached Einstein, this 

time to explain to him the utterly different global situation and to indicate in 

broad outline - for to give details would have been to infringe security 

regulations - the possibility that the United States might initiate an atomic- 

armaments race. Einstein proceeded once more to sign a warning letter 

intended, together with a circumstantial memorandum by Szilard, for 

President Roosevelt. Szilard had written his opinion that any momentary 

military advantage the bomb might bring to the United States would be 

offset by grave political and strategic disadvantages. But neither Einstein's 

final letter nor Szilard's eloquent warning against employment of the bomb 

ever came to the notice of the President. Both documents were still lying on 

his desk, untouched, when suddenly, on 12 April 1945, he died. 

Szilard could at first see no opportunity whatever of laying his request, 

urgent even in these circumstances and especially so in view of the 

advancing preparations for atomic bombardment, before the new President, 

Harry S. Truman. It was said in Washington that in those first weeks the 

former senator would at most be accessible to the somewhat restricted circle 

of residents in his own state, Missouri. Luckily one of Szilard's scientific 

collaborator; at Chicago came from Kansas City, Missouri. This man knew 

'Pruman's secretary, Matt Connelly, who was, of course, a citizen of 

Missouri, and took Szilard to see him. 

The new President had only recently himself been fully informed by 

Stimson, on 25 April, of the strictly secret bombing project. Overwhelmed 

as he was by a mass of novel and unexpected tasks, Truman, understandably 

enough, had no time just then for a personal interview with Szilard. 

Connelly therefore sent the scientist to Justice James F. Byrnes, an 

influential Democrat, though at the moment he held no official appointment. 

Byrnes had practically no experience in international politics at that time, 

though he was appointed Secretary of State by President Truman later that 

summer. However, Byrnes held considerable influence in domestic affairs. 

A former justice of the Supreme Court, he had headed the Office of War 

Mobilization in 1944. 

Szilard accordingly had to set out, with his memorandum and a copy of 

Einstein's letter, to the southern city of Spartanburg in South Carolina, 

'Jimmy' Byrnes's political stronghold. There the atomic scientist, whose fate 

it had been to become a citizen of the world and who bore a burden of 

anxiety for all mankind, confronted the successful politician, who knew that 

he himself was about to enter upon a great advance in his career. The 

considerations in Szilard's memorandum related to a future probably much 

further ahead than the other cared to look. They involved such surprising and 

unheard-of measures as a partial surrender of national sovereignty, with 

Soviet police on American soil and American police on Soviet soil, 

international action to supervise prospecting for uranium and production of 

atomic power. In the sleepy atmosphere of Spartanburg such ideas sounded 

like unpractical or even hysterical fancies. 

Szilard soon saw that Byrnes had no sympathy with his arguments, though 

he concealed his lack of interest in them under the cover of conventional 

amiability which a professional politician always has at call. 'Are you not 

worrying too much and quite un- necessarily about all this?' he asked his 

guest, whose foreign name he found so hard to pronounce. 'So far as I know, 

there is nut even any uranium to be found in Russia." 

Only a few weeks later President Truman appointed James Byrnes to the 

office of Secretary of State. Stimson, the Secretary of War, had asked 

President Roosevelt, shortly before the latter's death, for a directive dealing 

with the employment of the first atom bombs and the future of the project 

for their manufacture. But he had never received it. Consequently, at his first 

interview with President Truman at the end of April 1945, Stimson strongly 

urged the setting up at the earliest possible moment of a committee of 

experts to advise the President on these questions. The news, when it 

became known in the laboratories of the Manhattan Project, was a great 

relief to all the scientists who dreaded that the bomb might be used and were 

in favour of early international control. But their disappointment was equally 

great when they learned who were to serve on the committee. Five of the 

members were prominent politicians. They comprised the Secretary of War, 

Henry L. Stimson, his deputy, George L. Harrison, James Byrnes, as 

Truman's personal representative, Ralph A. Bard, representing the Navy, and 

William L. Clayton for the State Department. In addition, there were three 

scientists who, since 1 940, had been in charge of the entire organization 

devoted to research for military purposes. Their names were Vannevar Bush, 

Karl T. Compton, and James B. Conant. This main committee was 

reinforced by a special committee of atomic experts, the 'scientific panel': J. 

Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, and Ernest O. 

Lawrence. The seven scientists, with the possible exception of Fermi, were 

known among their colleagues for their tendency to play bah with politicians 

and the military. They were not trusted to represent fairly the views of many, 

if not actually the majority, of those at work on the Manhattan Project. A 

suggestion that the Nobel prize winner Harold C. Urey, who possessed the 

confidence of a great many atomic Scientists, especially of the younger 

generation, Should be included in the scientific panel was not 

Such then was the body, given the intentionally vague name of the 

'Interim Committee', which met on 3 1 May and 1 June to consider, in the 

words of its orders from Marshall, 'atomic energy not simply in terms of 

military weapons but also in terms Of a new relationship of man and the 

universe. Arthur H. Compton remembers that the scientific panel, to which 

he himself belonged, was not called upon to decide the question whether 'he 

new bomb should be used but only 

low it should be used. At this first consultation the four atomic experts 

unfortunately kept strictly to their limited instructions, instead of suggesting 

on their own account or as the mouthpieces of many of their professional 

colleagues, that the bomb should not be used in warfare. Compton reports, 

with regard to Oppenheimer's stand before the Interim Committee: He was 

giving a technical reply to a technical question. The reply referred to 

estimated that some 20,000 people would be killed the first time the bomb 

was dropped. The fact that employment of the bomb, in Compton's words, 

'throughout the morning Seemed to be a foregone conclusion' was due, 

above all, to the influence of a man whose name does not appear in the list 

of members and who is also not mentioned by Stimson in his subsequent 

account of the proceedings. This man's name was Leslie R. Groves. 

‘It would nor have looked well', Groves explains, 'if I had been officially 

appointed to serve on a committee of civilians. But I was present at all 

meetings and I always considered it my duty to recommend that the bomb 

should be dropped. After all, great numbers of our boys were dying every 

day at that time in the war against the Japanese. So far as I am aware, none 

of the scientists who opposed the dropping of the bomb had any near 

relatives in the field very well afford to be soft.' 

The outcome of the committee's deliberations was in any case a complete 

victory for Groves. On the conclusion of the meetings the following 

recommendations were forwarded to President Truman : 

(1) The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible. 

(2) It should be used on a dual target - that is, a military installation or war 

plant surrounded by or adjacent to houses and other buildings most 

susceptible to damage. 

(3) It should be used without prior warning of the nature of the weapon. 

The third recommendation was considered by Ralph A. Bard, who 

represented the Navy at these discussions, to be so unfair that he afterwards 

withdrew his agreement to the point in question. His was the only voice that 

registered even a mild protest. 

It was probably no accident that the representative of the American Navy 

proved more accessible to humane consideration, than his colleagues. The 

United States Navy has always shown utmost respect for the rules of 

chivalrous combat. A typical case of this attitude occurred when the Judge 

Advocate General of the Navy Department was asked, shortly before the 

decision to drop the atomic bomb, to give a juridical opinion as to the use of 

a 'biological weapon' recently developed in a naval research laboratory. The 

product concerned was a biochemical preparation which would have 

destroyed the whole of Japan's rice harvest and would thus have brought the 

country near to starvation if it had been applied from the air. The jurist's 

opinion was that so inhuman a weapon would be an offence against the laws 

of war and consequently unworthy of the Navy. 

But no attempt was ever made to obtain any such legal pronouncement 

from any competent source before the atom bomb was employed. 

The recommendations made by the Interim Committee were, of course, 

strictly secret. They filtered through, however, to Chicago, Oak Ridge, and 

Los Alamos, where the younger scientists, in particular, continued to speak 

more and more openly against the use of the bomb. At Chicago the 

University appointed a committee to discuss and report in detail upon the 

'social and long. At lunch after the session Compton raised the question 

whether a non- military demonstration of the weapon could not be arranged. 

The majority of those present at the meal rejected the idea for one reason or 

another. He then, with surprising alacrity, withdrew his proposal, political 

consequences of atomic energy'. Its chairman was the Nobel prize winner 

James Franck, the former Gottingen professor. Apart from Franck, it was 

probably Szilard and the bio- chemist Eugene Rabinowitch who contributed 

most of the ideas in the memorandum, which afterwards became known as 

the 'Franck Report'." 

'It was unbearably hot in Chicago at that time,' Rabinowitch recalls. 'As I 

walked through the streets of the city, I was overcome by a vision of 

crashing skyscrapers under a flaming sky. Something had to be done to warn 

humanity. Whether on ac- count of the heat or my own inward excitement, I 

could not sleep that night. I began writing our report long before daybreak. 

James Franck had given me a draft of one and a half pages as his 

contribution. But my own treatment of the matter became very much more 

detailed.' 

The seven scientists from Chicago began their report, forwarded to the 

Secretary of War in the form of a solemn petition on 1 1 June 1945, by 

declaring that they did not presume to speak authoritatively on problems of 

national and international policy. They proceeded to affirm that only in the 

capacity of a small group of citizens cognizant of a grave danger of which 

the rest of mankind was unaware had they resolved to act. They were the 

more impelled to do so, they continued, because as modem men of science, 

unlike the investigators of former ages, they were un- able to hold out the 

prospect of any effective defence against the new weapons, so far did their 

destmctive power exceed anything hitherto known. Such a defence could not 

on this occasion, it was added, be provided by scientific inventions, but only 

by a new political organization of the world. 

This passage was followed by an amazingly accurate forecast of the 

armaments race to be expected - as was later proved. In order to avoid such a 

contingency, the report continued, efforts should immediately be made to 

establish control of armaments on a basis of mutual tmst. It was just this 

essential confidence which would be destroyed at the start if the United 

States were to make a surprise attack on Japan with a bomb which would be 

certain, like the German rocket missiles, to slaughter soldiers and civilians 

without distinction. The seven scientists warned the Secretary: 'Thus the 

military advantages and the saving of American lives achieved by the 

sudden use of atomic bombs against Japan may be outweighed by the 

ensuing loss of confidence and by a wave of horror and repulsion sweeping 

over the rest of the world and perhaps even dividing public opinion at home.' 

The Franck Report proposed that, instead of the atomic bombardment of 

Japan as planned, a demonstration of the new weapon might best be made, 

before the eyes of representatives of all the United Nations, in a desert or on 

a barren island. The report continued: 'The best possible atmosphere for the 

achievement of an international agreement could be achieved if America 

could say to the world: " You see what sort of a weapon we had but did not 

use. We are ready to renounce its use in the future if other nations join us in 

this renunciation and agree to the establishment of an efficient international 

control.'" Compton believes, to the best of his recollection, that Franck 

himself came to Washington and handed him the report, which Compton 

then immediately passed on to George L. Harrison, Stimson's deputy. The 

urgency of this new appeal and the high respect in which the seven members 

of the Franck committee were held caused Stimson at once to refer the 

document to the scientific panel of atomic experts which had been consulted 

a fortnight before. 

At that moment the four men concerned - Compton, Fermi, Oppenheimer, 

and Lawrence - undoubtedly had it in their power, by agreeing to the 

suggestion of their colleagues at Chicago, at least to query and perhaps even 

to prevent the atomic bombardment of buildings and human beings 

occupying a military target in Japan. 'The panel met, for the second time, at 

Los Alamos on 16 June 1935. Oppenheimer subsequently gave the following 

account of its deliberations: 

The other two assignments which the panel had - one was quite slight. We 

were asked to comment on whether the bomb should be used. I think the 

reason we were asked for that comment was because a petition had been sent 

in from a very distinguished and thoughtful group of scientists: 'No, it 

should not be used.' It would be better for everything that they should not. 

We didn't know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn't know 

whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the 

invasion was really inevitable. But in back of our minds was the notion that 

the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that. I have not been 

able to review this document, but what it said I think is characteristic of how 

technical people should answer questions. 

We said that we didn't think that being scientists especially qualified us as 

to how to answer this question of how the bombs should be used or not; 

opinion was divided among us as it would be among other people if they 

knew about it.* We thought the two overriding considerations were the 

saving of lives in the war and the effect of our actions on the stability, on our 

strength and the stability of the post-war world. We did say that we did not 

think that exploding one of these things as a firecracker over a desert was 

likely to be very impressive. 

The initiative taken by the seven men of Chicago was thus repudiated and 

the hope of stopping the atomic bombardment of Japan dwindled away to 

almost nothing. 

Such was the background, one of petitions that failed and of growing 

disappointment among Allied atomic scientists, against which it is necessary 

to judge the thoughts and actions of a certain theoretical physicist, then 

thirty-four years old. Four and a half years later, at the end of January 1950, 

he was to become notorious as the central figure in a great espionage 

scandal. This man was Klaus Fuchs. 

He was the son of a German Protestant pastor, who was a member of the 

Quaker community and a Christian Socialist. As one of the most important 

of the team of British atomic scientists Fuch’s had arrived in the United 

States at the end of 1943 and at Los Alamos in December 1944. While a 

pupil of Max Bom in Edinburgh and as assistant to Rudolf Peierls in 

Birmingham, Fuchs had been regarded as a somewhat taciturn and 

unsociable character. But in the restricted Los Alamos circle of scientists of 

all nations he had blossomed forth as never before. He made many friends 

and rendered personal services to his colleagues in all sorts of discreet ways. 

He was always ready to help out as a baby-sitter, to execute shopping 

commissions in Santa Fe, and in every possible manner to comply with the 

Christian precept to love one's neighbour. 'He was one of the kindest and 

best- natured men I ever met,' declares Dorothy McKibben to this day. 

* It was E. O. Lawrence who objected most strongly to the dropping of the 

bomb. He did so, according to Compton, because some of his pupils had 

been Japanese. 

His colleagues remember how intently Fuchs listened to the discussions, 

more and more frequent after the beginning of 1945, on the political and 

social consequences of the bomb. He seldom made any contribution to them. 

He only interrupted on one occasion. When someone said: ‘We ought all to 

refuse to go on working, because the government will be breaking its 

unwritten contract with us if it uses the bomb for the purposes of military 

aggression,' Fuchs retorted dryly, with devastating objectivity: ‘It's probably 

too late for that now. The whole thing's already in the hands of the 

technicians.' 

He may have been impelled less by an arrogant self-sufficiency than by 

sympathy with his disappointed colleagues when in February and June 1945, 

at Cambridge and Santa Fe, he passed on everything he knew about the atom 

bomb to the Soviet agent Raymond, alias Marry Gold. Perhaps he thought: 

'Others talk, hope, wait, and are repeatedly disappointed, because they don': 

understand the true nature of political power. Well, I'm going to act. Maybe I 

could prevent another war. 

At a later date, after his arrest, he declared that he was sorry to have 

played a double game with his friends. If such scruples had occurred to him 

as early as the spring of 1945, he must have consoled himself with the 

reflection that in those days all these Friends had repeatedly and 

emphatically stated, during their de- bates, that the new weapon forced 

mankind to transcend national boundaries in their thinking and to take 

altogether exceptional action, contrary to hitherto-accepted ideas of 

patriotism and national loyalty. 

No doubt the other atomic scientists intended later on, with the permission 

of the state and public opinion, to commit this treason to conceptions which 

they considered historically out of date. But such a plan must have appeared 

to Fuchs doomed to failure. What did he really think at that time? His own 

statement, made after his arrest, that he had acted schizophrenically, does 

not carry much conviction. He probably hoped by this declaration to escape 

the death sentence he must have feared and to be given a milder punishment 

as being 'temporarily irresponsible for his actions.’ 

We may be able to obtain a more accurate notion of what was actually in 

Fuchs's mind when he resolved to commit high treason if we consider the 

comments of his father and close friends, with whom he never lost touch, 

either before or after his arrest. Pastor Emil Fuchs, who had a private 

interview with his son after the war, in England, attempts today to explain 

his son's conduct as follows : 

As a father I can understand his extreme inward distress at the moment 

when he realized that he was working for the manufacture of the bomb. He 

said to himself, 'If I don't take this step, the imminent danger to humanity 

will never cease.' He thus found a way out of a situation that seemed 

hopeless. Neither he nor I have ever blamed the British people for his 

sentence. He endures his fate bravely, with determination and a clear 

conscience. He was justly condemned under British law. But there must of 

course always be people from time to time who deliberately assume such 

guilt as his. The Prussian General Yorck did so in 1812 when he neutralized 

the Prussian Army by the Convention of Tauroggen. They have to bear the 

consequences of their resolute affirmation that they see a position more 

clearly than do those in whose power, at that juncture, the decision rests to 

deal with it. Should it not be clear by this time that my son acted with more 

accurate foresight in the interests of the British people than did their 

government? His action imperilled the highly paid and distinguished post he 

held and a still more distinguished career in the future. I can only have the 

greatest respect for the decision he took. Which of us can be certain how we 

would have decided in a similar situation?" 

Margaret Hager, a close friend of the Fuchs family, wrote a long study of 

Klaus Fuchs, which she sent to certain acquaintances. It includes the 

following revealing passages: 

As soon as one begins to examine this case it becomes clear that the moral 

ideas which we more or less intuitively apply, in a deplorably mechanical 

fashion, are not immediately adequate and effective in matters in which one 

does not take a one-sided view of loyalty but regards It as obligatory in a 

comprehensive sense. Loyalty is then not something to be shown to an 

individual against others but simply and in principle loyalty to mankind as a 

whole. The question is accordingly not, How could Dr Fuchs act in such a 

way? but, How could a society and thus also of necessity - a man act when 

confronted by circumstances, against his will and without his desiring it, 

with the problem of the best use of power here and now in this world? Fuchs 

was forced to become a traitor in these conditions. 

But how would it be if he did the opposite to what he apparently did? He 

would then be guilty in the other direction. The atomic secret would be kept 

and the man would remain true to his oath. War, from a human standpoint, 

would be inevitable. Dr Fuchs would then have taken the easy path. No one, 

not even the strictest moralist, would probably have been able to reproach 

him in that case. For no one would be aware that for one fateful moment the 

life and death of nations lay - humanly speaking - at his mercy. Subjectively, 

Fuchs must be judged wholly innocent. But ... in the end the British people 

would of course also have to suffer the horrors of a third world war ... and 

though he himself would have remained 'innocent', it would have been at the 

expense of the nations of the earth. 

But this argument does not prove that Dr Fuchs was unjustly condemned. 

He was guilty according to contemporary moral ideas of loyalty. But he 

became so fundamentally in order that nations, individuals, and humanity at 

large might learn, in principle, from his case, where our present social 

organization is taking us.... The circumstance does not turn Dr Fuchs into a 

hero. But however little of a criminal or martyr he may be, he is clearly - let 

us understand the issue at its deepest level - a stopgap, safeguarding the 

inward development and transformation of the human race in its progress 

towards a more genuine, more truly creative humanity.... Apparently 

disloyalty can be deeper loyalty than the common type. 

Fuchs himself made the following revealing comment after his arrest: 'It 

appeared to me at the time that I had become a free man because I had 

managed to establish myself in an area of my being as completely 

independent of the surrounding forces of society. 

It is obvious that he instantly lost this freedom again when he handed on 

his information to the agents of another power. He had only exchanged one 

loss of liberty for another. 

12 FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO 1945 

NEVER was the pace at Los Alamos fiercer than after the capitulation of 

the Third Reich. 'Our husbands worked almost incessantly,' Eleanor Jette, 

the wife of a leading atomic scientist, re members. She was a sort of local 

celebrity on account of her authorship of the sketches regularly performed 

on New Year's Eve in which the difficulties of life on the mesa and the 

peculiarities of certain of its prominent inhabitants were good-naturedly 

satirized. 

But in June and July 1945 even she lost her sense of humour. It seemed 

the weather had conspired to frustrate the bomb builders. For weeks not a 

drop of rain fell. A dry, hot wind blew from the desert over the settlement. 

The grass withered. Foliage and pine needles dried up on the trees. Now and 

then the sky darkened and lightning flickered in the distance over the Sangre 

de Cristo Mountains. But the clouds did not open. Forest fires started on a 

number of occasions close to the town of laboratories. It was feared that the 

wind would carry sparks to the residential quarters, office buildings, and 

workshops. They were still all timber constructed and would easily catch 

fire. But if this happened the only water available for extinguishing purposes 

was Ashley Pond, a small pool in the centre of the settlement. The supply 

system did not now even suffice for the most necessary personal ablutions, 

with this precious liquid. 'We brushed our teeth with Coca Cola,’ says a 

hospital nurse. 'To cap it all some cases of chicken-pox chose this particular 

moment to break out among the school children more important than ever 

for all the children to be able to wash as often as possible and that was just 

when there was a shortage of water. ’ 

A directive from Groves required the first bomb to be ready for testing by 

the middle of July and the second to be available for war purposes in 

August. Philip Morrison states: 'I can personally testify that n date in the 

neighbourhood of the 10th of August was the mysterious deadline which we, 

who were working daily on the job of: finishing the bomb, had to observe at 

all costs, irrespective of money troubles or the mass of development work 

still to come. 

The rush of business, the heat, and the scarcity of water combined to make 

everyone irritable. Mrs Jette reports: 'One day, as I was passing an old 

acquaintance, I quite innocently said "Good morning!" He instantly turned 

upon me in a fury, exclaiming: "What's so good about the morning?'" 

During this final stage of the construction of the atom bomb two young 

physicists, both of them, incidentally, in the same age- group as Klaus 

Fuchs, became particularly conspicuous. They were the exceptionally tall 

Californian Luis W. Alvarez and the skinny Louis Slotin, bom in Canada of 

Russian parents who had fled there from the pogroms. Both these scientists 

were 'war babies' who had first come to be experts at their trade by doing 

war work and achieved their first big results in arms laboratories. In their 

eyes the 'new power' was neither so wonderful nor so terrible as it seemed to 

the veterans with whom they worked. They had not, therefore, much 

sympathy with the doubts that afflicted their seniors in these last few 

months. 

Alvarez, the son of a well-known surgeon at the Mayo clinic, had come to 

Los Alamos rather late, after distinguishing himself in the secret radar 

laboratory attached to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had 

made some important discoveries there, including the invention of a bomb- 

aiming device and the ground-control approach system now in use at 

practically all airfields. On the Hill at Los Alamos he and his still younger 

re- search team had succeeded in constructing the complex release 

mechanism of the bomb, accurate to one-millionth of a second. 

The testing of this apparatus, so far as it could be done in the laboratory, 

was regarded as one of the most dangerous jobs in Los Alamos. It was 

undertaken in narrow, isolated canyons at a considerable distance from the 

mesa on which the residential quarters and workshops had been built. After 

Alvarez had completed to his satisfaction, in the spring of 1945, the first 

development model of this bomb release and tried it out, he handed over 

production of the final model to Dr Bainbridge, the Technical Director, and 

asked Oppenheimer for a new assignment, preferably close to the front line. 

At the end of May 1 945 Alvarez and his team were sent to the air base on 

the island of Tinian in the Pacific, from which almost daily raids with 

ordinary explosive and incendiary bombs were carried out against Japan. He 

developed there, while awaiting his first definite employment Of the atom 

bomb, a measuring device to be dropped at the same time as the bomb. It 

was designed for transmission by radio signal to the bombing aircraft of 

information on the strength of the shock waves released by the new weapon. 

Meanwhile Slotin had been busy testing the interior mechanism of the 

experimental bomb. It consisted of two hemispheres which would come 

together at the moment of release, thereby enabling the uranium they 

contained to unite in a 'critical mass'. The determination Of this critical size - 

referred to simply as 'crit' in the Los Alamos jargon - had been one of the 

chief problems studied by the theoretical department. But the quantity of 

uranium required, the scattering angle and range of the neutrons to be 

emitted by the chain reaction, the speed at which the two hemispheres would 

have to collide, and a whole series of other data could be only approximately 

estimated. If absolute precision and certainty were to be attained, it could 

only be by way of experiment in every case. Such experiments were 

assigned to the group in the charge of Frisch, the discoverer of fission, who 

had been brought to Los Alamos from England. Slotin was one of the 

members of this group. He was in the habit of experimenting without taking 

any special protective measures. His only instruments were two 

screwdrivers, by means of which he allowed the two hemispheres to slide 

towards each other on a rod, while he watched them with incessant 

concentration. His object was to do "O more than just reach the critical 

point, the very first step in the chain reaction, which would immediately stop 

the moment he parted the spheres again. If he passed the point or was not 

quite quick enough in breaking contact, the mass might become super- 

critical and produce a nuclear explosion. Frisch himself had once nearly lost 

his life during one of these experiments at Los Alamos. 

Slotin knew, of course, by how narrow a margin his chief had escaped 

death. But the daring young scientist thoroughly enjoyed risking his life in 

this way. He called it 'twisting the dragon's rail'. Ever since his earliest youth 

he had gone in search of fighting, excitement, and adventure. He had 

volunteered for service "n the Spanish civil war, more for the sake of the 

thrill of it than on political grounds. He had often been in extreme danger as 

an anti-aircraft gunner in that war. As soon as the Second World War broke 

out he immediately joined the Royal Air Force. But in spite of distinguished 

service in active conflict he was obliged to resign shortly afterwards, when it 

was discovered that at his medical examination he had managed to conceal 

the fact that he was near-sighted. 

On the way home from Europe to his native city of Winnipeg in Canada 

Slotin met an acquaintance in Chicago who convinced him that in view of 

his high scientific qualifications - he had won a prize for biophysics while a 

student at King's College in London - he could do more for the war effort in 

a laboratory than in a fighter aircraft. He had therefore found employment 

first as a biochemist and then as a member of the group which constructed 

the big cyclotron in the Metallurgical Laboratory of the Manhattan Project. 

The young man was popular with everyone. Nothing in life seemed to 

interest him so passionately as his work, to which he devoted himself day 

and night. 

After working at Oak Ridge with Wigner on the development of new 

types of reactor, Slotin eventually arrived in Los Alamos. He had hoped to 

be transferred with Alvarez to Tinian at the beginning of 1945, in order to 

undertake the assembly there of the explosive heart of the first atom bomb to 

be used in the war. But as he was a Canadian citizen the security authorities 

were bound by the regulations to refuse his application. By way of 

consolation he was given the task of mounting the internal mechanism of the 

Alamogordo experimental bomb and handing it over officially to the Army 

on behalf of the Laboratory. A copy of the document sent to him certifying 

the delivery to the Army of the nuclear component of the first complete atom 

bomb was thenceforward the principal exhibit in his collection of diplomas, 

boxing trophies, and letters of appreciation of his services. 

On 21 May 1946, not quite a year later, Slotin was carrying out an 

experiment, similar to those he had so often successfully performed in the 

past. It was connected with the preparation of the second atom-bomb test, to 

be performed in the waters of the South Sea atoll of Bikini. Suddenly his 

screwdriver slipped. The hemispheres came too close together and the 

material became critical. The whole room was instantly filled with a 

dazzling, bluish glare. Slotin, instead of ducking and thereby possibly saving 

himself, tore the two hemispheres apart with his hands and thus interrupted 

the chain reaction. By this action he saved the lives of the seven other 

persons in the room. He had realized at once that he himself would be bound 

to succumb to the effects of the excessive radiation dose which he had 

absorbed. But he did not lose his self-control for a moment. He told his 

colleagues to go and stand exactly where they had been at the instant of the 

disaster. He then drew on the blackboard, with his own hand, an accurate 

sketch of their relative positions, so that the doctors could ascertain the 

degree of radiation to which each of those present had been exposed. 

As be was sitting with A1 Graves, the scientist who, except himself, had 

been most severely infected by the radiation, waiting at the roadside for the 

car which had been ordered to take them to the hospital, he said quietly to 

his companion: 'You'll come through all right. But I haven't the faintest 

chance myself.' It was only too true. Nine days later the man who had 

experimentally determined the critical mass for the first atom bomb died in 

terrible agony. 

The recording card of the neutron counter had been left behind in Slotin's 

laboratory. It showed a thin red line which rose steadily till it stopped 

abruptly at the instant of the catastrophe. The radiation had become so strong 

at that moment that the delicate instrument could no longer register it. The 

scientist charged with ascertaining from the available data what had 

happened, as a matter of physics, after Slotin's hand had slipped, was Klaus 

Fuchs. 

Strange to say, a terrible fate was also in store for the complement of the 

cruiser Indianapolis, which took to Tinian the greater part of the explosive 

heart of the first atom bomb destined for use against Japan. Only three men 

aboard the vesse2 the fastest in the American fleet, had any idea what she 

was carrying. The rest simply supposed that there must be something very 

important in the big wooden case which had been hoisted aboard, with every 

precaution, on the morning of 1 6 July shortly before the ship put to sea. 

During the voyage from San Francisco to Tinian very special security 

measures were taken for defence against hostile submarines. Everyone 

heaved a sigh of relief when the Indianapolis, after unloading her secret 

cargo at Tinian, stood for the offing. But before the cruiser had reached her 

second port of call she was struck, at five minutes past midnight on 30 July, 

by a torpedo. Owing to a series of unfortunate circumstances news of the 

sinking did not reach naval headquarters for another four days. Signals from 

another ship were wrongly taken to be routine reports from the Indianapolis 

of her position and owing to one more misunderstanding she was not 

reported as overdue at Leyte harbour. Therefore, salvage units arrived too 

late at the scene of the disaster, and of the ship's 1,196 men only 316 were 

rescued. Some days before the first test of the bomb it was an open secret in 

Alamogordo, even among the wives and children of the Los Alamos 

scientists, that some particularly important and exciting event was in 

preparation. The test was referred to under the code name 'Trinity'. No clear 

explanation has hitherto been forthcoming as to why this blasphemous 

expression was employed, above all in such a connexion. One probability is 

that it was taken from the name of a turquoise mine near Los Alamos, which 

had been laid under a curse and therefore abandoned by the superstitious 

Indians. Another guess supposes that it was chosen because at that time the 

first three atom bombs were approaching completion, and that the code 

name was derived simply and solely from the existence of that hellish trinity. 

The main topic of conversation among the atomic scientists working at 

Los Alamos naturally turned on the question, 'Will the "gadget"' - the word 

'bomb' was discreetly avoided - 'go off or not?' The majority believed that 

the theoretical hypotheses would be proved right. But the possibility of 

failure had always to be taken into account. Alvarez, constructor of the 

trigger of the bomb, had often enough told over-confident colleagues how in 

1943, when his invention for blind landing had been demonstrated to the 

military authorities, it had failed no less than four times before it eventually 

worked. 

The question whether the first complete atom bomb would be a 'dud' or a 

success, or, as they said at Los Alamos, a 'girl' or a 'boy', aroused such 

intense interest that it became the pretext for a charming little game with 

horror. Lothar W. Nordheim, an atomic physicist who had once been a 

member of the old guard of Gottingen, relates: 'The scientists at Los Alamos 

had a betting pool before the first test of 16 July 1945 on the size of the 

burst. But most estimates were too low by far except for one or two wild 

guesses.' 

The only estimate that was nearly correct came from Oppenheimer's 

friend Robert Serber, who had not been in Los Alamos for some time. When 

he was asked at a later date why he of all people should have been so nearly 

right in his forecast, he replied: 'It was really only out of politeness. I 

thought that as a guest I ought to name a flatteringly high figure.' 

On Thursday the 12th and Friday the 13th of July 1945 the components of 

the interior explosive mechanism of the experimental bomb left Los Alamos 

by the 'back door', along a secret road built during the war. They were 

transported from 'Site S', where they had been assembled, to the 

experimental area known as the Jornada del Muerto (Death Tract) near the 

village of Oscuro (which means 'dark'). Here, in the middle of the desert, a 

tall frame of iron scaffolding had been put up to hold the bomb. Because of 

the many thunderstorms experienced during the month it was decided not to 

place the bomb in position until the last possible moment. A bomb of about 

equal size, filled with ordinary explosive, had been strung up on the 

scaffolding a few days before to test the conditions. It had been struck by 

lightning and had gone off with a loud bang. 

The central portion of the bomb was fitted to it in an old farm- house 

under the direction of Dr Robert Bacher, head of the Bomb Physics Division 

at Los Alamos. General Farrell, Groves's deputy, writes in this connexion: 

'During final preliminary assembly a bad few minutes developed when the 

assembly of an important section of the bomb was delayed. The entire unit 

was machine-tooled to the finest measurement. The insertion was partially 

completed when it apparently wedged tightly and would go no farther. Dr 

Bacher, however, was undismayed and reassured the group that time would 

solve the problem. In three minutes' time Dr Bacher's statement was verified 

and basic assembly was completed without further incident.' 

Those of the atomic scientists who had not left Los Alamos a week earlier 

to carry out final preparations held themselves in readiness for departure at 

any moment. They had with them provisions and also, at the express order of 

those in charge of the experiment, a snake-bite kit. On 14 and 15 July heavy 

thunderstorms, accompanied by great quantities of hail, broke over Los 

Alamos. The participants in the experiment, many of whom then 2eamed for 

the first time the precise aim and object of the work they had been doing, 

were addressed by Hans Bethe, head of the Theoretical Division, in the 

biggest of the community halls, ordinarily used for movies. Bethe's speech 

ended with the words: 'Human calculation indicates that the experiment must 

succeed. But will Nature act in conformity with our calculations?' The 

audience then bearded buses camouflaged with paint and set off on the four 

hours' journey to the experimental area. 

By two o'clock in the morning all those taking part in the experiment were 

in their places. They were assembled in the Base Camp, some ten miles from 

Point Zero where there stood the high scaffolding on which the new, still 

untested weapon had been placed - the bomb on which they had been 

working for the last two years and had now finally brought to completion. 

They tried on the dark glasses with which they had been provided and 

smeared their faces, by artificial light, with anti-sunburn cream. They could 

hear dance music from the loudspeakers distributed throughout the area. 

From time to time the music was interrupted by news of the progress of the 

preparations. It had been arranged that the shot should take place at 4 a.m. 

But the bad weather rendered a postponement necessary. 

At the control point, slightly over five and a half miles from the 

scaffolding, Oppenheimer and Groves conferred about whether the test 

should be put off altogether. Groves reports: 'During most of the time we 

were strolling about in the dark, outside the control building, looking up at 

the stars. We kept assuring each other that either one or both of the two stars 

visible had grown brighter.' After consultation with the meteorological 

experts it was eventually decided to explode the experimental bomb at 5.30 

a.m. 

At ten minutes past five Oppenheimer's deputy, the atomic physicist Saul 

K. Allison, one of the twenty people in the control room, began to send out 

time signals. At about the same time Groves, who had by then left the 

control point and returned to the Base Camp, something over four miles 

farther back, was giving the scientific personnel waiting at the Camp their 

last instructions. They were to put on their sunglasses and lie down on their 

faces with their heads turned away. For it was considered practically certain 

that anyone who- tried to observe the flames with the naked eye would be 

blinded. 

During the ensuing period of waiting, which seemed an eternity, hardly a 

word was spoken. Everyone was giving free play to his thoughts. But so far 

as those who have been asked can remember, these thoughts were not 

apocalyptic. Most of the people concerned, it appears, were trying to work 

out how long it would be before they could shift their uncomfortable 

position and obtain some kind of view of the spectacle awaited. Fermi, 

experimental- minded as ever, was holding scraps of paper, with which he 

meant to gauge the air pressure and thereby estimate the strength of the 

explosion the moment it occurred. Frisch was intent on memorizing the 

phenomenon as precisely as possible, without allowing either excitement or 

preconceived notions to interfere with his faculties of perception. Groves 

was wondering for the hundredth time whether he had taken every possible 

step to ensure rapid evacuation in the case of a disaster. Oppenheimer 

oscillated between fears that the experiment would fail and fears that it 

would succeed. 

Then everything happened faster than it could be understood. No one saw 

the first flash of the atomic fire itself. It was only possible to see its dazzling 

white reflection in the sky and on the hills. Those who then ventured to turn 

their heads perceived a bright ball of flame, growing steadily larger and 

larger. 'Good God, I believe that the long-haired boys have lost control!' a 

senior officer shouted. Carson Mark, one of the most brilliant members of 

the Theoretical Division, actually thought - though his intelligence told him 

the thing was impossible - that the ball of fire would never stop growing till 

it had enveloped all heaven and earth. At that moment everyone forgot what 

he had intended to do. 

Groves writes: 'Some of the men in their excitement, having had three 

years to get ready for it, at the last minute forgot those welders' helmets and 

stumbled out of the cars where they were sitting. They were distinctly 

blinded for two to three seconds. In that time they lost the view of what they 

had been waiting for over three years to see.' 

People were transfixed with fright at the power of the explosion. 

Oppenheimer was clinging to one of the uprights in the control room. A 

passage from the Bhagavad Gita the sacred epic of the Hindus, flashed into 

his mind. 

If the radiance of a thousand suns 

were to burst into the sky, 

that would be like 

the splendour of the Mighty One - 

Yet, when the sinister and gigantic cloud rose up in the far distance over 

Point Zero, he was reminded of another line from the same source: 

I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds. Sri Krishna, the Exalted One, 

lord of the fate of mortals, had uttered the phrase. But Robert Oppenheimer 

was only a man, into whose hands a mighty, a far too mighty, instrument of 

power had been given. 

It is a striking fact that none of those present reacted to the phenomenon 

as professionally as he had supposed he would. They all, even those - who 

constituted the majority - ordinarily without religious faith or even any 

inclination thereto, recounted their experiences in words derived from the 

linguistic fields of myth and theology. General Farrell, for example, states: 

The whole country was lighted by a searing light with an intensity many 

times that of the midday sun.:.. Thirty seconds after the explosion came, 

first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed 

almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of 

doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare 

tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty. Words are 

inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the 

physical, mental, and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be 

realized. 

