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Adult Ed September 19th, 2010
The Men Who Made the Atomic Bomb
A Jewish Secular Perspective
Welcome to the 4th year of Adult Education at the JCS of Ann
Arbor. Today’s presentation will be on The Men Who Made the Atomic
Bomb. As usual I will begin by telling you why I have chosen this
topic and why you should care. One could tell this story as a
Biblical story. “And a fearsome tyrant arose, dedicated to
destroying the Jewish people. Great was the misery as his shadow
fell upon the land. A few wise Jewish men from many nations fled
across the sea. There they met and raised their voices and drew
arcane symbols. And in answer to their words, fire fell from the
sky and a pillar of smoke rose above their enemies’ cities.” In the
late 1930s and the first five years of the 1940s, the scientists of
the Allies and those of the Axis were engaged in a race, a race to
see who could first develop an atom bomb. It is not an exaggeration
to say that the fate of the world literally hung in the balance.
Had the team of scientists working in Berlin developed the atomic
bomb first, the world today might well be a different place. One
could reasonably ask if any of us would be sitting here today. The
outcome of World War II was decided as much in the laboratory as on
the battlefield. And the difference was made by a few individuals,
many of them Jewish or who would be defined as Jewish by the Nazis.
Before Hitler came to power, the greatest physicists in the world
were in Europe, with the most eminent gathering in Berlin. It was
Hitler’s racial purity laws that caused these few brilliant
individuals to flee Europe. Most emigrated first to Great Britain,
then to United States. It was that flight of these individuals from
Hitler’s Europe and their finding refuge in the United States that
would change the course of the war and the course of human history.
To summarize, a small group of scientists, mostly Jews, fleeing
Hitler’s Europe, changed the course of history. And one last point;
their debates about whether to use and how best to use the
destructive power that would soon be in their hands have an almost
Talmudic quality to them. A Series of Events The concept of time
travel was popularized by, among other stories, the H.G. Wells
classic tale, The Time Machine1. Imagine, if you will we are in
such a machine, able to travel backward and forward in time. There
are times when an event occurs that changes everything, after which
the world (or at least our perspective on the world) is completely
changed. Such an event took place on the morning of August 6th,
1945, at a heretofore largely unknown Japanese city of Hiroshima.
At approximately 8:15 that morning, local time, the American B-29
bomber named Enola Gay and piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets released
its payload, a 9,700 pound uranium bomb, which had been named
“Little Boy.”
1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Origins_of_the_concept
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The target was to be the Aioi Bridge. Because of a stronger than
expected crosswind, the bomb missed this target by 800 feet,
detonating almost directly over the Shima Surgical Clinic. Almost
90% of all medical staff in the area died almost instantly. The
immediate effects of the blast killed approximately 70,000 people
in Hiroshima. Estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945 from
burns, radiation and related disease, aggravated by lack of medical
resources, range from 90,000 to 166,000. Some estimates state up to
200,000 Japanese had died by 1950, due to cancer and other
long-term effects.
The bombing of Hiroshima and the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki
3 days later were the climax of years of research, planning and
testing. Let us travel back to a moment a month prior, to July
16th, 1945. The place is an unused Army base in the Mojave Desert,
35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico. It is at this forsaken
place that the Trinity test, the first real test of the potentially
explosive power of an atomic weapon is put to the test. The bomb
goes off as planned, releasing the energy equivalent of 20 thousand
tons of TNT. Watching the test, Los Alamos director (Julius) Robert
Oppenheimer, would later say that he was reminded of the verse from
the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the
destroyer of worlds.” He would not, however, actually say this out
loud. However, test director Kenneth Bainbridge would say to
Oppenheimer, "Now we are all sons of bitches."2
2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_%28nuclear_test%29#Test_site
Figure 2: A Replica of "Little Boy."
Figure 1: The Hiroshima mushroom cloud, through a window in one
of the three B-
29s which went on the bombing run.
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Before the Trinity test could take place, there would be years
of development. Let us once again twist the dial on our time
machine and travel back to December 2nd, 1942, from the New Mexico
desert to a squash court beneath the West end of Stagg Field, the
disused football stadium of the University of Chicago. On this day,
Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and about 40 scientists will set off the
first nuclear chain reaction. Three years before, the Hungarian
physicist, Leo Szilard, had suggested to Fermi, a Nobel Prize
winner, that an atomic bomb was a real possibility. Fermi had
greeted the idea with a one word response: “Nuts!” Gradually, Fermi
came to respect both the idea and his colleague. He would later
describe Szilard as follows: “He is extremely brilliant…and he
seems to enjoy startling people.” This first nuclear reactor
consisted of fifty-seven layers of pure graphite blocks, the layers
alternating between solid blocks of graphite and blocks that were
hollowed out to hold slugs of uranium. The blocks had to be cut by
hand, an unenviable task that fell to a Jewish, Canadian physicist
named Walter Zinn. The whole structure was the size of a house
measuring twenty-five feet on each side and twenty feet high. Zinn,
working with another physicist named Herbert Anderson and thirty
students that they had enlisted, had been carving the graphite
twelve hours a day for six weeks. Their hands and faces were
stained black by the graphite. Leo Szilard would have been proud to
point out that he had not carved a single brick. The carbon-rich
graphite seemed like the ideal material to use for a nuclear
reaction. But the initial American attempt (as well as all attempts
by the German team) failed. It was Leo Szilard who realized that
the graphite needed to be 100% pure, in particular that it must be
free of any traces of boron that would absorb neutrons, inhibiting
the reaction. The best physicists of the Third Reich, including the
brilliant Werner Heisenberg, never quite got this detail.3 The
scientists hoped to control the reaction through the use of cadmium
rods. Cadmium is a powerful absorber of neutrons. Pulling the rods
out would increase the reaction, inserting the rods would inhibit
the reaction. Walter Zinn had designed the last cadmium rod as a
failsafe; the rod would drop back in automatically should the
reaction rise above a certain point, potentially preventing the
scientists from approaching the pile. This rod was named ZIP, an
acronym standing for “Zinn’s Infernal Pile.”4 At 9:45 AM, Fermi and
his team began the process of slowly withdrawing the cadmium rods,
measuring carefully and checking to ensure that all failsafe
measures were in place. At 11:30 AM, Fermi stopped the work, saying
“I’m hungry. Let’s go lunch.” At 2:20 PM, they returned and began
withdrawing the rods again. At 3:25 PM, they began the process of
withdrawing the final rod, one foot at a time. Finally that last
rod was withdrawn. According to scientist Herbert Anderson, “At
first you could hear the sound of the neutron counter,
clickety-clack, clickety-clack. The clicks began to come more and
more rapidly, and after a while they began to merge into a roar.”
