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July 25, 2023 - June 24, 2025
He veered off into religion—Judaism—and came back bitterly disillusioned: “Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true. . . .
Einstein
Conditions worsened again for the Jews when the Empire was Christianized in the fourth century A.D. with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine; Christianity and Judaism competed, in a Darwinian sense, for the same Holy Land and the same holy books. Under systematic persecution only a small remnant of the Jewish people remained in Judea. The fantasy of Jews as a brotherhood of evil was invented during this era when Christianity fought its missionary way to dominance.
The English were the first to expel the Jews entirely. The Jews of England belonged to the Crown, which had systematically extracted their wealth through a special Exchequer to the Jews. By 1290 it had bled them dry. Edward I thereupon confiscated what little they had left and threw them out.
But the scurrilities of Mein Kampf, which on the evidence of their incoherence are not calculated manipulations but violent emotional outbursts, demonstrate that Hitler pathologically feared and hated the Jews. In black megalomania he masked an intelligent, industrious and much-persecuted people with the distorted features of his own terror. And that would make all the difference.
American Jews built the bomb
Universities were state institutions. Members of their faculties were therefore civil servants. The new law abruptly stripped a quarter of the physicists of Germany, including eleven who had earned or would earn Nobel Prizes, of their positions and their livelihood.676 It immediately affected some 1,600 scholars in all.677 Nor were academics dismissed by the Reich likely to find other work. To survive they would have to emigrate.
Theodor von Kármán departed first, from Aachen. He had pioneered aeronautical physics; the California Institute of Technology, then vigorously assembling its future reputation, wanted to include that specialty in its curriculum. Aviation philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim was prevailed upon to contribute. The Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, with a tenfoot wind tunnel, began operation under von Kármán’s direction in 1930.
He introduced a new type of force, the “weak interaction,” completing the four basic forces known in nature: gravity and electromagnetism, which operate at long range, and the strong force and Fermi’s weak force, which operate within nuclear dimensions. He introduced a new fundamental constant, now called the Fermi constant, determining it from existing experimental data.
Bohr went on to say that the common aim of all science was “the gradual removal of prejudices,” a complementary restorative to the usual pious characterization of science as a quest for incontrovertible truth.
To a greater extent than any other scientist of the twentieth century Bohr perceived the institution of science to which he dedicated his life to be a profoundly political force in the world. The purpose of science, he believed, was to set men free. Totalitarianism, in Hannah Arendt’s powerful image, drove toward “destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other.”923 It was entirely in character that Bohr, at a time of increasing danger, publicly opposed that drive with the individualistic and enriching discretions of complementarity.
If the large uranium nucleus split into two smaller nuclei, the smaller nuclei would weigh less in total than their common parent. How much less? That was a calculation she could easily work: about one-fifth the mass of a proton less. Process one-fifth of the mass of a proton through E = mc2. “One fifth of a proton mass,” Frisch exclaims, “was just equivalent to 200 MeV. So here was the source for that energy; it all fitted!”992
Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, “You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?” And I answered, “binary fission.” He wanted to know if you could call it “fission” alone, and I said you could. Frisch the sketch artist, good at visualizing as his aunt was not, had metamorphosed his liquid drop into a dividing living cell.1016 Thereby the name for a multiplication of life became the name for a violent process of destruction.
Make note
When I heard this I immediately saw that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted . . . then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.