Even so cool and matter-of-fact a person as Enrico Fermi received a 

profound shock, in spite of the retort he had made to all the objections of his 

colleagues to the bomb during the discussions of the past few weeks. He had 

always said: 'Don't bother me with your conscientious scruples! After all, the 

thing's superb physics!' Never before had he allowed anyone else to drive his 

car. But on this occasion he confessed that he did not feel capable of sitting 

at the wheel and asked a friend to take it for him on the road back to Los 

Alamos. He told his wife, the morning after his return, that it had seemed to 

him as if the car were jumping from curve to curve, skipping the straight 

stretches in between. 

It appears that General Groves was the first to regain his composure. He 

consoled one of the scientists who rushed up to him almost in tears, 

announcing that the unexpectedly powerful explosion had destroyed all his 

observation and measuring instruments, with the words: 'Well, if the 

instruments couldn't stand it, the bang must certainly have been a pretty big 

one. And that, after all, was what we most wanted to know.' To General 

Farrell he remarked: 'The war's over. One or two of those things, and Japan 

will be finished.' 

The general public was, for the time being, told nothing about this first 

world-shaking atomic explosion. Dwellers near the experimental area up to a 

distance of some 125 miles had seen an unusually bright light in the sky 

about 5.30 a.m. But they were put on the wrong scent by the head of the 

Manhattan District press agency, Jim Moynahan, who sent the false 

information that a munitions depot had blown up in the Alamogordo region. 

He added that no lives had been lost. 

On the other hand the security authorities, when they tried to restrict 

knowledge of the successful test to those who had taken part in it, failed 

once more in their object. Within a few days the scientists' whispering 

campaign had carried the news to all the Manhattan Project laboratories. 

Harrison Brown, one of the younger men on research at Oak Ridge, recalls: 

'We knew about the fireball, the mushroom cloud, the intense heat. 

Following Alamogordo many of us signed a petition urging that the atomic 

bomb should not be used against Japan without prior demonstration and 

opportunity to surrender. And we urged that the government start 

immediately to study the possibility of securing international control of the 

new weapon.' 

The petition mentioned by Brown had been drafted by Szilard, who, after 

the failure of his efforts at the White House and the negative results of the 

Franck Report, had decided to lead a last forlorn hope. His idea was to 

collect the greatest possible number of signatures from participants in the 

Manhattan Project pro- testing against the use of the bomb. When a copy of 

the petition came into the hands of the director of the Oak Ridge laboratory 

he at once informed Groves of the movement. It would have been difficult 

for the General to forbid the men on research to sign the document. He 

therefore hit on a different method of stopping its further circulation. 

Szilard's petition was declared 'secret'. And the law stated that secret papers 

could only be taken from one place to another under military guard. Thus all 

Groves had to do was to decree: 'Unfortunately, we cannot spare any troops 

for the protection of this document. Until we can do so it must be kept 

locked up. 

In Chicago the men working in the Metallurgical Laboratory were 

growing more and more restless. John A. Simpson, a young physicist who 

took a particularly active part in the efforts to pre vent the bomb being 

dropped, states: 'In June an extensive panel discussion was held within the 

Laboratory by several of the younger scientists, covering subjects ranging 

from the ways of using the bomb to international controls. Following these 

discussions the military officials refused to permit more than three people to 

enter into discussions on the problem at Laboratory meetings. The scientists 

then resorted to the fantastic technique of holding meetings in a small room, 

where a succession of about twenty people would, one at a time, enter to 

discuss these problems with a panel of two or three scientists selected for the 

evening.' 

Excitement ran so high in Chicago that eventually the Director, A. H. 

Compton, had a vote taken, through his deputy, Farrington Daniels, who put 

the following questions: 

Which of the following procedures comes closest to your choice as the 

way in which any new weapon that we might develop should be used in the 

Japanese war? 

(1) Use them in the manner that is from the military point of view most 

effective in bringing about prompt Japanese surrender at mini- mum cost to 

our own armed forces (23 votes, i.e. 15 per cent). 

(2) Give a military demonstration in Japan, to be followed by a renewed 

opportunity for surrender before full use of the weapon (69 votes, i.e. 46 per 

cent). 

(3) Give an experimental demonstration in this country with 

representatives of Japan present followed by a new opportunity for surrender 

before full use of weapon (39 votes, i.e. 26 per cent). 

(4) Withhold military use of the weapons but make public experimental 

demonstration of their effectiveness (16 votes, i.e. 1 1 per cent). 

5) Maintain as secret as possible all developments of our new weapons 

and refrain from using them in this war (3 votes, i.e. 2 per cent). 

Unfortunately the voting, in which 150 persons participated, took place 

without any previous debate. Consequently, the greatest number of votes, 

69, were cast for the second alternative, suggesting a military demonstration 

in Japan. But after the first two bombs had been dropped on the centre of the 

town of Hiroshima and on Nagasaki most of the 69 voters explained that 

they had taken a 'military demonstration in Japan' to mean an attack on 

purely military objectives, not on targets occupied also, in fact mainly, by 

civilians. 

It will be noted from the above summary that, compared with alternative 

(2), 39 votes were cast for experimental demonstration in the United States, 

23 for leaving the military authorities a free hand, 1 6 for a public 

demonstration without military use of the bomb, and 3 for keeping the whole 

affair secret and not employing the bomb in the current war. 

Szilard had obtained the signatures of 67 prominent scientists before 

Groves had been able to stop further circulation of the petition. Szilard then 

sent his appeal direct to President Truman. But he only succeeded, by this 

procedure, in having the matter again referred to the body by which it had 

twice previously been held up, viz. the Interim Committee charged with 

advising the President in this fateful question. The most influential members 

of that committee in this matter were the four atomic physicists whose task it 

was to facilitate, as professional experts, the form that advice should take. 

These were Oppenheimer, Fermi, Compton, and Lawrence. For the third 

time within two months they had the opportunity to throw the weight of their 

authoritative opinion into the scale. Those who opposed the dropping of the 

bomb on Japan had good grounds for believing that the four scientists would 

now, after the Alamogordo test, revise their former judgement. For prior to 

1 6 July no one had known whether and if so with what effect the new 

weapon would explode. But now all calculations had been exceeded ten and 

twenty times over. The participants in the experiment no longer spoke of the 

bomb and its effects as a 'firecracker' but as a 'shattering experience'. Surely 

so great a shock would induce the committee to plead, at this eleventh hour, 

for a remission of the death sentence passed upon the prospective victims of 

the first atomic bombardment ever planned. 

The argument which had carried most weight in the informal debates 

preceding the employment of the bomb was the consideration that although 

the new weapon would undoubtedly entail the sacrifice of very many human 

lives, on the other hand it might well prevent even greater destruction of life 

and property on both sides if it really should bring about an immediate end 

to the war. Ever since May the American public had remained deeply 

affected by reports of the exceptionally bloody fighting for the island of 

Okinawa. Although the Japanese knew that Germany had been defeated and 

that their own position was now hopeless, they continued to defend 

themselves with incredible obstinacy and contempt of death. More 

Americans had been killed or severely wounded on Okinawa alone than 

during the whole campaign for the re-conquest of the Philippines. This fact 

gave rise to the fear that an invasion of Japan would cost hundreds of 

thousands of human lives on both sides. 

When the four professional experts of the scientific panel set themselves 

once more to study the crucial problem of employment of the atomic bomb, 

the following question, Compton recalls, was submitted to them: 'Can we 

think of any other means of ending the war quickly ?' 

But the dilemma represented by the alternatives of dropping the bomb or 

allowing the war to go on indefinitely did not, as we know today, correspond 

with the true nature of the situation. It was based, in exactly the same way as 

the earlier alternatives - 'Either we build an atom bomb or Hitler will do it 

first' - on a false estimation of the plans and resources of the enemy. 

The intelligence services of both the Army and the Navy of the United 

States were in fact at this date already convinced that the final downfall of 

Japan could only be a question of a few more weeks. Alfred MacCormack, 

Military Intelligence Director for the Pacific Theatre of War, recollects that 

'we had such complete control of the air over Japan that we knew when and 

from what port every ship would put to sea. The Japanese had no longer 

enough food in stock and their fuel reserves were practically exhausted. We 

had begun a secret process of mining all their harbours, which was steadily 

isolating them from the rest of the world. If we had brought this operation to 

its logical conclusion the destruction of Japan's cities with incendiary and 

other bombs would have been quite unnecessary. But General Norstad 

declared, at Washington, that this blockading action was a cowardly 

proceeding unworthy of the Air Force. It was therefore discontinued. 

The surrender of Japan could not only have been achieved by 

intensification of the blockade. The chances of bringing it about by clever 

diplomacy were even more favourable. For Japan was at that time more than 

ripe for capitulation. The country was to a great extent willing to capitulate. 

At the end of April Fujimura, the Japanese Naval Attache in the Third Reich, 

who had gone to Berne when Germany collapsed, was introduced by Dr 

Friedrich Hack, an anti-Nazi German to three close colleagues of Alien 

Dulles, resident in the Swiss capital as chief of the American intelligence 

organization, the O.S.S. Fujimura told them he was ready to bring pressure 

to bear on his government with a view to inducing it to accept American 

capitulation terms. Almost at the same time the Military Attache, General 

Okamoto, acting independently, approached the Dulles organization, 

through the International Settlements Bank at Basle, with a similar proposal. 

But both these plans came to nothing, as Washington did not wish to commit 

itself to a precise statement of terms and Tokyo gave no support whatever to 

the efforts of the two Japanese in Switzerland. 

But another attempt made by Japan for the earliest possible restoration of 

peace might have been taken more seriously. At the suggestion of the 

Japanese Emperor a movement was initiated to end the war with the United 

States through the Soviet Union. The first steps toward that goal were taken 

12 July - the very day on which the -first consignment of components for 

the Alamogordo test of the atom bomb left Los Alamos. But the Russians 

had little interest in bringing the war to an end before they themselves 

entered it against Japan as had been determined at Yalta in the previous 

February. They accordingly at first did all they could to avoid consultation 

with the Japanese emissaries. When Ambassador Sate was at last given a 

hearing, the Russians only passed on Tokyo's proposals to the Americans 

after intentional delay, making light of their importance. 

Washington, however, had long known of these manoeuvres, for the 

Americans had deciphered the Japanese secret code. They had been reading, 

ever since the middle of July, the urgent instructions sent by radio to Sate in 

Moscow by Prime Minister Tojo. as well as the replies of the Ambassador. 

Among other messages they had read the words: 'Japan is defeated. We must 

face that fact and act accordingly. 

But Truman, instead of exploiting diplomatically these significant 

indications of Japanese weakness, issued a proclamation on 26 July at the 

Potsdam Conference, which was bound to make it difficult for the Japanese 

to capitulate without 'losing face' in the process. The President had at that 

date already been informed by General Groves, in an impressive report, that 

the experiment at Alamogordo had succeeded beyond all expectations. The 

American historian Robert J. C. Butow, who has made a comparative study 

from both American and Japanese sources of the events that preceded the 

collapse of Japan, is of the opinion that at this period the war could very well 

have been brought rapidly to an end by diplomatic measures, for example by 

conveying the conditions laid down in the Potsdam proclamation to Prince 

Konoye — who had already been given the widest possible plenipotentiary 

powers by the Emperor - by the discreet use of political channels instead of 

broadcasting them to the entire world. 

Butow writes: 'Had the Allies given the Prince a week of grace in which 

to obtain his Government's support for acceptance of the proposals, the war 

might have ended towards the latter part of July or the very beginning of the 

month of August, without the atomic bomb and without Soviet participation 

in the conflict." 

But probably the main reason why the American government remained 

blind to the possibility of such measures was the know- ledge that it 

possessed the atomic bomb. Instead of patiently un- doing the knot it 

appeared more convenient to cut it with a slash or two of the shining new 

weapon. 

It would no doubt have required considerable courage on the part of the 

responsible politicians and strategists concerned to renounce employment of 

the bomb for the time being. For they could not help fearing that the entire 

Manhattan Project, which had hitherto swallowed up nearly two billions of 

dollars, might perhaps be described, after the war, as a senseless waste of 

money. In that case the praise and fame they might otherwise expect would 

turn to mockery and censure. 

President Truman, in his memoirs, writes that his 'yes' decided the issue of 

the dropping of the bomb. On this passage General Groves remarked to the 

author: 'Truman did not so much say " yes " as not say " no ". It would 

indeed have taken a lot of nerve to say "no" at that time.' 

If even the President of the United States did not dare to change gear, any 

such action was far less to be expected of the four atomic experts of the 

scientific panel who had never hitherto offered any serious resistance to the 

plans of their superiors. They felt themselves caught in a vast machinery and 

they certainly were inadequately informed as to the true political and 

strategic situation. If at that time they had had the moral strength to protest 

on purely humane grounds against the dropping of the bomb, their attitude 

would no doubt have deeply impressed the President, the Cabinet, and the 

generals. Once more the four atomic scientists 'only did their duty.' 

The hopes of those who opposed the use of the bomb were revived for a 

moment longer when they heard that Oppenheimer was closeted with 

General Groves at a specially arranged meeting. In reality, however, the 

scientist, in seeking this interview with Groves shortly before the bomb was 

dropped, merely desired in the first place to convince his companion that it 

would soon be time to think of constructing less primitive atomic weapons. 

Thus the sum of a thousand individual acts of an intensely conscientious 

character led eventually to an act of collective abandonment of conscience, 

horrifying in its magnitude.* 

* In an interview with Oppenheimer in Le Monde, 29 April 1958, he was 

asked: 'At the time you were a member of the Interim Committee and 

responsible for advising President Truman on scientific questions and the 

use of the bomb in Japan, did you have the impression that some well- 

informed persons were able to influence certain decisions made for political 

reasons?' He answered: 'What was expected of this committee of experts was 

primarily a technical opinion on new questions. Let us not forget that it is to 

a new government, to men who had not been prepared to exercise the power 

and still less to resolve the atomic problems, on whom the responsibility of a 

decision fell in this era. The majority of those who demanded an opinion had 

not had the time to study the question. On the other hand, President 

Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill showed their complete accord with the 

fact that the atomic bomb had to be used if it proved necessary to end the 

war. This opinion weighed heavily in the scale. Unfortunately, time was 

lacking. It seems possible that a more thorough study of the problem, more 

prolonged, would have led those responsible to a more precise or even 

different conception of what was necessary to do with these new weapons. ' 

13 THE STRICKEN 1945 

ON 7 August at 9 a.m. an officer of the Japanese Army Air Force called at 

the laboratory of Yoshio Nishina, the best known of the Japanese atomic 

scientists, which had suffered severe damage in a previous air raid. The 

officer requested Nishina to accompany him at once to the Headquarters of 

the General Staff. 

When Nishina asked what the Staff wanted to see him about, the officer 

only smiled. Nishina was giving his workers instructions for the work to be 

done during his absence when a reporter from Domei, the official news 

agency, arrived. He inquired whether the Professor believed the American 

broadcast that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. 

The scientist was greatly alarmed. Like the overwhelming majority of his 

countrymen, he had not yet heard of this first atomic bombardment. But he 

had often enough thought, since 1939, that such a weapon might be 

constructed and used in war. He had even gone so far as to make private 

calculations of the amount of destruction it might cause. 

The journalist had assumed that the announcement was mere propaganda 

and hoped that the Professor would confirm that it was a lie. But instead 

Nishina only nodded, stammering with white lips: 'Well, yes - it's quite 

possibly true....' He then followed the officer who had called to see him. 

Nishina was small even for a Japanese. His friendly, almost quadrangular 

countenance, spotted with small warts, was known and loved by atomic 

scientists all over the world. He had worked under Niels Bohr in the twenties 

and had deduced in Copenhagen, together with another of Bohr's pupils, the 

'Klein- Nishina formula'. On his return to Japan he had founded a school of 

atomic science. He was the obvious person, therefore, who should be 

consulted as to the character of the new weapon. For the first few hours after 

the Hiroshima catastrophe no one in Tokyo knew what had happened there. 

The earliest official news was contained in a telegram from the senior civil 

official of the district of Chugoku. It stated that Hiroshima had been attacked 

by a 'small number of aircraft' which had employed a 'wholly new type of 

bomb'. At dawn on 7 August the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Kawabe, 

had received a further report with a sentence that was at first 

incomprehensible: 'The whole city of Hiroshima was destroyed instantly by 

a single bomb.' 

Kawabe immediately remembered that Nishina had once told him, at an 

earlier date, that, according to information supplied by the Japanese Naval 

Intelligence Service, atomic bombardment was a possibility. As soon as the 

Professor appeared Kawabe asked: 'Could you build an atom bomb in six 

months? In favourable circumstances we might be able to hold out that long.' 

Nishina replied: 'Under present conditions six years would not be long 

enough. In any case we have no uranium.' The scientist was then asked 

whether he could suggest any effective method of defence against the new 

bombs. He was able to make only one suggestion: 'Shoot down every hostile 

aircraft that appears over Japan.' 

Nishina's statement was too devastating to carry immediate conviction to 

Tokyo military circles. The same day a hastily summoned' Committee for 

the study of counter-measures against the new bomb' took the view, based 

on the opinion of another scientist, that even the masterly technical skill of 

the Americans was not enough to transport such dangerous apparatus across 

the whole Pacific, from the United States to Japan. 

Nishina had offered to fly to Hiroshima himself and verify his conjectures 

on the spot. It was decided that a committee formed mainly of military 

experts should take off that same day, in two planes, from the airfield at 

Tokorazawa for the scene of the disaster. The plane in which Nishina rode 

developed engine trouble halfway and returned to Tokyo. There were so few 

aircraft avail- able in Japan at that time that he had to wait a day before he 

could start again for Hiroshima. 

While the Professor waited, he had an experience which made a deep 

impression on him. With his pupil Fukuda he was standing in a Tokyo street 

when a Single B-29 appeared in the sky. The inhabitants of Tokyo were used 

to mass air raids. Since their newspapers had not yet been allowed to give 

them any information about the new bomb, they paid little attention to this 

one enemy plane, which had apparently broken away from its formation. 

But the two scientists felt like cowards as they ran in search of an air-raid 

shelter. Fukuda relates: 

At that moment we were both suffering from acute pangs of conscience. 

We alone knew, as those around us did not, that even a single aircraft with a 

single bomb might cause a more frightful catastrophe than all the squadrons 

which had formerly attacked us put together. We wanted to utter a cry of 

warning to all those indifferent people: 'Run for safety! That may be no 

ordinary aircraft with ordinary bombs!' But the General Staff had strictly 

enjoined us to keep the secret from the uninitiated, even from our own 

families. Our lips were therefore sealed. Overcome with rage and shame at 

not being allowed to warn our fellow creatures, we waited for minute after 

minute in that air-raid shelter. We scarcely dared to breathe until the 'all 

clear' signal was given. Fortunately no atom bomb was dropped on that 

occasion. But that temporary piece of luck made no difference to our 

dejection. As we had not dared to warn our fellow human beings, we felt 

that we had betrayed them. My revered professor, Nishina, never recovered 

from the feeling of guilt he experienced that day. 

Nishina started next day, for the second time, on his flight to Hiroshima, 

still hoping that he might after all have been mistaken. In addition to the 

sorrow he felt as a patriot he was also tormented by the fear that if a 

scientific super-weapon of this kind had really been constructed and used, 

the scientists of the West, his friends over so many years, in the eyes of the 

Japanese people would now be inhuman monsters. When on the afternoon of 

8 August his aircraft came within sight of the huge, smoking heap of ruins 

that had once been a flourishing city, all his fears were confirmed. Later he 

told the American officers who cross- examined him: 'As I surveyed the 

damage from the air, I decided at a glance that nothing but an atomic bomb 

could have created such devastation. 

The Japanese officers who had reached Hiroshima the day before, headed 

by Seize Arisue, Director of the Second Bureau (Intelligence Department) of 

the Army, still hoped that only an ordinary weapon might have been used. 

On their arrival the military officer in charge of the airfield had run to meet 

them. One half of his face was badly burned, the other intact. Pointing to the 

bums, he reported: 'Everything that is exposed gets burned. But anything 

that is covered even slightly will escape. Therefore it cannot be said that 

there are no counter-measures.' 

Other eye-witnesses of the terrible disaster that overwhelmed the city of 

Hiroshima subsequently described the scenes of human misery. Nishina 

himself was greatly moved by the magnitude and horror of the spectacle, but 

he would not allow it to divert him from his work. He remained the 

outwardly calm professional expert, making precise calculations. His 

business was to note the measurements, not the sufferings of hell. The fact 

that the roof tiles of all the houses within a radius of some 650 yards of the 

point of explosion had melted to a thickness of.004 inches enabled him to 

compute the enormous temperatures which had developed. The shadows of 

human beings and objects, retained in the wood of some of the walls - the 

dazzling light had bleached and scorched everything around them - enabled 

him to calculate, within a margin of error of only slightly less than 3 per 

cent, the height at which the bomb had exploded. He even dug up the ground 

'on the spot right under the point of explosion' in order to test the degree of 

its radioactivity. Four months later, in December 1945, his whole body 

developed blotches which he believed to be a delayed result of the 

examination he had carried out of the radiation still in the debris. 

The tireless little man explored the city in all directions, to ascertain the 

radius over which windows had been shattered by the pressure of the bomb. 

He visited an anti-aircraft station on the island of Mukai Shima near the city 

and obtained a description of the attack from the gunners. They told him: 

'There were really only two B-29s. We can't believe they destroyed the 

whole city. 

On 10 August the various Japanese investigation committees which had 

spent the last three days trying to reconstruct the course of the disaster met 

in one of the buildings that were still standing in the neighbourhood of 

Hiroshima. Most of those who attended were now convinced that the 

Americans had really dropped an atom bomb. One Naval Academy 

instructor declared that a 'different sort of bomb' had been used, probably 

one containing 'liquid air'. Nishina unhesitatingly rejected this view. He 

proceeded to outline briefly the pre-war development of atomic research, 

closing his lecture with the words, 'I myself took part in it.' The statement 

sounded like self-accusation, as though he felt that his conduct had been 

indefensible. The Professor then relapsed into a moody silence of despair, 

which persisted for a long time afterwards. 

One of those who were deeply shocked by the news that an atom bomb 

had been dropped was the discoverer of uranium fission, Otto Hahn. He 

could not bear to think that his researches, undertaken without any idea of 

their practical exploitation, had eventually led to the deaths of tens of 

thousands of men, women, and children. After arrest by the Alsos mission he 

had been taken, by way of Heidelberg and the American Special Transit 

Camp, known as the 'Dustbin', near Paris, to an English country house at 

Godmanchester, not far from Cambridge. He was in British custody when he 

learned of the frightful consequences of the studies he had completed nearly 

seven years before. 

Nine other German physicists were interned at Godmanchester with Hahn. 

Heisenberg and Weizsacker were there with some of their group; and 

Harteck and Bagge, who had worked in Hamburg on Diebner's uranium 

project; Gerlach, who had been appointed, with the aid of Speer, the 

Minister of Supply, and in the teeth of opposition by the Party officials, to 

the post of Supreme Head of Nuclear Physics Research; and Max von Laue, 

though Goudsmit had assured him that the Allies knew perfectly well he had 

always been an outspoken opponent of the National Socialist regime. 

These ten men had a better time of it, in a material sense, than anyone 

who had to live in Germany during the months that followed the collapse. 

They were treated in very friendly, even frankly flattering fashion. The 

American soldiers themselves who had to mount guard over them during the 

various stages of their journey noticed that they must be very important 

people and were fond of guessing who they might be. One of these 

uniformed guards confided to his prisoner, von Laue:' You are Marshal 

Petain!' 

But the excellent fare and adequate accommodation provided could not 

relieve the prisoners of their anxiety over the fate of their families, left 

behind in the chaos of Germany. They had at first been forbidden to 

correspond directly with anyone in their native land, including their nearest 

relatives. They had disappeared so entirely from the knowledge of the rest of 

the world that when the Swedish Academy wished to get in touch with 

Hahn, who had been proposed for a Nobel prize, he could not at first be 

found. It was vaguely rumoured that he was somewhere in the United States. 

Goudsmit, who spent an hour with each of the prisoners before they were 

transferred, remarks: 'Just why these top German physicists were interned in 

England I never understood.... Perhaps our military experts did not know 

what to do with these scientists after we had found them and felt quite 

grateful when the British offered to take them over.' The scientific head of 

the Alsos mission explained the secrecy maintained about the place of 

internment: 

All this hush-hush was necessitated by our original assumption that the 

Germans had the atom bomb or must be close to its secret. As it turned out, 

they knew practically nothing of significance. But by tracking them down 

and making such a thorough investigation we might have shown our hand. 

Actually, the German scientists were sure of their own superiority. It never 

occurred to them that we might have succeeded where they had failed. But 

our military security experts could not be sure of this. They could not be sure 

that if these men were set free the supposition that we might have a gigantic 

uranium project would become a matter of common knowledge everywhere. 

The risk was too great. The only thing to do was to segregate the men and 

keep their colleagues and the rest of the world guessing. 

Farm Hall, the secret place of internment for the German atomic 

physicists, had been built in 1728. Its first owner, a judge named Clark, had 

been infected by 'jail fever' after one of his periodic visits to examine those 

in custody. He had died of the illness. If in 1945 he had glanced from heaven 

at his idyllic little seat in the country, where he spent his leisure digging in 

the garden for Roman coins and fragments of pottery, he would undoubtedly 

have been amazed to find that his 'Tusculan villa' had, for the time being, 

been turned into a prison. Before the German atomic physicists came to be 

interned at Farm Hall it had been used as a training school for the British, 

Dutch. Belgian, and French secret agents who were to be landed on the 

Continent during the German occupation. 

It was a large brick house, walled in from the road, with a view of green 

meadows and high trees. All in all, the Hall was a most agreeable and 

hospitable place of detention. Two British officers supervised the ten 

valuable prisoners. Weizsacker subsequently acknowledged that these two 

officers carried out their difficult task of superintending ten discontented 

physicists with the greatest tact imaginable. We shall always be grateful to 

them for their behaviour.' But the discontented ones often regarded their 

internment as a bit of luck, since it released them for a while from the 

complex web of duties which scientists, like all others today, are bound to 

perform. Weizsacker comments, in recalling the period he spent in the ivory 

tower which had been created by Army security measures: 'If it were not for 

the constant worry about my family, I should say that I probably never 

enjoyed myself more than I did then.' Like most of the other prisoners 

Weizsacker was able to meditate and write in such peace as he had not 

known for years. It was at Farm Hall that he worked out some of the most 

important and striking of his ideas about the origin of the universe. Another 

of the interned physicists, Max von Laue, wrote a study of Rontgen rays. To 

keep fit, the sixty-five-year-old Nobel prize winner walked six miles every 

day. Otto Hahn reports: 'This meant that he had to make about fifty rounds 

of the garden assigned to us, putting a chalk mark on the wall for every 

round.' 

Many hours were passed, quite in the style of prisoners of war, getting 

through the time by playing handball, solving brain- teasers, and rummaging 

in the library of the house, which was well stocked with old books. 

Heisenberg read nearly all the works of the British novelist Anthony 

Trollope. At other times the internees listened to concerts broadcast by the 

B.B.C. But daily 'classes' were also held, at which one of the ten scientists 

would give an account of his most recent studies. These lectures generally 

ended with a lively interchange of ideas. A1 such debates, and also even 

private conversations and table talk, were tapped by concealed microphones 

and recorded on tape. The prisoners learned of this later, because of an 

accident. One evening, not long before Christmas 1945, they were 

unexpectedly requested to leave their common living room. It turned out that 

a soldier who had been installing a loudspeaker for the Christmas party of 

the troops on guard duty had inadvertently cut the micro- phone wire in the 

process. 

It would be extremely interesting to listen to the tape recordings today 

preserved in the secret archives of the British Intelligence Service and hear 

the discussions which took place among the internees at Farm Hall on the 

evening of 6 August, after the announcement of the dropping of the bomb on 

Hiroshima. Goudsmit has written a fairly long account of the conversation, 

but those who took part in it do not consider his report quite accurate. He 

says that the German experts at first refused to believe the story. 'It can't be 

an atomic bomb,' one is said to have remarked. 'It's probably propaganda, 

just as it was in Germany. They may have some new explosive or an extra- 

large bomb they call "atomic". But it's certainly not what we would have 

called an atomic bomb. It has nothing whatever to do with the uranium 

problem.... "That being settled' - Goudsmit continues - 'the German scientists 

were able to finish their dinner in peace and even partially digest it. But at 

nine o'clock came the detailed news broadcast ... the impact on the ten 

scientists was shattering ... they spent hours discussing the science of the 

bomb and tried to figure out its mechanism. But the radio, for all its details, 

had not given enough and the German scientists still believed that what we 

had dropped on Hiroshima was a complete uranium pile.... 

Waiter Gerlach, who kept a diary, confirms at least one of Goudsmif s 

statements. He too, noticed immediately at that time that Heisenberg did not 

believe in the existence of an American bomb. Weizsacker makes the 

following comments on Goudsmif s account : 

Goudsmit himself was not present at the discussions we had, which he 

describes in so lively a fashion, at our place of internment on the evening 

when we heard that the atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. He can 

only have based his narrative on the reports of the two English officers who 

had been put in charge of us ... but these officers were not physicists and 

could therefore certainly not have reproduced accurately the conversations to 

which they listened about the physics of the bomb. Goudsmif s account 

therefore contains a number of inaccuracies. In particular, we never 

supposed that the Americans had dropped a pile. I cannot say, of course, 

whether one of us may not have mentioned such a possibility, in the course 

of the debate, concerned as it was with technical matters which were not 

clear to us at the time. But if so we should certainly have had no trouble in 

concluding, from our own technical knowledge, that such an interpretation 

of the newspaper report would be in the highest degree improbable. ... 

Nor is it true that on receipt of the first broadcast we all soothed ourselves 

with the reflection that the bomb could not have been atomic. Obviously no 

one who listens to an excited conversation among ten people can hear 

everything that is said. It is true enough, however, that we had such a precise 

knowledge of the difficulties inherent in the production of an atom bomb 

and considered them so formidable that it had never occurred to us that 

America would be in a position to produce atom bombs during the war. ... In 

our own narrow circle we thought it probable that the United States, if they 

were to apply their whole resources to that end, would make further progress 

than ourselves towards a solution of the uranium problem, as well as of other 

questions. But we considered it improbable that American studies would be 

promoted in this sense during the war. For the fact was that we 

underestimated the American potential in supposing that even in the States 

the actual production of an atom bomb could be practically ruled out. We 

assumed that in view of this state of affairs the American authorities would 

decide in advance to postpone such an undertaking until after the war. Nor 

was our assessment of the position, though quantitatively in error, 

qualitatively far out. For after all it was not until the war with Germany was 

over that the bomb was actually completed. 

'A very difficult situation', as Gerlach notes in his diary, then arose in the 

small, circle of scientists at the Hall. During the months of internment they 

had come to be friends. But now the younger men, especially, began to 

reproach their seniors. Had they been right in not building the bomb? If 

Germany had possessed such a weapon, would it not have been possible to 

extort more favourable peace conditions? The older men answered that it 

was fortunate for German atomic physics to have been spared the heavy 

burden of guilt which Allied nuclear physicists would probably now have to 

bear. 

Otto Hahn took hardly any part in these heated and often acrimonious 

disputes. He was so depressed that his colleagues feared at times he might 

grow desperate enough to take his own life. 'Watch Hahn!' they whispered to 

one another. 

From the diary of Dr Bagge, 7 August 1945: 

Poor Professor Hahn! He told us that when he first learned of the terrible 

consequences which atomic fission could have, he had been unable to sleep 

for several nights and contemplated suicide. At one time there was even an 

idea of disposing of all uranium in the sea, in order to prevent this 

catastrophe.... At 2 a.m. there was a knock on our door and in came von 

Laue. 'We have to do something, I am very worried about Otto Hahn. This 

news has upset him dreadfully, and I fear the worst.' We stayed up for quite 

a while and only when we had made sure that Hahn had fallen asleep did we 

go to bed. 

It was one of the two supervising officers who had first told him about the 

dropping of the bomb. Hahn had been almost as deeply shocked by the 

words in which the other had attempted to console him as by the news itself. 

For when the scientist, who had always condemned Hitler's mania for racial 

discrimination, ex- claimed incredulously: 'What, a hundred thousand lives 

lost? But that's terrible!' his informant replied: 'No need to get so excited. It's 

better for a few thousand Japs to perish than a single one of our boys.'* 

"The argument that the lives of many soldiers of the Allied Nations were 

saved by the atomic bombardment of Japan was met at a later date by the 

well-known American clergyman Monsignor Sheen in the following words: 

'That was precisely the argument Hitler used in bombing Holland.' 

14 THE SCIENTISTS' CRUSADE 1945-6 

THE minds of the atomic physicists at Los Alamos had been greatly 

disturbed and bewildered by the news of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 

O. R. Frisch remembers that one day he suddenly heard loud cries of delight 

in the corridor outside his study. When he opened the door he saw some of 

his younger colleagues rushing along with yells of 'Whoopee!' like an Indian 

war cry. They had just heard, over the radio, President Truman reading the 

report by General Groves of the successful use of the first atom bomb. 'It 

seemed to me that shouts of joy were rather inappropriate,' Frisch noted 

dryly. It was he who, in 1939, had first calculated what enormous energy 

would be released by splitting the atomic nucleus. That energy had now 

destroyed tens of thousands of lives. 

6 August 1945 was a black day for people like Einstein, Franck, Szilard, 

and Rabino witch, who had done their best to prevent use of the bomb. But 

the men and women up on the mesa were in a quandary. After all, they had 

worked day and night to achieve their goal. Should they now be proud of 

what they had done, as it was generally considered they ought to be, in this 

first moment of surprise? Or should they be ashamed of their work when 

they thought of the suffering it had caused so many defenceless people? Or 

again, was it possible - and this position would be the strangest of all, really 

only comparable with the contradictory data of atomic physics - for one and 

the same person to feel pride and shame simultaneously? 

The whole business became still more confusing contrasted the character 

of this event, so difficult to grasp, with that of the men who had brought it 

about by the exercise of their intelligence and their deliberate concentration 

on their effort. In the eyes of the world they had now grown to a stature 

which no longer corresponded with, in fact contradicted, their true 

personalities. The godlike magnitude of their performance had given them 

the standing of mythical figures, more than life size, in the imagination of 

the public. They were called titans and compared with Prometheus, who had 

challenged Zeus, the controller of the Fates. They were also called 'Devil 

Gods'. But to themselves and their neighbours they seemed the same as they 

were before, human beings not distinguished for any special virtue or 

wickedness, contradictory beings in the habit of calculating in business 

hours, undistracted by 'incidental' considerations, their bomb's probable 

radius of destruction, while in their leisure hours they might be, like Alvin 

Graves, the most careful of gardeners, rationing their own drinking water to 

save one of their plants from drying up. 

Robert Erode, one of the American physicists who had studied in 

Gottingen twenty years before, tried to describe his own feelings and those 

of some of his companions at Los Alamos at that time in the following 

terms: 

We were naturally shocked by the effect our weapon had produced, and in 

particular because the bomb had not been aimed, as we had assumed, 

specifically at the military establishments in Hiroshima, but dropped in the 

centre of the town. But if I am to tell the whole truth I must confess that our 

relief was really greater than our horror. For at last our families and friends 

in other cities and countries knew why we had disappeared for years on end. 

They had now realized that we, too, had been doing our duty. Finally we 

ourselves also learned that our work had not been in vain. Speaking for 

myself, I can say that I had no feelings of guilt. 

'Willie' Higginbotham, a thirty-four-year-old electronics specialist - the 

son of a Protestant clergyman and soon afterwards prominent among those 

atomic scientists who felt politically and morally responsible for their work - 

wrote from Los Alamos, to his mother: 

I am not a bit proud of the job we have done ... the only reason for doing it 

was to beat the rest of the world to a draw ... perhaps this is so devastating 

that man will be forced to be peaceful. The alternative to peace is now 

unthinkable. But unfortunately there will always be some who don't think. ... 

I think I now know the meaning of 'mixed emotions'. I am afraid that Gandhi 

is the only real disciple of Christ at present... anyway it is over for now and 

God give us strength in the future. Love, Will. 

Some of the atomic physicists at work in Los Alamos knew that the last of 

the atom bombs - only three had been completed so far - was stored on the 

island of Tinian, ready for use. In contrast to the bomb dropped on 

Hiroshima, called the 'thin man', this was known as the 'fat man'. There was 

every reason to suppose that, with a smaller expenditure, it would be even 

more destructive. One of the constructors of this last bomb, who for obvious 

reasons does not wish to be named, admits: 'I dreaded the use of this " 

better" bomb. I hoped that it would not be used and trembled at the thought 

of the devastation it would cause. And yet, to be quite frank, I was 

desperately anxious to find out whether this type of bomb would also do 

what was expected of it, in short, whether its intricate mechanism would 

work. These were dreadful thoughts, I know and still I could not help having 

them.' 

Twenty-five atomic scientists and their assistants had mean- while 

travelled from Los Alamos to Tinian, under the leadership of Norman 

Ramsay, to get the fat man ready for use. 

So long as no one on the island knew what the 'long-haired guys' were 

really doing in the buildings they occupied, surrounded by a special guard, 

the military personnel had considered them merely objects for good-natured 

ridicule. But as soon as the news of the dropping of the first atom bomb 

became known, they were treated as heroes. There were good grounds for 

this attitude. For the men of the Marine Corps stationed on the island had 

learned that they were to bear the brunt, as front-line troops, of the 

forthcoming landing in Tokyo Bay. But there was now reason to hope that 

this operation might never take place. A large number of journalists began to 

arrive at the air base, as well as certain senior officers, who distributed 

badges to the crew of the Enola Gay - the first atom-bomb aircraft, which 

was named for the mother of the pilot, Paul Tibbetts. 