The number of neutrons became so high, that the counters became
useless. Fermi asked for the chart recorder to be turned on. He
worked with his slide-rule for a while. Finally he announced, “The
reaction is self-sustaining. The curve is exponential.” The Chicago
pile, or CP-1, had come on line. It would be the distant ancestor
of Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station here in Michigan, the
power plant based on the technology patented jointly by Fermi and
Szilard.
3
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventors/p/Leo_Szilard.htm 4
http://media.cns-snc.ca/history/pioneers/zinn/zinn.html
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Leo Szilard was a Jew who fled anti-Semitism in his native
Hungary to continue his education in Berlin. In turn he fled Berlin
in 1933, ahead of the Nazis. He literally took the last train out;
the next day that very same train was being stopped at the border
by the German military. Enrico Fermi’s wife, Laura, was Jewish.
Together they were forced to flee Mussolini’s Italy. Others among
the scientists working on the Chicago project had also had to flee
for their lives.
Figure 3: Chicago Pile One scientists at the University of
Chicago on December 2, 1946, the fourth anniversary of their
success. Back row, left to right, Norman Hilberry, Samuel Allison,
Thomas Brill, Robert G. Nobles, Warren Nyer, and Marvin Wilkening.
Middle row, Harold Agnew, William Sturm, Harold Lichtenberger,
Leona W. Marshall, and Leo Szilard. Front row, Enrico Fermi, Walter
H. Zinn, Albert Wattenberg, and Herbert L. Anderson.
(http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/CP1/image5.shtml)
On this very same day, December 2nd, 1942, the United States
State Department acknowledges that two million European Jews have
been murdered and that as many as five million more are in
jeopardy. On December 13 America's most popular broadcaster, Edward
R. Murrow reported the following: "Millions of human beings, most
of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and
murdered...It is a picture of mass murder and moral depravity
unequaled in the history of the world. It is a horror beyond what
imagination can grasp...There are no longer 'concentration camps' -
we must speak now only of 'extermination camps'."
A telegram sent by Polish-Jewish leader Ignacy Schwarzbart to
the World Zionist Congress on December 2nd, 1942 ends with the
phrase “Believe the unbelievable.”
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The Chicago Pile could not have been built without the support
of the American government. That support would grow over time and
with each success into what would become known as the Manhattan
Project, with a budget in the then unthinkable amount of two
billion dollars. But that support would need to be coerced. And it
would begin with a letter, a letter from Albert Einstein to the
President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By 1939,
Leo Szilard had become convinced that the German scientists were
researching the means of developing an atomic bomb. He had good
reason to feel this way; the Germans had stopped the sale of
uranium ore from occupied Czechoslovakia. Moreover, Szilard was
familiar with the capabilities of the German scientists. These were
the same scientists that a few years earlier included Einstein and
Szilard in their ranks. If it wasn’t for the anti-Semitism that was
such a core element, Szilard, Einstein and the other Jewish
physicists would have been happy to stay in Berlin. But now they
were here in America, the Nazis were the enemy and Szilard wanted
to make sure that if anyone developed an atomic bomb, it would be
the Allies. So Szilard went to see Einstein to enlist his help in
galvanizing the American government. Not only had Einstein been
Szilard’s mentor in Berlin, but the two of them had co-patented a
refrigeration system. That summer, Einstein was vacationing on Long
Island. Szilard got fellow Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner to
drive him out. Wigner was part of the group of Hungarian
physicists, including Szilard which was known as the “Hungarian
Quartet” when they studied together in Berlin. Although the letter
which begins “some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard…...leads
me to believe that the element uranium may be turned into a new and
important source of energy” is signed by Einstein, it is generally
acknowledged that Szilard was both the impetus for the letter being
written and the source of most of the ideas contained in the
letter. There would be significant delays before the letter would
reach Roosevelt, but finally on October 11th, the President would
read the letter and would approve a “Uranium committee” with a
budget of $6000. Although this first letter dated August 2nd, 1939,
is the most famous, Einstein actually wrote four letters to
Roosevelt about the importance of funding and supporting atomic
research. The last letter, dated in 1945, introduces Leo Szilard to
the President. This letter did not reach Roosevelt before his
death. When Einstein wrote to the President of the United States in
1939, the world was six years from having a working atomic bomb,
three years before the Chicago Pile would go on line. How did they
know that an atomic bomb was possible? Simple, Leo Szilard had
conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933, while
walking to work at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, the only place that
he was able to get his hands on radioactive materials. He was
waiting for traffic lights to change on Southampton Row in
Bloomsbury, an area in central London, when the idea came to him.
The following year he would offend the scientific community when he
filed for a patent on the concept. Filing for a patent was
Szilard’s way of keeping the idea secret, especially from the
Germans. Szilard had two major sources of inspiration. The first
was that he had recently a read an article by Ernest Rutherford,
1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry,
widely regarded as the Father of Nuclear physics. Rutherford had
just been quoted in the London Times as having stated that nuclear
power was impractical, “We might in these processes obtain very
much more energy than the proton supplied, but on the average we
could not expect to obtain
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energy in this way. It was a very poor and inefficient way of
producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in
the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.”5 If
Rutherford said it couldn’t be done, then clearly Szilard had to do
it.
5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd
Copy of the Einstein-Szilard Letter
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The second inspiration for Leo Szilard’s work was a science
fiction novel. The year before, in 1932, Leo Szilard had read The
World Set Free, a novel by our friend H. G. Wells (you thought he
just wrote about time machines?) that predicted a chain reaction of
atomic explosions powering a bomb so awful that its use prevents
future wars. Szilard would try to create a chain reaction using
beryllium and indium, but these elements did not produce a chain
reaction. During 1936, he would despair of ever achieving the
reaction and he would assign his chain-reaction patent to the
British Admiralty to ensure its secrecy. In 1938, Szilárd accepted
an offer to conduct research at Columbia University in Manhattan,
and moved to New York. It was there that he would meet Fermi. After
learning about the successful nuclear fission experiment conducted
during 1939 in Germany by a team including Otto Hahn, Fritz
Strassmann, Lise Meitner, and Otto Robert Frisch, (all physicists
that Leo Szilard knew personally) Szilárd and Fermi concluded that
uranium would be the element capable of sustaining a chain
reaction. Szilárd and Fermi conducted a simple experiment at
Columbia and discovered significant neutron multiplication in
uranium, proving that the chain reaction was possible and enabling
nuclear weapons. Szilárd would later describe the event that would
open the way for the Atomic Age as follows "We turned the switch
and saw the flashes. We watched them for a little while and then we
switched everything off and went home. That night, there was very
little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief." From
Einstein’s letters to the creation of the Chicago Pile to the
Manhattan Project to Michigan’s nuclear reactor, the names of Leo
Szilard and Enrico Fermi appear together, but who were these men?