Luis W. Alvarez, Ernest Lawrence’s tall, ice-blond protégé, a future Nobelist whose father was a prominent Mayo Clinic physician, read it at Berkeley sitting in a barber chair in Stevens Union having his hair cut. “So [I told] the barber to stop cutting my hair and I got right out of that barber chair and ran as fast as I could to the Radiation Lab . . . where my student Phil Abelson . . . had been [trying to identify] what transuranium elements were produced when neutrons hit uranium; he was so close to discovering fission that it was almost pitiful.”1069
We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects—hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments—can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar behavior of one type of atom. Spencer R. Weart
Many years later Szilard succinctly summed up the difference between his position and Fermi’s. “From the very beginning the line was drawn,” he said. “ . . . Fermi thought that the conservative thing was to play down the possibility that [a chain reaction] may happen, and I thought the conservative thing was to assume that it would happen and take all the necessary precautions.”1082
Szilard had known what the neutrons would mean since the day he crossed the street in Bloomsbury: the shape of things to come. “That night,” he recalled later, “there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.”1117
As far as Wigner was concerned, the time for such amateurism was over. He “strongly appealed to us,” says Szilard, “immediately to inform the United States government of these discoveries.”1118 It was “such a serious business that we could not assume responsibility for handling it.”1119
Pegram called Washington. Edison was unavailable; his office directed Pegram to Admiral Stanford C. Hooper, technical assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations. Hooper agreed to hear Fermi out. Pegram’s call was the first direct contact between the physicists of nuclear fission and the United States government.
Did this not mean that a nuclear explosive was certainly possible?” Not necessarily, Bohr countered.1123 “We tried to convince him,” Teller writes, “that we should go ahead with fission research but we should not publish the results. We should keep the results secret, lest the Nazis learn of them and produce nuclear explosions first. Bohr insisted that we would never succeed in producing nuclear energy and he also insisted that secrecy must never be introduced into physics.”1124
More crucial for Bohr was the issue of secrecy. He had worked for decades to shape physics into an international community, a model within its limited franchise of what a peaceful, politically united world might be. Openness was its fragile, essential charter, an operational necessity, as freedom of speech is an operational necessity to a democracy. Complete openness enforced absolute honesty: the scientist reported all his results, favorable and unfavorable, where all could read them, making possible the ongoing correction of error. Secrecy would revoke that charter and subordinate science as
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Brings up the innocence of scientists. Bohr thought that not sharing information was bad science and that it overshadowed the danger of sharing.
From the horrible weapon which they were about to urge the United States to develop, Szilard, Teller and Wigner—“the Hungarian conspiracy,” Merle Tuve was amused to call them—hoped for more than deterrence against German aggression.1194 They also hoped for world government and world peace, conditions they imagined bombs made of uranium might enforce.
They thought of mutual assured destruction
One of Roosevelt’s first acts was to appeal to the belligerents to refrain from bombing civilian populations. Revulsion against the bombing of cities had grown in the United States since at least the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1937.1198 When Spanish Fascists bombed Barcelona in March 1938, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had condemned the atrocity publicly: “No theory of war can justify such conduct,” he told reporters. “ . . . I feel that I am speaking for the whole American people.”1199 In June the Senate passed a resolution condemning the “inhuman bombing of civilian populations.”
So although Roosevelt had asked Congress for increased funds for long-range bombers nine months before, in appealing to the belligerents on September 1, 1939, he could still articulate the moral indignation of millions of Americans:
Read ROosevelt's letter condemning Arial bombing of civilians
A byproduct of the explosion—about 20 percent of its energy, they thought—would be radiation, the equivalent of “a hundred tons of radium” that would be “fatal to living beings even a long time after the explosion.” Effective protection from the weapon would be “hardly possible.”
Owing to the spreading of radioactive substances with the wind, the bomb could probably not be used without killing large numbers of civilians, and this may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use by this country. . . . 3. . . . It is quite conceivable that Germany is, in fact, developing this weapon. . . .
4. If one works on the assumption that Germany is, or will be, in the possession of this weapon, it must be realised that no shelters are available that would be effective and could be used on a large scale. The most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar weapon.
Thus in the first months of 1940 it was already clear to two intelligent observers that nuclear weapons would be weapons of mass destruction against which the only apparent defense w...
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‘If the scientists in the free countries will not make weapons to defend the freedom of their countries, then freedom will be lost.’ ” Teller believed Roosevelt was not proposing what scientists may do “but something that was our duty and that we must do—to work out the military problems, because without the work of the scientists the war and the world would be lost.”1325 Teller’s
Consistent with Martin Klaproth’s inspiration in 1789 to link his discovery of a new element with the recent discovery of the planet Uranus and with McMillan’s suggestion to extend the scheme to Neptune, Seaborg would name element 94 for Pluto, the ninth planet outward from the sun, discovered in 1930 and named for the Greek god of the underworld, a god of the earth’s fertility but also the god of the dead: plutonium.