Among the very important persons who visited Tinian at this time was 

General 'Tooey' Spaatz, commander-in-chief of all the Air Forces engaged 

on that front. Herbert Agnew, one of the atomic experts on the island, relates 

that 'we naturally took him, among other places, to the hangar where we had 

got the first bomb ready for release. One of my colleagues showed him the 

little box in which the central mechanism of the bomb had been packed 

before we fitted it. The General lost his temper. He turned to his adjutant and 

said: " You can believe this boy's line of sales talk if you like. But he doesn't 

pull my leg!" The General simply refused to believe that such a little thing 

had caused such mighty destruction.' 

It was arranged that certain atomic scientists, including Alvarez Agnew, 

and the British bomb expert Penney, should accompany this second atomic 

air raid in another plane. While Alvarez and his friends Philip Morrison and 

Robert Serber were drinking a can of beer, shortly before starting on the 

raid, they had a sudden brain wave. They decided to drop a letter with the 

bomb addressed to their Japanese friend Professor Sagane, with whom they 

had worked in close contact at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley before 

the war. Three copies of the letter were handwritten in great haste, and one 

copy securely fastened to each of the three measuring instruments which 

Alvarez would release over the target. It ran: 

Headquarters, Atom-bomb Command 

9 August 1945 

To: Professor R. Sagane. 

From: Three of your former scientific colleagues during your stay in the 

United States. 

We are sending you this as a personal message, to urge that you use your 

influence, as a reputable nuclear physicist, to convince the Japanese General 

Staff of the terrible consequences which will be suffered by your people if 

you continue in this war. 

You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a 

nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary 

material. Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production 

plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of these 

factories, working twenty-four hours a day, will be exploded on your 

homeland. 

Within the space of three weeks we have proof-fired one bomb in the 

American desert, exploded one in Hiroshima, and fired the third this 

morning. 

We implore you to confirm these facts to your leaders and to do your 

utmost to stop the destruction and waste of life which can only result in the 

total annihilation of all your cities, if continued. As scientists, we deplore the 

use to which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that 

unless Japan surrenders at once this rain of atomic bombs will increase 

manifold in fury. 

One of these messages was found after the bombardment of Nagasaki and 

handed over to the Japanese Naval Intelligence Division. It was not until 

much later that it reached the man to whom it was written. 

It is not known to what extent this letter contributed to bring about Japan's 

capitulation. In reality the United States had not a sin-'- atomic bomb in 

reserve, ready for use, at the time the message was dropped. Nor could any 

fresh bombs be produced for several weeks, possibly for several months, 

ahead. The American General Staff had one object in particular in raiding 

Nagasaki. It was desired to give the enemy the impression that the United 

States already possessed a whole arsenal of atom bombs and thus induce the 

Japanese to lay down their arms immediately. The bluff was substantiated, in 

all innocence, by the message which the three physicists had composed for 

humanitarian ends. Consequently, even the friendship among scientists of 

different nations had been misused as a weapon. Late in the evening of 1 1 

August 1945 the American radio announced: 'The United Press has just 

reported from Berne in Switzerland that the Japanese government has 

offered unconditional surrender... 

The news caused ecstatic rejoicing at Los Alamos. All contradictory 

feelings and doubts were for the moment forgotten. Further bloodshed had 

been prevented by the two 'boys' born on the hill. The war was at an end! A 

rush was made to extract from their hiding places the supplies of whisky, 

gin, vodka, and other alcoholic beverages - long since, in expectation of this 

hour, smuggled into the City of laboratories, hitherto subject to a strict 

prohibition. People touched glasses happily and drank to peace. 

At the climax of one of the many improvised victory parties Professor K., 

one of the leading specialists in the Explosives Department, rose to his feet, 

reeling slightly, and dashed out into the night before anyone could stop him. 

Ever since 6 August he had been working, unknown to all but the security 

authorities, on a surprise of his own, to be revealed the day the war ended. A 

moment later flashes and roars came from all directions. People who rushed 

out of their houses beheld a magnificent spectacle. The whole of the town of 

Los Alamos, perched on its precipice, was illuminated by a blinding, 

shimmering glare. The towering red rocks glowed in the reflection of the 

flames. Arrowy fountains of sparks shot up out of the canyons. There 

seemed no end to the bangs, loud reports, and thunderous echoes. Professor 

K. had connected by wire two or three dozen small munitions dumps at 

concealed spots; by pressing a button they would explode. 

After the victory fireworks had burned themselves out and only 

occasional belated explosions could be heard as an aftermath to the main 

display, people returned to their houses and began to listen in again in the 

hope of hearing more details of the surrender. They learned, however, that 

the news of Japan's capitulation had unfortunately been premature. 

Four days later came the announcement that Japan really had surrendered. 

This time there was no rejoicing at first, but after a while, despite the late 

hour of the announcement, a victory parade was organized at Los Alamos. It 

was led by a jeep with more than a dozen of the younger scientists clinging 

to it. The slim figure of Willie Higinbotham was seated on the shoulders of 

the driver. He played lively tunes on his accordion and banged a kettledrum 

made of the lids of two dustbins, to make sure that those who happened to be 

asleep should have no doubt that peace had broken out. 

Lights went on again in most of the houses. Dorm parties began in the 

bachelor sleeping quarters. Dancing went on until dawn. The staff were 

excused from work on the following day. So it continued for two days and 

two nights. 

But when the rejoicings came to an end it was found that for the present 

everything was to go on as before. The world might be under the impression 

that peace had come again. But so far as the people on research at Los 

Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Chicago were concerned, the same strict 

rules of secrecy prevailed as had been in force during the war. 

The younger workers on the Manhattan Project, in particular, found these 

conditions unbearable. They began to grumble. A typical complaint came 

from Herbert Anderson, a young American physicist. He had taken part in 

Fermi's first uranium experiments at Columbia University, during which he 

had contracted lifelong beryllium poisoning. Shortly after the war Anderson 

wrote to a friend: 'We ought to resist every encroachment upon our rights as 

human beings and citizens. The war has been won. We wish to be free 

again.' 

These scientists were not only concerned about their personal freedom. 

They desired in particular to be free to enlighten their fellow men about the 

terrors of the new weapon. When they read in the newspapers, at that time, 

that members of Congress were in favour of the United States keeping the 

secret of the atom bomb to themselves, the physicists would have liked to 

retort that there was no atomic secret which could not be detected within a 

very short time by any nation scientifically of the first rank. They would 

have liked to press for the immediate convocation, on American initiative, of 

an international conference on the control of atomic development, as had 

been desired by Bohr, Szilard, and the author of the Franck Report. 

A special subject brought up by the scientists at Los Alamos was the game 

of hide-and-seek played by the Army with the problem of radioactivity. 

Even before the atomic weapon had first been used some physicists had 

entreated General Groves to allow pamphlets to be dropped at the same time 

as the bomb, pointing out the unfamiliar dangers of radioactivity arising 

from the explosion of this new weapon. This request had been refused by the 

military authorities, for they feared that such warnings might be interpreted 

as a confession that they had been employing a type of weapon like poison 

gas. 

They proceeded, probably from similar motives, to try to divert attention 

from the radioactive effects of atomic bombardment. It was explained that 

there was now no dangerous radio- activity to be found in the ruins of 

Hiroshima, and the number of the victims who had been exposed, at the 

moment of the explosion, to a fatal dose of radiation or one likely to cause 

chronic illness, was kept secret. Groves stated openly at a Congressional 

hearing that he had heard death from radiation was 'very pleasant '. 

Such observations made the Los Alamos scientists' blood boil. For at that 

very moment their twenty- six-year-old colleague Harry Dagnian was 

struggling against the menace of a cruel death from the effects of radiation. 

On 21 August 1945, during an experiment with a small quantity of fissile 

material, Dagnian had set off a chain reaction for the fraction of a second. 

His right hand had received a huge dose of radiation. After admission to 

hospital within half an hour of the accident, the patient had at first noticed 

only a certain loss of sensation in the fingers, occasionally superseded by 

slight tingling. But soon his hands grew more and more swollen and his 

general condition deteriorated rapidly. 

Delirium set in. The young physicist complained of severe internal pains, 

for it was now that the effect of the gamma rays, which had penetrated far 

beneath the skin to the interior of the body, began to be perceptible. The 

patient's hair dropped out. The white corpuscles of his blood increased 

rapidly. Twenty- four days later he died. 

For the first time death by radiation, which the men of Los Alamos had 

indicted upon thousands of Japanese by constructing their weapon, had 

overtaken one of themselves. For the first time the dangerous effects of the 

new power had been brought close, not in the form of a distant statistic, but 

as the suffering, pain, and fatal sickness of one of their own group. 

The accident to Henry Dagnian intensified the movement which had 

begun in all the atomic laboratories among those scientists who intended to 

tell the world the whole truth about the new weapon and entreat their fellow 

men to renounce all use of atomic energy in warfare. Nine days after 

Dagnian had been taken to the hospital shed on the Hill, the Association of 

Atomic Scientists, headed by Higinbotham. was formed in Los Alamos. 

About a hundred of the men in research immediately joined it. Similar 

groups had already arisen in Chicago, at Oak Ridge, and in New York. The 

groups got in touch with one another and came to a common decision to 

enlighten the public and thus bring strong pressure to bear on the statesmen 

of the country, in spite of the fact that such an appeal would constitute an 

infringement of the Army regulations to which the members of the 

Association were still subject. Such was the start of the movement which 

later became known, in a somewhat exaggerated phrase, as the 'revolt of the 

atomic scientists'. Seldom can jubilation have made a man so sad and 

adulation made a man so sceptical as they did Robert Oppenheimer as he 

watched the frenzied delight with which his countrymen greeted the end of 

the Second World War. He, known only to a small circle of his scientific 

colleagues and a handful of politicians, had suddenly come to be an object of 

mass admiration. As the alleged 'father of the atom bomb' - it was a 

designation he always repudiated as over-simplified - the learned physicist 

was saluted on all sides as though he were a victorious commander-in-chief. 

He was regarded not only as the man whose miraculous weapon had spared 

the country the dreaded prospect of heavy casualties in an invasion of Japan 

and another winter of war, but also as a essential to keep this affair a secret, 

residents of Los Alamos were even forbidden to decline invitations to a 

reception arranged a long time in advance in honour of Santa Fe notabilities, 

who had been asked to visit the Hill. Even some of Slotin's closest friends, 

for example Philip Morrison, were obliged to appear at this cocktail party, in 

between attendances at the bedside of the dying man, and behave as though 

they had not a care in the world, new kind of peacemaker, whose amazing 

discovery would make all armies and wars superfluous from this time 

onward. 

Oppenheimer, however, knew too much to be able to acquiesce in this 

overwhelming tide of optimism about the future. He must at that time have 

observed all those who were not in the picture and showed such enthusiasm 

for the coming paradise of peace with the same sadness with which adults 

sometimes watch the innocent play of children. 

When Oppenheimer speculated about the future, his mind was 

overshadowed by two complex sets of facts. In the first place, it was clear to 

him that the two atom bombs which had been dropped on Hiroshima and 

Nagasaki did not represent the height or even all extreme limit, but only the 

beginning, of a new kind of weapons development whose limits could still 

not be seen. Even before the completion of the uranium bomb he had written 

two letters dated 20 September 1944 and 4 October 1944 to a friend, 

Professor Tolman, chairman of a research committee constituted almost a 

year before the end of the war to study the future of atomic energy, pointing 

out that because of wartime conditions they had been able to produce only a 

relatively primitive atomic weapon. These had been his words: 

Whatever technical superiority this country may at present possess in 

dealing with the scientific and technical aspects of the problem of the 

exploitation of nuclear reactions to produce explosive weapons has resulted 

from a few years of work which was, to be sure, intensive, but inevitably 

badly planned. Such superiority can probably only be maintained through 

continued further development of both the technical and the underlying 

scientific aspects of the problem. For this purpose both the availability of 

radioactive materials and the participation of qualified engineers and 

scientists are equally indispensable. No government can adequately meet its 

responsibilities for defence if it rests content with the wartime results of this 

project. 

In the second place Oppenheimer knew from personal experience - the 

degrading interviews forced upon him in 1 943 - that the germ of atomic 

rivalry between the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet 

Union, then still allies, already existed. Unlike his military chief, General 

Groves, who believed that it would be ten, twenty, or even sixty years before 

the U.S.S.R. could develop its own atom bomb, Oppenheimer had a high 

opinion of Soviet research. His views had been quite recently substantiated 

by Irving Langmuir, an American who had won a Nobel prize for chemistry, 

on his return from Moscow, where he had been the guest of the Academy of 

Sciences. Langmuir had no doubt that the Russians could, if they wished, 

construct atom bombs within a relatively short time and might well have 

done so already. He even considered that the Soviet Union, as a totalitarian 

state, could easily initiate a bigger programme of atomic armaments than 

would be possible for the United States. 

Such considerations of practical politics at first prevented Oppenheimer, 

the atomic physicist whose public prestige probably stood higher just after 

the war than any other, from raising his voice to join in the steadily 

increasing chorus of warnings. While men like Einstein, Szilard, Franck, and 

Urey talked of the need for an understanding with Russia, Oppenheimer was 

at the very same time trying to arrange for patrols of aircraft furnished with 

sensitive measuring instruments to detect any atomic test explosion that 

might take place in Russia or anywhere else in the world. During the actual 

week in which the first two atom bombs were dropped, Oppenheimer, 

Compton, Fermi, and Fawrence had already laid down the lines on which 

future atomic armament should proceed. Oppenheimer himself strenuously 

opposed the growing tendency of scientists and also of many government 

officials to 'hand back Fos Alamos to the desert foxes'. In personal 

conversations and public speeches he endeavoured, usually with success, to 

persuade his collaborators to remain at Fos Alamos for, at any rate, some 

time longer. He felt himself more than ever responsible for this 

extraordinary settlement 'on the edge of the world'. His persuasive ability 

and diplomatic skill gained him new friends among the soldiers stationed at 

Fos Alamos. They had expected a special public citation by the President as 

a reward for their services. When it failed to materialize they grumbled and 

protested. Oppenheimer learned of their discontent; he wrote a personal 

letter of thanks, signed with his own hand, and had a copy delivered to each 

man. This step made him more popular than ever with the G.I.s. 

On the other hand Oppenheimer began to lose more and more friends 

among his closest colleagues, who, with few exceptions, had idolized him 

for years. They had hoped that he would now act as their spokesman to the 

world, since they themselves were still sworn to secrecy. But whenever they 

approached him, he in- variably replied: 'Patience, patience! Just now 

delicate questions as to the future control of atomic energy are being 

discussed. We scientists must be careful not to rock the boat. We mustn't 

interfere.' The delaying answers Oppenheimer gave to the worried young 

scientists of Los Alamos and also to those of Oak Ridge, when he paid that 

establishment a visit, resembled the advice proffered by A. H. Compton, 

head of the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, to the scientists of the 

Laboratory. He repeated again and again: 'Don't take any action. If you do, 

you will endanger important political developments.' It seemed clear that he 

could only be referring to secret negotiations with Moscow. So the scientists 

held their tongues, as Compton recommended. 

But towards the end of September the news filtered through that no 

conversations whatever with the Russians on atomic problems had yet been 

initiated from the American side. At a cabinet meeting on 21 September the 

American government, with the exception of the former Vice-President and 

present Secretary of Commerce, Wallace, had decided for the time being 

against tiny revelation of atomic secrets, regarded as a sacred trust. What, 

then, could Compton have meant? Szilard determined to find out. It was due 

to his pertinacity that the scientists eventually discovered the truth at which 

Oppenheimer and Compton had only hinted. Conversations relating to the 

control of atomic energy had in fact taken place in Washington. Only they 

had not dealt with international control, as had been supposed, but with the 

form of control to which the new power was in future to be subject in the 

United States. 

Almost every scientist at that time was of the opinion that there ought to 

be some sort of public supervision of atomic energy. Now, for the first time 

in history, something had been invented which in irresponsible hands might 

imperil the lives of all citizens of the state and perhaps of the entire 

population of the globe. But everything depended upon who, in the name of 

the nation, would exercise such control. Should direction of the new atomic 

industry be placed, as in time of war, in the hands of the military authorities? 

Szilard gathered from Compton that some such plan was in view. The 

latter also revealed to him, under pressure, that the War Department, which 

had framed the new legislative proposals for the control of atomic energy, 

considered it most important that the bill should pass both houses of 

Congress without difficulties and also, if possible, without debate. 

At this news Szilard lost his patience. He went straight to Washington in 

order to find out what exactly this bill, hitherto so anxiously kept secret from 

all the world, might contain. Bob Lamb, C.I.O. representative in 

Washington, procured him a copy of the bill. Szilard was greatly agitated at 

what he read. His negative reaction to the bill's contents was supported by 

the legal faculty of his university in Chicago when he submitted the 

document to that body. If such a law were to be passed by the 

representatives of the American people, all future developments in atomic 

research, instead of being at last directed to the peaceful exploitation of this 

rich source of energy, would be for the most part misused for the purposes of 

armament. And yet atomic scientists were supposed to comply with the 

extremely strict secrecy regulations applicable to them, under the threat of 

long prison sentences for infringement! If the bill became law the result 

would soon be, as Chester Barnard, a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, 

had exclaimed with misgivings when he first heard of the atom bomb, 'the 

end of democracy'. 

The scheme had been ingeniously contrived. The War Department had 

drafted the new legislation under the direction of Kenneth Royall, the 

Assistant Secretary of War, and with the help of General Groves. The 

Department managed to introduce it as unobtrusively as possible into a 

Congress over-burdened with urgent bills. But under the Constitution public 

hearings were required before any new legislative proposal was read and 

debated in Congress. At such hearings qualified supporters and opponents of 

the bill expressed their opinions. Congressman Andrew May, a small-time 

attorney from Kentucky, whose many years in the House of Representatives 

had secured him the chairmanship of the Military Affairs Committee, 

succeeded in holding hearings on the bill - which he and Senator Johnson of 

Colorado were to introduce - without any publicity. Only four people had 

been asked to testify on behalf of the bill. They were the Secretary of War, 

Patterson, and General Groves, who were both naturally in favour of it, 

together with the scientists Vannevar Bush and James Conant, who had both 

collaborated as consultants in the formulation of the bill. 

It was only after Szilard, at the last minute, had alarmed his colleagues, 

that May was compelled, by the pressure of public opinion aroused by 

statements from the scientists, to arrange further hearings, to be attended by 

well-known opponents of his bill. One can imagine his irritation with 

Szilard, who instantly presented himself as the first witness against the 

proposed legislation. 

It was just six years since Szilard, on his way to Einstein's summer home, 

had doubted whether he ought to continue with his fateful mission. What he 

had foreseen then had come true. The military authorities had no intention of 

relaxing their control of the new source of energy. And he himself, for 

daring to oppose them, was now treated, in spite of his contribution to the 

development of the new power, worse than a defendant. Congressman May, 

who presided over the hearing, tried in every possible way to provoke and 

confuse the scientist. He pretended he had not caught Szilard's name 

properly, or could not pronounce it, and persistently called him 'Mr 

SiGhland'. Szilard talked for an hour and forty minutes, and was continually 

interrupted and deliberately misunderstood. He was rudely called to order 

for not answering intricate questions with a plain 'yes' or 'no'. The witness 

was also told repeatedly he was taking up too much of the hearing’s valuable 

time. 

Szilard, by nature a. temperamental man, controlled his indignation with 

remarkable restraint. He saw through the traps laid for him. He allowed 

neither taunts nor accusations to disconnect him and eventually convinced 

most of the members of the committee he addressed that his resistance to the 

continuance of military control of the development of atomic energy was 

well grounded. He thus won the first skirmish in the month-long struggle of 

the atomic scientists to ensure civil control. His adversary, Congressman 

May, apparently so devoted to the interests of the military authorities, was 

soon afterwards forced to retire from public life and serve a prison sentence 

for showing favours to an industrialist who had got Army contracts by 

corrupt practices. 

As soon as copies of the May-Johnson Bill reached the atomic 

laboratories and the universities, the members of the new scientific 

associations, mostly the younger generation of scientists, determined to send 

delegates to New York and Washington. They were anxious to enter the 

political arena to campaign for more satisfactory legislation for the control 

of atomic power. By the middle of November the local groups had combined 

into a single body, the Federation of Atomic Scientists. The word 'atomic' 

was later replaced by 'American', for a great many of the members had 

nothing whatever to do with nuclear research. But at that time, in the autumn 

of 19~5, the ominous adjective was still indispensable. It was still a name to 

conjure with. All doors opened at the word 'atomic', the new superlative. 

Senator Tydings, for instance, declared that an atomic scientist is one of the 

'few persons whose intellectual development in many respects - and 

especially in the scientific field - bears the same relation to that of the rest of 

us as a range of mountains bears to a molehill.' 

The atomic scientists had become important people. That was their first 

discovery when they returned from their laboratories to the world at large. 

'Before the war we were supposed to be completely ignorant of the world 

and inexperienced in its ways. But now we are regarded as the ultimate 

authorities on all possible subjects, from nylon stockings to the best form of 

international organization,' one of them remarked with mildly ironic self- 

detachment, after he had become somewhat accustomed to being dazzled by 

flash bulbs and confronted by microphones and newsreel cameras. 

The more sensitive of these scientists suffered increased pangs of 

conscience when they realized, as the biologist Dr Theodor Hauschka put it 

in a bitter open letter to Oppenheimer, that their prestige came chiefly 

because they had been 'brilliant collaborators with death'. But whenever they 

started to confess their 'sins' public interest in them increased. Those who 

unburden their hearts can nearly always count on a sympathetic audience 

which not only pardons but admires them. Many of the scientists very soon 

perceived that this asset of accumulated attention and respect might, 

perhaps, be converted into the current coin of a genuine political influence. 

They accordingly began 'the last Crusade', as their efforts were called by 

Michael Amrine, an idealistic young writer who placed himself at their 

disposal in those days. It was a crusade undertaken by men who were 

children in political affairs and yet - or possibly for that very reason - 

gradually made headway in Washington against cunning politicians and 

apparently invincible vested interests. 

Amrine, the loyal historian of this unusual movement, describes the mood 

that inspired it: 

These men had rediscovered their personal, human consciences and were 

determined to overcome all opposition in order to guide society back to the 

road of progress and divert it from that which led to annihilation. The 

manifesto in which they announced this aim was a small sheet of paper 

written in single space on each side. A radio reporter remarked later that it 

seemed to have been duplicated with a wet handkerchief. He could not have 

known, of course, that the scientists only possessed an office which had been 

lent to them on the fourth floor of a house without an elevator. They had 

only one room, where there were not enough tables and chairs, so that 

world-renowned Nobel prize winners and students had to squat on the floor 

while they passed to one another the statements and petitions which were 

subsequently heard by the entire world. 

Such was the beginning of an amazing campaign carried out in the face of 

indifference from the White House, the State Department, and Congress, and 

against powerful and well- organized opposition. Experienced people in 

Washington all shook their heads. They warned the 'league of frightened 

men', as the scientists were called, not to expect their undertaking to 

succeed. 

During the winter of 1945 the scientists' vision of a new world without 

hunger or cold was being jotted down by men in thick overcoats in an 

unheated office immediately above Larry's Coffee Shop on L Street. These 

men learned the language of politics with surprising rapidity. For instance, 

they first wrote: 'The transformation of mass into energy, as understood by 

us, has fundamentally changed the nature of the world, as hitherto conceived 

by us.' But that was much too abstract and cautiously formulated a sentence 

to make any impression. Soon afterwards they were addressing politicians in 

the following jazzed-up terms: 'Senator, if a single one of the new bombs 

were to burst on the railway station at Washington, the marble on top of the 

Capitol here would be ground to powder. You yourself and most of your 

colleagues would probably be dead within the first few minutes.' That was 

effective. 

What the young scientists lacked in political experience they made up for 

by an enthusiasm and sincerity which deeply impressed the politicians and in 

particular the representatives of the press in Washington. It was known that 

this strangest of all lobbies was financed only by voluntary contributions 

from the scientists and that many of them who had been given no leave for 

years were now dedicating their first free time to this public question. That 

they were really indefatigable is proved by the entries in a grey-covered, 

oblong logbook in which every scientist working for the Federation wrote 

down his doings at the end of the day. 

Atomic scientists were the first to enter the anterooms of congressmen 

early in the morning. Later on they visited editorial offices to distribute the 

statements which they had themselves typed and duplicated. At noon they 

gave lunchtime lectures to all sorts of societies - answering such questions as 

'What colour is plutonium?' In the afternoons they sometimes even ventured 

into the lions' den itself, the Army Hospital, or attended the tea- parties 

given for them by Mrs Pinchot, a politically influential member of 

Washington society. Late in the afternoon they were to be found at cocktail 

parties where they might meet important persons. Some also conducted 

evening classes in nuclear physics for congressmen and government 

officials. Others discussed their missionary task, far into the night, with 

doctors, sociologists, and representatives of the Church, the press, and the 

film world. 

The first result of all these activities was a substitute for the May-Johnson 

Bill, framed by the scientists in collaboration with Senator McMahon and 

now laid before Congress. The next problem was an additional rider attached 

to the bill by Senator Vandenburg, who had taken this indirect method of 

smuggling in military control again. The scientists contrived to have this 

smothered under an avalanche of letters of protest from 75,000 indignant 

voters. At last, in July 1946, when the McMahon Bill, which handed over 

control of atomic research development in the United States to a civil 

commission, was made law, the scientists were able to taste the fruits of 

victory. But that victory very soon turned out to have been a Pyrrhic one. 

15 THE BITTER YEARS 1947-55 

IN October 1945 Robert Oppenheimer announced his resignation as 

Director at Los Alamos. His decision caused much astonishment among the 

many atomic scientists who had stayed on the Hill. For Oppie had opposed, 

both in his public speeches and in private conversation, the view prevalent at 

the end of the war among most of his colleagues that they should now return 

as soon as possible to the investigation of basic principles for peaceful 

purposes, because armament research had not after all, despite its practical 

results, led to the discovery of any important new data in the field of nuclear 

physics. Teller, who had always admired Oppenheimer but had never been 

able to get on with him personally, now seized the opportunity to call his 

attention to this inconsistent attitude. 'Three months ago', he complained, 

'you told me that by all means I should stay. Now you tell me I should leave. 

Oppenheimer had said that he proposed to devote himself for the future 

chiefly to the resumption of his former teaching activities in Berkeley and 

Pasadena. Such may actually have been his intention at one time. But the 

war years had changed him. He had become an extremely successful 

organizer, a planner, and a politician of high calibre. Back in 1935 he had 

explosively and arrogantly refused the request of one of the best-known 

science reporters, William L. Laurence of the New York Times, for an 

explanation of some of his scientific feats that could be under- stood by the 

layman. But now he had a masterly understanding of how to handle his 

public relations. Oppenheimer typified for the general public the new 

worldly variety of scientist, with the mighty forces of Nature arrayed behind 

him, just as the generals commanded their divisions and the politicians their 

masses of constituents. 

He was more and more to be found in government offices, less and less in 

the lecture room. He had become the oracle of diplomats and strategists. A 

new stage had begun in the career of this extraordinary man. The fact could 

even be noted in his altered appearance and behaviour. He now wore his 

greying hair cut very short - as if to prove even by this detail that he was no 

longer one of the 'long-haired'. His movements had a military abruptness. 

His voice could cover a whole range of tones, from deliberately arrogant 

through judiciously reflective to irresistibly demonstrative of warmth of 

feeling. He was regarded as a 'scientific statesman', with an important 

influence on the decisions taken in great public issues, as the 'Grey 

Eminence' of the State Department and the Pentagon, and simultaneously as 

the preceptor of those in power, capable of turning their offices into 

classrooms from one moment to the next, when he world Stand at a 

blackboard trying to teach them the elements of nuclear physics. He 

probably considered himself not only their tutor but also their spiritual 

director. 

Oppenheimer's friends, however, believed that Washington's influence on 

him was greater than his influence on Washington. They were annoyed to 

find that, despite his private criticism of the May-Johnson Bill when be was 

among his scientific colleagues, his public statements favoured the bill on 

'tactical grounds'. 'Better a bad law than no law at all' was his argument.* It 

was also held against him that, although he had remarked that the physicists 

were now aware that they bad 'known sin', he made no suggestions as to how 

they might show their remorse in a practical form. Again, while he did 

undoubtedly take a leading part in drafting the plan supported by the 

scientists for the control of atomic research, which the Americans intended 

to submit to the United Nations, at the same time he told the generals and 

politicians privately that he considered the proposals went much too far to be 

really acceptable to the Russians. There was no need, he hinted, for any 

great uneasiness about the matter. 

The physicists had the impression at this time, when they met Oppie, that 

he was no longer quite one of them. Some were no doubt susceptible to the 

glamour that now surrounded him, but it was his best friends, in particular, 

who grew cold towards him. One of Oppenheimer's former favourite pupils 

relates: 'When Oppie started talking about Dean Acheson as simply "Dean", 

and actually referred to General Marshall, as merely "George", I knew that 

we did not move in the same circles any more and that we had come to the 

parting of the ways. I think that his 

Oppenheimer had proposed, at the hearings on the bill, that General 

Marshall should be made chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, 

sudden fame and the new position he now occupied had gone to his head so 

much that he began to consider himself God Almighty, able to put the whole 

world to rights.' 

After Oppenheimer had left Los Alamos a general exodus began. Huge 

removal vans were to be seen descending the wide new road down into the 

valley. They carried furniture, trunks, and all sorts of local souvenirs, from 

Indian bracelets to a full-grown saddle horse which Herbert Anderson was 

taking back to Chicago with him. General Groves remained boss of the 

research laboratories pending the passing by Congress of a new law 

governing the control of the installations. He complained: 'My first and 

second teams have left. My third and fourth teams are leaving.' 

At this period, in February 1946, David Lilienthal, later chairman of the 

Atomic Energy Commission, paid a visit to Los Alamos in his capacity as 

adviser to the State Department on the preparation of the American plan for 

the international control of atomic energy. He found the settlement in a 

rather neglected condition. He reported: 

Deterioration had set in, as one might expect. Scientists had left the project 

in large numbers. Contractors had declined to go forward, such as Du Pont. 

Du Pont turned in its contract at Hanford. There was great uncertainty. 

Morale was badly shot. At Los Alamos we found the most serious situation 

because although some very able men remained, the top management of that 

project had left for the universities. We found a great many health hazards 

and fire hazards that were very damaging to morale... there was no inventory 

of the properties. There was no accounting. This whole thing had been done 

so hastily that it had not been possible to do that. These things made it very 

difficult for the men who were operating to make head or tail of what they 

were doing. The net effect of that was a very depressed state of mind. 

In order to raise the spirits of residents on the Hill a little, Oppenheimer’s 

successor, a former professor of physics and officer in the Naval Reserve 

named Norris Bradbury, sent for a famous jazz orchestra and a wrestling 

team. The wrestlers, in particular, were a great success. The Los Alamos 

Times, which began publication after the war, reported that they were 

vociferously encouraged with shouts of 'Bite him, bite him! Tear his hair! 

Don't worry about your children! We will take care of them!' But this outlet 

apparently did not suffice to relieve the Hill residents of their bottled-up 

aggressiveness. So the psychiatrist Dr John Warkentin was summoned to 

Los Alamos to treat their neuroses. In addition to the usual shortage of 

water, the neglect of roads, hedges, and open spaces, and the dilapidation of 

the houses, which had been hastily constructed with green wood, the shift in 

public opinion became noticeable, even on these remote heights. The 

changed mood had been brought about under the influence of the 'scientists' 

crusade', the horrified reports of eye- witnesses from Hiroshima and essays 

such as the famous article by Norman Cousins - which he afterwards 

developed into a short book, Modern Man Is Obsolete. It was now 

considered old- fashioned or even disreputable still to be working on atom 

bombs. 

The Bomb That Fell on America, an epic in verse by the poet Hermann 

Hagedom, represented so vividly the deepest feelings of many Americans 

that it went into a dozen editions in a few months. One passage read: 

When the bomb fell on America it fell on people. 

It didn't dissolve them as it dissolved people in Hiroshima. 

It did not dissolve their bodies. 

But it dissolved something vitally important to the greatest of them and the 

least. 

What it dissolved were their links with the past and with the future. 

There was something new in the world that set them off forever from what 

had been. 

Something terrifying and big, beyond any conceivable earthly dimensions. 

It made the earth that seemed so solid, Main Street, that seemed so well 

paved, a kind of vast jelly, quivering and dividing underfoot... 

What have we done, my country, what have we done? 

The profound shock to people's feelings of security is illustrated by the 

retort, published in Time, of an eight-year-old boy to the question: 'What do 

you want to be when you grow up?' He answered: 'Alive!' 

But the 'realists', as all those people called themselves who favoured 

retention of the secret of the atom bomb by the United States alone and were 

already preparing a commanding position for the new weapon in the 

American Armed Forces' arsenal, worked on at their armament plans 

undisturbed by the change in public opinion. In September 1945, less than a 

month after the end of the war, ground began to be cleared for a new atomic- 

bomb factory near Albuquerque, at the foot of the Sandia Mountains, not far 

from Los Alamos. The bombs to be manufactured here would be mass- 

produced without the attention to detail which had been devoted to the 

original prototypes. 

The exodus of the atomic scientists from the armaments laboratories did 

not worry General Groves quite so much as it had originally, once he had got 

over his first disappointment. He was sure his 'little sheep' would find their 

way back. Meanwhile German armament technicians, despite the protests of 

American scientists, were being imported to the United States. Those 

recruited in this way - the affair was known as 'Operation Paper- clip' to the 

military authorities - were mainly members of the research departments of 

the German Air Ministry and constructors of 'reprisal weapons'. No notice 

was taken of their former political views. At a time when Americans in 

occupied Germany were not even allowed to shake hands with people who 

had been Hitler's enemies or had obeyed him against their wills, a number of 

those who had openly professed Nazism and had worked on the V2 rockets 

and other instruments of destruction were invited to the United States to 

assist in the American armaments industry. 

But protests like Hans Bethe's against such a peculiar choice of personnel 

were disregarded by the Armed Forces. Their attitude was that if they 

themselves did not get hold of these scientific brains the Russians soon 

would. As a matter of fact the Red Army, with an ideological nonchalance 

that rivalled that of their Western allies, really had taken into custody, as war 

booty, a large number of scientific and technical specialists. 

Even the Americans, who later on gave them regular contracts, used 

somewhat rough methods in their hunt for German scientists immediately 

after the end of hostilities. For example, the American military police, 

months after the Armistice, seized a certain 'atomic scientist' in Bremen. He 

was transported, in spite of his desperate protests, to the United States. There 

he was cross- examined, day after day, about his knowledge of nuclear 

physics. But unlike most of the other German scientists, who had reported 

willingly enough to their new masters on their war work, this captive proved 

to be frankly obstinate. He stubbornly maintained that he knew nothing of 

atomic research except what he had read in the newspapers, and was, in 

point of fact, a tailor. He was believed to be shamming until someone hit on 

the notion of handing him a needle and thread. He dumbfounded his warders 

by doing really excellent work on their shirts and trousers. It turned out in 

the end that the man had only been carried off across the ocean because his 

name was Heinrich Jordan. The M. P.s had mistaken him for Pascual Jordan, 

the famous theoretical physicist and former pupil of Max Bom. 

Another mistake made by the Army authorities could not so easily be put 

right. In conformity with an order which was supposed to have been issued 

in General Groves's office, a detachment of the American Army of 

occupation in Japan, under the command of a Major O'Heam, destroyed 

Professor Nishina's two cyclotrons, in the erroneous belief that they might 

possibly serve for the production of atomic bombs. Before the forceful 

complaints of the Japanese scientist reached his colleagues in the United 

States, the demolition unit of the Eighth Army had already, in five days and 

nights, completed the work of destruction. All the petitions forwarded by the 

American physicists, who compared this act of vandalism with Hitler's 

burning of books, came too late. 

The American scientists' strongest protests were levelled at the plan for 

carrying out atomic-bomb tests in the summer of 1946. They took the view 

that such an experiment would be regarded by public opinion in the rest of 

the world as 'sabre-rattling' and would be bound to prejudice negotiations for 

international control. The atomic manoeuvres had been proposed by the 

Navy, which declared that they were a necessary preliminary to the new 

naval building programme, future naval strategy, and naval security 

measures against the new weapon. The Federation of Atomic Scientists and 

many other scientific speakers objected that neither scientific nor strategic 

importance could be attributed to the new tests, which were to be carried out 

off the atoll of Bikini. In case of war, they pointed out, an enemy would use 

such expensive weapons, not against targets as difficult to hit as battleships 

but against large cities, where they would be bound to cause a maximum of 

devastation. It was forecast that the public would obtain an entirely false 

idea of the power of the new weapon from the tests proposed. 

The experiments at Bikini were postponed for a while they were 

considered a discordant accompaniment to the forthcoming presentation of 

the American plan for international control to the United Nations. But in 

July 1946 they were held. Their material effect was, as the professionals had 

prophesied, surprisingly small. But their spiritual effect was great. They 

soothed the fears of the American public almost as much as the bombs 

dropped on Japan had aroused them. William Laurence, the only American 

journalist permitted to attend both the experiment at Alamogordo and the 

atomic bombardment of Nagasaki, wrote at that time: 

On returning from Bikini one is amazed to find the profound change in the 

public attitude towards the problem of the atomic bomb. Before Bikini the 

world stood in awe of this new cosmic force. Since Bikini this feeling of awe 

has largely evaporated and has been sup- planted by a sense of relief 

unrelated to the grim reality of the situation. Having lived with a nightmare 

for nearly a year, the average citizen is now only too glad to grasp at the 

flimsiest means that would enable him to regain his peace of mind. 