The Doomsday Men- Early Years
Figure 4 Fermi and Szilard
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome in 1901. At age 17, he would
enroll in the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. In order to gain
admittance, prospects had to pass an entrance examination that
included an essay test. For his essay on the Characteristics of
Sound, young Enrico chose to
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“derive and solve the Fourier analysis based partial
differential equation for waves on a string.” 6 Fermi’s examiner
would offer that the teenager’s essay would have been commendable
for a doctoral dissertation. By age 24, Fermi had earned a
professorship at the University of Rome by winning a competition
held by Professor Orso Mario Corbino, director of the Institute of
Physics. Fermi would gain a reputation for the simplicity and
elegance of his solutions to complex problems. In 1938, Fermi
received the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 37 for his
"demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements
produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of
nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". After Fermi
received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he, his wife Laura, and
their children immigrated to New York. This was mainly because of
the anti-Semitic laws promulgated by the fascist regime of Benito
Mussolini which threatened Laura, who was Jewish. Also, the new
laws put most of Fermi's research assistants out of work. Soon
after his arrival in New York, Fermi began working at Columbia
University.7 It was while working at Columbia that Fermi would meet
Leo Szilard. Leo Szilard was born on February 11th, 1898, in
Budapest, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that
time. His family had changed their name from Spitz to Szilard
(meaning “solid”) as part of a process of assimilation with
Hungarian culture. Leo was raised in a secular household,
subscribing to what his mother called “natural religion” based on
honesty and loosely drawing from the Christian values of their
neighbors. When Leo was of high school age, he was required to
attend classes at their local synagogue once every two weeks as
part of their public school curriculum. When his teacher, a young
Rabbi, once asked Leo about his lack of religion, inquiring “Do you
possibly not even have a mezuzah at your door?” Leo replied “My
parents don’t like to show off.” Leo was always bright, and drawn
to science, but never liked to get his hands dirty, preferring to
be a pure thinker. So he persuaded his younger brother Bela to act
as his research assistant, doing the actual experiments. This was
perhaps a foreshadowing of Szilard’s later relationship with Fermi.
In September of 1917, Leo entered the Austro-Hungarian Army as a
one-year volunteer. He would take classes at the Reserve Officer
School in Budapest. Sometimes he was even able to take classes at
the Technical University. He was called to active service toward
the end of the war and was assigned to a squad guarding prisoners.
Toward the end of the war, Leo became ill. Due to his illness, he
missed the heaviest fighting that his unit saw. For Leo, World War
I was more of an inconvenience than anything else. He did take one
lesson from the war: for the rest of his days, he would live with
two suitcases packed and ready to go. He would say “I think that I
would have preferred to have roots, but when I couldn’t have roots,
I wanted to have wings and to be able to move at a moment’s notice
became important to me.” Leo returned to a Hungary economically
devastated by the war. Leo and his brother Bela attended the
Technical University and became involved with the Socialist
movement there. For a time, Hungary was ruled by the Bolshevik
style government of Bela Kun, and the Szilard brothers supported
this regime, although with misgivings. Kun and many leaders of his
government were also Jewish. When the Kun government was toppled,
the Szilards correctly anticipated that the
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi 7 Ibid
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backlash would not only be conservative, but anti-Semitic as
well. They applied to change their official religion from
“Israelite” to “Calvinist.” It did them little good. Under the new
regime, they were investigated as socialists and barred from
attending university as Jews. When the brothers protested that they
were Calvinists and offered to show the papers to prove it, they
received a beating from more than a dozen fellow students. And so
it was that the brothers, first Leo and then Bela, set off to
complete their education in Berlin. Leo originally enrolled in a
technical school to complete his studies in engineering, but he
soon rejected engineering as the “routine application of already
established knowledge.” He became interested in physics, as it was
being taught at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University. Among the
teachers there were:
- Max Planck, who had won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918 and
is considered the founder of quantum theory, which states that
atoms did not absorb and emit energy in continuous streams, but
rather in discrete bundles called “quanta”,.
- Max Von Laue, a student of Planck’s who had received a 1914
Nobel Prize for measuring
the wavelengths of X-rays.
- Walter Nernst, credited with establishing the “third law” of
thermodynamics describing how matter behaves at temperatures near
zero.
- Fritz Haber, who received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in
1918, for his process to
synthesize ammonia from its elements. This process is credited
with saving Europe from famine by allowing for the formulation of
cheap fertilizer. He would also direct the German development and
use of poison gas during World War I. We’ll talk more about Herr
Doktor Haber a bit later.
- Albert Einstein delivered a weekly seminar at the university,
an event that was always
crowded with faculty and the brightest students. He attended
other colloquia. Einstein became a friend and mentor to Szilard and
the two of them jointly filed a patent for a refrigeration system.
In 1905, Einstein had authored a series of papers, each of which
would become the basis for a branch of physics. In Does the Inertia
of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?, Einstein developed his
theory of special relativity, which included a calculation on the
amounts of energy contained in matter.
Far from being awed by this brilliant group, Leo Szilard
responded with cockiness. When calling on Planck to apply for
admission to Planck’s course, Szilard summed up his goals as
follows: “I only want to know the facts of physics. I will make up
the theories myself.” Far from being offended, Planck found humor
in Szilard’s remark. Not long after he was accepted at the
University, Szilard approached Einstein and asked him to teach a
class on statistical mechanics for Szilard and a group of his
friends. When Einstein agreed, Szilard invited the brightest people
that he knew, including three friends from his native Hungary.
Eugene Wigner worked with Szilard as part of the Manhattan Project
and would become a Nobel Laureate in physics in 1963. John von
Neumann is recognized as the creator of game theory and the
developer of the modern computer. Dennis Gabor was the fourth
member of the group. He was the inventor of holography and a 1971
Nobel physics laureate. These four geniuses were called the
“Hungarian Quartet” although the younger Edward Teller would come
to replace Gabor in the group. Edward Teller would be known as “the
father of the hydrogen bomb” and would be one of the inspirations
for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
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To recap, we have gathered in Berlin in the 1920s a group of
incredible geniuses. Many of them are native Germans or Austrians;
in the case of Albert Einstein, Swiss and German. However, the
ending of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire after World War I and the
rise of anti-Semitic government in Hungary has added a number of
brilliant, Hungarian Jews to the student body. In particular we
have physicists, mathematicians and chemists all studying the
mysteries of the atom. The European Schools Why Germany and what
was so interesting about atomic physics at this particular time? In
1895, Wilhelm Roentgen was conducting a particular experiment to
determine the effects of passing an electrical discharge though a
vacuum tube covered in aluminum with only a thin window to allow
the cathode rays to escape. Roentgen had added a protective
covering of cardboard to protect the aluminum; this should have
blocked all light from coming out. But he noticed a fluorescent
effect on a small cardboard screen painted with barium
platinocyanide when it was placed close to the aluminum window. He
had discovered X-Rays also known as Roentgen rays, an achievement
that would earn him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The
discovery of these X-Rays would not only change medicine, but would
greatly help in the understanding of the structure of the atom.
It is one of those little-known factoids that Wilhelm Roentgen
almost came to the United States. He had family living in Iowa and
had accepted a position to teach at Columbia University and had
even gone so far as to buy a ticket to America, but then World War
I broke out and Roentgen decided to stay in Germany. Roentgen’s
discovery and his subsequent work are significant on its own
merits; further, he would help advance the work of future
scientists. But he also showed a utility to this branch of science
and made the impact comprehensible to the common man.8 Germany was
not the only center for atomic research. In 1896, at roughly the
same time that Roentgen was discovering the X-Ray, Frenchman Henri
Becquerel discovered that uranium salts emitted rays that resembled
X-rays in their penetrating power. He demonstrated that this
radiation, unlike phosphorescence, did not depend on an external
source of energy, but seemed to arise spontaneously from uranium
itself.
8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_R%C3%B6ntgen
Figure 5: The first “medical” X-ray ever taken, the hand
Roentgen’s wife, Anna Bertha. When she saw her skeleton she
exclaimed "I have seen my death!"
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Becquerel had, in fact, discovered radioactivity. Marie
Skłodowska Curie, born in Poland, but now a resident of France,
began investigating uranium radiation as a possible topic for her
thesis. Born in Poland, she came from an illustrious academic
family. In 1891, at the insistence of her sister and in response to
a failed relationship with Kazimierz Żorawski, Marie would go to
France, where she would study at the Sorbonne. In 1893, Marie would
earn a degree in physics. In 1894, she would add a second degree in
mathematics. That same year, she would meet Pierre Curie. They were
brought together by a shared interest in mathematics. Pierre and
Marie would become husband and wife, partners and scientific
collaborators. Marie Curie made many contributions to science, but
the most important was that she showed that the energy coming from
uranium was not the result of some interaction between molecules,
but came from the uranium atoms themselves.9 But how could this be
when the atom was the smallest part of matter and was indivisible?
This was the definition of the atom that had existed from ancient
Greek times. 10 That explanation would require the development of a
model of the atom that resembled the solar system, except that
electrostatic charges rather than gravity hold the particles in
their relationships. It would be developed by Danish physicist
Niels Bohr in 1913. Niels Bohr was the son of Christian Bohr, a
devout Lutheran, and professor of physiology at the University of
Copenhagen. Niels’ mother was Ellen Adler Bohr, who came from a
wealthy Jewish family, prominent in Danish banking and
parliamentary circles. Bohr would provide the theoretical overview
for atomic physics. He would have philosophical debates with
Einstein over the implications of light behaving sometimes like a
particle and sometimes like a wave. Werner Heisenberg would serve
as an assistant to Bohr. In 1943, Adolph Hitler had ordered the
arrest of the Danish Jews, which would have included Niels Bohr.
Shortly before he was to be arrested by the German police, as part
of the rescue efforts of the Danish resistance, Bohr escaped to
Sweden, and then traveled to London. He would come to America and
participate in the Manhattan Project, although he was dismissive of
his role. He said that he served as a "father confessor" on the
project. He was concerned about a nuclear arms race, and is quoted
as saying, "That is why I went to America. They didn't need my help
in making the atom bomb."11 While Szilard was the “idea guy” and
Bohr was the “theory guy,” Enrico Fermi was the master experimental
scientist. At the risk of stating the obvious, were it not for
Hitler’s racial purity laws, these men would never have been
brought together, certainly not in the United States. Fermi would
have stayed in Italy, Bohr in Denmark, Szilard and Einstein in
Germany. Einstein only left Germany in April, 1933, after he
learned that the Nazi government had passed a law barring Jews from
holding any official positions, including teaching at universities.
A month later, the Nazi book burnings occurred, with Einstein's
works being among those burnt, and Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels proclaimed, "Jewish intellectualism is dead." Einstein
also learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets,
with a "$5,000 bounty on his head". One German magazine included
him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not
yet hanged". Leo Szilard stayed even longer, partially because he
had taken upon himself the
9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie 10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom 11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
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responsibility for warning other scientists to leave and
partially because of his own perverse nature. 12 The Race for the
Bomb The centers for atomic study in Germany, France, Italy and
Denmark did not end when the Jewish scientists were forced to flee.
The German scientists in particular were very familiar with the
work of Einstein, who had studied with and taught among them, and
had arrived at the same theoretical basis as Szilard. With the
annexation of Czechoslovakia, the Germans had possession of
Europe’s largest source of uranium. The race was on to build the
first atomic weapon. The non-Jewish German and French scientists
would continue their research, although some say they worked
reluctantly. How willingly the scientists worked and how close they
would come to developing the atomic bomb are matters that are still
debated. For example, Werner Heisenberg would come to visit his
colleague and mentor Niels Bohr in Denmark in 1941. Did he come to
warn Bohr to flee? Would Heisenberg heroically undermine the Nazi’s
efforts, as Thomas Powers argues in his book Heisenberg's War?13
Would Heisenberg deliberately flub calculations to forestall the
Nazi efforts or did he make honest mistakes? After the end of the
European conflict, Heisenberg and the rest of the German atomic
bomb team were interned at Farm Hill in England. Their
conversations were secretly recorded, including their reaction to
the US bombing of Hiroshima. The following are actual excerpts from
those tapes: KORSCHING: “That shows at any rate that the Americans
are capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would
have been impossible in Germany. Each one said that the other was
unimportant.”
HEISENBERG: We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend
to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ
120,000 men just for building the thing up.
WEIZSAECKER: I believe the reason we didn't do it was because
all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had
wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded!