It has been said that this psychological effect was intended from the start 

by those who arranged the Bikini experiment. But this view assumes a 

Machiavellian intelligence. The truth probably is that the American Navy, in 

its efforts to attract the attention of the public, desired to have a test of its 

own after having been defeated in its struggle with the Army for permission 

to cooperate in the development of the bomb.* 

In reality the American public, after thirteen years of unrest and war, 

simply had neither the capacity nor the desire to be impressed by any further 

warnings or prophecies of terror. The people's growing apathy was due not 

only to the Cassandra-like utterances of the scientists but also to 

tranquillizing articles such as a report on Hiroshima by Major de Seversky, 

published in the Reader's Digest, which intentionally underplayed its 

horrors. If the citizens of any town in North Carolina, Kansas, or Texas 

heard an atomic physicist say in the course of explanatory lectures that there 

was really no defence against the new bombs, a typical reaction noted by 

investigators from Cornell University who were trying to assess public 

opinion by questionnaires was, for example: 'I am only one of many people 

who take life as it comes. If I have to live in a country where there are 

earthquakes, surely there would be no point in my going to bed every night 

in feat- of an earthquake. 

* Although the first six thousand dollars provided from public funds for 

atomic research in the United States came from the Navy, General Groves 

would not even allow it to procure uranium for its own experiments. George 

Gamow, who during the war had worked out an early solution of the atom- 

bomb problem on behalf of the Navy, was unable to continue his studies 

simply because he had applied to the wrong branch of the Armed Forces for 

protection. 

This new feeling of helplessness in the face of natural forces which man 

himself had the power to liberate was accompanied by a renunciation of 

civic responsibility. 'I'm not worrying about it,' said one of the average 

citizens interviewed in August 1946 by the Cornell investigators. 'The 

government is sure to be taking precautions. Why should my heart be heavy 

over something I can't possibly control?' 

Even the labour unions, which had originally attempted to mobilize their 

members against atomic armaments, became increasingly indifferent to the 

question. The following incident is evidence : 

The members of a pacifist organization of workmen, led by their president, 

James Peck, decided in the summer of 1946 to demonstrate against the use 

of atomic energy for war purposes. The demonstration was to be staged 

outside the Oak Ridge factories, which were still working day and night at 

the production of explosive material for atom bombs. But the C.I.O. leaders 

acting for the factories stopped the demonstration, since any move towards 

abolishing atomic-armament factories might ultimately endanger the jobs of 

those workers. 

To combat this public apathy a group of atomic scientists at the University 

of Chicago, headed by Hyman H. Goldsmith and Eugene Rabinowitch, 

founded a periodical, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Its object was to 

explain the social and political consequences of the new source of power. 

The idea first arose in discussions at a drugstore on 57th Street, opposite the 

campus. The editorial work was done in the basement of Eckart Hall and the 

printing by contract with a small East Side newspaper for Czech immigrants. 

But the Bulletin exercised from the start an influence on leading American 

intellectuals far beyond its limited circulation. Nevertheless, the new journal, 

perhaps the most important publicizing venture to appear in the atomic age, 

was perpetually involved in the greatest financial difficulties. 'To say that the 

Bulletin was founded on a shoestring would be to describe it as overdressed 

at birth,' one of the editors recalls. 'It lived for many months from hand to 

mouth, supported by the atomic scientists of Chicago, debts, and 

Goldsmith's convictions. 

In 1952, after years of struggle, the Bulletin appeared inevitably doomed 

to extinction. But at the last moment it was saved by the voluntary demise of 

the Emergency Committee for Atomic Scientists which the trend of the 

times had discouraged to the point of surrender. Its members, however, were 

able, before laying down their arms, to apply the last of their resources to 

giving the dying Chicago periodical the requisite 'shot in the arm'. The 

Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists had been set up soon after the 

war at the suggestion of Albert Einstein to enlighten the public about what it 

might hope and fear from atomic power. The great scholar had been deeply 

shocked by what had followed his historic letter of August 1939. After 

Hiroshima he became the most resolute of those opposed to the atom bomb. 

Having travelled thousands of miles to escape nationalism and militarism in 

Germany, he had watched with horror the encroachment of these forces 

upon the American continent. But none of his passionately indignant 

speeches, manifestoes, and protests seemed to have done any good. His 

anxiety for- the world had eventually made him only too ready to sign 

repeated public petitions. Kowarski, one of Joliot-Curie's early associates, 

recollects that when he asked a group of American lecturers and students 

after the war what they were discussing so eagerly, he received the slightly 

ironical answer: 'Oh, we're just wondering what we're going to say in 

Einstein's latest letter to the President!' 

But by 1947 the greatest scientist of his generation had already recognized 

that all his efforts and those of his colleagues had failed to penetrate the 

public's stubborn indifference. In his discouragement he made the following 

statement to representatives of the foreign Press: 'The public, having been 

warned of the horrible nature of atomic warfare, has done nothing about it 

and to a large extent has dismissed the warning from its conscious- ness. It 

should not be forgotten that the atomic bombs were made in this country as a 

preventive measure. It was to head off its use by the Germans if they 

discovered it. We are in effect making the low standards of the enemy in the 

last war our own for the present. 

During a walk with Ernst Straus, a young mathematician acting as his 

scientific assistant at Princeton, Einstein remarked, as though to console 

himself for his almost completely unsuccessful political efforts: 'Yes, we 

now have to divide up our time like that, between politics and our equations. 

But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter 

of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever. It was not, 

however, the lack of understanding among many politicians, not the counter- 

offensive of the military authorities, nor even public apathy, that finally 

brought the scientists' crusade to a halt. It was above all the attitude of 

Soviet statesmen. It was evident from the way in which the subject was 

handled in the Russian papers that the Soviet Union, whether deliberately or 

because it knew no better, set less store by the importance of the atom bomb 

than did the West. The Russian newspapers said very little about the 

dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and did not mention the Nagasaki bomb 

at all. In the first years after the end of the war almost nothing was done to 

inform the Russian people about the real nature and the danger of atomic 

warfare. 

Nor, apparently, did the campaign of atomic scientists in the Western 

democracies for international control of atomic energy arouse any interest 

among their Soviet colleagues. The American atomic scientists made every 

effort, at the White House and in the State Department, to ensure the 

participation of an eminent scientist in the Four Power Conference planned 

to take place in Moscow at the end of 1945. They gained their point at last, 

after some preliminary resistance by the statesmen. But when James Conant, 

the scientific spokesman, attended the Moscow meeting, he was given no 

opportunity whatever to bring up his carefully prepared suggestions for an 

exchange of scientists and international controls. Molotov side-tracked any 

discussion of such problems, postponing them to the next meeting of the 

United Nations. Conant returned home without having said a single word 

and expressed his well-grounded disappointment to his colleagues. 

Nevertheless, the atomic scientists of the West hoped, almost without 

exception, that the Russians would at least show some serious interest in the 

American plan for the control of atomic armaments, which had been worked 

out with Oppenheimer's assistance and included many of their own ideas. 

The unmistakable rejection of the plan by the Soviet representative, Andrey 

Gromyko, on 24 July 1 946, was a bitter blow for many of them. 

Six days after Gromyko's speech to the Assembly of the United Nations 

President Truman signed the MacMahon Bill, establishing civil authority, 

for which the atomic scientists had fought so hard, over the 'new power'. But 

the victors were no longer much elated by a success which only affected 

domestic politics. They already suspected that in consequence of the tense 

inter- national situation the soldiers would soon, after all, necessarily be 

calling the tune of atomic development. For it was they who would be the 

most important and favoured customers of the Atomic Energy Commission 

controlled by the civilians. 

As the debates in the United Nations Assembly on atomic- armaments 

control persistently hung fire, the Emergency Committee of Atomic 

Scientists tried to arrange a comprehensive exchange of views between 

Western and Eastern atomic scientists, hoping that the outcome would 

enable them to show their respective statesmen a way out of the impasse. 

Such an international conference of nuclear physicists was planned not only 

to clear up misunderstandings between Communist and non-Communist 

countries, but also to extinguish the competition between Western 

laboratories, due to the official policy of secrecy to which they were bound 

by their governments. The British, for example, had some right to complain 

that the Americans had not adhered to the agreement concluded in 1943 at 

the Quebec Conference about the mutual exchange of atomic data. Even 

official American publications dealing with the history of the production of 

the atomic bomb, the British considered, minimized the contributions of 

British, French, and Canadian scientists. It seems typical of this attitude that 

in the official American film of the Bikini test the voice of the British 

scientist Ernest Titterton on the loudspeaker system, counting the seconds 

that elapsed before the explosion, was cut out and replaced by a voice with 

an American accent. 

As the great international family reunion of physicists contemplated, the 

misunderstandings that had arisen during the war would have been cleared 

up and an attempt made to revive the wide international brotherhood of 

science. 

Harrison Brown, in the name of American scientists, submitted to Andrey 

Gromyko, through a Polish delegate to the United Nations, this proposal to 

call an international conference of this kind to enable scientists to discuss 

questions relating to the control of atomic armaments. Jamaica was 

suggested as the place of meeting. Brown states: 

The secret police of both groups of powers, we thought, might be allowed, 

before the meeting, to install their listening apparatus in the large hotel 

where it was to take place. They might perhaps also make use of that 

opportunity to get to know one another a little. An answer from Moscow 

was received in a surprisingly short time. We were invited to the New York 

quarters of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations, on Park Avenue, in 

order to hear it. Our hearts beat high with hope. But when we arrived we 

found Gromyko in quite a different mood from that of our first meeting. He 

confined himself to reading out to us - and to the microphones which were 

probably concealed in the room - an extremely formal rejection of our 

proposal. 

Only on one occasion did a friendly voice reach the Western atomic 

scientists from the huge prison in the East. Referring to the explosion of the 

experimental bombs at Bikini, Kapitza called upon his Western colleagues to 

go on fighting to prevent the use of atomic energy in war. The former 

assistant and friend of Rutherford declared: 'To speak about atomic energy 

in terms of the atomic bomb is comparable with speaking about electricity in 

terms of the electric chair. 

That was the last time that the West heard from Kapitza. It was not until 

ten years later that some American scientists, who had been invited to attend 

a large gathering of physicists in the Soviet Union, learned what had become 

of him. Soon after the statement he had made in July 1946, which had been 

directed, it now appeared, not only to foreign but also to Soviet atomic 

scientists, Stalin had placed him under house arrest because of his refusal to 

work on the production of Soviet atomic weapons. At the same time he had 

been removed from his post as Director of the Institute for Physical 

Problems which had been established for him. He remained practically 

confined to his home at Zvenigorod for seven years. During the whole of 

this time erroneous reports were continually appearing in the Western press 

that he and no other was responsible for the Soviet atom bombs. The 

American physicists who visited Moscow in the summer of 1956 were told 

that a number of other Russian nuclear experts like Kapitza had been 

sentenced under Stalin to deportation and compulsory labour for having 

refused to work on atom bombs. But it was only a small minority which 

dared such a resistance. By the spring of 1947 it had become clear to 

everyone that the scientists' crusade had failed. The atomic-armaments race 

was in full swing. The new scientists' organizations had been definitely 

thrown on the defensive. The return journey to the armaments laboratories 

had begun.* 

* A questionnaire - not intended for publication - by the Federation of 

American Scientists, which had been in the forefront of the struggle to 

prevent the use of atomic energy in warfare, registered 243 affirmative votes 

in the spring of 1947 in answer to the question: 'Do you think that the United 

States should proceed with the production of atom bombs ?' Only 174 

negative replies were registered. At Los Alamos there were actually 137 

votes cast against the discontinuance of bomb production and only 31 in 

favour of it. 

General Groves had been right. He humorously remarked later about the 

rebels: 'What happened is what I expected, that after they had this extreme 

freedom for about six months their feet began to itch, and as you know, 

almost every one of them has come back into government research, because 

it was just too exciting.' 

Actually General Groves simplified the true situation. Only a minority of 

American atomic scientists were perfectly free agents in deciding to resume 

participation in government-sponsored research. Most were compelled to 

take this step, because they would have had no choice, otherwise, but to 

change their profession. They could not help noticing that while they had 

been engaged in promoting civil control of atomic energy, the military men 

had cleverly turned their Rank by infiltration into the strongholds of the 

scientists themselves, the universities. 

The universities during the war had found a new and extremely wealthy 

patron in the Armed Forces. Although they were bound to regard these funds 

for weapons research as merely temporary until the war was over, the 

scientists had greatly expanded their departments of physics, chemistry, 

technology, and biology because of military financial support. After the war 

university presidents, occupied with their peacetime budgets, were visited by 

representatives of the Office of Naval Research or G6 (for research) of the 

War Department. They explained: 'We are ready to go on financing you. 

There is no need for you to close any of your expanded laboratories or 

dismiss any of your staff. We shan't even ask you to work on inventions 

which we can use immediately. You may devote yourselves to theory. We 

want to promote a flourishing school of research. In this century the strength 

of a nation is measured not only by reference to its arsenals but also by its 

laboratories. Go quietly ahead with your peace time tasks.'* 

* In order to prevent such a development the scientists had suggested the 

establishment of a National Science Foundation, to be financed by the 

government, which would provide the universities with funds for theoretical 

research on problems of public interest. But this foundation, largely because 

of disagreement among the scientists themselves, came into being only some 

years later. Nor did its annual budget represent more than an insignificant 

percentage of the funds provided by the military authorities. 

Thus by the end of 1946 the Armed Forces had already spent many 

millions of dollars financing not only their own research organizations but 

also the university laboratories. As early as the end of October 1946 Philip 

Morrison indicated his anxiety about the situation during the annual forum 

on public affairs conducted by the New York Herald Tribune: 

At the last Berkeley meeting of the American Physical Society just half the 

delivered papers ... were supported in whole or in part by one of the services 

... some schools derive 90 per cent of their research support from Navy 

funds ... the Navy contracts are catholic. They are written for all kinds of 

work ... some of the apprehension that workers in science feel about this 

war-bom inflation comes from their fear of its collapse. They fear these 

things: the backers - Army and Navy - will go along for a while. Results, in 

the shape of new and fearful weapons, will not justify the expenses and their 

own funds will begin to dwindle. The now amicable contracts will tighten up 

and the fine print will start to contain talk about results and specific weapon 

problems. And science itself will have been bought by war on the instalment 

plan. 

The physicist knows the situation is a wrong and dangerous one. He is 

impelled to go along because he really needs the money. It is not only that 

the war has taught him how a well-supported effort can greatly increase his 

effectiveness, but also that his field is no longer en- compassed by what is 

possible for small groups of men. There is a real need for large machines - 

the nuclear chain reactors and the many cycle-, synchro- and beta-trons - to 

do the work of the future. He needs support beyond the capabilities of the 

university. If the O.N.R. or the new Army equivalent, G6, comes with a nice 

contract, he would be more than human to refuse. 

The situation foreseen by Morrison came about more swiftly and 

completely than the most pessimistic observer could have anticipated." In 

the universities, once the homes of free speech throughout the world, the 

spirit of secrecy took possession. Some of their research was under military 

safeguards and law. Invisible barriers and trenches were placed around them. 

Professors began to have secrets and could only talk to one another, like 

priests of some peculiar religion, in a special language, when they wished to 

discuss their affairs. Since but a few people knew what they were really 

doing, even those who could only with difficulty have reconciled their work 

with their consciences, remained at their posts. For when secrecy about 

armaments governs, one need fear no other censure but the military. 

* A decade later Business Week for 12 January 1957 reported under the 

heading 'Defence Department, Leading Patron of the Sciences': 'In the 

United States military expenditure for scientific research and development 

have jumped from an annual average of 245 million during World War II to 

1.5 billion this year. This trend will continue to rise.... Indirect military and 

development expenses ... [reach] ... at least 3.6 billion. ' 

On 21 March 1947 President Truman issued the 'loyalty order', calling for 

a thoroughgoing police investigation of the political and moral reliability of 

all government officials. Since most of nuclear research both in and out of 

the laboratories was directly or indirectly financed by the Federal 

government, the atomic physicists were particularly involved in the 

operation of the decree. Some idea of the atmosphere which prevailed in the 

'atom cities' may be obtained from the following story told to a scientific 

congress by Dr Swartout, Director of the Radio- chemistry Department at 

the Oak Ridge atomic-research laboratory : 

One evening in the summer of 1947 a scientist - and by the term 'a 

scientist' I indicate only a typical case - was aroused from his dinner by a 

knock on the door. At his door stood a uniformed guard, who demanded that 

the man turn over his badge, his means of access to the town in which he 

lived and the installation at which he worked. Because the guard could give 

no reason, the man called his supervisor for an explanation, who turned out 

to be completely unaware of what was going on. After calls to successively 

higher authorities the man was told to comply with the guard's orders and to 

report to the installation director's office early the next morning. Confronted 

by officials on the next day he was told that the F.B.I. investigation had 

disclosed in- formation which forced the Commission to consider him to be 

a questionable security risk; that he would be permitted to submit a 

statement in his defence regarding his character, loyalty, and associations; 

and that this would be reviewed by an A.E.C. board in Washington. In the 

meantime he would get a temporary pass to admit him to his home but not to 

his place of work. 

* The following amusing parody of the new jargon used by armaments 

scientists circulated at that time in the University of Chicago: 'Gentlemen, I 

feel that to set you right 1 will have to tell you the true story of the X Plant 

operations. Or course, I must ask you to keep it strictly secret, because I am 

the only one who knows. So please, if you do tell anybody what I am about to 

tell you, be sore to ask them not to tell. 

'Here is the whole procedure. They are taking plumscrate, raw plumscrate 

mind you, and putting it into ballisportle tanks. These are called ballisportle 

tanks merely because the inside is coated with quadrelstitle thus preserving 

the full strength of the plumscrate. 

'Next, this is taken to the sarraputing room, where only expert sarraputers 

are employed. Here, of course, is where they add thungborium, the 

ingredient which causes the entire masterfuge to knoxify. After this jells into 

five pound ignots a heavy coating of spurndaggle is applied, causing the 

entire product to disappear. The workmen, known as spurndagglers, also 

disappear. 

'Now the invisible compound is taken to the abblesnurting building, also 

invisible, where glass snaggle hooks are applied for carrying. 

'This completes the operation. Delivery is the next problem. At twenty 

minutes past twelve on the third Tuesday night of each month eight hundred 

men (800) known as shizzlefrinks because their brains have been 

temporarily syphoned from their heads are lined up in single file, each given 

two ignots of the Oustenstufftingle (that's the name of the finished product) 

and away they march over the hills to Blank Blank, where they trade the 

finished product for enough raw materials to make another batch of 

Oustenstuff- tingle. ' 

Imagine yourself in his position. If you were asked to defend your 

character, loyalty, and associations, what would you do? Against what! 

Whom had he known, what had he done or said which would bring this 

accusation against him! 

The story - and here it was far less typical - had a happy ending. The 

accused was reinstated in his position. 'But', Dr Swartout goes on, 'all of this 

required time, several months, during which he endured the suspense of not 

knowing whether his job and scientific career would be erased and during 

which he was not permitted to work. In the case of direct employees of the 

A.E.C. this was also a period without an income. Employees of contractors 

fared better, but a vacation of several months under such constant mental 

stress is not advised for rest.' 

There were hundreds of such cases in these 'bitter years'. Statistics alone 

cannot describe them, for no figures can comprise the whole burden of 

anxiety, fear, and grief borne by all who were involved, because of some 

unsupported denunciation or some long-forgotten episode in the past. No 

later revision on the grounds that the anonymous accusers and the judges 

(who as a rule tried these cases reluctantly) had violated basic civic and 

human rights, could compensate the victims of such crude proceedings for 

all they had suffered. Though they were never brought before a regular court 

of law, they lived under suspicion of having betrayed their country. They 

were spied on by the government, mistrusted and avoided by most of their 

neighbours. Many of their colleagues no longer dared to talk to them. It was 

a time of sentences of banishment, of exile endured in their own country, a 

time of grief and shame that drove men to suicide. 

From 1947 on, the atmosphere in which the Western scientists lived 

became more and more oppressive. The new methods used by Washington, 

the centre of political power in the West, influenced the mental climate of 

London and Paris. Soon even in England and France unpopular scientists 

were being examined by loyalty committees, deprived of their passports, and 

dismissed from their posts. Friendships between men of science broke down 

under the strain of mistrust and fear. Scientific correspondence that had 

lasted for decades came to an end. Even in the laboratories of the Western 

world people started whispering to one another, anxiously on the watch for 

the state's long ears, as had been true before only in totalitarian countries. 

Yet even such drastically restricted freedom, with its unhealthy climate of 

suspicion, accusations, and time-wasting defence against false charges, was 

still preferable to the total slavery which reports from behind the Iron 

Curtain said was the fate of scientists in the Communist states. The 

persecution, in particular, of the Soviet geneticists who had been disciplined 

or even, like the famous Vavilov, murdered, for their deviations from the 

theories of Lysenko, aroused deep sympathy in the West. During the 

'beautiful years' atomic scientists had been short of funds for their research. 

But in compensation they had been able to work in a free and fortunate 

atmosphere. Their studies had gone almost unnoticed, yet for that very 

reason they themselves had been all the more respected. There had only been 

a few of them and they had known one another across great distances of land 

and sea. Now there were perhaps a hundred times as many. Their science 

had become the fashion. Their congresses were like mass meetings. Many 

people feared or even hated them. They were regarded as important 

personalities - so important indeed that on occasion they were not even 

allowed to die alone. 

In those days a desperately sick man was once brought unconscious, under 

strict military guard, to the Letterman Hospital in San Francisco. He was 

taken to an isolation ward. At first an armed sentry was posted at the door of 

the ward. Later the soldier was withdrawn, as his presence had aroused 

comment in the hospital. All the doctors and nurses in attendance had been 

previously tested for political reliability. It was impressed upon them that 

they must immediately forget anything the man might mutter in his delirium. 

William G. Twitched, the patient in question, was a nuclear chemist from 

Minnesota, thirty-six years old. He had for some years occupied a post of 

some authority in the radiation laboratory of the University of California. As 

one branch of this world- renowned research establishment was at that time 

working exclusively upon the improvement of atomic weapons, Twitchell 

probably knew some important atomic secrets. The circumstances in which 

the young man had fallen ill were never made public. At any rate Fiedler, 

Director of the Berkeley Security Division - the same office in which 

Oppenheimer had made his first confession in 1943 - did his best to hush up 

the affair. He had re- quested the Anny to transfer the patient to a hospital of 

its own, where stricter security regulations could be enforced than at a civil 

hospital. 

'The case came by chance, six months later, to the attention of a 

correspondent of the New York Times. But even he was unable to discover 

the precise nature of Twitchell's illness. The scientist may simply have 

collapsed under the strain of the duty of silence imposed upon him. This 

happened to a naval officer during the war, who was serving in the atomic 

laboratory at Oak Ridge. He was arrested by security officials in the act of 

telling people in a crowded railway carriage about the work being done in 

the atomic city. A special small clinic, with doctors and staff in attendance, 

was established to deal with this one man who had become mentally 

unstable - it was not considered advisable to transfer him to any private, 

much less public, mental hospital. No such arrangements were found 

necessary for Twitchell, who died a few days after his admission. Not one of 

his friends or relatives was allowed to be with him during his last hours. 

16 

16 'JOE I' AND 'SUPER' 1949-50 

TOWARD the end of August 1949 a United States Air Force 'flying 

laboratory', installed in a B-29 to assemble data for the protection of bomber 

crews, made a disturbing discovery. The photographs brought back from a 

flight somewhere in the Far East showed clear, unaccountable traces of 

radioactive matter in the atmosphere. In addition to the usual threadlike 

white tracks which particles from outer space commonly made on the 

negative, many other new lines had become perceptible. The phenomenon 

seemed so unusual that it was reported immediately, in code, to Washington. 

At once orders were issued for RD aircraft, specially equipped for radiation 

detection, to investigate. They took samples of rain from high clouds and 

also, using a kind of flypaper, certain microscopic particles of ash from the 

highest layers of the atmosphere. These were subjected to thorough radio- 

chemical analysis. Not until then did the scientists of the Air Force and the 

Atomic Energy Commission venture to put into words what they had 

suspected from the beginning. The radioactivity discovered must have 

originated from an atomic explosion somewhere in Soviet Asia. 

Among the few experts who learned this there was tremendous surprise. 

People had grown used to believing the prophecies that the Russians would 

possess atom bombs, if ever, not before 1956 or 

960. Air Force technologists, who had suggested an earlier date, 1952, 

were considered by the Army and Navy to have been exaggerating. But it 

now looked as though even they had been over-optimistic, 

The strategists of the Pentagon, after recovering from their original shock, 

began to console themselves by conjecture. Probably, they thought, the 

heightened degree of radioactivity had not arisen from the test of a bomb 

ready for use in warfare but from some negligence or clumsiness which had 

caused an accidental explosion in one of the Russian atomic laboratories. 

And yet an explosion on so great a scale must indicate that the Soviet Union 

already disposed of considerable quantities of fissile material. How had the 

Russians contrived to produce so much U235 or Pu239 (plutonium)? Could 

they possibly have built the comprehensive installations necessary for the 

purpose in the four years since 1945? Even to this fateful question an answer 

was found which minimized the importance of the event. It was supposed 

that the fissile material had not been produced behind the iron Curtain but 

secretly smuggled into the Soviet Union by spies. This did not sound very 

credible, for during the immediately preceding months Senator Hickenlooper 

had subjected all the operations of the Atomic Energy Commission to a 

painstakingly detailed public examination. In this process only four grams of 

U 335, in all, had been reported missing. The widespread underestimation in 

the West, during the first four years after the war, of Russia's capacity to 

construct atom bombs within a foreseeable time is almost more astonishing 

than the earlier overestimation of Germany's atomic potential. Until the end 

of 1945 the Russians had mentioned quite openly in their technical writings 

and even in their daily Press their great interest in nuclear physics and their 

studies in that field. 

Two institutes in Leningrad, the Radium Institute and the Institute for 

Technical Physics, and two in Moscow, the Lebedev Institute and the 

Institute for Physical Problems, as well as an institute in Kharkov, had been 

concerned to some extent, ever since the beginning of the 1920s, with 

nuclear research. That the Russians possessed large deposits of uranium ore 

- and knew it - was clear from the publications of the well-known geologist 

Vernadsky. He and his pupils had begun by 1921, on Lenin's instructions, 

the exploration and description of all deposits of raw materials throughout 

the Soviet Union. 

As soon as the news of Otto Hahn's discovery was published, Soviet 

scientists had begun to study its significance and estimate its possibilities 

with as much enthusiasm as their colleagues in the West.* An official and 

public congress dealing with problems of nuclear physics took place in 

Moscow in 1939. In April 1940 the Soviet Academy of Sciences announced 

in its monthly bulletin the formation of a special Uranium Problem 

Commission. All the leading Russian physicists belonged to this Soviet 

Uranium Society, including Flerov and Petrzak, who had been the first to 

discover the spontaneous fission of uranium when in 1940 they carried out 

certain experiments in a shaft of the Moscow subway. 

* From the start, uranium fission interested not only Russian men of 

science but also the Russian government. When Kaftanov, the Soviet 

Minister for Education, visited Berlin in 1939, he was particularly anxious 

to sec Hahn's laboratory and interview him personally on the subject of his 

experiments. His request was granted. 

As early as 1939 A. I. Brodsky published an article on the separation of the 

uranium isotopes, while Kurschatov and Frenkel, at about the same time as 

Frisch, Bohr, and Wheeler gave theoretical explanations of the fission 

processes in uranium. In the 1940 New Year's Eve issue of Izvestia an article 

entitled 'Uranium 235' contained the following passage, 'Mankind will 

acquire a new source of energy surpassing a million times everything that 

has hitherto been known ... we shall have a fuel which will be a substitute 

for our depleting supplies of coal and oil and thus rescue industry from a 

fuel famine . human might is entering a new era ... man will be able to 

acquire any quantity of energy he pleases and apply it to any ends he 

chooses.' In October 1941 Kapitza stated in a lecture published in many 

Soviet newspapers that 'Theoretical calculations prove that ... an atom bomb 

... can easily destroy a large city with several millions of inhabitants. 

In 1941, after the German invasion, the Russians seem to have abandoned 

their programme of atomic research for the time being. The Rand 

Corporation, which acts under the orders of the United States Air Force and, 

among other activities, issues reports on technical progress in the Soviet 

Union, published in 1956 a study with the following statement: 

But the Russians apparently dismissed the idea that it [the bomb] would be 

feasible for the war then raging. They made no attempt to conceal the fact 

:hat they had stopped atomic research; and they apparently did not assign 

priority to the subject of atomic energy in their foreign espionage.... By 1943 

the Russians had resumed an atomic development programme with the 

apparent intent of trying to acquire nuclear weapons. 

The earlier false conclusions drawn in America from the failure of the 

atomic project in the Third Reich also contributed to the underestimation of 

Russian atomic research and the progress made by the totalitarian Soviet 

state. Under Stalin, as under Hitler, officialdom had attacked modem physics 

on ideological grounds. The quantum and relativity theories, and 

'Einsteinism' - as it was called in the Russian technical press - were 

condemned as 'idealist' and 'reactionary'. But this was as far as the 

resemblance between the two dictatorships went. In the National Socialist 

Third Reich natural science was not encouraged. But in Stalinist Russia it 

was given every possible material support. Not only was the profession of 

physicist among those which had the highest salaries and standards of living, 

but their institutes received exceptionally large funds for their projects. The 

Russian nuclear experts were therefore able, before 1939, to build the first 

cyclotron in Europe. By 1941 they were erecting two more of these gigantic 

atom-smashing machines. One was designed to attain a radiation strength 

three times as great as that of the biggest apparatus then operated in the 

United States. 

Ruggles and Kramish, two of the specialists studying Soviet atomic 

research for the Air Force, conclude that 'far from starting a nuclear research 

programme from scratch in 1945 the Russians should not have been by that 

date too far behind the knowledge and skill that had been achieved in the 

United States. These findings might well occasion some surprise that it took 

Soviet industry four years more to produce the atomic bomb exploded in 

1949. 

This realistic assessment of Soviet atomic development was not made until 

1956. During the first years after the war it would probably have been 

dismissed in the United States as exaggeration, like Molotov's declaration of 

1947 that the atom had no more secrets for Soviet scientists. In the anxious 

days that followed the discovery of the first Soviet atomic explosion of 

August 1949, the Washington authorities were fortunately not content with 

deceptive consolations of conjecture. They called in a committee of 

specialists to make a further statement, based on all the available evidence. 

The committee held several sessions under the chairmanship of Vannevar 

Bush, with the participation of Oppenheimer and Bacher. After examination 

of all the information they not only came to the conclusion that an atomic 

bomb must have been involved but were also able to supply data about its 

probable composition and the force of the explosion. The American 

scientists were by that time so certain of the existence of the Soviet atom 

bomb that they gave it a name, 'Joe I', in 'honour' of Joseph Stalin. 

It was then necessary to apprise President Truman and the Congressional 

Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the appearance of Joe I on the scene. 

Both the President and a leading Republican Senator, Vandenberg, reacted 

to the information with the same question, which revealed the depth of their 

consternation: 'Where do we go from here?' The first decision necessary was 

whether to publish this secret story to the world. Secretary of Defence 

Johnson was in favour of withholding it, fearing it might cause panic in 

America. Johnson was outvoted. On 23 September 1949, President Truman 

read out his brief and very carefully phrased message, stating that an atom- 

bomb explosion had taken place in the Soviet Union. 

Even this information did not succeed in shocking the great masses of the 

people out of their helpless indifference to the atomic peril, but the 

excitement among American atomic scientists increased. Almost without 

exception they had pointed out, since 1945, that the United States monopoly 

of this weapon could only be brief. They now believed that there was 

practically no hope of ending the atomic-armaments race, that, on the 

contrary, it was likely to become more acute. Their anxiety found visible 

expression in a symbolic act. The cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 

bore every month a design representing a minute hand pointing to eight 

minutes to twelve. The hand was now advanced to indicate three minutes to 

the hour. The end of time had come nearer still. 

In the discussions among those 'in the know' that arose after the news of 

the explosion in the Soviet Union one word was repeated continually which 

outsiders would scarcely have understood. It was 'Super'. The Bulletin, 

which had developed into an internationally respected organ and forum of 

debate among atomic scientists, had for years of its own accord suppressed 

any mention of what the term meant. It was considered the best policy not to 

draw anyone's attention to the monstrous further growth in armaments 

technique at which the word hinted. 

For Super was a bomb which might well be a thousand times as powerful 

as that which had razed Hiroshima to the ground. Unlike the ordinary atomic 

bomb it was an 'open-ended weapon', of unrestricted range. 

Such a bomb could be constructed only if the powerful natural processes 

taking place in the interior of the sun were successfully reproduced on earth. 

Quantities of energy were perpetually being released in that flaming 

heavenly body by the fusion of hydrogen atoms. The forces liberated were 

incomparably more powerful than those let loose in uranium fission. 

The Super first became the subject of investigation as far back as the 

summer of 1942. At that time Oppenheimer had gathered about him at 

Berkeley a small group of theoretical physicists to consider the question of 

the best type of atom bomb to make. During the discussions Teller, who had 

been engaged for some years, at Gamow's suggestion, on the study of such 

thermo- nuclear reactions in the stars, had indicated the possibility of a 

fusion of this kind, the logical next step after the fission bomb. 

At the University of California at Berkeley, most of the University's 

undergraduates were already on vacation or away on military service. The 

scientists - seldom more than seven - participating in the discussions had 

practically the whole campus to themselves. It was there, on a green lawn 

among high cedars, or in one of the many- windowed lecture rooms, to the 

accompaniment of the regular chiming of the hours from the campanile, like 

music of the spheres, that for the first time the conversation turned to the 

idea of man-made suns. Those were days, as Teller later recalled, filled with 

'a spirit of spontaneous expression, adventure, and surprise'. The deep thrill 

at the discovery of the new dimensions of human knowledge and power 

made most of them forget that they had really met to design an instrument of 

death. As a result of the Berkeley conversations, the decision was made to 

begin by concentrating mainly on the construction of the uranium bomb, but 

also meanwhile to devote further serious attention to the problems of the 

Super bomb. One of the questions to be considered was peculiarly sinister. 

The possibility had been mentioned at Berkeley that once the thermonuclear 

processes had been set in motion by the explosion of a bomb, they might 

affect the atmosphere and the waters of the earth. An irresistible global chain 

reaction might be released by the Super, which would transform the entire 

planet in a short time into a flaming and dying star. The study of this 

monstrous idea was at first as- signed to two theoretical physicists, Emil 

Konopinsky and Cloyd Marvin, Jr. They both returned a reassuring answer 

to the question, but not everyone was convinced by it. An appeal for a final 

decision was made to Gregory Breit, a physicist celebrated for his sagacity 

and precision of thought. 

Gregory Breit had been brought to the United States as a fifteen-year-old 

boy, in flight from the pogroms of tsarist Russia. In America he had found a 

quiet spot to live in, suitable to his retiring nature. He was able to read, 

think, and teach without having to worry much about the rest of the world. 

All that was changed one fine day in 1940. Professor Breit was taking one of 

his habitual walks in a Washington park when a car drew up beside him. He 

was asked if he would like a lift. In ordinary circumstances he would 

probably have declined, but that day he felt rather tired and gratefully 

accepted the invitation. It soon turned out that the good-natured driver was a 

member of the Scientific Research Department of the Navy. He was 

attracted by the shy professor, and asked him to call at his office in a day or 

two. He told Breit that the Navy had a specially interesting problem in 

physics to solve. 

The Professor agreed to come. He had little inclination to work for the 

promotion of war and destruction, but the naval officers did not ask him to 

do so. They were looking for a man who could suggest some means of 

protecting their warships against the new German magnetic mines; it was 

only a matter of pre- serving men's lives and property. Breit consented to 

help. He began to work for the Navy and his ideas soon put the physicists of 

the Research Department on the right path. 

Not long after, Breit was again summoned to a government department. 

He was told that he was the only man capable of coordinating and directing 

work on a new bomb. The officials added that there was no intention of 

using the new bomb in war- fare. It was merely to serve as a deterrent in 

case the Germans developed a similar weapon. Breit' s work would be 

contributing to the preservation of the whole nation from a catastrophe. 'I'm 

a bad administrator,' Breit objected. 'You could not have hit upon anyone 

less suitable for the work of coordination.' But the others argued: 'We 

haven't anyone else who is free to undertake the job and an American 

citizen. Nearly all the other physicists engaged in this affair are foreigners. 

The peace-loving Professor was thus persuaded to preside over the first 

committee to study 'fast fission' in Washington - such was the phrase used to 

describe the uncontrolled chain reaction which takes place in the atom 

bomb. After a few months Breit, to his great relief, was permitted to resign 

this responsible post. He assumed that he would now be able to return to his 

own scientific work. 

But he was soon called upon to advise on another problem, the 'global 

chain reaction'. The first time he had been asked to help to prevent the 

destruction of warships. Next, it had been a case of the possible destruction 

of the United States. Now the possibility was the destruction of the whole 

world! 

The entire responsibility would be his alone; his judgement was to be 

accepted as final. As the matter was strictly secret he could not count on 

other physicists being simultaneously made aware of the problem. Suppose 

he gave the wrong answer to so important a question, one which had never 

before been put to anyone, even in myth or legend? Supposing he 

overlooked some factor in it? Supposing he said, 'All right, the risk you 

mention, so far as can be foreseen by the human mind, does not exist,' and 

then it turned out that he was mistaken? Had not the possibility of release of 

the forces that slumbered within the atom long been discounted by the most 

famous of scientists? Was not another such error of judgement still 

conceivable? 

It would have been understandable enough if Breit had declined to 

undertake the task demanded of him, to assume the superhuman 

responsibility; but he had to remember that in such a case the task would 

certainly have been entrusted to another scientist who might be less 

judicious than himself. Also, he could rely absolutely on his own 

conscientiousness. 