HAHN: I don't believe that, but I am thankful we didn't
succeed.
HEISENBERG: Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was
absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium
engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom
of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a
bomb. I must admit that.14 The German atomic weapons project
failed, while the American project succeeded. Whatever the reasons
might have been for the German failure, the success of the American
program is attributable to the genius of a few men. And it would
take an unlikely figure, a genius himself, to direct the
scientists.
12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein 13
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/nazi.htm 14
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p11a.htm
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Enter Oppenheimer J. Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22,
1904 to Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish textile importer
who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1888, and
Ella Friedman, a painter. He had a younger brother, Frank
Oppenheimer, who also became a physicist. His first initial, “J”
either stood for Julius or “for nothing” as he claimed in an
autobiographical interview conducted by Thomas S. Kuhn on November
18, 1963. He was born in New York and attended the Ethical Culture
School, now known as Fieldston, on 5th Avenue and 64th Street.
Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar, interested in the humanities,
psychotherapy, and in science. He entered Harvard College a year
late because he had suffered an attack of colitis. To recover he
had gone with a former English teacher to New Mexico, where he fell
in love with horseback riding and the Southwest. (This would
explain why he chose Los Alamos as a location for the
Manhattan Project.) He majored in chemistry at Harvard, but
continued his studies of Greek architecture, classics, art, and
literature. He made up for his late start by taking six courses
each term, and graduated summa cum laude in just three years.15 In
his first year at Harvard, Oppenheimer was admitted to graduate
standing in physics on the basis of independent study and was
exempted from taking the basic classes. After graduating from
Harvard, Oppenheimer was encouraged to go to Europe for further
study. He was accepted for postgraduate work at Ernest Rutherford's
Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Oppenheimer's
clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent his forte was not
experimental but rather theoretical physics. He developed an
antagonistic relationship with his tutor, Patrick Blackett, who was
only a few years his senior. Oppenheimer once doused
an apple with noxious chemicals and put it on Blackett's desk;
Blackett did not eat the apple, but Oppenheimer was put on
probation and ordered to go to London for sessions with a
psychiatrist. In 1926 he left Cambridge for the University of
Göttingen to study under Max Born. Göttingen was one of the world's
leading centers for theoretical physics. Here Oppenheimer would
work alongside notable figures including Werner Heisenberg, Enrico
Fermi and Edward Teller. Oppenheimer was recognized for his keen
mind but also for his propensity for taking over class discussions,
leading a number of students to take up a petition to make
Oppenheimer be quiet. Born would leave the petition out where
Oppenheimer would see it, and Oppenheimer got the message without
confrontation. He and Born would co-publish a paper entitled the
"Born-Oppenheimer approximation" which remains his most cited work.
When World War II started, Oppenheimer became involved in the
efforts to develop an atomic bomb. By 1941, it was recognized that
the key to a successful bomb would be a fast, self-
15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer
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propagating neutron chain reaction, as Szilard had outlined in
1933. Oppenheimer was given the humorous title "Coordinator of
Rapid Rupture." In 1942, control of the American efforts was taken
from the S-1 Uranium Committee and given to the U.S. Army. The
efforts were renamed as the Manhattan Engineering District, or
Manhattan Project. General Leslie R. Groves was appointed project
director, and Groves, in turn, selected Oppenheimer as the
project's scientific director. Oppenheimer was a most unlikely
choice. Oppenheimer had been romantically involved with Jean
Tatlock, a psychiatrist, physician, and a member of the Communist
Party. Oppenheimer was alleged to have hosted fundraisers for the
Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and to have supported
other anti-fascist activity. When he joined the Manhattan Project,
he wrote on his personnel questionnaire that he had been "a member
of just about every Communist Front organization on the West
Coast.” In 1954, he testified, "I was associated with the Communist
movement." Regardless of his liberal or even Communist leanings,
Oppenheimer was the right man for the job and credit should be
given to General Groves, who was quite conservative and at least
mildly anti-Semitic, for recognizing Oppenheimer’s abilities.
Certainly Groves got along better with Oppenheimer than he did with
Leo Szilard, who felt it was his duty to challenge anyone in
authority. With Oppenheimer leading the team, and all the enormous
resources of the United States behind them, the Manhattan Project
would succeed in creating the atomic bomb. The Los Alamos site was
the “think tank” and the final assembly site for the bombs. The
Hanford Site near Richland, Washington, was where the reactors
would produce plutonium. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was chosen because
of the availability of cheap hydroelectric power needed for the
uranium enrichment process. The facility there was so large that it
would be the 5th largest city in the state and consume 1/6 of all
the electrical power used in America, more than New York City.
There was also an Allied effort at Chalk River, Ontario, with
scientists from Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia,
France, Norway, etc. contributing to the efforts.
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The Manhattan Project would involve over 150,000 workers and an
over $2 billion budget. My point is that the development of the
atomic bomb was not only the work of a few amazing men, it required
much more than that. But without the work of Szilard, Fermi,
Oppenheimer and others, it would not have been possible. Through
this combination of resources and genius, two different types of
bombs were developed. The “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima
was based on enriched uranium. Two sub-critical masses are combined
when a “gun” fires one mass into the other. This triggers an
“exponentially growing nuclear chain reaction” which releases a
vast amount of energy quickly. The “Fat Man” bomb that was dropped
on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima was based on using a
chemical explosion to quickly combine two masses of plutonium,
again creating a nuclear fission reaction. The Manhattan Project
had succeeded in creating not one, but two nuclear weapons.16
Edward Teller had been part of the group of expatriate scientists
gathered by Leo Szilard in Berlin and referred to as the Hungarian
Quartet. He would also be Szilard’s driver on his second trip to
visit Einstein on Long Island. He was a brilliant genius in his own
right. He was also an ardent anti-Communist and was outraged by the
Soviet occupation of his native Hungary after World War II. In
fact, Teller had hated the Russians since they had invaded Hungary
after World War I. Teller was part of the Theoretical Physics
division at the then-secret Los Alamos. He was a proponent of an
alternate technology, arguing for a fusion rather than a fission
device, a hydrogen bomb rather a uranium or plutonium device. The
development of a fusion bomb was given a low priority; Teller would
also be passed over to become director of the theoretical division
(the job would instead be given to Hans Bethe, another Jewish
scientist) and Teller would at first refuse to take part in the
calculations for the implosion mechanism. This, and his habit of
playing piano late at night, would alienate his fellow scientists.
He would relent and make significant contributions to the implosion
device. After the Soviet Union detonated their atomic bomb in 1949,
beginning the nuclear arms race that Szilard and Oppenheimer had
feared, Teller came to the forefront with his development of the
hydrogen bomb. The bomb was actually based on the Teller-Ulam
design, the Ulam referring to mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. Teller
downplayed the contribution of Ulam, saying in a 1999 interview: “I
contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this
abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He
came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out
and difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign
a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really
putting work into it, he refused. He said, 'I don't believe in
it.”17 After the first hydrogen bomb, code named “Ivy Mike”, was
detonated in 1952, Teller became known in the press as “the father
of the hydrogen bomb.” Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov (who would
later become known as a human rights activist) may have used the
fallout from the American device to deduce the underlying
principle. Sakharov had been part of the Soviet atomic bomb project
under Igor Kurchatov that succeeded in detonating a device in 1949.
In 1952, he helped produce the Soviet’s first fusion bomb. In 1955,
Sakharov’s
16 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon 17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller
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“third idea” as it was called was a hydrogen bomb based on the
Teller-Ulam design. The nuclear arms race was in full gear.18 Post
Script on the Doomsday Weapon In 1947, biophysicist Eugene
Rabinowitch and physicist Hyman Goldsmith, the co-founders and
directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the
University of Chicago created the Doomsday Clock. The closer the
clock is to midnight, the closer we are felt to be to nuclear
holocaust. In 1947, the clock was originally set to 7 minutes to
midnight. In 1991, when the US and the Soviet Union signed the
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the clock moved to 17 minutes to
midnight, the farthest we have been perceived to be. On January 1,
2010, the clock was set to 6 minutes to midnight. I don’t mean to
downplay how close we have come to nuclear war at various times,
such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. But…we haven’t had a world war.
The fear of Mutually Assured Destruction has prevented the use of
nuclear weapons since World War II. The development of weapons so
powerful that they would make war unthinkable has been a goal for
well over 100 years. In 1876, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of
dynamite and the man whose endowments made possible the Nobel Peace
Prize, said “I would like to produce a substance or a machine of
such frightful, enormous and devastating effect, that wars would
become altogether impossible…on the day that two army corps can
mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations
will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” Many have
tried to end war by creating a Doomsday device, a weapon so
terrible that without ever being used, it will end war.
Fritz Haber was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry in 1918 for his development for synthesizing ammonia,
important for fertilizers and explosives. Haber was credited with
saving Europe from a famine of Malthusian proportions, a famine
that would have wiped out a significant portion of the population,
by making cheap fertilizer possible. However, Haber is also the
father of chemical warfare. On April 22nd, 1915, at a battlefield
in Ypres, France, German soldiers unleashed a cloud of chlorine gas
against the French soldiers, who thought they were protected in
their trenches. A cloud drifted toward the unsuspecting soldiers.
Because chlorine is twice as dense as air, when the cloud reached
the trenches, it drifted down like a slow waterfall. When inhaled,
chlorine destroys the lining of the lungs. The victims drowned in
the middle of a sunny day.
18 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov
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Haber, the man who saved Europe from famine, justified his
violation of the Geneva Convention by saying “Im Frieden der
Menschheit, im Kriege dem Vaterland.” (“In peacetime for humanity,
in war for the Fatherland.”) Chlorine would be supplanted by
phosgene gas and phosgene by mustard gas, each more deadly. Poison
gas was not just used by Germany. France pioneered the use of
phosgene and by the end of World War I, the allies had three
million shells filled with poison gas. The expectation was that
poison gas was so terrible a weapon that no one would go to war
once it was invented. Of course, the same was thought of explosives
a generation earlier. In recognition of his contributions during
the war Fritz Haber was given the rank of captain in the German
Army and was named director of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Physical Chemistry and Electro-chemistry. It was here that he would
meet and work with Einstein, Szilard, Heisenberg, et al. During the
1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the cyanide
gas formulation Zyklon B, which was used as an insecticide,
especially as a fumigant in grain stores. Of course Zyklon B was
also used as part of the extermination of the Jews in gas chambers
at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and the other camps. The irony is that
Fritz Haber was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland),
into a Hasidic family. His was one of the oldest families of that
town. Haber later converted from strict Judaism to Christianity. He
had relatives that were killed in the camps. Haber’s genius was
recognized by the Nazis, who offered to keep him on and wanted to
fund his weapons research. Haber would however resign in protest
over the expulsion of his fellow Jewish scientists and would leave
Germany in 1933. He would move to England, along with his assistant
JJ Weiss. Many there remembered Haber’s use of poison gas against
British troops during World War I. Ernest Rutherford pointedly
refused to shake his hand. Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who was a
chemist himself and inventor of the process used to make the
cordite explosive used by the British during World War I, would
offer Haber a position as director at the Sieff Research Institute
(which is now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, in what was the
Palestine Mandate. Haber accepted the position and even set sail
for Palestine. His ill health forced him to turn back and he would
die in a hotel in Basel at the age of 65. He bequeathed his
extensive private library to the Sieff Institute. Had Haber not
died, the man who pioneered the use of poison gas and whose
protégés made Zyklon B, might have gone to live in Israel. Why They
Did What They Did It should be obvious that these men were all
geniuses. But they were not only geniuses in their own fields,
these were men who were not oblivious or unconcerned with the
consequences of their work. There were three ethical questions that
divided the scientific community:
1) Should the US use the atomic bomb against civilian targets or
just have a demonstration against an unpopulated target?
2) Should the US tell its allies, including the Soviet Union,
that they had the bomb before
using it?
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3) Should development of nuclear weapons continue and advance?
The issue of whether the bombs should be used against civilian
targets or for demonstration only divided the Manhattan Project
team. Of those involved, only Leslie Groves and Edward Teller were
unwavering in their support for the use of the bomb against Japan.
General Groves would say in 1945, “I have no qualms of conscience
about the making or using of [the atomic bomb]. It has been
responsible for saving perhaps thousands of lives. If the bomb had
not been used the Japs would have held out for 60 to 90 days
longer. We know what that would mean in the sacrifice of human
lives. . . . I had staked my reputation and long service in the
Army on the successful construction of the bomb, as I believed it
would do what it has done—save thousands of lives.”19 Leo Szilard,
in contrast, opposed the use of the atomic bomb against civilian
targets, wanted to give the Soviets advance warning and opposed the
arms race. In 1960, Szilard would participate in a Question and
Answer session for the US News and World Report: Q Dr. Szilard,
what was your attitude in 1945 toward the question of dropping the
atomic bomb on Japan? A I opposed it with all my power, but I'm
afraid not as effectively as I should have wished. Q Did any other
scientists feel the same way you did? A Very many other scientists
felt this way. This is particularly true of Oak Ridge and the
Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. I don't know
how the scientists felt at Los Alamos. Q At the Oak Ridge and
Chicago branches of the A-bomb project, was there any division of
opinion? A I'll say this: Almost without exception, all the
creative physicists had misgivings about the use of the bomb. I
would not say the same about the chemists. The biologists felt very
much as the physicists did. Q When did your misgivings first arise?