For considerable time, during which the whole burden of the fate of the 

earth and its inhabitants rested upon the Professor's narrow shoulders, he 

calculated and meditated day and night. At last he could do no more than 

work out his calculations and submit them to his taskmasters. He now 

believed that he had proved beyond human doubt that an unprecedented 

encroachment upon the light elements of the earth of the reactions liberated 

in a thermonuclear bomb could not occur in any circumstances, that this was 

contradictory to the fundamental laws of Nature. 

And yet other doubts must then have tormented Breit. His opinion had 

indeed eliminated the greatest, probably the greatest conceivable, obstacle to 

the future construction of the Super bomb. But wouldn't he now share the 

responsibility if such bombs were ever used, not experimentally, but 

wantonly and deliberately, to bring destruction on a planetary scale upon the 

world? 

When the lovable little men reached this point in his reflections he must 

have suffered terrible mental distress. He had never done anything, 

throughout this frightful war, but try to help avoid a worse catastrophe. What 

could one do that would not lead to guilt ? 

At the discussions in Berkeley it had not been supposed that the Super 

bomb would take very long to construct. During the laboratory experiments 

between 1943 and 1945, however, the goal appeared to recede further and 

further. After all, the ordinary atom bomb had first to be developed. It was 

an indispensable preliminary to the Super. For only a uranium-fission bomb 

of this kind, built into the hydrogen bomb as a fuse, could generate the 

enormously high temperatures required to trigger thermo- nuclear reactions. 

This task turned out to be more difficult and protracted than had been 

anticipated. 

Much to Edward Teller's annoyance, the Super project was more and more 

definitely shelved as time went on. Even he him- self was not at first allowed 

to work on it; there were more urgent things for him to do. But Teller was 

not made to march with the rank and file. Systematic work simply did not 

interest him. Serious friction resulted. His chief, Hans Bethe, reported later: 

I relied and I hoped to rely very heavily on him to help our work in 

theoretical physics. It turned out that he did not want to cooperate. He did 

not want to work on the line of research that everybody else in tile 

laboratory had agreed to as the fruitful line. He always suggested new 

things, new deviations. He did not do the work which he and his group were 

supposed to do in the framework of the theoretical division; so that in the 

end there was no choice but to relieve him of any work in the general line of 

the development of Los Alamos, and to permit him to pursue his own ideas, 

entirely unrelated to the Second World War work, with his own group 

outside of the theoretical division. 

This was quite a blow to us because there were very few qualified men 

who could carry on that work. 

The gap left by Teller at that time was filled by Rudolf Peierls and Klaus 

Fuchs. Teller proceeded, with a small group, to work on the problem of the 

Super, which he called 'my baby'. 

In a community as closely knit as Los Alamos during the years of war an 

outsider like Teller was bound to attract special attention. In time he excited 

envy, irritation, and even hatred. Other scientists submitted to military 

discipline, though they would formerly never have dreamed of such a thing. 

Punctually at an early hour every morning they disappeared behind the 

barbed- wire fences of the Technical Region. Teller got up late, worked at 

home and then went for long, lonely walks. In a university town these habits 

would not have aroused much comment. But on the Hill questions were 

asked, such as 'What's he really doing here? Why doesn't he have to obey the 

same regulations as everybody else?' 

Complaints about Teller were laid before Oppenheimer, the director of the 

laboratory. Many were petty fault-finding. Surely the Tellers, with only one 

child, had one room too many? Why should they put their little son's playpen 

right in front of the apartments, where the cycle racks ought to be? Was 

Teller to be allowed to play the piano late at night, disturbing all the 

neighbours ? 

Oppenheimer took little or no notice of this tale-bearing. He had been told 

that Teller criticized him severely but also admired him. In many ways the 

two men were alike. They were both spurred on by a similar burning 

ambition. They both felt themselves to be immeasurably superior to their 

fellow men. They were both, as Bethe, who worked with them for many 

years, remarked, 'almost more like artists than scientists'.* 

The oversensitive Oppie was perfectly well aware that all was not right in 

the relations between himself and this unusual colleague. He knew that in 

spite of their frequent meetings they had never really made contact with each 

other. For that reason he was particularly careful never to take any step 

which Teller might construe as indicating animosity. 

On the other hand Oppenheimer never praised Teller as much as he 

probably expected. A witness remarks: 'If Oppie had only occasionally, for 

once, said a few good words for Edward in those days, such as he very well 

understood how to address to almost any mechanic, the destinies of both 

men might perhaps have been different.' This observation dates from a much 

later time, when the lack of sympathy between Oppenheimer and Teller had 

grown into a serious dispute with important consequences. At the end of the 

war Teller did not at first join the general return to the university 

laboratories. During the war evil tongues had hinted that he envied 

Oppenheimer his post as director. It was now said that he considered himself 

to be a suitable successor, though no one but himself, it appeared, could 

imagine Teller as a satisfactory administrator. 

* A former close collaborator, in a letter to the author, gave a notable 

description of Teller's character in the following terms: 7 got to know him 

rather better while he was helping me with a chapter of my ... book. He is a 

typical modern thinking machine, by no means without a heart or lacking 

sensitivity. But these last two faculties in him are on a very ordinary level 

and quite incapable of competing with the vigour of his intellectual 

pleasures. ’ 

Oppenheimer's actual successor, Norris Bradbury, may have heard 

something of these rumours. He sent for Teller and immediately offered him 

the second most important post in the laboratory, that of head of the 

Theoretical Division, left vacant by Bethe's departure. 

A conversation took place between the two men which was full of 

unfriendly undertones. Teller declared in his usual aggressive style: 'Let us 

see if we could test something like twelve fission weapons per year or if, 

instead, we could go into a thorough investigation of the thermonuclear 

question.' Bradbury answered: 'That is, as you must know yourself, 

unfortunately out of the question.' Thereupon Teller refused Bradbury's 

invitation to remain permanently at Los Alamos and went off to the 

University of Chicago. During 1946, however, Teller did return for a few 

days to Los Alamos to attend a special conference. The subject of the 

discussions, to which about thirty physicists had been summoned, was the 

Super. The majority of those present concluded that the development of such 

a weapon was bound to be protracted and complicated. A minority, led by 

Teller, maintained, on the contrary, that the bomb could be constructed in 

two years. The meeting then broke up. One of the participants in particular 

must have been deeply impressed by Dr Teller's arguments; he did not 

hesitate to convey the fact to his contacts. This man was Klaus Fuchs, whose 

last important information given to the Russians dealt with that final 

conference on the Super. 

In his chair of physics at Chicago Teller continued to advocate 

construction of the Super bomb. He demanded, for example, that the 

Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists should not only listen to him 

but itself call for the construction of this terrible weapon, a demand which 

aroused great indignation in Einstein, the Chairman of the Committee. He 

sternly refused to comply. To Teller his attitude seemed illogical. The world 

situation after 1947, particularly since the Communist coup d’etat in 

Czechoslovakia in February 1948, reminded Teller of the period between 

1939 and 1941 when he had belonged to the small group around Szilard 

agitating for the construction of the uranium around. Was the position now 

so very different? he asked. There was again a danger that a totalitarian state 

might threaten freedom again a weapon to which there was no answer but 

'counter- terror' by the same weapon. Why should Stalin be trusted more 

than Hitler? 

But oddly enough Teller also took every opportunity to advance the cause 

of world government; it seemed to him to be the only hope of preserving 

peace. He used to say to other atomic scientists: 'It won't be until the bombs 

get so big that they can annihilate everything that people will really become 

terrified and begin to take a reasonable line in politics. Those who oppose 

the hydrogen bomb are behaving like ostriches if they think they are going to 

promote peace in that way. 

But Teller did not go so far as Harold Urey, who was also in favour of a 

world government. Urey, after vainly acting as a front-line champion of 

international control of atomic armaments, was now induced to call, 

actually, for a preventive war, so that humanity could enjoy peace and 

freedom again when it was finally over. 

Until the explosion of Joe I became known, Teller's campaign for the 

construction of the hydrogen bomb found little support. The moment the 

news broke, all those who had formerly nick- named him, rather derisively, 

the 'apostle of the Super', remembered his warnings. People who were 

convinced that the armaments race was inevitable considered that Joe would 

have to be trumped with the Super if the lead in the atomic field were to be 

retained. 

Or was it already too late for that? Might not the Russians already actually 

be ahead in this sinister contest of speed? Such was the question Luis 

Alvarez asked himself. After the conclusion of his mission in Tinian he had 

returned once more to theoretical research at the Berkeley Radiation 

Laboratory. An entry in his diary reads: 

October 5 1949. Latimer and 1 independently thought that the Russians 

could be working hard on the Super and might get there ahead of us. The 

only thing to do seems to get there first - but hope that it will turn out to be 

impossible. 

Alvarez at once consulted Ernest O. Lawrence, who had been thinking 

along the same lines. They determined to get in touch with Teller 

immediately, but they did not know where he was and a telephone call to his 

apartment in Chicago remained unanswered. Teller, restless as ever, had 

obtained a year's leave from the University, to enable him to resume work in 

Los Alamos for a while. He had begun by going abroad for a few weeks. 

The news of the Soviet bomb reached him, as it did the general public, on 23 

September 1949, as he was passing through Washington. He immediately 

phoned Oppenheimer to hear how he was taking the announcement, but 

Oppenheimer did not seem to be worried. He replied simply: 'Keep your 

shirt on!' Teller hurried with all speed to Los Alamos. There, on 6 October, 

Alvarez and Lawrence at last contacted him by telephone, but the line was 

bad. The two physicists at Berkeley decided that, since they were to fly to 

Washington in two days' time, they would break the journey at Los Alamos 

to have a detailed discussion with Teller. 

Los Alamos now had nearly ten thousand inhabitants. Amazing changes 

had taken place in the town since its decline in 1946. In addition to the 

intensive resumption and extension of the armament programme 

considerable sums had been voted to build more laboratories and houses. 

There were now well-paved streets, a Community Centre with a meeting 

hall, a movie theatre, and all kinds of Shops. A large hospital had arisen, an 

excellent town library, good schools and a thriving sports club, called the 

'Los Alamos Atomic Bombers'. A stadium was being built, named after 

Louis Slotin, the young atomic expert now revered as a martyr to the bomb. 

Alvarez and Lawrence took an air taxi from Albuquerque up 'O the Hill. 

Teller carried them Off to his house In the 'Western Area', where the senior 

scientists now occupied cosy little villas. Their party was joined later by 

Gamow who had recently arrived in Los Alamos as a temporary consultant, 

and by the gifted Polish mathematician Stan Ulam. 

Ulam, during the years 1946 and 1947, and J. L. Tuck, an Englishman, had 

composed some extraordinarily interesting studies on thermonuclear 

problems. These included the effects produced by converging shack waves 

from hollow charges. An enormous temperature is produced, sufficient for 

fusion. But at that time, during the first years after the war, calculations of 

thermonuclear reactions had been held up chiefly because the calculating 

machines then in use could not cope with the problem that arose. 

In the course of the discussion among these five men at Los Alamos the 

question was asked whether the supposed Russian interest in the new type of 

bomb had not been overestimated. Might it not be true that they still had no 

idea of these possibilities? Gamow then related the following story from his 

Soviet past. In 1932, before his eventual flight from the Soviet Union, he 

had referred at a scientific gathering to the work of Atkinson and 

Houtermans, in which, as was known, the fusion of light nuclei in the sun 

had first been suspected. After Gamow's lecture he had been approached by 

Bukharin, the People's Commissar, who had asked with interest whether he 

thought such reactions could not also be reproduced on the earth. Bukharin 

had even offered Gamow the use of all the current generated by the 

Leningrad electricity works for experimental purposes a few hours every 

night.* 

Gamow's story strengthened the determination of Teller, Alvarez, and 

Lawrence to force the construction of the Super bomb on the government as 

soon as possible. They promised one another to do everything in their power 

to attain this goal. 

* According to a report by the German atomic physicists Gerlach and Joos, 

an atomic scientist had been found during the German invasion of the Soviet 

Union who was hoping to bring about a fusion of light nuclei by means of 

shaped charges. Unfortunately Gerlach and Joos do not remember the name 

of the Russian who had been carrying out these experiments. 

17 DILEMMA OF THE CONSCIENCE 1950-1 

HANS B ETH E had been famous among his colleagues and friends, 

throughout his life, for his invariable good humour and his - if possible - 

even better appetite. He was a healthy and happy man, inwardly and 

outwardly sure of himself, and could not by any stretch of the imagination 

be identified with the popular conception of an atomic scientist - a prey to 

conscientious hesitations. Yet this was the man who took it particularly hard 

when he, like other physicists, was faced with the question whether the 

hydrogen bomb ought to be built. 

'I am unhappy to admit that - during the war at least - 1 did not pay much 

attention to this. We had a job to do and a very hard one,' said Bethe, when 

he was later asked whether any moral scruples about the construction of 

atom bombs had occurred to him in Los Alamos. After Hiroshima his 

attitude changed. Like many other atomic scientists, he was troubled by the 

responsibility he bore for his share in the construction of this terrible 

weapon. As a member of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists he 

took a leading part among those who urged that the public be enlightened on 

the danger of atomic warfare and insisted on the necessity of international 

control. He soon saw, earlier than most of his colleagues, that if the 

scientists wished to maintain their influence they would have to keep a 

certain distance from the turmoil of contemporary politics. 

Bethe, as the son of a distinguished German physiologist, had been 

particularly reluctant to leave his native land in 1933. From Baden-Baden, 

where he was allowed to spend a few last enjoyable days before his final 

emigration, he wrote a most melancholy letter of farewell to his teacher, 

Sommerfeld, who had regarded him as his inevitable successor. From the 

moment of his arrival in the United States Bethe embarked upon a brilliant 

career, but he often looked back with longing to the old days when he had 

been obliged to live chiefly on a meagre scholarship procured by his master. 

Sommerfeld asked him after the war whether he would care to accept the 

Chair of Theoretical Physics at Munich - it had been occupied after 

Sommerfeld's departure by the worst successor imaginable, a rabid adherent 

of German Physics named Muller. Bethe felt compelled to refuse. He had 

grown accustomed to his new homeland and above all considered himself 

under so deep an obligation to the Americans that he was no longer attracted 

by the highest goal of his former ambition, a professorship at one of the 

German universities. 

His strong personality had created at Cornell University one of the most 

respected institutes of nuclear physics in the United States. That paradise of 

pure research was invaded, towards the middle of October 1949, by Teller, 

advocate of the 'hell bomb'. Teller intended to lead Dr Bethe into temptation. 

He begged him to return to Los Alamos for just one year, since his 

collaboration in the production of the new weapon was indispensable. 

Bethe was well aware of his own merit. He knew that Teller was not 

merely Battering him but really could not do without him. Bethe's brilliant 

colleague was rather like one of those Hungarian authors of boulevard plays 

whose excellent ideas are usually good enough for a magnificent first act but 

have seldom been thought out to the end. 'Teller ...needs ... some control, 

some other person who is more able to find out what is the scientific fact 

about the matter. Some other person who weeds out the bad from the good 

ideas. .. .' Such was Bethe's judgement of his visitor, and he could see 

himself perfectly well in the part of the 'other person'. 

When Teller found that Bethe was not to be tempted by financial offers, he 

tried to dazzle him with some glittering notions about the probable character 

of thermonuclear reactions. Bethe was, as he says himself, 'very impressed 

by his ideas'. The attraction of working with Teller, Ulam, Gamow, and 

possibly also Fermi, especially with the aid of the greatly improved 

electronic computing machines which were at that time strictly reserved for 

military purposes, must have been extraordinarily strong. Plenty of 

interesting new discoveries could undoubtedly be expected from such an 

exceptional team. 

Yet Ham Bethe hesitated. It seemed to him, as he immediately told Teller, 

'a fearful undertaking to develop an even bigger bomb'. He had always 

talked over all important questions in life with his young wife, a daughter of 

the well-known German scientist Ewald. They discussed Teller's request 

until late that night. Later Bethe recalled that he had been deeply troubled 

about what he should do: 'It seemed to me that the development of 

thermonuclear weapons would not solve any of the difficulties that we found 

ourselves in and yet I was not quite sure whether I should refuse. 

Bethe acted as scientists do when they cannot solve a problem. He tried to 

discover more facts, especially political and military facts, before he might 

reach a final conclusion. He thought he would be best able to obtain them 

from Oppenheimer, who was undoubtedly in a position to form a more 

accurate estimate of the global situation than Bethe himself, since he served 

on a number of secret government committees. 

Bethe had no sooner told Teller, who had stayed in Ithaca for the night, 

what he had decided to do, when the telephone rang. Oppie was on the line. 

He had heard of the efforts by Alvarez, Lawrence, and Teller to convince the 

authorities of the necessity of a Super and wanted to know what Bethe 

thought. He had heard also that Teller was in Ithaca to discuss the matter. 

Oppenheimer proposed that the three of them should talk it over at 

Princeton. 

This was precisely what Bethe wanted, but Teller suspected that 

Oppenheimer meant to argue either against him personally or against the 

Super. He appeared very depressed after this long- distance conversation. 'I 

had been under the impression', he recalled a few years later, 'that 

Oppenheimer was opposed to the thermonuclear bomb or to a development 

of the thermonuclear bomb..:. I am pretty sure that I expressed to Bethe this 

worry, telling him, "We are going to talk with Oppenheimer and then you 

will not come!" ' 

Two days later Bethe and Teller were sitting in the Director's office at the 

Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Oppenheimer had been in charge 

of the Institute since 1947 and regarded it as the most important of his many 

new preoccupations. There was a very great difference between the bright 

and orderly room in which they sat, with its outlook over broad meadows 

fringed with trees in all the varied tints of autumn, and Oppie's barrack- like 

office at Los Alamos, where the same three men had met during the war. In 

those days Oppenheimer had often seemed to his associates to resemble the 

enthusiastic founder and leader of some pioneer settlement in the Wild West. 

Now 'he reminded them of an English country gentleman receiving his 

guests at a stately home furnished with exquisite taste. In the same building, 

only a few doors away from Oppenheimer's office, Einstein, now in his 

seventies, was working in bare, unadorned surroundings at the splendid 

structure of the unified field theory embracing all the phenomena of 

gravitation, light, and matter. He only rarely discussed scientific questions 

with the Director of his Institute. But whenever he read any news in his 

morning paper which did not please him, he used to call Oppenheimer on the 

house telephone with the indignant demand: 'Now, what do you think of 

that?' 

At bottom it was a simple question to which Bethe wanted an answer when 

he came to Princeton. But it was not answered for him. Oppenheimer 

showed him and Teller a letter which he had just received from James 

Conant. 'Uncle Jim', as he was called in research circles, took a strong 

position against the new bomb project. He declared in that letter that if 

people absolutely must have it they could only get it over his dead body. 

Apparently Oppenheimer did not share Conant' s views, but he said nothing 

definite against them. He observed that if a hydrogen bomb were to be 

developed in the United States the work ought to proceed, from the start, 

with less secrecy than in the case of the atom bomb. He compared the United 

States to transparent glass and the Soviet Union to the semi-opaque onyx. 

During the entire interview he refrained from any frank expression of 

opinion, either from caution in Teller's presence, or because he did not wish 

to say anything that might influence Bethe, or perhaps simply because he 

himself had not yet made up his mind. 

Bethe was very disappointed with the turn the conversation had taken, so 

much so that after they had left Oppenheimer he said to Teller: 'You see you 

can be quite satisfied. I am still coming.' But no sooner had Teller departed 

than Bethe's conscience again began to torture him. He consulted Victor 

Weisskopf, a close friend and colleague, who had been called the 'Oracle' at 

Los Alamos. Since the end of the war Weisskopf had firmly declined to have 

anything more to do with atomic armaments. He was now teaching at M.I.T. 

and was considered one of the leading nuclear experts of his generation. 

On a fine, warm autumn evening the two friends paced to and fro, deep in 

talk, until long after dark. Trees towered over and around them; a light wind 

was singing the fiery-red autumn leaves to sleep; a brook murmured a 

melody. Had mankind the right to destroy this kind of world, or even to 

imperil it? In 1939 Weisskopf had been one of the group with Szilard which 

had urgently demanded action, but he had learned from experience that 

when one gave soldiers a weapon they could hardly resist the temptation to 

pull the trigger. 

The two men continued their conversation next day, during a drive to New 

York with Georg Placzek, a friend of both. He was not only an outstanding 

physicist but also a first-rate historian, with an especially deep knowledge of 

the Middle Ages. As they drove to New York through the monotonous 

industrial landscape, void of all tradition, the three European-born friends 

agreed that, as Bethe reported later, 'after such a war, even if we were to win 

it, the world would not be such, would not be like the world we want to 

preserve. We would lose the things we were fighting for. This was a very 

long conversation and a very difficult one. ... 

Bethe's struggles with his conscience were at an end. He was anxious to 

return to his university at Ithaca the same evening, but because of these 

highly important discussions he missed his plane. 'Perhaps it's better so,' he 

thought. 'I ought to have another talk with Teller today. 

It was difficult to find his colleague in the large city, but at last he reached 

him by telephone. Teller was at the home of Lewis Strauss, the only one of 

the five directors of the Atomic Energy Commission who approved, like 

Teller himself, a 'crash programme' for production of the Super. 'Edward,' 

said Bethe, 'I've been thinking it over. J can't come after all. On the morning 

of 29 October 1949 the Washington newspapers published some 

encouraging statistics. 'Mortality in this city is at present lower than it has 

ever been,' they announced. 'It has fallen by about 25 per cent in the last ten 

years. This means that 15,000 of our fellow citizens and neighbours would 

not be alive today if medicine and hygiene had not made such encouraging 

progress.' 

The papers could not report that on the same day a debate was being held 

on the second floor of the Atomic Energy Com- mission building on 

Constitution Avenue to consider the question of constructing a weapon 

capable of increasing the mortality figure, almost in an instant, to between 

80 and 90 pet cent of the population affected. Only about a hundred people 

in the United States had any idea that on this day the General Advisory 

Com- mission, a body of nine leading American scientists, had met to come 

to a decision on the Super problem. 

Since the beginning of 1947 the Commission had been sitting every few 

months, under the chairmanship of Robert Oppenheimer, who had been in 

charge of it from the start. On this occasion it had been summoned to answer 

a question put by the 'supermen' - a term derived from the well-known comic 

strip - Lawrence, Alvarez, Teller, and Strauss. They had asked: 'Should the 

United States embark upon the production, as a matter of urgency, of a 

thermonuclear bomb?' 

Oppenheimer opened the meeting by stating once more the matter to be 

debated. Then he asked each of the seven members present - one of the nine, 

Glen Seaborg, was abroad - to give their opinions in turn.* After they had all 

done so he stated his own view. None of the members spoke for longer than 

five or ten minutes. During the following days two reports were drawn up 

and discussed. They agreed on the point that the Super would probably be 

technically feasible, but that its production would be so extraordinarily 

complicated and uneconomic as to affect adversely the development 

programme for fission bombs, which were being manufactured in the 

greatest variety of types and in growing numbers. From a military point of 

view it appeared doubtful whether there would be much point in 

constructing a Super, since there would only be two targets in the Soviet 

Union - Moscow and Leningrad - big enough to justify such a bomb. But in 

the third place - and this was the aspect on which by far the greatest 

emphasis was laid - all the members believed that the moral standing of the 

United States in the world would suffer if it developed such a weapon. 

This view was expressed with special clarity and force by Rabi and Fermi 

in their joint memorandum. It stated: 

The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its 

very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as 

a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these 

reasons we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell 

the American public and the world that we think it wrong on fundamental 

ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon. 

* James B. Conant, President of Harvard, Lee Du Bridge, President of the 

California Institute of Technology, Enrico Fermi of the University of 

Chicago, I. L. Rabi of Columbia University, Hartley Rowe, President of the 

United Fruit Company, Oliver Buckley, President of American Telephone 

and Telegraph Company, and Cyril S. Smith of the University of Chicago. 

Rabi and Fermi associated their rejection of the proposal to make the bomb 

with a suggestion that the President might make political use of a public 

repudiation of it by calling upon the Russians to agree to repudiate it in their 

turn. Any future breach of such agreement on the subject of thermonuclear 

weapons was to be regarded as justifying war. 

The other six members of the Commission came to a more cautious but 

equally adverse conclusion: 

We all hope that by one means or another the development of these 

weapons can be avoided. We are all reluctant to see the United States take 

the initiative in precipitating this development. We are all agreed that it 

would be wrong at the present moment to commit ourselves to an all-out 

effort towards its development. 

In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb we see a unique 

opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war 

and thus of eliminating the fear and arousing the hope of mankind.* 

This victory of reason and moderation was permitted to live exactly three 

months. The 'activists' stubbornly continued their campaign. They worked 

with success on the Air Force and the Chairman of the Joint Congressional 

Committee on Atomic Energy, Brien McMahon. They broke through the 

defences of Secretary Johnson, and Paul Nitze, head of the-Planning 

Division of the State Department, who thought that it was absolutely 

necessary for the world to go on believing in the superiority of American 

technology. He advanced the opinion that such a belief alone was well worth 

the five hundred million dollars such a weapon was estimated to cost. 

* Hans Bathe did not participate in the sessions of the General Advisory 

Commission, as he did not belong to it. It may be of some additional interest 

to note here the very decided views he expressed on the subject at the time. 7 

thought', he stated, 'that the alternative might be or should be to try once 

more for an agreement with the Russians, to try once more to shake them out 

of their indifference or hostility by something that was promising to be still 

bigger than anything previously known, and to try once more to get an 

agreement at that time that neither country would develop this weapon. This 

is enough of an undertaking to develop the thermonuclear weapon that if 

both countries had agreed not to do so it would be very unlikely that the 

world would have such a weapon. 'Maybe the suggestion to negotiate again 

was one of desperation. But for one thing the difference was that it would be 

a negotiation about something that did not yet exist and that one might find 

it easier to renounce making and using something that did not yet exist than 

to renounce some- thing that was actually already in the world. For this 

reason I thought that maybe there was again some hope. It also seemed to 

me that it was so evident that a war fought with hydrogen bombs would be 

destruction of both sides that maybe even the Russians might come to 

reason. ' 

At last the advocates of the Super won over even Omar Bradley, Chairman 

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, well known for his level-headedness and 

moderation. His letter of 13 January 1950, in which he stated that he could 

not bear to think that the Russians might be the first to produce the hydrogen 

bomb and thus obtain a lead in the armaments race, contributed more than 

anything else to bring about the already imminent change of feeling. It only 

needed one more shock to ensure the support of the White Mouse for the 

production of the Super. 

That shock duly happened. On 27 January 1950 Klaus Fuchs left the 

English atomic research station at Harwell for London. He was met at 

Paddington Station by James William Skardon, a police inspector. The two 

men greeted each other amicably and then drove together to the War Office, 

where they entered one of the rooms and sat down. Skardon asked: 'Are you 

ready to make a statement?' Fuchs nodded. He had known for some time that 

he was under suspicion. He now intended to make a full confession. He 

began: 'I am Deputy Chief Scientific Officer (acting rank) at the atomic 

energy research establishment, Harwell. I was bom at Russelsheim on the 

29th December 1911. My father was a parson and I had a very happy 

childhood.... 

That same day the authorities in Washington learned that Fuchs had for 

many years been communicating to the Russians all the atomic secrets to 

which he had access. How much did he know? The Atomic Energy 

Commission, in response to an inquiry, was able to state on the following 

day that Fuchs had not only been supplied with information relating to the 

new, improved uranium bombs, but had also attended lectures and debates 

on the Super. 

Fuchs told the inspector all about his activities as an agent. He refrained 

from giving him details of the technical information he had passed on, since 

Skardon had no right to knowledge of atomic data. He did not discuss that 

subject until 30 January, when he talked about it exhaustively with Michael 

Perrin, the scientist appointed for that purpose, the man who had acted as 

wartime liaison officer for atomic affairs between the United States and 

Britain. 

This sensational news could not, of course, fail to have its effect upon the 

General Advisory Commission, then again in session at Washington. On the 

following day, 3 1 January, the Special Committee of the National Security 

Council appointed to deal with the Super problem met in the old building of 

the State Department, next door to the White House. The Committee 

consisted of Secretary Johnson, Secretary of State Acheson, Lilienthal, 

Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and their associates. Deeply 

impressed by the Fuchs case, they resolved by two votes (Johnson and 

Acheson) to one (Lilienthal) to recommend that the President order a crash 

programme to build the hydrogen bomb. 

That same afternoon the American people, who had not been consulted in 

the matter, were informed of one of the greatest decisions in its history. 

President Truman solemnly declared: 

I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all 

forms of atomic weapons, including the 'hydrogen' or super bomb. Like all 

other work in the field of atomic weapons, it is being and will be carried 

forward on a basis consistent with the over-all objectives of our programme 

for peace and security. 

One of the hundreds of thousands of persons who read this alarming 

statement in their newspapers was Klaus Fuchs. At that moment he was still 

at liberty. On 2 February 1950 he agreed, after a telegraphic invitation from 

Perrin, to visit him at his London office in Shell-Mex House. Fuchs still 

believed that after making such a frank confession he would not be 

punished. He called at Perrin's office, as agreed, at precisely three in the 

after- noon. The police officer who had been ordered to arrest him there had 

not yet arrived because of a dispute about the wording of the warrant. He 

was a good fifty minutes late. Shortly after, Klaus Fuchs was on his way to 

Bow Street Police Station, the first of his prison residences. 

The history of the relations and negotiations between the United States and 

Britain in the field of atomic affairs was, for the most part, still secret. The 

few who knew something about it noticed that the Fuchs case had come to 

light at the very moment that a British delegation in the United States was 

attempting to extend the scope, restricted for years, of the exchange of 

atomic information between the two countries. The arrest of Fuchs, who had 

been at Los Alamos as a member of a British delegation, at once ]ed to the 

abrupt termination of the discussions in question, though they had had every 

prospect of success. The Americans now believed that British security 

measures for the protection of atomic secrets were too lax. Might it not be 

that the Russians had intended to bring about this state of affairs, and 

succeeded in doing so, by denouncing Fuchs them- selves to the British 

Intelligence Service? It was some time since he had last given them any 

information. Had the Russians found a use for a man who had otherwise 

become of no value to them, as a weapon against closer Angle- American 

cooperation ? If this is what the Russians intended, they certainly got what 

they wanted, but if so, they themselves had supplied the final impetus for the 

construction of the American 'hell bomb'. 

This time public opinion was at last startled out of its mood of resignation. 

The 'H-bomb', as it was thereafter called, aroused the same fear and 

indignation as the first atom bomb. Church- men, scholars, politicians, and 

editors throughout the world warned of the danger and called urgently for a 

new attempt to reach an understanding between West and East. The 

American journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote: 'The exploitation of 

the deepest secrets of creation for the purposes of destruction is a shocking 

act.' Nobel prize winner Compton declared: 'This is not a question for 

experts, either militarists or scientists. All they can do is to explain what the 

results will be if we do or do not try to develop such destructive weapons. 

The American people must themselves say whether they want to defend 

themselves with such weapons.' Szilard stated in a broadcast that the 

radioactive effects of the Super bomb could be so much intensified that even 

the explosion of five hundred tons of heavy hydrogen would suffice to 

extinguish all life on earth. Einstein said with horror: 

The armament race between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., originally 

supposed to be a preventive measure, assumes a hysterical character. On 

both sides the means to mass destruction are perfected with feverish haste - 

behind the respective walls of secrecy. 

If successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence 

annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of 

technical possibilities. The ghostlike character of this development lies in its 

apparently compulsory trend. Every step appears as the unavoidable 

consequence of the preceding one. In the end there beckons more and more 

clearly general annihilation. 

* This supposition is strengthened by the fact that in the case of the 

Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who afterwards worked in 

England, the Russians chose to reveal his presence in Moscow, which had 

been concealed for years, at the very time when another British delegation 

was about to open negotiations in Washington for the release of atomic 

secrets. 

The leading spirit in the campaign against the hydrogen bomb was Bethe. 

He gave expression to one fear in particular. 'It would hardly be possible 

today to eliminate the atom bomb from our armament programme, for most 

of our strategy is based upon it. I should not care for the same situation to 

arise in connexion with the H-bomb. An explanatory article written by Bethe 

for the respected periodical The Scientific American, dealing with the 

scientific, political, and moral aspects of the Super bomb, contained the 

passage: 

I believe the most important question is the moral one: can we, who have 

always insisted on morality and human decency between nations as well as 

inside our own country, introduce this weapon of total annihilation into the 

world? The usual argument, heard in the frantic week before the President's 

decision and frequently since, is that we are fighting against a country which 

denies all the human values we cherish and that any weapon, however 

terrible, must be used to prevent that country and its creed from dominating 

the world. It is argued that it would be better for us to lose our lives than our 

liberty; and this I personally agree with. But I believe that this is not the 

question; I believe that we would lose far more than our lives in a war fought 

with hydrogen bombs, that we would in fact lose all our liberties and human 

values at the same time, and so thoroughly that we would not recover them 

for an unforeseeably long time. 

We believe in peace based on mutual trust. Shall we achieve it by using 

hydrogen bombs? Shall we convince the Russians of the value of the 

individual by killing millions of them? If we fight a war and win it with H- 

bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but 

the method we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to 

the warfare of Genghis Khan, who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of 

Persia. 

Several thousand copies of the issue in which this article appeared were 

confiscated and pulped by government agents, in defiance of the freedom of 

the press, on the pretext that the article revealed secrets of importance to 

national defence. 

Bethe was also one of the twelve American physicists* who challenged 

President Truman's decision in a statement dated 4 February 1950: 

We believe that no nation has the right to use such a bomb, no matter how 

righteous its cause. This bomb is no longer a weapon of war but a means of 

extermination of whole populations. Its use would be a betrayal of all 

standards of morality and of Christian civilization itself ... to create such an 

ever-present peril for all the nations of the world Is against the vital interests 

of both Russia and the United States ... we urge that the United States, 

through its elected government, make a solemn declaration that we shall 

never use this bomb first. The circumstance which might force us to use it 

would be if we or our allies were attacked by this bomb. There can be only 

one justification for our development of the hydrogen bomb and that is to 

prevent its use. 

The American government gave no such reassuring promise, either then or 

at any later time. 

The debate on the Super bomb renewed most acutely for many scientists 

the problem of their personal responsibility for the results of their work. This 

problem had been stated for the first time in most explicit fashion by the 

celebrated mathematician Norbert Wiener. He had been asked not long after 

the end of the war on behalf of the research department of an aircraft- 

building firm, which also produced long-range guided missiles, whether he 

would let the from have a copy of a report he had written during the war at 

the request of a certain military authority. Wiener's reply included the 

passage: 

The experience of the scientists who have worked on the atomic bomb has 

indicated that in any investigation of this kind the scientist ends by putting 

unlimited powers in the hands of the people whom he is least inclined to 

trust with their use. It is perfectly clear also that to disseminate information 

about a weapon in the present state of our civilization is to make it 

practically certain that that weapon will be used. 

If therefore I do not desire to participate in the bombing or poisoning of 

defenceless peoples - and I most certainly do not - 1 must take a serious 

responsibility as to those to whom I disclose my scientific ideas. 

I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage 

in the hands of irresponsible militarists. 

Wiener's radical attitude was decisively repudiated by most American 

scientists. They relied mainly on the counter-argument of Louis N. 

Ridenour, in an answer to Wiener: 'No one can tell what the result of any 

given scientific Investigation may be. And it is absolutely certain that no one 

can prophesy the nature of any practical final product that may arise in 

consequence of such research. ...’ 

To this constantly repeated objection the English crystallographer 

Kathleen Lonsdale has replied: 'The risk that one's work, though good in 

itself, may be misused must always be taken. But responsibility cannot be 

shirked if the known purpose criminal or evil, however ordinary the work 

itself 

Only a few scientific investigators in the Western world have in fact acted 

on this principle. Their honesty obliged them to risk their Professional future 

and face economic sacrifices with resolution. In some cases they actually 

renounced the career they had planned, as did one of Max Born's young 

English assistants, Helen Smith. As soon as she heard of the atom bomb and 

his application, she decided to give up physics for jurisprudence. 

A number of American scientific investigators hostile to armament work 

were to be found in the Society for Social Responsibility in Science. Its 

members differed from those belonging to other organizations in one 

decisive point: they were unwilling to wait until the politicians finally 

decided upon collective disarmament. On the contrary they expected every 

individual to take an immediate personal stand against the continuance of the 

atomic-armaments race. 

One of the founders of this society, Professor Victor Paschkis or Columbia 

University, gives the following account of its history : 

In August 1947 I Published in the Friends' Intelligencer [a Quaker 

periodical]; an article entitled 'Double Standards', in which I expressed my 

views of something I considered utterly unreasonable. This was the fact that 

scientists who were trying to amass funds for the enlightenment of the public 

on the dangers of atomic weapons were simultaneously continuing their 

work on the weapons in question. A. J. Muste, President of the 

Reconciliation Brotherhood, rang me up and said: 'There must be other 

research workers who feel the same.'... 

This society expressed its horror at the development of arms technique in 

deeds as well as in manifestoes. It probably gained some members when it 

was announced that the United States intended to construct a Super bomb, 

but it never comprised more than about three hundred scientists in America 

though by 1950 Einstein and Max Bom were members. Unfortunately they 

could exert little influence. They were even refused admittance to the 

organization comprising all the scientific bodies in America, the American 

Association for the Advancement of Science.* Protests soon died away. 

After a while no more was heard in public about the hydrogen bomb. Once 

again, 'flaming indignation' had proved to be only a fire of straw. 