A Well, I started to worry about the use of the bomb in the spring
of '45. But misgivings about our way of conducting ourselves arose
in Chicago when we first learned that we were using incendiary
bombs on a large scale against the cities of Japan. This, of
course, was none of our responsibility. There was nothing we could
do about it, but I do remember that my colleagues in the project
were disturbed about it. Q Did you have any knowledge of Secretary
of War Stimson's concern at this time on the question of using the
bomb? A I knew that Mr. Stimson was a thoughtful man who gave the
bomb serious consideration. He was one of the most thoughtful
members of the Truman cabinet. However, I certainly have to take
exception to the article Stimson wrote after Hiroshima in "Harper's
Magazine." He wrote that a
19
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_military_history/v067/67.3bernstein.html
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"demonstration" of the A-bomb was impossible because we had only
two bombs. Had we staged a "demonstration" both bombs might have
been duds and then we would have lost face. Now, this argument is
clearly invalid. It is quite true that at the time of Hiroshima we
had only two bombs, but it would not have been necessary to wait
for very long before we would have had several more.20 Not only did
Leo Szilard object to the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities
with no military or strategic value, many others disagreed with the
President’s decision as well. Why did the US then go ahead?
Remember that Einstein’s last letter to Roosevelt was never
delivered. Remember that Einstein’s last letter to Truman was never
delivered. Roosevelt had died three months into his historic 4th
term as President and Harry S. Truman had succeeded him. Truman’s
opinions on the Japanese have been well-documented and in many
cases his original letters are available: Context is critical to
understanding why Truman ignored both the advice of his joint chief
of staff and his secretary of war. In Europe, the enemy was defined
as the Nazis, not the German people; in the Pacific, the enemy was
defined as the “Japs,” or the Japanese people. The conflict between
the United States and Japan was racialized on both sides. Japanese
government urged all Asians to fight a race war against white
Americans, calling them “wild beasts,” monsters, and devils. The
U.S. government and media portrayed the Japanese enemy as demons,
savages, and a “monkey race.” This wartime American hatred toward
the Japanese was rooted in a long history of anti-Asian attitudes
and fear of “the Yellow Peril.” Truman himself was part of this
culture of prejudice. In a letter to his future wife, Bess, dated
June 22, 1911, he wrote: “ I think one man is as good as another so
long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman…It is
race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that
negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in
Europe and America.” During World War II, Truman was swept into the
maelstrom seeking revenge for Pearl Harbor, determined to destroy
what he denounced as “Japs,” “fanatics,” “savages,” and “beasts.21
Prior to joining the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer had been
among the most politically active members of the scientific
community. But he would not oppose the use of the bomb on a
Japanese city. He would later, however, be ostracized for
opposition to the arms race of the Cold War era. This opposition
would bring him into conflict with Teller. Reading about Robert
Oppenheimer, it is hard not to feel a certain sympathy for him. He
had been under investigation by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI since before
the war because of his political leanings. In the 1940s, Hoover
ordered Oppenheimer’s home and office bugged, his phone tapped and
his mail opened. (Hoover also investigated Szilard and Fermi as
“enemy aliens.”) In a series of hearings conducted between April
and May 1954, Oppenheimer would testify about the political
leanings of many of his scientific colleagues, naming names as it
might be put, but would be stripped of his clearance anyway. It is
a shame that he was treated this way because of his opposition to
the nuclear arms race and that he would break at the end. Missile
scientist
20 http://members.peak.org/~danneng/decision/usnews.html 21
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=ecfa9b763e247593d705b1a122da92ee
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Werner von Braun would quip to a Congressional committee: "In
England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."22 Edward Teller,
who would be known as the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, felt that
their actions were necessary. In a September 30th, 1990 interview,
he would sum it up as follows: “What we did in Los Alamos is to
make sure that the United States would be the first to do something
with this new power. We feared it would be the Nazis. But because
of our efforts -- and I believe in part because of Heisenberg's
reluctance, in part because of the lack of strength in Germany --
that fortunately did not happen. But we know that a great Soviet
scientist, Kurchatov, had made great progress on the atomic bomb.
And when our success made it clear that all this was possible, it
took the Soviets, who in many other respects were much more slow,
only four more years to catch up with us. What we did in Los
Alamos, in fact, was make sure that the United States, rather than
the Soviet Union, would have the first words to say in the atomic
age. And there I think is an influence that we really did exercise,
and it is very clear that what we did is something that had to be
done.”23 In 1954, Teller would give controversial testimony that
would result in Oppenheimer being stripped of his security
clearance: “In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer
act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me
was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him
in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused
and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the
vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better,
and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like
to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if
public matters would rest in other hands.” “If it is a question of
wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I
would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.”24 Teller
suffered a heart attack in 1979, which he blamed on Jane Fonda;
after the Three Mile Island accident, the actress had outspokenly
lobbied against nuclear power while promoting her latest movie, The
China Syndrome (a movie depicting a nuclear accident which had
coincidentally been released only a little over a week before the
actual incident.) In response, Teller acted quickly to lobby in
favor of nuclear energy, testifying to its safety and reliability,
and after such a flurry of activity suffered the attack. Teller
authored a two-page spread in the Wall Street Journal which
appeared on July 31, 1979, under the headline "I was the only
victim of Three-Mile Island", which opened with: “On May 7, a few
weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington.
I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader,
Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their
attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years
old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The
next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the
only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg.
No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda.
Reactors are not dangerous.”