In June 1950 the Korean War broke out. At once quite a number of 

scientists, hitherto reserved about cooperating in armament laboratories, 

returned to war research. They now considered it their patriotic duty. One of 

them was no other than Hans Bethe. He hoped, as he said later, to convince 

himself by his work that the hydrogen bomb could not, in principle, be 

produced. Such an assurance would have seemed to him the best solution for 

the United States, which had far more to fear from a Super-bomb war than 

the Russians. Bethe finally played a decisive part in the ultimate production 

of the bomb he himself so feared and hated because of his outstanding 

emdition and systematic work. And - as the supreme irony - he was in the 

end actually entrusted with the task of writing its technical history. 

In 1954, however, he said: 'I am afraid my inner troubles stayed with me 

and are still with me and I have not resolved this problem. I still have the 

feeling that 1 have done the wrong thing. But I have done it.' 

Nature itself seemed, at the beginning of 1950, to be putting up more 

successful resistance to Teller's plans than the atomic scientists who first 

protested against and then took part in the Super project. Immediately after 

the White House directive the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos had 

started calculations for the new bomb. Two groups tackled the problem 

independently. One made use of the first of the big electronic computing 

machines, the ENIAC, which had been constructed from von Neumann's 

plans, sent from Philadelphia to the artillery range at Aberdeen mainly to 

calculate ballistic curves. The second group was com- posed of only two 

men, Ulam and his assistant Everett. Their sole mechanical appliance was 

the ordinary calculator, which had also been used in calculations for the 

construction of the first atomic bombs. 

*The Society for Social Responsibility in Science had its own placement 

service at the disposal of scientists who lost their appointments because of 

refusing to undertake armamen ts work. Some found positions in 

underdeveloped countries, where they could apply their scientific knowledge 

to the struggle against famine and poverty. 

This system Of working out the same problem in two groups, which could 

the" compare the results independently arrived at, was already traditional at 

Los Alamos. It was practised there, candidly, as a kind of intellectual sport. 

Rolf Landshoff, an emigrant from Berlin to the United States, who had 

belonged to Teller's group during the war, remembers in connexion with this 

'racing' that 'there was a meeting in Teller's office with Fermi von Neumann, 

and Feynman in which T took part because I was to carry out the 

calculations planned at that meeting. Many ideas were thrown back and forth 

and every few minutes Fermi or Teller would devise a quick numerical 

check and then they would spring into action. Feynman on the desk 

calculator, Fermi with the little slide rule he always had with him, and von 

Neumann in hi, head. The head was usually first, and it is remarkable how 

close the three answers always checked. 

In the case of the calculations for the Super the handicap that Ulam had 

assumed seemed almost too heavy for him. It was sup- posed that he would 

not be ready for some days or even weeks after the ENIAC. But, as is well 

known, these artificial brains talk a language of their own, into which any 

problem put to them must first be translated. Such programming is seldom 

free from error. The machine -notices' the fact and gives senseless answers 

which indicate, after close study, where the error lies. 

This process all took time, which Ulam well understood how to employ. 

Before the ENIAC group had come to the end of the fault-detecting period 

and put their corrected questions to the electronic oracle, Ulam, by taking a 

few bold short cuts, had already reached the goal and submitted his results. 

They were discovered to be, if correct, fatal to Teller's plans. According to 

these data the hydrogen bomb, as hitherto conceived, would either be utterly 

impracticable or could only be produced with so great a quantity of the rare 

hydrogen isotope tritium that its cost would apparently be far too high. 

Teller reacted to this news like an oriental despot. He couldn't very well 

behead Ulam, that bringer of evil tidings, but he caused him to fall from 

favour. When, soon afterwards, the first results came in from the ENIAC 

group and appeared promising, the suspicious Teller imagined Ulam might 

have deliberately deceived him. After all, there were a number of people in 

Los Alamos who were only working there because they hoped that the Super 

would turn out to be impossible. But a little later, further results from the big 

Aberdeen computer brilliantly confirmed those of the Polish mathematician. 

They ratified his calculations in every detail. 

There it was in black and white, stated as a mathematical certainty. All the 

work hitherto done on the Super had been, in Teller's own words, 'nothing 

but fantasies'. It had to be started all over again. Had the preliminary 

measurements themselves, upon which the calculations had so far been 

based, in fact been accurate? One could find out only by testing them afresh 

in actual trial. If practical results were to be obtained, much more precise 

observations would have to be taken in the new test than in any previous 

undertaking in the atomic-armaments field. Instruments of hitherto unknown 

speed and precision were essential. Cameras would have to take thousands 

of photographs in a fraction of a minute. A system of signals would be 

necessary to relay their 'experiences' to a distant control point before they 

themselves were destroyed by the force of the explosion. Count- less 

artificial organs, electronic eyes, ears and noses, superior to the 

corresponding human senses, would have to deliver data to a laboratory set 

up on the remote atoll of Eniwetok in the South Pacific. Such data might 

then suggest to the theoreticians a new method of procedure which would 

have a chance of success. 

The test for which Teller and his aides were preparing between 1950 and 

the middle of May 1951 bore the code-name 'Green- house'. They 

themselves called it far more often - and in certain respects more 

appropriately - 'Icebox'. The monstrous device which they intended to send 

up into the air had to be kept at a very low temperature to enable the heavy 

hydrogen, or tritium, to maintain the state of aggregation required for an 

explosion of such magnitude. Much later this most expensive and grandiose 

of all Super-bomb tests was given the nickname 'Superfluous'. Although a 

rich haul of experimental results was obtained, they were eventually found 

to have little bearing on the solution of the Super crisis it had been hoped 

they would provide. 

Before the experiment was carried out Stan Ulam, whose calculations had 

reduced to absurdity the original plans for the hydrogen bomb, picked up an 

altogether new scent. He communicated his idea, which pointed in a wholly 

different direction, to Teller, who had meanwhile apologized for his earlier 

suspicions. Though Teller was at first unwilling to follow this line of 

research, he eventually adopted it. He began by discussing the suggestion 

with Frederic de Hoffman, his young assistant. Hoffman recalls that he 

thought nothing of it at the time 'because, after all, Edward is always having 

an idea. But the next morning he came in to me and said, "Freddie, I thi nk I 

really have some- thing. Stick some figures into it." He told me about it and 

I started to work with my desk calculator. The answer came out right. 

This suggestion originally made by Ulam was responsible for the 

development of that ingenious idea which finally made possible the 

construction of the American Super. It was in June 1951 that Teller revealed 

his idea for the first time to a larger number of experts, assembled at the 

Institute for Advanced Study for a week-end debate on the existing state of 

the 'thermonuclear question '. 

The intellectual climate had greatly changed since the October days in 

1949, when the majority of those now gathered had declared themselves, 

mainly on political and ethical grounds, opposed to the construction of Super 

bombs. The change is evident in the report of an eye-witness, Gordon Dean, 

then Chair- man of the Atomic Energy Commission: 

We had at that meeting in June of 195 1 every person, I think, that could 

conceivably have made a contribution. People like Norris Bradbury, head of 

the Los Alamos laboratory, and one or two of his assistants. Dr Nordheim, I 

believe, was there from Los Alamos, very active in the H programme. 

Johnny von Neumann from Princeton, one of the best weapons men in the 

world, Dr Teller, Dr Bethe, Dr Fermi, Johnny Wheeler, all the top men from 

every laboratory sat around this table and we went at it for two days. 

Out of the meeting came something which Edward Teller brought Into the 

meeting with his own head, which was an entirely new way of approaching a 

thermonuclear weapon. 

I would like to be able to describe that but it is one of the most sensitive 

things we have left in the atomic-energy programme ... it was gust a theory 

at this point. Pictures were drawn on the board. Calculations were made, Dr 

Bethe, Dr Teller, Dr Fermi participating the mast in this. Oppy very actively 

as well. 

At the end of those two days we were all convinced, everyone in the room, 

that at least we had something for the first time that looked feasible in the 

way of an idea. 

I remember leaving that meeting impressed with this fact, that everyone 

around that table without exception, and this included Dr Oppenheimer, was 

enthusiastic now that you had something foreseeable. I remember going out 

and in four days making a commitment for a new plant ... we had no money 

in the budget to do it with and getting this thing started on the tracks, here 

was enthusiasm right through the programme for the first time. The 

bickering was gone. The discussions were pretty well ended, and we were 

able within a matter of just about one year to have that gadget ready. 

This report does not sound as if it were concerned with men who had 

abandoned only their 'huts' with reluctance, after long inward conflict. How 

is one to explain such macabre enthusiasm, which had swept away all the 

earlier scruples and objections to the Super monster? Oppenheimer himself 

provides a clue to the reason why scientists of today, despite occasional 

hesitations, in the end so often change their minds when the successful 

solution or" a problem they hale long wrestled with is at last in view, 

however disastrous its ultimate effects may be. In recalling the repudiation 

of the hydrogen bomb by the General Advisory Committee in October 1949 

he said: 

I do not think we want to argue technical questions here and I do not think 

it is very meaningful for me to speculate as to how we would have 

responded had the technical picture at that time been more as it was later. 

However, it is my judgement in these things that when you see something 

that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to 

do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it 

was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there 

were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very 

well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 

1951 that the tone of our report would have been the same. 

In this statement there is no longer any trace of the ethical doubts so 

forcibly expressed in the report of the General Advisory Committee. 

Oppenheimer here, whether intentionally or not, reveals a dangerous 

tendency in the modern research scientist. His remarkable admission perhaps 

explains why the twentieth-century Faust allows himself, in his obsession 

with success and despite occasional twinges of conscience, to be persuaded 

into signing the pact with the Devil that confronts him: What is 'technically 

sweet' he finds nothing less than irresistible. 

18 IN THE SIGN OF THE 'MANIAC' 1951-5 

AFTER that memorable week-end at Princeton, the direction of the road 

which would presumably lead to the Super was known, but it was blocked at 

the start by still another almost insurmountably high mountain range of 

figures. Even the calculations relating to the atom bomb had involved 

thousands upon thousands of detailed computations. The precise 

determination of a thermonuclear explosion would be many degrees harder, 

for a physical process comprising numerous stages would have to take place 

in a fraction of a second. The steps must be foreseen with the greatest 

possible accuracy. On the basis of these assumptions an infinitely complex 

apparatus would have to be constructed . 

All this work had to be done at an even higher speed than had been 

necessary in the Second World War. Eighteen months had already gone by 

since President Truman's directive for the construction of the Super. The 

Russians were probably devoting all their energies to the same problems. 

Teller and the Director of the Los Alamos laboratory, Norris Bradbury, 

mobilized their whole forces for the conquest of the mathematical Mount 

Everest. Workers at the laboratory immediately resolved to work six instead 

of five days a week, while the computer section actually introduced day and 

night shifts. 

Cerda Evans a specialist in the field of the new 'electronic brains', states: 

Never in my life have I been obliged to sleep and breakfast at such 

impossible hours as during those months, when we sat at our computers for 

twenty-four hours a day, relieving one another at intervals. The ENIAC on 

which we worked, though faster than any other previous mathematical 

apparatus, was temperamental and delicate. Some tube or other or some 

circuit was forever going wrong. On those occasions we simply had to wait. 

Once a storm put the mechanism right off balance. We all sat glued to the 

telephones in our rooms, waiting for the repair crew to report that we could 

carry on. Several times they called us up to say that we could come over, as 

everything would be all right in ten minutes. But when we rushed to the 

spot, it would turn out to be only another false alarm. So it went on for a 

whole week. 

Until every one of the calculations had been completed there was simply 

no possibility of any real progress. But they took so long that one could see 

no end to them. Once more a crisis seemed to be at hand. At that moment the 

situation was saved by the mathematician and atomic scientist John von 

Neumann, who told Teller he hoped to have a new electronic computer 

ready within a few months which would be incomparably more effective 

than the ENIAC. 

Even during his years as an undergraduate at Gottingen the ingenious 

Hungarian von Neumann had been nicknamed 'Dr Miracle' by his fellow 

students, because of his passion for mechanical toys. They were thinking of 

E. T. A. Hoffmann's weird builder of automata, who invented the life-size 

and lifelike doll Olympia and then fell desperately in love with it. 

In 1930 von Neumann, already considered one of the leading 

mathematicians of his generation, had emigrated to the United States. At 

first he felt far from comfortable in the New World. Von Neumann, apart 

from his mathematics, was fender of a free and easy social life than of 

anything else. At Princeton, however, there were no cafes, like those in 

Central Europe, where one could gossip and argue for hours over a cup of 

coffee. The scholarly man missed this institution so much that he began to 

wonder in all seriousness whether he should invest his rather meagre fortune 

in a business of the kind. 'But, Johnny,' his American colleagues objected, 

'the citizens of Princeton wouldn't know what to do with a Viennese cafe! 

"Don't bother about that,' von Neumann replied. 'We'll recruit a few of our 

European colleagues. They’ll sit in my cafe every afternoon for a few days, 

just to show you how it's done. 

This plan, which was eventually given up, met with less approval among 

von Neumann's new countrymen than his passion for robots. The recent 

advances in electronics made in the United States favoured the cultivation of 

his hobby. Soon he was devoting more and more time to it. The similarities 

between human beings and machines fascinated him. He proceeded to invent 

a whole series of mechanisms with human or even superhuman properties.* 

Teller had experienced no difficulty in winning over his com- patriot von 

Neumann, from the start, to take part in the Super project. Unlike 

Oppenheimer and other atomic scientists, who had at first suffered from 

conscientious scruples about the new bomb, the Hungarian mathematician 

had immediately declared his approval of it, because he feared nothing in the 

world so much as Communism. He had learned to hate it as a thirteen-year- 

old boy during its brief period of domination in Budapest after the First 

World War. There were few experiences in his life that had left such a deep 

impression on him as those days of terror and his flight from the city. Since 

then he had adopted, at any rate when Bolshevists were being discussed, a 

hard-boiled attitude. 

Von Neumann immediately saw what an indispensable part his new 

computer would be able to play in the production of the ;hell weapon'. He 

did all he could to speed up its construction, while at the same time his 

pupils Nicholas Metropolis and James H. Richardson built up an identical 

computer at Los Alamos. 

The E IAC, which could only remember twenty-seven 'words', had a 

sparrow's memory in comparison with that of the new electronic brain. This 

could retain 40,000 bits of information at once and, if necessary, recall them 

later. It was so accurate that it could check the instructions given it, identify 

errors and, if given the chance, correct its faulty orders. When von Neumann 

released his last invention for use, it aroused the admiration of all who 

worked with it. Carson Mark, head of the Theoretical Division at Los 

Alamos, recollects that 'a problem which would have otherwise kept three 

people busy for three months; could be solved by the aid of this computer, 

worked by the same three people, in about ten hours. The physicist who had 

set the task, instead of having to wait for a quarter of a year before he could 

get on, received the data he required for his further work the same evening. 

A whole series of such three months' calculations, narrowed down to a 

single working day, were needed for the production of the hydrogen bomb. 

* In this connexion von Neumann thought up, among other models, one 

capable so long as it was supplied with enough raw material, of continuous 

self-reproduction. It was to consist of a box and a 'genetic tail' which 

contained the basic elements of its posterity. Von Neumann 's pupil Kemeny 

states: 'One could further arrange to limit the supply of raw material, so that 

the machines would have to compete for "Lebensraum" even to the extent of 

killing one another. 

It was a calculating machine, therefore, which was the real hero of the 

work on the construction of the bomb. It had a name of its own, like all the 

other electronic brains. Von Neumann had always been fond of puns and 

practical jokes. When he introduced his machine to the Atomic Energy 

Commission under the high-sounding name of 'Mathematical Analyser, 

Numerical Integrator and Computer', no one noticed anything odd about this 

designation except that it was rather too ceremonious for everyday use. It 

was not until the initial letters of the six words were run together that those 

who used the miraculous new machine realized that the abbreviation spelled 

'maniac'. 

Work with the MANIAC went on with a good deal less friction than 

between the Los Alamos team and another great brain, Edward Teller. Just 

as he had failed to adjust during the Second World War, he constantly tried 

to direct the tempo and method of Director Bradbury's own activities. Teller 

hinted to his influential friends in Washington that the leading personalities 

on the mesa still paid too much attention to Oppenheimer's views and were 

accordingly more concerned with the production of better atom bombs than 

with the construction of the hydrogen bomb. From Teller's dissatisfaction 

came the idea of building a second nuclear-weapons laboratory, in addition 

to Los Alamos, with himself as its boss. It was to be devoted exclusively to 

the problems of a thermonuclear bomb. 

The idea found special favour with the Air Force. At that time, in 1952, 

this branch of the armed services feared that it might have to share with the 

other two branches, but in particular with the Army, its monopoly of 

employing the atom bombs. The General Advisory Commission, led by 

Oppenheimer, several times rejected the idea of the second laboratory as 

unnecessary, but in the summer of 1952 the Commission was 

outmanoeuvred. Preparations were begun to expand a small laboratory 

which had been used only occasionally for research for the University of 

California. 

The little town at which this new smithy for the forging of atomic weapons 

arose was called Livermore. By an irony of fate, it had been founded by 

Robert Livermore, a veteran weary of the naval battles against Napoleon. As 

an ordinary seaman he had deserted the British warship Colonel Young at 

the California port of Monterey. His wanderings led him in 1835 to a green 

valley which reminded him of the landscapes in central Italy. He married a 

local girl, had eight children, and developed his property, Las Positas, into a 

flourishing estate. In 1952 bulldozers invaded this idyllic retreat in the 

Golden West, and a few months later the thermonuclear laboratory of the 

Atomic Energy Commission was built. Teller's departure from Los Alamos, 

which had for some time been inevitable, came in July 1952. Soon after, 

with E. O. Lawrence and Herbert York, he took charge of the new 

installations. 

Meanwhile, on the Hill, the construction of the first Super bomb was 

approaching completion, though its spiritual father had gone. That autumn 

Marshall Holloway, director of this final phase of the work, arranged for 

some new apparatus at Los Alamos, in which a quarter of a billion dollars in 

taxes had been invested for expansion and technical equipment since 1945. 

The new machinery practically eliminated risk from the most dangerous part 

of the work, the determination of critical mass inside the bomb. 

Experiments were now no longer carried out with such primitive resources 

as had been available in the time of Louis Slotin but with the help of a 

critical assembly under remote control, which bore the name 'Jezebel'. It had 

been placed, with two other similar devices, ’Topsy' and 'Godiva', behind 

heavy radiation shielding in two flat-roofed buildings so 'hot' - i.e. highly 

radio- active - that they could be entered only if special precautionary 

measures were taken. The control room, from which the machinery was 

guided, stood in the main laboratory, a quarter of a mile from the danger 

zone. What went on inside the 'kivas' was observed only on television 

screens. The buildings had been called Kivas after the sacred ceremonial 

chambers of the Pueblo Indians, whose priests approached them with the 

greatest awe. 

The thermonuclear device eventually produced by Teller and von 

Neumann, about a hundred devoted scientists, MANIAC, and Jezebel was 

not yet an actual projectile but a thermonuclear device, weighing no less 

than 65 tons. The tritium it contained, among other components, was an 

artificial hydrogen isotope produced in the uranium pile which had to be 

maintained at a fixed low temperature in a freezing apparatus as heavy as it 

was complex. 

At the beginning of October 1952 thousands of scientists, test engineers, 

mechanics, soldiers, and sailors gathered on what had become a nuclear 

testing ground, the atoll of Eniwetok, one of the Marshall Islands, a U.N. 

trusteeship territory under U.S. supervision. They prepared to shoot off 

'Mike', as the monster was called. Before the test Vannevar Bush, who had 

directed American research during the Second World War, made a strenuous 

attempt to induce the government to initiate negotiations with the Russians 

before taking this fresh step into a 'hideous sort of world'. His advice was 

declined. The device was installed on the islet of Elugelab. It was placed in a 

big protective shed whose massive rectangular shape reminded some of the 

participants of the Kaaba, the building which houses the sacred stone of the 

Moslems at Mecca.* 

On the night of 3 1 October- 1 November 1952, a final roll call of all the 

personnel was held. Roy Reider, the security director, had insisted as a 

precautionary measure that all the islands be evacuated. The people were 

taken aboard the waiting ships. In such experiments one must always count 

on, for safety's sake, a bang ten times as big as calculated. In this case one 

had to take into consideration also the possibility of an upheaval of the sea. 

All except a small group of specialists went at least forty miles away from 

the point of the expected explosion. The experts stayed on Elugelab to set 

off the bomb shortly before dawn. Reider recalls that these men were 'as 

lonely as a group of wandering lepers, though at no time was this party ever 

out of communication with headquarters back at the control centre.' As soon 

as these specialists had also been taken to a place of safety the counting of 

minutes and seconds over the ships' loud- speakers began. Every eye stared 

into the distance out of which the light of the first man-made star would rise. 

Edward Teller had received a formal invitation from Bradbury to attend 

the test of the Super in the Pacific. But Teller had, for understandable 

reasons, declined. About a quarter of an hour before the great event - it was 

then just before midday on the West Coast of the United States - he was 

walking slowly, with bent head, along a narrow path across a park on the 

grounds of the University of California at Berkeley, on his way to Haverland 

Hall, a budding where one of the most sensitive seismographs in the world 

was kept in the basement. There Teller hoped to see signs of the shock 

initiated by the experiment five thousand miles away. The small room, with 

the sensitive instrument embedded in its floor of rock, was lit only by a 

single red lamp. It was turned off. Teller was left alone with a loudly ticking 

kitchen clock and the recording apparatus, which could indicate the slightest 

tremor on a photographic plate, with a beam of light a millimetre thick. He 

relates what happened then: After my eyes became accustomed to the 

darkness I noticed that the spot seemed quite unsteady. Clearly this was 

more than what could be due to the continuous trembling of the earth, to the 

'microseisms' that are caused by the pounding of the ocean waves on the 

shores of the Continent. It was due to the movements of my own eyes which 

in the darkness were not steadied by the surrounding picture of solid objects. 

Soon the luminous point gave me the feeling of being aboard a gently and 

irregularly moving vessel, so I braced a pencil on a piece of the apparatus 

and held it close to the luminous point. Now the point seemed steady and I 

felt as if I had come back to solid ground again. This was about the time of 

the actual shot. Nothing happened or could have happened. About a quarter 

of an hour was required for the shock to travel, deep under the Pacific basin, 

to the Californian coast. I waited with little patience, the seismograph 

making at each minute a clearly visible vibration which served as a time 

signal. At last the time signal came that had to be followed by the shock 

from the explosion and there it seemed to be: the luminous point appeared to 

dance wildly and irregularly. Was it only that the pencil which I held as a 

marker trembled in my hand? I waited for many more minutes to be sure that 

the record did not miss any of the shocks that might follow the first. Then 

finally the film was taken off and developed. By that time I had almost 

convinced myself that I must have been mistaken and that what I saw was 

the motion of my own hand rather than the signal from the first hydrogen 

bomb. Then the trace appeared on the photographic plate. It was clear and 

big and unmistakable. It had been made by the wave of compression that had 

travelled for thousands of miles and brought the positive assurance that Mike 

was a success. 

* In connexion with the choice of this locality for the first test of the 

hydrogen bomb the American author and painter Gilbert Wilson noted a 

strange coincidence. While he was reading Moby Dick it struck him that 

'only a century after Herman Melville wrote his great book our own 

American atomic engineers unwittingly selected almost the very spot in the 

broad Pacific, some few thousand miles south-east off the coast of Japan, 

where the fictional Pequod' - this was the American whaler commanded by 

the vengeful and fanatical Captain Ahab - 'was rammed and sunk by the 

White Whale.... Melville had Ahab describe the Whale with an image 

remarkably similar to the conventional symbol of the atom used by artists, 

"O trebly hooped and welded hip of power!'" 

A crater a mile long and 175 feet deep had been dug in the Pacific. As 

soon as the fireball of the first Super, a flaming dome three and a half miles 

in diameter, had disappeared and the vast, mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke 

rose into the sky, the oh- servers realized a fact which they at first could 

hardly believe. The island of Elugelab had disappeared. The shot, in which 

the energy of three megatons - three million tons - of TNT had been 

liberated, had, like the first atom bomb, surpassed all expectations, even the 

calculations of MANIAC. 

Mike's successful explosion had given practical proof, for the first time, 

that it was possible to reproduce on earth processes presumed to take place 

in the sun. The 'monster' was not yet a bomb which could be carried in an 

aircraft. The American scientists in the armaments race were not really 

satisfied with even this notable technical success. They decided to start 

work, at the same speed, on a 'dry' type of bomb, which would act on an 

isotope of lithium instead of tritium and thus dispense with the refrigerating 

apparatus. They were still engaged, at Los Alamos and Livermore, on the 

production of this new bomb, known simply by the affectionate name of 

'The Sausage', when news from Soviet Russia startled scientists all over the 

world. 

Malenkov, Stalin's successor, proclaimed on 8 August 1953 that 'the 

United States no longer has a monopoly of the production of the hydrogen 

bomb.' Four days later the Radiation Detection Patrol identified traces, in the 

skies over Asia, of a new Soviet bomb explosion. Samples of these traces 

were subjected to laboratory analysis. The results caused an excitement 

among the initiated which could only be compared with that following the 

news of the first Soviet bomb. The radiation chemists reported that the 

Russians already possessed the 'dry bomb'." They were now probably in a 

position, as Sterling Cole, Chairman of the Congressional Atomic 

Committee explained with considerable alarm to a small group of his 

colleagues, to threaten the United States with hydrogen bombs at any time, 

while the Americans could for the present retaliate only with atom bombs. 

But the American government did not communicate these facts to the 

people. 

The conditions which Washington had so long feared had now actually 

come to pass. The other side now held the lead in the race for the 'absolute 

weapon'. What could be done to overtake and if possible pass it? The race 

now accelerated to positively breakneck speed. To gain a few minutes' grace 

before the infliction of a hostile onslaught that might kill millions of people 

and cripple American industrial establishments at a single blow, a beginning 

was made on an 'electronic wail' designed to approach the North Pole and 

reach far out to sea. To save a few minutes an idea was revived which had 

been given only casual attention Since 1945 - to put into operation 

unmanned missiles guided by remote control, capable of crossing the 

Atlantic or the snowy wastes of the North in less than a half hour. 

*The well-known Austrian physicist Hans Thirring had already foreseen 

the possibility of such a bomb in his book The History of the Atom Bomb, 

which appeared in 1946 in Vienna. In that work he wrote: 'Nor is lithium, in 

fact, by any means a rare element. Consequently, in a super atom bomb, 

about as many tons of lithium hydride could be used as there are kilograms 

of plutonium in the present bomb. Under such conditions an effect some 

thousands of times greater than that hitherto known could be achieved. God 

help any country over which a six-ton lithium hydride bomb explodes. ' 

These 'intercontinental ballistic missiles' had been planned mainly under 

the direction of Germans, who had built the V2 weapons, and who now had 

become naturalized Americans. The main reason why these machines had 

not been built in great numbers was because it was calculated that their 

deviation from the target over a range of 5,000 miles would amount to 1 per 

cent, or fifty miles. Improvement of the control mechanism succeeded 

eventually in reducing the margin of error to .2 per cent. But even that meant 

a deviation of ten miles. Consequently, if such a missile were aimed at 

Moscow, it would not burst in the centre of the city but in one of the 

suburbs. And if a long-range rocket were aimed at a Leningrad airfield it 

would fall in open country or even in the sea. 

Nevertheless, the Air Force believed that this sinister air torpedo, if it 

could only be more accurately aimed, would be the card with which the 

latest Russian ace could be most expeditiously trumped - unless it was even 

too late for that. Reports of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had already 

begun to inform the Pentagon of amazing Russian advances in precisely that 

same field of long-range guided missiles. 

John von Neumann, then already suffering from an incurable cancer, was 

placed at the head of a secret committee to study this problem. The 

committee met for the first time in September 1953, a month after the 

announcement of the Russian H-bomb explosion. Von Neumann had in the 

past been closely associated with the Atomic Energy Commission and 

became a Commissioner shortly afterwards. He was therefore aware that 

plans for a 'three-stage' bomb had been drawn up by the Commission. They 

wanted to add to the two stages of a thermonuclear bomb (that is, the central 

atomic-bomb explosion which initiates the fusion reaction in the 

thermonuclear fuel surrounding it, so producing a much greater effect) a 

third stage consisting of the fusion of the bomb's casing. This was to be 

made of U238 instead of ordinary material. This bomb, named the ' Fission- 

fusion-fission ' or FFF bomb, had not hitherto been constructed, the only 

reason being that it was considered likely to cause the maximum of ruin and 

destruction. Its radioactive fission matter would be spread over an area of 

300 square miles. The weapon was there- fore regarded as 'over destroying'. 

But von Neumann now proceeded to work out in his mind a combination 

of the intercontinental missile's uncertainty of aim with the enormous 

dispersion area over which the effect of the three-stage bomb would operate. 

He united two monsters, hitherto considered impracticable for war purposes, 

in unholy matrimony and presented them to his grateful employers as the 

'absolute weapon'. For now, even if the intercontinental missile burst a long 

way from its target, it would still include it in its circle of death and 

annihilate it. The American periodical Fortune reported later on von 

Neumann's ingenious compound: 'Because of the quantum jump in the 

destructive power of the thermo- nuclear warhead, not to mention the still 

greater area of lethal fall-out, delivery within eight or ten miles of the centre 

of the target became militarily acceptable. 

Von Neumann, 'the mathematician who gave the green light' ;is Fortune 

put it, is the dearest instance of a scientist who developed from an 

inventor of new weapons into a scientific strategist. During the years 

following the end of the Second World War, wrote Hanson W. Baldwin, an 

American expert on military subjects, 'the technological revolution has made 

its major strides and has produced by far the greatest effects upon the art of 

war in the whole century and a half since Napoleon.' The atomic scientists 

had begotten an entire family of nuclear weapons of all sorts and sizes. The 

specialists in aerodynamics and the aircraft engineers had built jet fighters 

capable of unprecedented manoeuvres and unheard-of speeds. The rocket 

experts had developed tremendously fast missiles in great variety. In 

addition, as Baldwin explains, 'biological and chemical weapons such as 

radioactive dusts and gases' had been made practicable. 

Advances in electronics enabled all these messengers of death to be aimed 

accurately even at the highest speeds. But the generals, if left to their own 

resources, would never have been able to keep pace mentally with this 

'quantum jump' in the technique of war. They needed scientists at their 

elbows to help them work out their plans and revise them when it became 

necessary with every step forward in technology. Most of the scientific 

experts who took part in this war game continued to do so under the 

compulsion of the anxiety and suspicion to which they had been a prey ever 

since 1939. They participated in these progressively more and more 

desperate manoeuvres of increasing threat and counter-threat, because of 

their belief that it was only by so doing that they could hope to preserve 

peace.* 

The planning of future wars of this kind - in the hope that they would 

never take place if only they were prepared beforehand - also gave the 

MANIAC and other electronic 'oracles' made in its image new parts to play 

as indispensable instruments for extremely rapid assessments and decisions 

in the strategic field. 

For the M A NI A C even the end of the world was only one more question 

to be answered by calculation. If a city or a nation were translated into the 

equivalent expressions in the language of the machine, history and life 

would converge in a mass of dry figures and convenient formulae could be 

worked out for the annihilation of millions of people. When von Neumann's 

pupils or their opposite numbers in the Soviet Union sat at a computer panel 

working out the chances of war, they divided the resources of a country by 

the panic and despair of its population or multiplied them by its inventive 

capacity and obsession with victory. Would the problem be solved only if 

the loser were reduced to zero? Or should one simply proceed to retaliation 

by degrees instead of to radical retaliation? In such calculations it was 

always millions of deaths that were involved, from one million to hundreds 

of millions. And the time to elapse before annihilation became imminent 

grew ever shorter. If one could only forget - and one did gradually forget it 

almost completely, sitting at the console of such an instrument - that the 

single lives of human beings were at stake, the whole business could be 

regarded in principle as nothing more than one of those necessary 

calculations of probability for ascertaining the behaviour of the millions of 

atomic particles in the inner mechanism of the new bombs. 

*The American psychiatrist Lawrence S. Kubie, in an inquiry into the 

deeper motives of the scientists who took part in the armaments race, 

advanced a different interpretation in the The American Scientist for 

January 1954: Are we witnessing the development of a generation of 

hardened, cynical, amoral, embittered, disillusioned young scientists? If so, 

for the present the fashioning of implements of destruction offers a 

convenient outlet for their destructive feelings; but the fault will be ours and 

not theirs if this tendency should increase through the coming years and 

should find even more disastrous channels of expression. ' 

Yet ah these calculations that worked with such furious precision were 

suddenly interrupted by a perfectly ordinary sea breeze which no one had 

thought of considering. The weather forecast on 1 March 1954 stated that it 

seemed to be moving north from the atoll of Bikini. But then it quite 

unexpectedly turned south, drifting over the islands of Rongelap, Rongerik, 

and Uterik, till it reached the open sea where a Japanese steam trawler, the 

Lucky Dragon No. 5, lay. The boat was overtaken by a 'snowstorm' out of a 

clear sky. It was not until two weeks later that the world learned the storm 

had been a rain of radioactive ashes. The tiny particles of dust found by 

Japanese scientists in the seams of the ship's planking contained the secret of 

the three-stage bomb, exploded for the first time on 1 March 1954 as 'shoot 

one' of a new series of H-bomb tests. 

At this very time the danger of war had once more become particularly 

acute. The French military post at Dien-Bien-Phu in Indochina was about to 

fall. In Washington and Paris the question of American intervention against 

the advancing Indo-Chinese Communist Army was being considered. 

Admiral Radford, Chief of Staff, had just proposed that a 'tactical atomic 

bomb' should be employed. 

But it never came to that. Just as in August 1945 and February 1950, so 

now, for the third time, the entire world was seized with horror at the 

frightful violence of the new weapons. The Japanese fishermen had been far 

beyond the danger zone determined by the Americans. And yet they had 

been exposed, some 120 miles away from the point of explosion, to its 

effects. They reached their home port of Yaizu on 14 March, sick and weak 

with sufferings they could not account for, and were at once taken to the 

hospital. 

It was rumoured that the scientists had lost control of the new bomb, which 

had liberated the terrific quantity of energy equal to between 1 8 and 22 

million tons of TNT. Mike's explosive force had been equal only to 3 million 

tons of dynamite. It was admitted that the bang had been twice as powerful 

as had been anticipated. But even more disturbing than this news was the 

poisonous effect of the new projectile, which was identified during the 

following days in rain over Japan, in lubricating oil on Indian aircraft, in 

winds over Australia, in the sky over the United States, and as far away as 

Europe. 

The previous bombs had affected only the conscience of mankind, so soon 

to relapse again into apathy; but the latest 'hell bombs', it was evident from 

the reports, endangered the air that man breathed, the water he drank, and 

the food that he ate. They menaced, even in times of peace, the health of 

every person, wherever he lived. 

Admiral Strauss naturally lost no time in mounting a counter- offensive. 

He announced that his own scientists considered it an exaggeration to fear 

that the spread of increased radioactivity would endanger life wherever it 

was to be found. A dispute ensued between 'appeasers' and 'alarmists' which 

seemed likely to last for a good many years, for the most dangerous 

consequences of the radioactivity disseminated by the tests - its effects on 

posterity - could not be accurately assessed by science for generations. 

All geneticists are agreed on the fact, though not on the extent, of the risk 

to the health of those who come after us owing to the bomb's liberation of 

cell-poisoning material. The criticism of Strauss expressed by the 

distinguished American specialist in heredity A. H. Sturtevant was 

particularly searching. He wrote: 

There is no possible escape from the conclusion that the bombs already 

exploded will ultimately result in the production of numerous defective 

individuals - if the human race itself survives for many generations. ... I 

regret that an official in a position of such responsibility should have stated 

that there is no biological hazard from low doses of high energy radiation. 

Not long afterward the same scholar said in a public address that probably 

1,800 of the children bom in 1954, the year of the bomb test, were already 

infected by the high radiation. In the same year the American zoologist Curt 

Stem declared: 'By now everyone in the world harbours in his body small 

amounts of radioactivity from past H-bomb tests: "hot" strontium in bones 

and teeth, "hot" iodine in thyroid glands.' 

The American physicist Ralph Lapp uttered an even more serious warning 

based on conversations with an A.E.C. biologist, who would not allow 

publication of his name for fear of dismissal. Lapp stated: 

In 1945 55,000 tons of TNT equivalent were detonated. Sporadic testing 

followed until the tentacles of the cold war gripped the nation and the test 

rate zoomed up. By 1954 the test rate was a thousand times greater than in 

1945. My calculations show that if the world does follow the test schedule I 

have assumed by 1 962 there will be an amount of radio-strontium committed 

to the stratosphere which some time in the 1970s will add up to the 

'maximum permissible amount' for the world's population. 

Just what do we mean by the maximum permissible amount of a 

radioactive substance? Will more than this amount cause illness or death? If 

so, how much more? Is it safe for all humans to have one MPA (maximum 

permissible amount) of strontium retained in their bones? All MPA limits in 

the past have been specified for small groups of healthy adults working 

under controlled conditions and exposed to known hazards. 

For such people the International Committee on Radiological Protection 

has laid down definite occupational MPAs. There is consider- able 

disagreement among authorities on what MPAs should be for whole 

populations. 

In the specific case of radio-strontium it is well known that growing 

children are more sensitive to strontium injury than adults. Therefore most 

experts believe that the MPA for whole populations should be ten times less 

than the occupational level. 

Radio-strontium is one of the causes of cancer. To find out how much of 

this poison had already been disseminated throughout the world by the tests, 

Admiral Strauss sent a special investigation committee to all five continents 

and examined samples of the precipitation of strontium in plants, animals, 

and human beings. The committee bore from its inception the cheerful cover 

name of 'Operation Sunshine' and thoroughly lived up to its name. Its report 

beamed with purposeful optimism. 

Of the twenty-three Japanese fishermen who had been infected, one, 

Kuboyama, the wireless operator, died a few months later. His countrymen 

call him the 'first martyr of the H-bomb'. 

The others are still under treatment in Japanese hospitals. One of them, a 

fisherman named Misaki, sent the following message to the world through a 

reporter, Hilmar Pabel, who had visited him: 'Our fate menaces all mankind. 

Tell that to those who are responsible. God grant that they may listen.' 

19 THE FALL OF OPPENHEIMER 1952-4 

DURING the new phase of the armaments race, proceeding under the 

auspices of electronic brains, H-bombs, and guided missiles, Robert 

Oppenheimer gradually lost his influence with the American government, 

which had often been considerable. The process began when in July 1952 he 

resigned his post as Chairman of the General Advisory Commission, that 

very highly respected consultative offshoot of the Atomic Energy 

Commission. His withdrawal had become inevitable since the victory of the 

activists in the 'scientists' civil war', as the American lecturer John Mason 

Brown called the quarrel of the experts about the H-bomb. After that 

Oppenheimer's activities in the Atomic Energy Commission were confined 

to those of an occasional special consultant. He retained, however, the 'Q 

clearance', which still allowed him access to the most carefully guarded 

secrets of the daily advances in the development of atomic armament. In 

Washington Oppenheimer's advice was only seldom called for. Over a 

whole year he was consulted on no more than six occasions by the Atomic 

Energy Commission. 

Among American intellectuals Oppenheimer's reputation for imaginative 

guidance was rising year by year. He had become their most popular guide 

to the newly discovered realm of the atom. Unlike most other nuclear 

physicists, who had returned to their specialized pursuits after the failure of 

their attempts to help to mould the ideas of their countrymen, Oppenheimer 

continued his efforts in that direction. In a series of extremely able, 

sometimes magnificent, speeches he tried to indicate and if possible to 

bridge the gulf between the men of science and his other contemporaries. 

These appeals to a wide public were not couched in the usual terms. His 

exceptional gifts of presentation enabled him to arouse sympathy in his 

listeners for the great adventure of modem physics. He could communicate 

to them the profound excitement felt by the explorers of a new scientific 

region. His reputation of being a man who not only understood this strange 

new world but also knew how to reconcile it in philosophical and vivid 

images with the problem of the day was so great that in 1953 he received the 

honour of delivering the annual Reith Lecture for the B.B.C. It was arranged 

that at the same time, during his visit to England, he should receive his sixth 

doctorate, honoris causa, at Oxford. 

Distinctions and marks of esteem of all kinds had been regularly conferred 

on Oppenheimer ever since 1 945 in recognition of the work he had done 

during the war. They could be regarded as interest on the capital of great 

esteem he had then acquired. Some were of great importance, like the Medal 

of Merit bestowed upon him by President Tmman. He appeared to be fond 

of trophies and collected them quite indiscriminately. Thus he accepted the 

Wedge Award of the Georgia Hardwood Lumber Company, and consented 

to be appointed Father of the Year by the National Baby Institution as well 

as to be nominated for the Hall of Fame of the First Half of the Century by 

the magazine Popular Mechanics. His cupboards were crammed with 

certificates of membership in foreign academies, honorary diplomas, and 

letters of appreciation. One of his secretaries worked several hours a day on 

the filing and classification in his volumes of Press clippings of every item 

of news, article, caricature, or photograph referring to her chief. Fame was a 

glorious thing and Oppie, however ascetic his lean countenance, now so 

angular, might seem, obviously enjoyed his celebrity. It was only his purely 

scientific prestige that declined. The name of J. R. Oppenheimer, once 

known as that of the author of important articles, was now hardly ever seen 

in physics periodicals. Between 1943, the year in which he left his study for 

the 'great world', and 1953, his scientific publications amounted in all to only 

five minor contributions. Oppenheimer's official duties as a member of no 

less than thirty- five different government committees gradually diminished 

after the new administration under President Eisenhower came to power. He 

was able to plan to go abroad more often. In the summer of 1953 he lectured 

in South America. In the late autumn he left with his wife for Europe. 

Among the many friends whom Oppie visited on that continent was Haakon 

Chevalier, whose fate had never ceased to trouble his conscience. 

The professor of Romance languages had not been able to find another 

teaching appointment in the United States after he had become politically 

suspect because of the exaggerated importance attributed to Oppenheimer's 

tales of espionage. Finally he had been obliged to leave his home and settle 

in Paris as a professional translator. As Chevalier had never been a Soviet 

agent or even in any active contact with the Communist Party, the police had 

not been able, despite years of investigation, to find any evidence against 

him. But 'something always sticks', as Chevalier had to acknowledge when 

he applied to the American Embassy in Paris, in 1950, for a renewal of his 

passport. The difficulties he encountered induced him to communicate with 

Oppenheimer, of whose part in the 'Chevalier affair' he still remained 

ignorant. Oppenheimer sent him a letter which he used to obtain the renewal 

of his passport. 

In the winter of 1953, Chevalier had every reason to continue to regard 

Oppie as a friend and influential protector. His delight at the prospect of 

seeing Oppenheimer again after so many years was so overwhelming that as 

soon as he heard that Oppie wanted to visit him he left a Milan conference 

where he was an interpreter, though he needed the fees badly, and dashed 

back to the French capital. 

The meeting between the two men, after the years of separation, was 

extremely cordial. The Chevaliers had prepared a regular celebration feast in 

their two-room apartment on the butte of Montmartre. Their two wives were 

present, and the talk mainly concerned family and mutual friends. The 

subject of politics was avoided. Only once that evening did they touch on a 

delicate matter. Chevalier had criticized the execution of the two 

Rosenbergs, husband and wife, sentenced to death for atomic- research 

espionage. Oppenheimer considered that they had deserved punishment, but 

he deprecated the severity of the sentence. It would now have been possible 

for him to take that opportunity of admitting to his friend that in 1943, 

during his examination by Colonel Pash, he had made Chevalier - originally 

with the intention of withholding his name - the hero of a highly coloured 

tale of spying. Oppenheimer could not bring himself to make the disclosure. 

A second and more conspicuous chance for a belated confession of this kind 

occurred when Chevalier remarked that he was probably going to lose his 

employment as an interpreter with UNESCO. He said he could not hope to 

get through the security grilling which had recently been ordered for all 

Americans working for that body. A statement by Oppenheimer of the true 

facts of the case would have at last afforded Chevalier an explanation of the 

reason for all his difficulties. It would have put him in a position to defend 

himself effectively against the suspicions of the authorities. But even now 

Oppenheimer did not speak. 

Oppie embraced both his friends on taking his leave. Today Chevalier still 

shudders at the recollection of that parting gesture. He never saw 

Oppenheimer again. Nor did he ever receive from him anything but a single, 

exceedingly brief, formal, and non- committal reply to the letters he wrote 

six months later, after he had learned the whole truth.* 

By the winter of 1953, so far as Oppenheimer personally was concerned, 

the Chevalier affair, now ten years old, seemed to be dead and buried. But it 

had not been forgotten by the American authorities. J. Edgar Hoover, head 

of the F.B.I., had never considered that this particular episode in 

Oppenheimer's life had been satisfactorily explained. In 1947 he had argued 

in vain against the grant of a security clearance to Oppenheimer. Since then, 

on Hoover's instructions, his agents had been busy collecting further 

evidence. The Washington correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, 

Robert J. Donovan, reports that in 1953 Oppenheimer's file, if all the papers 

composing it were piled on top of one another, would have reached a height 

of four feet six inches, almost as tall as a human being. 

In November 1953, while Oppenheimer was in England, Hoover 

composed a digest of this formidable mass of documentary material. On the 

last day of the month he sent this summary not only to all interested 

government officials but also to President Eisenhower. The immediate 

occasion of this renewed interest in the Oppenheimer case had been a letter 

from William L. Borden, formerly senior assistant to Senator McMahon. In 

that communication, dated 7 November 1953, he had expressed the opinion, 

based on his personal knowledge of the secret J.R.O. (J. R. Oppenheimer) 

file, that the scientist was probably a Soviet agent in disguise. 

*Chevalier first came to know of the true situation in the following way. 

He had been out shopping in Montmartre with his black poodle Coquecigru. 

As usual the dog had carried the evening paper, Le Monde, for his master. 

As soon as the latter had returned home and sat down, the poodle presented 

him with the paper. 7 opened it, ' Chevalier says, 'saw Oppie's name in the 

sensational headline of a report from Washington, began reading, and came 

across my own name. Then at last I began to understand what had secretly 

been shaping my destiny for so many years.... 

President Eisenhower usually made it a rule not to become personally 

involved in any of the numerous security proceedings at that time instituted 

against officials who were politically suspect. In this exceptional case he 

nevertheless ordered an urgent special meeting at the White House. It took 

place on 3 December 1953. Present were two members of the Cabinet - 

Attorney-General Brownell and Secretary of Defence Wilson - as well as 

Robert Cutler, a member of the National Security Council, and Lewis 

Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. After a brief 

discussion - Eisenhower was about to leave for the Bermuda Conference - 

the President decreed the immediate erection of a blank wall between 

Oppenheimer and all government secrets. 

In the second half of December Oppenheimer, completely unaware of the 

storm brewing against him, returned to Princeton to spend the holidays with 

his two children. An urgent telephone call from Admiral Strauss reached 

him there. The head of the A.E.C. insisted that he come immediately - before 

Christmas, in fact - to Washington. 

On the afternoon of 2 1 December Oppenheimer entered the Admiral's 

office, Room 236 in the gleaming white building of the A.E.C. oil 

Constitution Avenue. The visitor found, to his astonishment, that Strauss 

was not alone. His general manager, K. D. Nichols, was standing beside 

him. This was the same Nichols whom Oppenheimer had met for the first 

time eleven years before, at another turning point in his career, in the 

Pullman compartment where he had drawn up, with Nichols and General 

Groves, plans for the first atomic-armaments laboratory. 

The three men took their seats at a long table used for board meetings. 

Although Strauss's attitude to Oppenheimer had not been very friendly for 

some years, the Admiral found it difficult to break the bad news to him at 

once. He alluded, to begin with, to the recent death of Admiral Parsons, who 

had played a conspicuous part in the history of atomic armament. It was 

Parsons who in 1945, during the flight of the Enola Gay with the Thin Man, 

the bomb destined for the unlucky city of Hiroshima, had prepared the 

mechanism in the dark rear cabin of the aircraft for explosion. But these 

reminiscences were listened to with only half an ear by the others present. 

Each of them was waiting for the real subject to be broached. Quite 

suddenly, Strauss let fly. Oppenheimer's features grew ashen. Nichols, who 

later wrote an account of the meeting, recalls that Oppenheimer's first 

reaction was to offer his immediate resignation from his post as consultant to 

the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss's next act was to pass across to him 

Nichols's draft of a letter in which the charges laid by the Commission were 

specified. 

Oppenheimer glanced through the document. Twenty-three paragraphs 

dealt with his 'associations' with Communists. But the big surprise was 

contained in the twenty- fourth. The scientist was censured for having 

'strongly opposed' the construction of the hydrogen bomb not only before 

but also after President Truman's decision. The letter concluded by 'raising 

questions as to your veracity, conduct, and even your loyalty'. 

Strauss stood up. He gave Oppenheimer a day to decide whether he would 

resign immediately of his own accord or would prefer the matter to be 

handled by a loyalty board. Oppenheimer returned home and wrote the 

following short letter to the chair- man of the Atomic Energy Commission. 

DEAR LEWIS, 

Yesterday, when you asked to see me, you told me for the first time that my 

clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission was about to be suspended. 

You put to me, as a possibly desirable alternative, that I request termination 

of my contract as a consultant to the Commission and thereby avoid an 

explicit consideration of the charges on which the Commission's action 

would otherwise be based. I was told that if I did not do this within a day I 

would receive a letter notifying me of the suspension of my clearance and of 

the charges against me, and I was shown a draft of that letter. 

I have thought most earnestly of the alternative suggested. Under the 

circumstances this course of action would mean that I accept and concur in 

the view that I am not fit to serve this government, that I have now served 

for some twelve years. This I cannot do. If I were thus unworthy I could 

hardly have served our country as I have tried or been the director of our 

institute in Princeton or have spoken, as on more than one occasion I have 

found myself speaking, in the name of our science and our country. 

Since our meeting yesterday you and General Nichols told me that the 

charges in the letter were familiar charges and since the time was short I 

paged through the letter quite briefly. I shall now read it in detail and make 

appropriate response. 

Faithfully yours, 

Robert Oppenheimer 

On the following day, 23 December 1953, Nichols's letter containing the 

charges, which the scientist had rapidly looked through in Washington, was 

delivered to him officially. From that moment his access to all government 

secrets was barred. Security officials of the Atomic Energy Commission 

arrived in Princeton and cleared the safe in which Oppenheimer, with the 

agreement of the Commission, was in the habit of storing certain documents 

stamped 'Secret' or 'Very Secret'. 

Oppenheimer had always shown great interest in the Dreyfus Affair. Now 

he must have felt like that unjustly suspected French officer whose epaulets 

were torn from his uniform and whose sword was broken before his eyes. He 

had served the United States while neglecting many moral scruples which he 

could never quite abandon. Had all this been in vain? Was he to be thrust 

back forever into no man's land? 

The public heard nothing about the forthcoming proceedings against 

Oppenheimer until three months later, in April 1954. Then his attorney 

Lloyd Garrison, at the start of the proceedings which were to be held in 

camera, handed to James Reston, head of the Washington office of the New 

York Times, General Nichols's letter of accusation and Oppenheimer's forty- 

three- page answer, dated 4 March 1954. 

The American government's action against Oppenheimer made a deep 

impression. It was not only because the accused scientist was a famous man 

who for many people had become the symbol of the atomic age, but also 

because almost every one of his con- temporaries was personally and 

intensely moved by the fate of this conscience-stricken scientist. Hardly two 

weeks had passed since Admiral Strauss had been forced, by the world-wide 

anxiety aroused by the disaster to the Japanese fishermen, to announce for 

the first time, on his return from the testing ground in the Pacific, more 

precise, official information about the formidable effects of the hydrogen 

bombs exploded there. A number of newspapers now wrote that 

Oppenheimer's associations with Communists, which had long been known 

and lay far back in his past, had been resurrected only because he had 

'opposed the hydrogen bomb'. Shocked and alarmed people throughout the 

world, who had for years not been allowed to participate in discussions of a 

question which affected them all so deeply, now regarded him as their 

champion. To the man in the street at that moment Oppenheimer was the 

only truly sensitive and re~8ective scientist among all those involved in the 

construction of the new weapons. Even before the proceedings had started 

the halo of a martyr was bestowed on him. 

Oppenheimer's professional colleagues were almost unanimous, from the 

beginning, in taking his side. But their support of him was only very rarely 

due to personal sympathy. They knew the story of his vacillations and 

compromises since 1945 too well to consider him, as a wider public, in its 

ignorance of the true facts of the case, was bound to consider him, a 

steadfast champion of humanity. Their primary motives were professional 

solidarity and self-interest. If an expert who had advised the government 

could afterwards be called to account for views expressed in his professional 

capacity and threatened with ignominious dismissal, the same thing might 

well happen later on to any of his colleagues. Many of them had repeatedly 

found him, ever since his support of the May-Johnson Bill backed by the 

War Department, only too submissive and docile in complying with the 

demands of the government. That he among all of them should now be 

pilloried as a saboteur seemed an historical irony. Scientists like the Nobel 

prize winner Harold C. Urey and Edward U. Condon, former Director of the 

Bureau of Standards, had often criticized Oppenheimer earlier for his 

excessive political pliability and timidity. Now, to their own astonishment, 

they found themselves rushing to his defence.* 

*Condon himself, some years before, had been the object of unjustified 

attacks made upon his loyalty. On that occasion prominent men of science 

had ostentatiously invited him to take the chair at a banquet. Oppenheimer 

was then the only prominent scientist who had declined, 'on tactical 

grounds', to associate himself with this demonstration of protest. 

20 AT THE BENCH OF THE ACCUSED 1954-5 

PROCEEDINGS in the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer began on 12 April 

1954. They lasted three full weeks. It was emphasized at the start that this 

was no trial but purely an administrative investigation. Nevertheless, certain 

trial procedures, such as the taking of statements from and cross-examining 

of witnesses, were used. Moreover, Roger Robb, who represented the 

Atomic Energy Commission, adopted the style of an aggressive and pitiless 

public prosecutor. He did not treat Oppenheimer as a witness in his own case 

but as a person charged with high treason. 

Not a single member of the public was admitted to the proceedings. They 

took place in Building T-3, an unpretentious temporary wartime office 

building. The white planks of its facade, the wooden 'bridges of sighs' that 

connected its sheds, and its ugly, greenish, makeshift roof were almost 

exactly like those of the first administrative building in Los Alamos, where 

Oppenheimer's office had been when he was director. So that his arrival 

should be unnoticed, he was always taken in through a back door and led up 

to Room 2022 on the second door. It was an ordinary office, some 24 feet 

long and 12 feet wide, which had been turned into a kind of court-room by 

setting a few tables and chairs along the walls. Along one of the end walls 

sat the three members of the Personnel Security Board specially appointed 

by the Atomic Energy Commission to preside over these proceedings. 

Gordon Gray, their chairman, was an intelligent, good- looking, but rather 

colourless official. He was the son of a millionaire and had distinguished 

himself particularly in the public service as Undersecretary of the Army. At 

the time he was President of the University of North Carolina and owner of a 

number of newspapers and broadcasting stations. To his right sat taciturn 

Thomas A. Morgan, industrialist, president, until 1952, of the Sperry 

Gyroscope Company. On Gray's left sat Ward V. Evans, a distinguished 

professor of chemistry. His occasional facetious questions and his habit of 

nonchalantly asking the witnesses called, while they were actually under his 

examination, about various private or professional acquaintances created 

a certain relaxed atmosphere in the tragically serious proceedings. 

At the other end of the room, opposite the three judges, was an old leather 

couch. It was there that the witnesses sat after the usual oath had been 

solemnly administered. No fewer than forty prominent scientists, politicians, 

and members of the Armed Services gave evidence. Robb, the prosecutor, 

sat with his back to the light from the windows. Oppenheimer, with his 

defence counsel, sat opposite. Seldom more than ten or twelve persons were 

ever present at the same time, but at times disembodied voices were heard 

coming from a portable loudspeaker, uttering statements by Oppenheimer 

himself, which had been recorded without his knowledge during his wartime 

examinations. They were now used contrapuntally by the prosecution, to 

contrast with his present evidence. 

Throughout the whole of the first week of the proceedings Robert 

Oppenheimer was continuously examined, except twice when statements 

were made by others, from the start of the morning session until the evening. 

Rarely can any man of our time have talked so much, with such readiness 

and in such detail, about himself, his hopes and fears, his achievements and 

his mistakes. It would be impossible for any written autobiography - for such 

works are always subjected to self-criticism, misrepresenting or censoring 

the writer's experiences - to compare for authenticity with the published 

record of the monologues and dialogues that took place at that time in Room 

2022. It ran to 992 closely printed pages. 

One cannot help being struck, in reading the transcript of the hearing, by 

the inarticulate and diffident way in which Oppenheimer, on other occasions 

such a brilliant speaker, holding his listeners spellbound, then expressed 

himself. It almost seems as though he had voluntarily renounced the use of 

his most powerful asset. It is only in the written statements which he 

prepared before the proceedings began, as in the moving though brief 

account of his life, that one can detect a master of language. 

Eye-witnesses who had known Oppenheimer as a dominant figure in any 

discussion, with eloquence which won even his opponents to adopt his own 

views, said that at these proceedings he often gave the impression of absent- 

mindedness. It was re ported that 'he leaned back ta7~ilv, sometimes as 

though his thoughts were elsewhere, on the sofa which had been turned into 

a dock for the occasion.' Andre Malraux, who had met Oppenheimer through 

Chevalier (Malraux's translator for a number of years), is said to have 

remarked, after reading the transcript of the proceedings, that he could not 

understand why so distinguished a scientist put up with often insulting 

treatment from his principal adversary, Roger Robb. The great French writer 

is reported to have exclaimed: 'He ought to have stood up proudly and 

shouted, "Gentlemen, I am the atomic bomb!"' 

But that was just what Oppenheimer's character forbade him to do. There 

was always more in him of Shakespeare's Danish prince than of the Roi 

soleil. Like Hamlet, he had once imagined himself bom to set the time (or 

rather the world) right. But that open mind' of his - a phrase he often used to 

describe his non- committal attitude - always caused him to hesitate, delay, 

and vacillate so long before taking important decisions that he was driven in 

the end, either by private ambition or public pressure, to come to 

conclusions which he almost invariably regretted shortly afterwards. 

So complex and inconsistent a character as Oppenheimer's was bound to 

be at a disadvantage from the start in confronting a one-track mind like 

Roger Robb's. The public prosecutor pitilessly involved the defendant in 

contradictions, lured him into traps, and drove him into comers. But by 

exposing his vacillating adversary in this fashion he was in reality rendering 

Oppenheimer a great service. For the 'father of the atom bomb' would never, 

after this, be able to seem to posterity as unscmpulous or even wicked as 

some of his disappointed friends believed him to be. He could only now 

appear as a man tortured by conflicting impulses, weak, and wanting in that 

underlying steadiness of mind which probably only some faith above and 

beyond reason could have given him. 

Perhaps Oppenheimer's mental distress and failure to meet the situation are 

nowhere so apparent as in the following passages from his dialogues with 

Robb. 

Robb: Did you oppose the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima 

because of moral scruples? 

Oppenheimer: We set forth our - 

Robb: I am asking you about T, not 'we'. 

Oppenheimer: I set forth my anxieties and the arguments on the other side. 

Robb: You mean you argued against dropping the bomb? 

Oppenheimer: I set forth arguments against dropping it. 

Robb: Dropping the atom bomb? 

Oppenheimer: Yes. But I did not endorse them. 

Robb: You mean, having worked as you put it, in your answer, rather 

excellently, by night and by day for three or four years to develop the atom 

bomb, you then argued it should not be used? 

Oppenheimer: No. I didn't argue that it should not be used. I was asked to 

say by the Secretary of War what the views of scientists were. I gave the 

views against and the views for. 

Robb: But you supported the dropping of the bomb on Japan, didn't you? 

Oppenheimer: What do you mean, support? 

Robb: You helped pick the target, didn't you? 

Oppenheimer: I did my job, which was the job I was supposed to do. I was 

not in a policy-making position at Los Alamos. I would have done anything 

that I was asked to do, including making the bombs a different shape, if I 

had thought it was technically feasible. 

Robb: You would have made the thermonuclear weapon, too, wouldn't you 

? 

Oppenheimer: I couldn't. 

Robb: I didn’t ask you that, Doctor. 

Oppenheimer: J would have worked on it. 

Robb: If you had discovered the thermonuclear weapon at Los Alamos, 

you would have done so. If you could have discovered it you would have 

done so, wouldn't you? 

Oppenheimer: Oh, yes. 

On 22 April 1954, Robert Oppenheimer became fifty years old. In normal 

circumstances the day would have been one of rejoicing for so successful a 

man. But it was a day of judgement. It fell in the second week of the 

proceedings, during the long procession of witnesses. All who had spoken 

had been full of praise for Oppenheimer. They had commended his energy 

and the qualities of leadership he had shown as director at Los Alamos, his 

realization of the need for strict measures against espionage, his organizing 

capabilities, and his loyalty. 

Before each witness, often after hours of examination by Gray, Robb, and 

Oppenheimer's counsel, came to the end of his evidence, Professor Evans 

usually cut in to put a question about the personal characters and habits of 

the scientists who testified. He did so on this particular morning. 

Bradbury, Oppenheimer's successor as Los Alamos director, was seated on 

the leather couch. Evans addressed him in the following terms: AT THE 

BBNCR OP THE ACCUSED 

Dr Evans: Do you think that scientific men as a rule are rather peculiar 

individuals 'I 

Bradbury: When did I stop beating my wife? 

Mr. Gray: Especially chemistry professors? 

Dr Evans: No, physics professors. 

Bradbury: Scientists me human being ... a scientist wants to know. He 

wants to know correctly and truthfully and precisely. ... Therefore I think 

you are likely to find among people who have imaginative minds in the 

scientific held individuals who are also willing, easer, to look at a number of 

other fields with the same type of interest, willingness to examine, to be 

convinced and without a priori convictions as to rightness or wrongness, that 

this constant or this or that curve or this or that function is fatal. 

I thi nk the same sort of willingness to explore other areas of human 

activity is probably characteristic. If this makes them peculiar I think it is 

probably a desirable peculiarity. 

Dr Evans: You didn't do that, did you? 

Bradbury: Well- 

Dr Evans: Do you go fishing and thing like that? 

Bradbury: Yes, 1 have done a number of things. Some people and perhaps 

myself among them, I was an experimental physicist during those days, and 

I was very much preoccupied by the results of my own investigations. 

Dr Evans: But that didn't make you peculiar, did it? 

Bradbury: This 1 would have to leave to others to say. 

Dr Evans: Younger people sometimes make mistakes, don't they? 

Bradbury: I think this is part of people's growing up. 

Dr Evans: Do you think Dr Oppenheimer made any mistakes? 

Thus the main subject of debate, Robert Oppenheimer, had again cropped 

up. He sat listening with his face like a Roman mask. The day before, Rabi, 

a lively, sharp-tongued little Nobel prize winner, who had known 

Oppenheimer when he was a student and young lecturer in Europe, had 

uttered the following remarkable opinion of the present proceedings: 'That is 

what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the 

man, what made him act, what he did and what sort of person he was. That is 

what you are really doing here. You are wanting a man's life. 

This statement and very many others made between 12 April and 6 May 

1954 in Room 2022 characterized not only the life story of a single man but 

also that of a whole generation of atomic scientists. The proceedings 

revealed their untroubled youth, their dread of the dictators, how they were 

dazzled by the overwhelming nature of their discoveries, the heavy 

responsibility for which they had not been prepared, the fame which 

threatened to be their ruin, their inextricable involvement and their deep 

distress. Not only Robert Oppenheimer's fate was being discussed in that 

narrow court-room. The debate concerned all the new, unsolved problems 

with which the onset of the atomic age had confronted scientists. It 

concerned the new part they had to play in society, their uneasiness in a 

world of mechanized terror and counter-terror which they themselves had 

helped to create, above all their loss of that deeply rooted set of ethical 

beliefs out of which all science had formerly grown. 

To study the statements made by these outstanding minds at this hearing, 

statements about themselves and their fate which at the time they never 

dreamed would be laid before a wider public, is to ask oneself why such 

first-rate calculators found such an entirely unexpected answer to the 

calculations they had made for their own lives. How paradoxical had their 

destiny been! They, who had been drawn into the storm centre of politics, 

had taken up their calling in the first place mainly because they wished to 

turn their backs upon a chaotic and lawless world. How had it happened that 

men who had tried to find a more comprehensive truth were in the end 

obliged to spend the best years of their lives in the search for more and more 

perfect means of destruction ? 

Some statements made at these proceedings prove that all this had been too 

much for even the most loyal citizens. This is evident, for example, from a 

crisis in the life of James Conant, described not by himself, though he was 

one of the witnesses. During a drive from Berkeley to San Francisco in the 

summer of 1949, says Luis Alvarez, 'Dr Lawrence was trying to get a 

reaction from Dr Conant on the possibility of radiological warfare and Dr 

Conant said he wasn't interested. He didn't want to be bothered with it. I 

have the strong recollection that Dr Conant said something to the effect that 

he was getting too old and too tired to be an adviser on affairs of this sort. 

He said, "I did my job during the war" and intimated that he was burned out 

and he could not get any enthusiasm for new projects.' 

It is staggering to hear that Alvarez did not regard this final 

insurmountable disgust before the fact of what had become the perversion of 

science as an expression of deep moral principles but merely as an indication 

that the great scholar and teacher was simply 'old, tired, and burned out'. 

The questions put by Dr Evans during these proceedings were often 

supposed to be minor and off the main point of the Oppenheimer case. But 

in reality it was these very queries which were aimed, for all their assumed 

naivete, at the very heart of the biggest problem of all, which Oppenheimer's 

fall had thrown into relief: What was the true character of this new figure, 

the scientist, so powerful and yet so powerless? 

This unconventional chemistry professor, invariably humane even when 

acting as a member of an official investigation committee, probably spoke 

for all those ordinary citizens who, he may have felt, regarded him with a 

mixture of admiration and fear since they had ceased to consider his 

profession as comic and now looked upon it as something terrible. 'Are 

scientists peculiar people?' The crude queries of this sort, put by Evans, were 

in reality echoes of the voices of millions of anxious persons who would 

have liked the men of science to answer such questions as: 'Are you the 

same sort of beings as we are? Do you still see any sense in moderation, in 

the dignity of man and the commands of his Creator ? Won't you tell us what 

you are really after ?' 

The atomic scientists who gave evidence in turn before the Personnel 

Security Board were themselves, in fact, also before the bar of justice. And 

the critical question which they ought to have answered was not 'Have you 

been loyal to the state?' but 'Have you been true to mankind?' 

The last act - for the time being - of the Oppenheimer drama is 

reminiscent, in its simplicity, of the popular ballads and traditional 

spectacles of earlier centuries, in which Marlowe and Goethe discovered the 

materials for their tragedies on the theme of Faust. Oppenheimer's fall was 

officially recognized by the decision of the Personnel Committee, in which 

Gray and Morgan voted against Evans's vote for reinstatement of the 

security clearance. This decision was finally ratified by the subsequent 

rejection of Oppenheimer's appeal by the Atomic Energy Commission. The 

Commission cast four votes for rejection of the appeal against only one - 

Henry D. Smyth's - for its acceptance.* 

* The Personnel Committee had stated: 'In arriving at our 

recommendation we have sought to address ourselves to the whole question 

before us and not to consider the problem as a fragmented one either in 

terms of specific criteria or in terms of any period in Dr Oppenheimer's life, 

or to consider loyalty, character, and associations separately. 'However, of 

course the most serious finding which this Board could make as a result of 

these proceedings would be that of disloyalty on the part of Dr Oppenheimer 

to his country. For that reason we have given particular attention to the 

question of his loyalty and we have come to a clear 

Yet from that moment the subject of this ordeal began a new ascent to 

different heights with a purer atmosphere. Freed from the burden of official 

duties and the obligation to offer political and strategic advice, Oppenheimer 

devoted himself mainly to directing the work of the Institute for Advanced 

Study and investigating the spiritual and intellectual problems raised by 

modern nuclear physics. Those who meet him today notice traces of inward 

conflicts and defeats on his features, which have greatly altered. At the same 

time they can perceive a tranquillity in his face, gained from stoical 

humility. His main aim seems now to be to collaborate in elucidating the 

grave questions which the character of our age and its unlimited technical 

powers have placed before us. 

Edward Teller, on the contrary, the only eminent scientist who spoke 

against Oppenheimer and thus made a decisive contribution to the eclipse of 

his rival, gives today the impression of a much-troubled man, intensely 

uneasy about his loudly proclaimed reputation as the father of the hydrogen 

bomb. During the first months after the Oppenheimer hearing Teller was 

treated like a leper by his professional colleagues, or, even worse, as a 

government informer, in whose presence it was impossible to speak frankly. 

He insisted on being allowed to defend his position conclusion, which 

should be reassuring to the people of this country, that he is a loyal citizen. If 

this were the only consideration, therefore, we would recommend that the 

reinstatement of his clearance would not be a danger to the common defence 

and security. 

'We have, however, been unable to arrive at the conclusion that it would be 

clearly consistent with the security interests of the United States to reinstate 

Dr Oppenheimer's clearance and therefore do not so recommend. 

'The following considerations have been controlling in leading us to our 

conclusion: 

1 . We find that Dr Oppenheimer's continuing conduct and associations 

have reflected a serious disregard for the requirements of the security 

system. 

2, We have found a susceptibility to influence which could have serious 

implications for the security interests of the country. 3. We find his conduct 

in the hydrogen bomb programme sufficiently disturbing as to raise a doubt 

as to whether his future participation, if characterized by the same attitudes 

in a government programme relating to the national defence, would be 

clearly consistent with the best interests of security. 

4. We have regretfully concluded that Dr Oppenheimer has been less than 

candid in several instances in his testimony before this Board. 

Respectfully submitted. 

Gordon Gray, Chairman 

Thomas A. Morgan' before a gathering of his associates at Los Alamos. He 

was listened to in an icy silence, but convinced no one. 

Concealing his helplessness under an outward show of aggressive 

cockiness, Teller turned for advice to Enrico Fermi, one of the few people to 

whose opinions he was always ready to give way. 

The interview between the two men took place under unusual 

circumstances. Fermi was in bed. He had known for some weeks that he was 

suffering from cancer and had little hope of recovery. The fact was no secret 

to Teller either. It encouraged him to speak more openly than he had ever 

dared to do before. ‘One usually reads', he remarked in recalling the 

occasion, 'that dying men confess their sins to the living. It has always 

seemed to me that it would be much more logical the other way about. So I 

confessed my sins to Fermi. None but he, apart from the Deity, if there is 

one, knows what I then told him. And Fermi can at most have passed on the 

information in heaven.' 

One result of this conversation, conducted in the shadow of the awareness 

of death and human weakness, was that Teller was helped and supported by 

Fermi in the writing of an article for the periodical Science. The article, 

convincing in its personal modesty and sincerity, describes the development 

of the hydrogen bomb. It was entitled 'The Work of Many People' and 

refuted the widespread popular story, not altogether unassisted in its 

currency, until then, by Teller himself, to the effect that he had discovered 

and produced the Super almost alone, in the face of resistance from his 

colleagues at Los Alamos. The article did not go unrecognized. Teller was 

again received into the community of atomic scientists. He was no longer 

avoided. He was tolerated. But even then he was never really forgiven. 

The grounds for the animosity against him probably lie deeper than most 

physicists themselves realize. Teller is not only regarded as having betrayed 

one of his professional colleagues, but as the living example and the 

embodiment of a traitor to the ideals of science. As he raced from his 

lectures to his bomb laboratory at Livermore, as he flew from the classroom 

to conferences with the State Department or the Strategic Air Command, he 

had grown to be a vivid symbol of the restlessness and captivity of science 

itself. 

His interviews and public lectures, even his purely scientific papers, which 

are considered by his colleagues to be for the most part insufficiently 

thought out and consequently imprecise, seem often to be contrived with a 

view to obtaining as many newspaper headlines in as thick type as possible. 

His hair for sensational news leads him sometimes to proclaim the vision of 

a world of moles in which a part of humanity, buried under cement and 

concrete, is to await the end of a third world war, and sometimes to prophesy 

the 'happiest of all centuries' An atomic physicist still in close contact with 

Teller observes:; 

It's a pity he has no time nowadays for serious work. We are losing in him 

a greatly creative spirit. A short time ago I told Edward's wife that I should 

like to write something with him again. But she begged me not to mention 

any such project to him, as he already had hardly any time left for his own 

affairs and his family. So I never said a word about it.' 

When Stan Ulam, Teller's former associate, is asked about him, he 

cautiously refrains from committing himself to a personal opinion. Instead of 

doing so he takes down a book by Anatole France from the shelf and points 

to a quotation heading one of the chapters. It reads: 'Did you not see that 

they were angels?' 

It is not clear whether he regards Teller as a good or a bad angel. He 

doesn't say but only smiles. He may think, as many atomic scientists think 

today, that Teller, because he surpassed everyone else in advocating, taking 

part in, and carrying to extreme lengths the mania for armaments, acted as 

the instrument of a divine will and helped in the establishment of peace. 

Oppenheimer, on the other hand, at present still considers the years of his 

blindness and distress as a part of history. 'We did the devil's work,' he told a 

visitor in the early summer of 1956, by way of summing up his experiences. 

'But we are now going back to our real jobs. Rabi for instance was telling me 

only the other day that he intended to devote himself exclusively to research 

in the future. 

Nevertheless, many of those who once knew Oppenheimer well and were 

disappointed in him cannot believe that he has renounced power forever. 

One of Oppie's former pupils, himself today a distinguished scientist, 

comments sceptically: 'I'm afraid he has only assumed a new role in his big 

repertoire. Just now he happens to be, of necessity, saint and martyr, but if 

ever the wind changes, he'll be busy again in Washington with the rest of 

them.' 

This bitter judgement is understandable enough, no doubt, but as a 

prophecy it is scarcely reliable. More important and stimulating tasks await 

Oppenheimer than any which the Cabinet or General Staff Corps could offer 

him. 

In one of his most recent lectures he indicated imaginatively the goal to 

which he wished to dedicate himself: 'Both the man of science and the man 

of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as the 

measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of 

what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and 

synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos. They can, in 

their work and in their lives, help themselves, help one another, and help all 

men. They can make the paths which connect the villages of art and science 

with each other and with the world at large into the multiple, varied, and 

precious bonds of a true and world- wide community. This cannot be an easy 

life. We shall have a rugged time of it to keep our minds open and to keep 

them deep, to keep our sense of beauty and our ability to make it, and our 

occasional ability to see it in places remote, strange and unfamiliar. We shall 

have a rugged time of it, all of us, in keeping these flourishing in a great, 

open, windy world. And in this condition we can help, because we can love, 

one another. 

Epilogue 

THE LAST CHANCE? 

TODAY Room 2022, where the inquiry into the Oppenheimer case was 

held, once more serves as an ordinary office. It is occupied by a civilian 

employee of the Navy who does not even know what went on between those 

four walls four years ago. At Farm Hall, where the German nuclear 

physicists were once interned, the new owner produces still-life paintings of 

flowers. At Haigerloch, in the former underground laboratory, rabbits 

peacefully munch their hay. The crater ploughed up by the first atom bomb 

in the barren soil of New Mexico has long since been filled in. 