22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer 23
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tel0int-1 24
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller
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The next day, The New York Times ran an editorial criticizing
the ad, noting that it was sponsored by Dresser Industries, the
firm which had manufactured one of the defective valves which
contributed to the Three Mile Island accident. Additional Readings
Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the
Superweapon by P.D. Smith, St. Martin's Press, 2007 Genius in the
Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb by
William Lanouette with Bela Szilard, University Of Chicago Press,
1994 Additional Notes About the Doomsday Men Leo Szilard (February
11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) After the war, Szilárd switched topics of
study because of his horror of atomic weapons, changing from
physics to molecular biology, working extensively with Aaron
Novick. Szilárd, proposed, during February 1950, a new kind of
nuclear weapon using cobalt as a tamper, a cobalt bomb, which he
said might destroy all life on the planet. U.S. News & World
Report featured an interview with Szilárd in its August 15, 1960
issue, "President Truman Didn't Understand." He argued that
"violence would not have been necessary if we had been willing to
negotiate." During 1961 Szilárd published a book of short stories,
The Voice of the Dolphins, in which he dealt with the moral and
ethical issues raised by the Cold War and his own role in the
development of atomic weapons. In May 1964, Szilárd died in his
sleep of a heart attack at the age of sixty-six. Enrico Fermi (29
September 1901 – 28 November 1954) After the war, Fermi served for
a short time on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy
Commission, a scientific committee chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer
which advised the commission on nuclear matters and policy. After
the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949, he,
along with Isidor Rabi, wrote a strongly worded report for the
committee which opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb on moral
and technical grounds. But Fermi also participated in preliminary
work on the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos as a consultant, and along
with Stanislaw Ulam, calculated that the amount of tritium needed
for Edward Teller's model of a thermonuclear weapon would be
prohibitive, and a fusion reaction could not be assured to
propagate even with this large quantity of tritium. Fermi was among
the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at an AEC
hearing in 1954. The hearing resulted in denial of Oppenheimer's
security clearance. In his later years, Fermi did important work in
particle physics, especially related to pions and muons. He was
also known to be an inspiring teacher at the University of Chicago,
and was known for his attention to detail, simplicity, and careful
preparation for a lecture. Later, his lecture notes, especially
those for quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and thermodynamics,
were transcribed into books which are still in print. He also mused
about a proposition which is now referred to as the "Fermi
Paradox". This contradiction or proposition is this: that with the
billions and billions of star systems in the universe, one would
think that intelligent life would have contacted our civilization
by now. Toward the end of his life, Fermi questioned his faith in
society at large to make wise choices about nuclear technology. He
said:
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“History of science and technology has consistently taught us
that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or
later led to technical and industrial applications that have
revolutionized our way of life. It seems to me improbable that this
effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to
this rule. What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is
that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the
powers that he acquires over nature." Fermi died at age 53 of
stomach cancer (which may have been a result of heavy exposure to
radiation.) Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967)
In August 1943, Oppenheimer volunteered to Manhattan Project
security agents that three men at Los Alamos National Laboratory
had been solicited for nuclear secrets on behalf of the Soviet
Union, by a person he did not know who worked for Shell Oil, and
who had Communist connections. He gave that person's name: George
Eltenton. However, when pressed on the issue in later interviews
with General Groves, who ordered him to give the names of these men
and promised to keep their identity from the FBI, he finally
identified the only contact who had approached him, as his friend
Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature who he
said had mentioned the matter privately at a dinner at
Oppenheimer's house. Oppenheimer would be asked again in 1947 for
interviews related to the "Chevalier incident", and he gave
contradictory and equivocating statements, telling government
agents that actually only one scientist had been approached at Los
Alamos, and that person was himself. This was by Chevalier, who at
the time had supposedly said that he had a potential conduit
through Eltenton for information which could be passed to the
Soviets. Oppenheimer claimed to have invented the other contacts in
order to conceal the identity of Chevalier, whose identity he
believed would be immediately apparent if he named only one
contact, but whom he believed to be innocent of any disloyalty.
After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) came into being in 1947,
as a civilian agency in control of nuclear research and weapons
issues, Oppenheimer was immediately appointed as the Chairman of
its General Advisory Committee (GAC) and left the directorship of
Los Alamos. From this position he advised on a number of
nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory
construction, and even international policy—though the GAC's advice
was not always implemented. After the 1954 security hearings,
Oppenheimer started to retreat to a simpler life. In 1957, he
purchased a piece of land on Gibney Beach on the island of St John
in the Virgin Islands. He built a spartan home on the beach, where
he would spend vacations, usually months at a time, with his wife
Kitty. Oppenheimer also spent a considerable amount of time sailing
with his wife. A chain smoker since early adulthood, Robert
Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 1965, and
after inconclusive surgery, underwent radiation treatment by cobalt
gamma rays and high energy electrons, then finally chemotherapy
late in 1966. These were not curative, and the tumor spread to his
palate, affecting his swallowing, hearing, and breathing. He died
at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Teller (January 15,
1908 – September 9, 2003) In 1986, he was awarded the United States
Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award. He was a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, and the American Nuclear Society.[10]
Among the honors he received were the Albert Einstein Award, the
Enrico Fermi Award, the Corvin Chain and the National
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Medal of Science. He was also named as part of the group of
"U.S. Scientists" who were Time magazine's People of the Year in
1960, and an asteroid, 5006 Teller, is named after him. He was
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W.
Bush less than two months before his death. He is a signatory of
the Oregon Petition. (“We urge the United States government to
reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto,
Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The
proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment,
hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health
and welfare of mankind. “) Shiro Ishii, Unit 731 and the Japanese
War Effort We have mentioned American feelings about the Japanese
and those of President Truman in particular. In the interest of
fairness, if should be pointed out the Japanese regarded the
conquered Asian peoples (Koreans, Chinese and others) as sub-human
and the Americans and Europeans as beasts. An example of this can
seen in the history of Unit 731, the Japanese version of Josef
Mengele’s experimental laboratory at Auschwitz: Unit 731
(Nana-san-ichi butai) was a covert biological and chemical warfare
research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that
undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible
for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese
personnel. Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin,
the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now
Northeast China). More than ten thousand people, from which around
600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai, were subjects of the
experimentation conducted by Unit 731. Prisoners of war were
subjected to vivisection without anesthesia. Human targets were
used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in
different positions and also to test flamethrowers. Prisoners were
injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations,
to study their effects. Plague fleas, infected clothing, and
infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets.
The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have
killed around 400,000 Chinese civilians. 25 Shiro Ishii, was the
commander of Unit 731. Arrested by the American occupation
authorities at the end of World War II, Ishii and Unit 731 leaders
received immunity in 1946 from war-crimes prosecution before the
Tokyo tribunal in exchange for germ warfare data based on human
experimentation. On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur wrote to
Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from
Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that
information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not
be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence."26 Ishii may or may not have
moved to Maryland for a time to conduct biological weapons research
for the US government. He eventually died in Japan at age 67. He
was never tried for any crimes.
25 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 26
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shir%C5%8D_Ishii#Immunity