And still the atomic scientists' unrest has not disappeared. It has grown 

with the problem. 'What should we do?' asked C. F. von Weizsacker in the 

fall of 1945. 'We have played with fire like children, and it flared up before 

we expected it.' The questions of conscience with which almost every 

nuclear physicist had confronted himself since the end of the war have found 

no acknowledged and binding answers even until today. 

Atomic scientists are living more tranquil lives since the summer of 1955, 

when many of them met at Geneva at the conference on 'Atoms for Peace'. 

Security regulations have been slightly relaxed. The obstacles to the 

resumption of international scientific communications have been removed to 

some extent. It is true that improved hydrogen bombs have continued to 

explode on the testing grounds in the Southwest Pacific and in Soviet Asia, 

unperturbed by manifestoes and resolutions. But physicists in general today 

are more deeply concerned with the long neglected investigation of 

principles and with the problems of economic exploitation of nuclear energy 

than they are with those of weapons research and development. 

Unlike the characters in plays and novels, who vanish when the curtain 

falls or the last pages are turned, the heroes of history often survive the end 

of their tragedy. A reporter finds them busy with their- everyday work, full 

of new plans and fresh hopes, their eyes more on what is coming than on 

what is past. 

No doubt most natural scientists now recognize that they share the 

responsibility for the use made of their discovery. Some of them believe it 

means that they should not participate in weapons projects. A landmark of 

that resolute attitude has been the declaration of the eighteen German atomic 

scientists led by Max Bom, Otto Hahn, and Weizsacker, issued on 12 April 

1957. It ends with this statement: 'At all events not one of the undersigned is 

prepared himself to share in the production, the testing, or the stock-piling of 

atomic weapons in any manner, 

Others, on the contrary, think that their newly acquired sense of 

responsibility forces them to take part in the weapons programmes of their 

nations whether they like it or not. Edward Teller has quite recently outlined 

this position in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations 

Subcommittee on Disarmament with the following outcry: 'I chose the 

profession of a scientist and I am in love with science; and I would not do 

willingly or eagerly anything else but pure science because it is beautiful and 

my interest is there. I don't like weapons. I would like to have peace. But for 

peace we need weapons and I do not think my views are distorted. I believe I 

am contributing to a peaceful world. 

A growing number of scientists still aim at international control of atomic 

research by means of reciprocal inspection. Others consider such a system 

impossible in the present state of nuclear technology, which has put it out of 

date. Some atomic scientists, disappointed by their failure to influence 

public life, have withdrawn to their laboratories. Some advocate an even 

more intensive preoccupation with the outside world. Of the younger men 

quite a number regard their scientific work as a kind of intellectual 

competition, not involving any particularly deep meaning or obligation. But 

again, even some of these find religious experience in their research.* 

The most significant effort towards re-establishing the inter- national 

family of scientists and giving it a voice in the conduct of human affairs has 

been the annual meetings, which have become known as the 'Pugwash 

Conferences'. 

This movement, like so many other events in the political history of atomic 

development, received its decisive momentum from the late Albert Einstein. 

Two days before his death he put his signature on a statement about the 

nature of future wars, drafted with his approval by the eminent philosopher 

and mathematician Bertrand Russell. This may have been the last public act 

of the discoverer of relativity. 

*See Richard P. Feynman's 'The Relation of Science and Religion' in 

Engineering and Science for June 1956. 

Russell wanted to submit this statement to an international body of 

scientists and persuaded the British Parliamentary Group for World 

Government (a group of Members of Parliament founded by the Labourite 

Henry Usbome) to convene such a conference through the World 

Association of Parliamentarians for World Government. 

This meeting, held in the Chambers of the London County Council from 3 

to 5 August 1955, did not at first look as if it might be of much consequence. 

Eugene Rabino witch remembers: 

Apart from the preparation of Bertrand Russell's statement, the programme 

of the London conference was rather improvised, and no personal invitations 

were extended to scientists most likely to contribute to it - one reason being 

that the actual organization of the conference was in the hands of people 

unfamiliar with the world of science, and the other, that practically no funds 

were available for travel expenses. Invitations were sent to the rectors or 

presidents of all universities in the world, with the request to transmit them 

to interested faculty members. It was hoped that atomic physicists on their 

way to Geneva would stop in London; but Professor Marcus Oliphant of 

Australia proved to be the only prominent atomic physicist from outside 

England who availed himself of this opportunity. My own attempt to inform 

the federation of American Scientists of the conference and to induce some 

individual American atomic scientists who were going to Geneva to stop 

over in London came too late to influence already tired travel plans. 

The sudden and unexpected appearance of a four-man Soviet delegation 

headed by A. V. Topchiev, Permanent Secretary of the Soviet Academy of 

Sciences, seems to have not only surprised, but also disconcerted, the 

organizers of the conference. They probably expected that the Russians, who 

until then had called Russell 'a capitalist lackey and bloodthirsty 

warmonger', would merely try to torpedo the meeting or turn it into a 

propaganda circus. This was prevented by the firmness of the conference 

leadership, which stuck to its intention to have the topics of the agenda 

discussed in a spirit of honest and thorough study. 

The four topics were considered by four commissions: 1. Destructive 

potential of nuclear weapons. 2. Risks involved in non-military atomic 

developments. 3. Technical possibilities of controlling atomic disarmament. 

4. The responsibility of scientists. 

From this rambling, ill-prepared, and rather unpromising meeting came, in 

July 1957, the first successful conference in the quaint old clipper-building 

town of Pugwash, situated on the Northumberland Straits of Nova Scotia. 

This quiet and old- fashioned place, a rather unlikely spot for a meeting of 

scientists concerned with the latest and most urgent problems of humanity, 

had been chosen in deference to the Canadian-born financier Cyrus Eaten, 

whose ancestors had worked and lived there. In this astonishing man the 

atomic scientists who refused any organizational support had found a 

Maecenas willing to shoulder the considerable financial responsibilities of 

this and later meetings while leaving them free to do what they wanted. 

The first and the following two Pugwash Conferences (April 1957 at Lake 

Beauport near Quebec and September 1958 at Kitzbuhel, Austria) have 

deliberately limited the number of attendants and restricted the publicity. 

Both factors have encouraged intimate, thorough, and soul-searching 

conversations free from any play for public attention and - perhaps most 

important - the intellectual cross-fertilization caused by communication 

among natural scientists from different branches of science and men like a 

specialist of international law, a former international civil servant, an analyst 

of modem strategic problems, an outstanding philosopher. 

Thus Pugwash does more than bridge the gulf between East and West; it 

tries to narrow down the growing gaps caused by specialization, and thus 

forms - probably without intentionally trying to do so - part of the trend 

towards a new universalism which aims at a 'whole man'. 

A fat two-inch-thick volume resulted from the second Pugwash 

Conference. It contained the main papers contributed by the participants as 

well as the minutes of the discussions. This big bundle of mimeographed 

paper was sent to the heads of interested governments. Further publication 

was not contemplated. This may seem a meagre result to the many people 

who expect intellectual and spiritual enlightenment to work as fast and 

efficiently as the installations controlled by switches which light our homes. 

But actually, since 1945 the scientists' movement, though apparently 

inefficient and at best of meagre success, has had, in more indirect and 

diffuse ways, an immense and ever-growing influence upon the public mind. 

Its ideas, which have steadily matured, and even the terms it was often the 

first to coin have unconsciously and without acknowledgement become part 

of our public and governmental thinking. 

One has only to ask oneself: What would have happened had the atomic 

scientists chosen to remain indifferent and silent after Hiroshima or if they 

had even been proud of their achievement there? Their contemporaries 

would then probably have been left ignorant about the nature of the nuclear 

revolution and the unheard-of new dangers this 'quantum jump' of 

technology entailed for mankind. The men in power on both sides, 

unhampered by public opinion, would then probably have fallen prey more 

easily to the temptation to use their atomic swords to slash entangled 

political knots. By a curious detour public opinion, fired by the repeated 

warnings of scientific authorities, even worked on the other side of the iron 

curtain. Only when they tried to take the lead of the popular movement 

against the use of atomic weapons in the free world were the Soviet rulers 

finally compelled to tell the frightening facts of nuclear warfare to their own 

people. 

This awakening towards new responsibilities has finally had definite effect 

upon the scientists themselves. This observer, who is quite conscious that his 

judgement may be premature and too subjective, believes that the 

intellectual uneasiness and psyche- logical distress he has found among 

atomic scientists is itself a noteworthy phenomenon. For three hundred years 

the natural scientist believed that he could isolate himself from the world, 

but now he is beginning to regard himself as a part of it. He feels himself to 

be conditioned and limited. This realization has shown him the way to a new 

modesty. He has been obliged to recognize that he, like everyone else, in 

Bohr's words, 'is both a spectator and an actor in the great drama of being.' 

Modem science had been inspired by 'the proud will to master nature'. It is 

an attitude which found expression, above all, in Bacon's aphorism 

'Knowledge is power.' But today one far more often hears it in the form, 

'Knowledge is unfortunately power.' The scientist has come to 'fear his 

godlike character,' as Feynman puts it, and confesses his 'intellectual 

humility in the face of unanswerable secrets of the universe, which ought to 

remain unanswered.' The age which culminated in the development of 

absolute weapons identified progress, almost unanimously, with progress in 

science and technology. But today the outstanding physicist Heisenberg 

declares: 'The space in which man has developed as an intellectual being has 

more dimensions than that of the single direction in which he has moved 

during the last few centuries.' 

This new modesty, like the inhuman and superhuman weapons, has grown 

from the tree of atomic research. It was the study of the atomic world that 

taught the theoretical physicist to recognize a tmth long ago proclaimed by 

religion but now also susceptible of scientific proof - that human capacity 

for observation and judgement has its limits. The atom bomb, whose power 

is the dearest expression of the lack of moderation in modem man, comes 

from the same root as the new philosophy of moderation, inspired by the 

experience of nuclear research. 

When H. G. Wells, in 1946, shortly before his death, found that the belief 

in scientific progress had collapsed, he felt justified in announcing that man 

was 'at the end of his tether' and almost inevitably doomed to rapid 

extinction. But probably man has only come to the end of one tether. 

Wolfgang Pauli, formerly known to the family of atomic scientists as a 

sceptic, has indicated a possible road for humanity to take. At Copenhagen 

in 1932 Pauli had played Mephisto to Faust. But by 1955 his keen mind had 

so extended its field of vision that he became the eloquent exponent of a 

long-neglected inner way to salvation. At the close of a lecture on 'Science 

and Western Thought' he said: 'Since the seventeenth century the activities 

of the human spirit have been strictly classified in separate compartments. 

But in my view the attempt to eliminate such distinctions by a combination 

of rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity obeys the 

explicit or implicit imperative of our own contemporary age.' 

Can the 'new modesty', along with a fresh recognition of an inner way to 

salvation, exert as strong an influence on the coming centuries as the spirit 

of overweening pride, now revealed to have been disastrous? 

The author of this chronicle does not venture to prophesy. He intends only 

to present a picture, hoping thereby to contribute something to the great 

debate which may perhaps eventually lead to plans for a future without fear. 

List of Sources 

PERIODICALS 

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 194-58, Chicago. 

Atomic Scientists News, 195(r-2, London. 

Atomic Scientists Journal, 1953-6, London. 

Nature, 1939-56, London. 

Newsletter of the Federation of American Scientists, 194656, Washington. 

Newsletter of the Society for the Social Responsibility of Science, 1950-6, 

Gambler, Ohio. 

Die Naturvissenschaften, 1933-9, Berlin. 

Die Naturwissenschaften, 194-56, Giittingen. 

Science, 1939, 1945-56, Washington. 

La Nef,'L'atome, notre destin', Paris, September 1955. 

Politics, 'The Bomb', New York, September 1945. 

Fortune, May 1956. 

Die Zeit,'Der deutsche Forscher- Anted' by K. Diebner, Hamburg, August 

1955. 

'Safety Planning of an Atomic Test Operation' by Roy Reider, Trans- 

actions of the National Safety Council, 1954. 

BOOKS 

Hartmann, H. Schiipfer des neuen Weltbildes. Bonn, 1952. 

Oppenheimer, J.R. Science and the Common Understanding. New York, 

1954. 

Oppenheimer, J. R. The Open Mind. New York, 1955. 

Schwartz, H., and Spengler, W. Forscher und Wissenschaftler im heutigen 

Europa. Oldenburg, 1955. 

Crowther, J. G. British Scientists of the Twentieth Century. London, 1952. 

Bergier, J., and de Latil, P. euinze hommes et un secret. Paris, 1955. De 

Wolf Smyth, H. Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. Washington, 1945. 

Crowther and Whiddington. Science at War. London, 1947. 

Bertin, L. Atom Harvest. London, 1955. Goudsmit, S. A. Alsos. New 

York, 1947. 

Werner, S. Niels Bohr. Copenhagen, 1955. 

Route, M. F. Joliot-Curie. Paris, 1950. Selig Carl. Helle Zeit - Dunkle Zeit 

- In Memoriam Albert Einstein. Zurich, 1956. 

Schilp, A. Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist. New York, 1951. 

Vallentin, A. Das Drama Albert Einsteins. Stuttgart, 1954. 

Fermi, L. Atoms in the Family. Chicago, 1954. 

Moorehead, A. The Traitors. London, 1952. U.S. Atomic Energy 

Commission. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Washington, 1954. 

Alsop, J. and S. We Accuse - The Story of the Miscarriage of American 

Justice in the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York, 1954. 

Eve, A. S. Rutherford. Oxford, 1939. 

Runge, Iris. Carl Rwtge und sein wissenschaftliches Werk. GBttingen, 

1949. 

Rabino witch, E. Minutes to Midnight. Chicago, 1950. 

Amrine, A. Secret. Boston, 1950. 

Barber, B. Science and Social Order. Glencoe, 1952. 

Butow, R. C. J. Japan's Decision to Surrender. Stanford, 1954. 

Blackett, P.M.S. Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy. 

London, 1952. 

Gellhom, Waiter. Security, Loyalty and Science. Ithaca, 1950. 

Shepley, J. R., and Blair, C. The Hydrogen Bomb. New York, 1954. 

Ruggles, M. J., and Kramish A. Soviet Atomic Policy. Rand Corporation, 

Santa Monica, 1956. Duplicated. 

Appendix A 

NIELS BOHR'S MEMORANDUM 

TO PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, JULY 1944* 

IT certainly surpasses the imagination of anyone to survey the 

consequences of the project in years to come, where, in the long run, the 

enormous energy sources which will be available may be expected to 

revolutionize industry and transport. The fact of immediate preponderance 

is, however, that a weapon of an unparalleled power is being created which 

will completely change all future conditions of warfare. 

Quite apart from the question of how soon the weapon will be ready for 

use and what role it may play in the present war, this situation raises a 

number of problems which call for most urgent attention. Unless, indeed, 

some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can 

be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be 

outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security. 

Ever since the possibilities of releasing atomic energy on a vast scale came 

in sight, much thought has naturally been given to the question of control, 

but the further the exploration of the scientific problems concerned is 

proceeding, the clearer it becomes that no kind of customary measures will 

suffice for this purpose, and that the terrifying prospect of a future 

competition between nations about a weapon of such formidable character 

can only be avoided through a universal agreement in true confidence. 

In this connexion it is particularly significant that the enterprise, immense 

as it is, has still proved far smaller than might have been anticipated, and 

that the progress of the work has continually revealed new possibilities for 

facilitating the production of the active materials and of intensifying their 

efforts. 

The prevention of a competition prepared in secrecy will therefore demand 

such concessions regarding exchange of information and openness about 

industrial efforts, including military preparations, as would hardly be 

conceivable unless all partners were assured of a compensating guarantee of 

common security against dangers of unprecedented acuteness. 

The establishment of effective control measures will of course involve 

intricate technical and administrative problems, but the main point of the 

argument is that the accomplishment of the project would not only seem to 

necessitate but should also, due to the urgency of mutual confidence, 

facilitate a new approach to the problems of inter- national relationship. 

The present moment where almost all nations are entangled in a deadly 

struggle for freedom and humanity might, at first sight, seem most unsuited 

for any committing arrangement concerning the project. Not only have the 

aggressive powers still great military strength, although their original plans 

of world domination have been frustrated and it seems certain that they must 

ultimately surrender, but even when this happens, the nations united against 

aggression may face grave causes of disagreement due to conflicting 

attitudes towards social and economic problems. 

A closer consideration, however, would indicate that the potentialities of 

the project as a means of inspiring confidence under these very 

circumstances acquire real importance. Moreover, the present situation 

affords unique possibilities which might be forfeited by a postponement 

awaiting the further development of the war situation and the final 

completion of the new weapon. ... 

In view of these eventualities the present situation appears to offer a most 

favourable opportunity for an early initiative from the side which by good 

fortune has achieved a lead in the efforts of mastering mighty forces of 

Nature hitherto beyond human reach. 

Without impeding the immediate military objectives, an initiative, aiming 

at forestalling a fateful competition, should serve to uproot any cause of 

distrust between the powers on whose harmonious collaboration the fate of 

coming generations will depend. 

Indeed, it would appear that only when the question is raised among the 

united nations as to what concessions the various powers are prepared to 

make as their contribution to an adequate control arrangement, will it be 

possible for any one of the partners to assure himself of the sincerity of the 

intentions of the others. 

Of course, the responsible statesmen alone can have insight as to the actual 

political possibilities. It would, however, seem most fortunate that the 

expectations for a future harmonious international cooperation, which have 

found unanimous expressions from all sides within the united nations, so 

remarkably correspond to the unique opportunities which, unknown to the 

public, have been created by the advancement of science. 

Many reasons, indeed, would seem to justify the conviction that an 

approach with the object of establishing common security from ominous 

menaces, without excluding any nation from participating in the promising 

industrial development which the accomplishment of the project entails, will 

be welcomed, and be met with loyal cooperation in the enforcement of the 

necessary far-reaching control measures. 

It is in such respects that helpful support may perhaps be afforded by the 

world- wide scientific collaboration which for years has embodied such 

bright promises for common human striving. Personal connection between 

scientists of different nations might even offer means of establishing 

preliminary and unofficial contact. 

It need hardly be added that any such remark or suggestion implies no 

underrating of the difficulty and delicacy of the steps to be taken by the 

statesmen in order to obtain an arrangement satisfactory to all concerned, but 

aims only at pointing to some aspects of the situation which might facilitate 

endeavours to turn the project to the lasting benefit of the common cause. 

Appendix B 

THE 'FRANCK REPORT' 

A REPORT TO THE SECRETARY OF WAR, JUNE 1945* 

I. Preamble 

THE only reason to treat nuclear power differently from all other 

developments in the field of physics is the possibility of its use as a means of 

political pressure in peace and sudden destruction in war. All present plans 

for the organization of research, scientific and industrial development, and 

publication in the field of nucleonics are conditioned by the political and 

military climate in which one expects those plans to be carried out, 

Therefore, in making suggestions for the post-war organization of 

nucleonics, a discussion of political problems cannot be avoided. The 

scientists on this Project do not presume to speak authoritatively on 

problems of national and international policy. However, we found ourselves, 

by the force of events, during the last five years, in the position of a small 

group of citizens cognizant of a grave danger for the safety of this country as 

well as for the future of all the other nations, of which the rest of mankind is 

unaware. We therefore feel it is our duty to urge that the political problems, 

arising from the mastering of nuclear power, be recognized in all their 

gravity, and that appropriate steps be taken for their study and the 

preparation of necessary decisions. We hope that the creation of the 

Committee by the Secretary of War to deal with all aspects of nucleonics, 

indicates that these implications have been recognized by the government. 

We believe that our acquaintance with the scientific elements of the situation 

and prolonged preoccupation with its world- wide political implications, 

imposes on us the obligation to offer to the Committee some suggestions as 

to the possible solution of these grave problems. 

Scientists have often before been accused of providing new weapons for 

the mutual destruction of nations, instead of improving their well- being. It 

is undoubtedly true that the discovery of dying for example, has so far 

brought much more misery than enjoyment and profit to humanity. 

However, in the past, scientists could disclaim direct responsibility for the 

use to which mankind had put their disinterested discoveries. We feel 

compelled to take a more active stand now because the success which we 

have achieved in the development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely 

greater dangers than were all the inventions of the past. Ah of us, familiar 

with the present state of nucleonics, live with the vision before our eyes of 

sudden destruction visited on our own country, of a Pearl Harbour disaster 

repeated in thousand-fold magnification in every one of our major cities. 

In the past, science has often been able to provide also new methods of 

protection against new weapons of aggression it made possible, but it cannot 

promise such efficient protection against the destructive use of nuclear 

power. This protection can come only from the political organization of the 

world. Among all the arguments calling for an efficient international 

organization for peace, the existence of nuclear weapons is the most 

compelling one. In the absence of an international authority which would 

make all resort to force in international conflicts impossible, nations could 

still be diverted from a path which must lead to total mutual destruction, by a 

specific international agreement barring a nuclear armaments race. 

II. Prospects of Armaments Race 

It could be suggested that the danger of destruction by nuclear weapons 

can be avoided - at least as far as this country is concerned - either by 

keeping our discoveries secret for an indefinite time, or else by developing 

our nuclear armaments at such a pace that no other nations would think of 

attacking us from fear of overwhelming retaliation. 

The answer to the first suggestion is that although we undoubtedly are at 

present ahead of the rest of the world in this field, the fundamental facts of 

nuclear power are a subject of common knowledge. British scientists know 

as much as we do about the basic wartime progress of nucleonics - if not of 

the specific processes used in our engineering developments - and the role 

which French nuclear physicists have played in the pre-war development of 

this field, plus their occasional contact with our Projects, will enable them to 

catch up rapidly, at least as far as basic scientific discoveries are concerned. 

German scientists, in whose discoveries the whole development of this field 

originated, apparently did not develop it during the war to the same extent to 

which this has been done in America: but to the last day of the European 

war, we were living in constant apprehension as to their possible 

achievements. The certainty that German scientists were working on this 

weapon and that their government would certainly have no scruples against 

using it when available, was the main motivation of the initiative which 

American scientists took in urging the development of nuclear power for 

military purposes on a large scale in this country. In Russia, too, the basic 

facts and implications of nuclear power were well understood in 1940, and 

the experience of Russian scientists in nuclear research is entirely sufficient 

to enable them to retrace our steps within a few years, even if we should 

make every attempt to conceal them. Even if we can retain our leadership in 

basic knowledge of nucleonics for a certain time by maintaining secrecy as 

to all results achieved on this and associated Projects, it would be foolish to 

hope that this can protect us for more than a few years. 

It may be asked whether we cannot prevent the development of military 

nucleonics in other countries by a monopoly on the raw materials of nuclear 

power. The answer is that even though the largest now known deposits of 

uranium ores are under the control of powers which belong to the 'western' 

group (Canada, Belgium, and British India), the old deposits in 

Czechoslovakia are outside this sphere. Russia is known to be mining 

radium on its own territory; and even if we do not know the size of the 

deposits discovered So far in the U.S.S.R., the probability that no large 

reserves of uranium will, be found in a country which covers one-fifth of the 

land area of the earth (and whose sphere of influence takes in additional 

territory) is too small to serve as a basis for security. Thus, we cannot hope 

to avoid a nuclear armament race either by keeping secret from the 

competing nations the basic scientific facts of nuclear power or by cornering 

the raw materials required for such a race. 

We now consider the second of the two suggestions made at the beginning 

of this section, and ask whether we could not feel ourselves safe in a race of 

nuclear armaments by virtue of our greater industrial potential, including 

greater diffusion of scientific and technical knowledge, greater volume and 

efficiency of our skilled labour corps, and greater experience of our 

management - all the factors whose importance has been so strikingly 

demonstrated in the conversion of this country into an arsenal of the Allied 

Nations in the present war. The answer is that all that these advantages can 

give us is the accumulation of a larger number of bigger and better atomic 

bombs. 

However, such a quantitative advantage in reserves of bottled destructive 

power will not make us safe from sudden attack. Just because a potential 

enemy will be afraid of being 'outnumbered and out- gunned', the temptation 

for him may be overwhelming to attempt a sudden unprovoked blow - 

particularly if he should suspect us of harbouring aggressive intentions 

against his security or his sphere of influence. In no other type of warfare 

does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor. He can place his 

'infernal machines' in advance in all our major cities and explode them 

simultaneously, thus destroying a major part of our industry and a large part 

of our population, aggregated in densely populated metropolitan districts. 

Our possibilities of retaliation - even if retaliation should be considered 

adequate compensation for the loss of millions of lives and destruction of 

our largest cities - will be greatly handicapped because we must rely on 

aerial transportation of the bombs, and also because we may have to deal 

with an enemy whose industry and population are dispersed over a large 

territory. 

In fact, if the race for nuclear armaments is allowed to develop, the only 

apparent way in which our country can be protected from the paralysing 

effects of a sudden attack is by dispersal of those industries which are 

essential for our war effort and dispersal of the populations of our major 

metropolitan cities. As long as nuclear bombs remain scarce tie. as long as 

uranium remains the only basic material for their fabrication), efficient 

dispersal of our industry and the scattering of our metropolitan population 

will considerably decrease the temptation to attack us by nuclear weapons. 

At present, it may be that atomic bombs can be detonated with an effect 

equal to that of 20,000 tons of TNT. One of these bombs could then destroy 

something like three square miles of an urban area. Atomic bombs 

containing a larger quantity of active material but still weighing less than 

one ton may be expected to be available within ten years which could 

destroy over ten square miles of a city. A nation able to assign ten tons of 

atomic explosives for a sneak attack on this country, can then hope to 

achieve the destruction of all industry and most of the population in an area 

from 500 square miles upwards. If no choice of targets, with a total area of 

five hundred square miles of American territory, contains a large enough 

fraction of the nation's industry and population to make their destruction a 

crippling blow to the nation's war potential and its ability to defend itself, 

then the attack will not pay, and may not be undertaken. At present, one 

could easily select in this country a hundred areas of five square miles each 

whose simultaneous destruction would be a staggering blow to the nation. 

Since the area of the United States is about three million square miles, it 

should be possible to scatter its industrial and human resources in such a 

way as to leave no 500 square miles important enough to serve as a target for 

nuclear attack. 

We are fully aware of the staggering difficulties involved in such a radical 

change in the social and economic structure of our nation. We felt, however, 

that the dilemma had to be stated, to show what kind of alternative methods 

of protection will have to be considered if no successful international 

agreement is reached. It must be pointed out that in this field we are in a less 

favourable position than nations which are either now more diffusely 

populated and whose industries are more scattered, or whose governments 

have unlimited power over the movement of population and the location of 

industrial plants. If no 2tficient international agreement is achieved, the race 

for nuclear armaments will be on in earnest not later than the morning after 

our first demonstration of the existence of nuclear weapons. After this, it 

might take other nations three or four years to overcome our present head 

start, and eight or ten years to draw even with us if we continue to do 

intensive work in this field. This might be all the time we would have to 

bring about the relocation of our population and industry. Obviously, no 

time should be lost in inaugurating a study of this problem by experts. 

III. Prospects of Agreement 

The consequences of nuclear warfare, and the type of measures which 

would have to be taken to protect a country from total destruction by nuclear 

bombing, must be as abhorrent to other nations as to the United States. 

England, France, and the smaller nations of the European continent, with 

their congeries of people and industries, would be in a particularly desperate 

situation in the face of such a threat. Russia and China are the only great 

nations at present which could survive a nuclear attack. However, even 

though these countries may value human life less than the peoples of 

Western Europe and America, and even though Russia, in particular, has an 

immense space over which its vital industries could be dispersed and a 

government which can order this dispersion the day it is convinced that such 

a measure is necessary - there is no doubt that Russia, too, will shudder at 

the possibility of a sudden disintegration of Moscow and Leningrad, almost 

miraculously pre-saved in the present war, and of its new industrial cities in 

the Urals and Siberia. Therefore, only lack of mutual trust, and not lack of 

desire for agreement, can stand in the path of an efficient agreement for the 

prevention of nuclear warfare. The achievement of such an agreement will 

thus essentially depend on the integrity of intentions and readiness to 

sacrifice the necessary fraction of one's own sovereignty, by all the parties to 

the agreement. 

One possible way to introduce nuclear weapons to the world - which may 

particularly appeal to those who consider nuclear bombs primarily as a 

secret weapon developed to help win the present war - is to use them without 

warning on appropriately selected objects in Japan. 

Although important tactical results undoubtedly can be achieved by a 

sudden introduction of nuclear weapons, we nevertheless think that the 

question of the use of the very first available atomic bombs in the Japanese 

war should be weighed very carefully, not only by military authorities, but 

by the highest political leadership of this country. 

Russia, and even allied countries which bear less mistrust of our ways and 

intentions, as well as neutral countries may be deeply shocked by this step. It 

may be very difficult to persuade the world' that a nation which was capable 

of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a new weapon, as 

indiscriminate as the rocket bomb and a thousand times more destructive, is 

to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by 

international agreement. We have large accumulations of poison gas, but do 

not use them, and recent polls have shown that public opinion in this country 

would disapprove of such a use even if it would accelerate the winning of 

the Far Eastern war. It is true that some irrational element in mass 

psychology makes gas poisoning more revolting than blasting by explosives, 

even though gas warfare is in no way more 'inhuman' than the war of bombs 

and bullets. Nevertheless, it is not at all certain that American public 

opinion, if it could be enlightened as to the effect of atomic explosives, 

would approve of our own country being the first to introduce such an 

indiscriminate method of wholesale destruction of civilian life. Thus, from 

the 'optimistic' point of view - looking forward to an international agreement 

on the prevention of nuclear warfare - the military advantages and the saving 

of American lives achieved by the sudden use of atomic bombs against 

Japan may be outweighed by the ensuing loss of confidence and by a wave 

of horror and repulsion sweeping over the rest of the world and perhaps even 

dividing public opinion at home. 

From this point of view, a demonstration of the new weapon might best be 

made, before the eyes of representatives of all the United Nations, on the 

desert or a barren island. The best possible atmosphere for the achievement 

of an international agreement could be achieved if America could say to the 

world, 'You see what sort of a weapon we had but did not use. We are ready 

to renounce its use in the future if other nations join us in this renunciation 

and agree to the establishment of an efficient control.' 

After such a demonstration the weapon might perhaps be used against 

Japan if the sanction of the United Nations (and if public opinion at home) 

were obtained, perhaps after a preliminary ultimatum to Japan to surrender 

or at least to evacuate certain regions as an alternative to their total 

destruction. This may sound fantastic, but in nuclear weapons we have 

something entirely new in order of magnitude of destructive power, and if 

we want to capitalize fully on the advantage their possession gives us, we 

must use new and imaginative methods. 

It must be stressed that if one takes the pessimistic point of view and 

discounts the possibility of an effective international control over nuclear 

weapons at the present time, then the advisability of an early use of nuclear 

bombs against Japan becomes even more doubtful - quite independently of 

any humanitarian considerations. If an international agreement is not 

concluded immediately after the first demonstration, this will mean a flying 

start towards an unlimited armaments race. If this race is inevitable, we have 

every reason to delay its beginning as long as possible in order to increase 

our head start still further. The benefit to the nation, and the saving of 

American lives in the future, achieved by renouncing an early demonstration 

of nuclear bombs and letting the other nations come into the race only 

reluctantly, on the basis of guesswork and without definite knowledge that 

the 'thing does work', may far outweigh the advantages to be gained by the 

immediate use of the first ~d comparatively inefficient bombs in the war 

against Japan. On the other hand, it may be argued that without an early 

demonstration it may prove difficult to obtain adequate support for further 

intensive development of nucleonics in this country and that thus the time 

gained by the postponement of an open armaments race will not be properly 

used. Furthermore one may suggest that other nations are now, or will soon 

be, not entirely unaware of our present achievements, and that consequently 

the postponement of a demonstration may serve no useful purpose as far as 

the avoidance of an armaments race is concerned, and may only create 

additional mistrust, thus worsening rather than improving the chances of an 

ultimate accord on the international control of nuclear explosives. 

Thus, if the prospects .f a, agreement will be considered poor in the 

immediate future, the pros and cons of an early revelation of our pos- 

session of nuclear weapons to the world - not only by their actual use against 

Japan, but also by a prearranged demonstration - must be carefully weighed 

by the supreme political and military leadership of the country, and the 

decisions should not be left to the considerations of military tactics alone. 

One may point out that scientists themselves have initiated the 

development of this 'secret weapon' and it is therefore strange that they 

should be reluctant to try it out on the enemy as soon as it is available. The 

answer to this question was given above - the compelling reason for creating 

this weapon with such speed was our fear that Germany had the technical 

skill necessary to develop such a weapon and that the German government 

had Do moral restraints regarding its use. 

Another argument which could be quoted in favour of using atomic bombs 

as soon as they are available is that so much taxpayers' money has been 

invested in these projects that the Congress and the American public will 

demand a return for their money. The attitude of American public opinion, 

mentioned earlier, in the matter of the use of poison gas against Japan, 

shows that one can expect the American public to understand that it is 

sometimes desirable to keep a weapon in readiness for use only in extreme 

emergency; and as soon as the potentialities of nuclear weapons are revealed 

to the American people, one can be sure that they will support all attempts to 

make the use of such weapons impossible. 

Once this is achieved, the large installations and the accumulation of 

explosive material at present earmarked for potential military use will 

become available for important peacetime developments, including power 

production, large engineering undertakings, and mass production of 

radioactive materials. In this way, the money spent on wartime development 

of nucleonics may become a boon for the peacetime development of national 

economy. 

IV. Methods of International Control 

We now consider the question of how an effective international control of 

nuclear armaments can be achieved. This is a difficult problem, but we think 

it soluble. It requires study by statesmen and international lawyers, and we 

can offer only some preliminary suggestions for such a study. 

Given mutual trust and willingness on all sides to give up a certain part of 

their sovereign rights, by admitting international control of certain phases of 

national economy, the control could be exercised (alternatively or 

simultaneously) on two different levels. 

The first and perhaps the simplest way is to ration the raw materials - 

primarily, the uranium ores. Production of nuclear explosives begins with 

the processing of large quantities of uranium in large isotope separation 

plants or huge production piles. The amounts of ore taken out of the ground 

at different locations could be controlled by resident agents of the 

international Control Board, and each nation could be allotted only an 

amount which would make large-scale separation of fissionable isotopes 

impossible. 

Such a limitation would have the drawback of making impossible also the 

development of nuclear power for peacetime purposes. How- ever, it need 

not prevent the production of radioactive elements on a scale sufficient to 

revolutionize the industrial, scientific and technical use of these materials, 

and would thus not eliminate the main benefits which nucleonics promises to 

bring to mankind. 

An agreement on a higher level, involving more mutual trust and 

understanding would be to allow unlimited production, but keep exact 

bookkeeping on the fate of each pound of uranium mined. If in this way, 

check is kept on the conversion of uranium and thorium ore into pure 

fissionable materials, the question arises as to how to prevent accumulation 

of lame quantities of such materials in the hands of one Or several nations. 

Accumulations of this kind could be rapidly converted into atomic bombs if 

a nation should break away from international control. It has been suggested 

that a compulsory denaturation of pure fissionable isotopes may be agreed 

upon - by diluting them, after production, with suitable isotopes to make 

them useless for military purposes, while retaining their usefulness for 

power engines. 

One thing is clear: any international agreement on prevention of nuclear 

armaments must be backed by actual and efficient controls. No paper 

agreement can be sufficient since neither this nor any other nation can stake 

its whole existence on trust in other nations' signatures. Every attempt to 

impede the international control agencies would have to be considered 

equivalent to denunciation of the agreement. 

It hardly needs stressing that we as scientists believe that any systems of 

control envisaged should leave as much freedom for the peacetime 

development of nucleonics as is consistent with the safety of the world. 

Summary 

The development of nuclear power not only constitutes an important 

addition to the technological and military power of the United States, but 

also creates grave political and economic problems for the future of this 

country. 

Nuclear bombs cannot possibly remain a 'secret weapon' at the exclusive 

disposal of this country for more than a few years. The scientific facts on 

which construction is based are well known to scientists of other countries. 

Unless an effective international control of nuclear explosives is instituted, a 

race for nuclear armaments is certain to ensue following the first revelation 

of our possession of nuclear weapons to the world. Within ten years other 

countries may have nuclear bombs, each of which, weighing less than a ton, 

could destroy an urban area of more than ten square miles. In the war to 

which such an armaments race is likely to lead, the United States, with its 

agglomeration of population and industry in comparatively few metropolitan 

districts, will be at a disadvantage compared to nations whose populations 

and industry are scattered over large areas. 

We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an 

early unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States 

were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction 

upon mankind, she would sacrifice public sup- port throughout the world, 

precipitate the race for armaments and prejudice the possibility of reaching 

an international agreement on the future control of such weapons. 

Much mom favourable conditions for the eventual achievement of such an 

agreement could be created if nuclear bombs were first revealed to the world 

by a demonstration in an appropriately selected uninhabited area. 

In case chances for the establishment of an effective international control 

of nuclear weapons should have to be considered slight at the present time, 

then not only the use ,f these weapons against Japan, but even their early 

demonstration, may ~ contrary to the interests of this country. A 

postponement of such a demonstration will have in this cast the advantage of 

delaying the beginning of the nuclear armaments race as long as possible. 

If the government should decide in favour of an early demonstration of 

nuclear weapons, it will then have the possibility of taking into ac- count the 

public opinion of this country and of the other nations before deciding 

whether these weapons should be used against Japan. In this way, other 

nations may assume a share of responsibility for such a fateful decision. 

Composed and signed by 

J. FRANCK 

D. HUGHES 

L. SZILARD 

T. HOGNESS 

E. RABINO WITCH 

G. SEABORG 

C. J. NICKSON 

the end