“Bohr spoke highly of Compton as a physicist and a man,” a friend of the Danish laureate remembers, “but he felt that Compton’s philosophy was too primitive: ‘Compton would like to say that for God there is no uncertainty principle. That is nonsense. In physics we do not talk about God but about what we can know. If we are to speak of God we must do so in an entirely different manner.’ ”
Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller were not, however, the first to conceive of using a nuclear chain reaction to initiate a thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen. That distinction apparently belongs to Japanese physicist Tokutaro Hagiwara of the faculty of science of the University of Kyoto.
Thus at the outset of the U.S. atomic energy program scientists were summarily denied a voice in deciding the political and military uses of the weapons they were proposing to build.
Patriotism contributed to many decisions, but a deeper motive among the physicists, by the measure of their statements, was fear—fear of German triumph, fear of a thousand-year Reich made invulnerable with atomic bombs. And deeper even than fear was fatalism.
The bomb was latent in nature as a genome is latent in flesh. Any nation might learn to command its expression. The race was therefore not merely against Germany. As Roosevelt apparently sensed, the race was against time.
The United States was not yet committed to building an atomic bomb. But it was committed to exploring thoroughly whether or not an atomic bomb could be built. One man, Franklin Roosevelt, decided that commitment—secretly, without consulting Congress or courts. It seemed to be a military decision and he was Commander in Chief.
Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, had few illusions about the ultimate success of a war against the United States. He had studied at Harvard and served as a naval attaché in Washington and knew America’s strength. But if war had to come he meant “to give a fatal blow to the enemy fleet” when it was least expected, at the outset. By that act he hoped he could win his country six months to a year during which it might establish its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and dig in.
Yamamoto attacked Pearl Harbor to buy the Japanese 6 more months in Asia... damn.
If time, not money, was the crucial issue—in Conant’s words, “if the possession of the new weapon in sufficient quantities would be a determining factor in the war”—then “three months’ delay might be fatal.” It followed that all five methods should be pushed at once, even though “to embark on this Napoleonic approach to the problem would require the commitment of perhaps $500,000,000 and quite a mess of machinery.”1582
“There was considerable talk about our being absorbed into the Army [i.e., commissioned as officers] and what the advantages and disadvantages might be. There were vigorous objections from most of the people present.”
“Stated in abstract form, the trouble at Chicago arises out of the fact that the work is organized along somewhat authoritative [sic: authoritarian] rather than democratic lines.”1602 The visionary Hungarian physicist did not believe science could function by fiat.
Seaborg had chosen the abbreviation Pu rather than P1 partly to avoid confusion with platinum, Pt, but also “facetiously,” he says, “to create attention”—P.U. the old slang for putrid, something that raises a stink.1605)
Not to risk their loss, the bomb-project leaders were no longer allowed to fly.
Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or the hydrogen in the ocean? This would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!
It
Explanation Of whether the whole world would blow up in a bomb
(As a student Wilson had analyzed the motions of swimming fish and invented the competition swimming style known as the Dolphin; with it he had won in Olympics tryouts in 1938 but then suffered disqualification because the style was new and thus unauthorized, a purblindness on the part of the Olympics judges which may have conditioned Wilson’s attitude toward authority.)
He had just finished building the Pentagon, the most visible work of his career.
He had dreamed that atomic energy might substitute exploration for war, carrying men away from the narrow earth into the cosmos. He knew now that long before it propelled any such exodus it would increase war’s devastation and mire man deeper in fear. He blinked behind his glasses. It was the end of the beginning. It might well be the beginning of the end. “There was a crowd there and then Fermi and I stayed there alone. I shook hands with Fermi and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”
Szilard after chicago pile 1
“Several of the European-born were unhappy,” Laura Fermi notes, “because living inside a fenced area reminded them of concentration camps.”
Comment
The men wore white jumpsuits over British Army uniforms and parachuted with skis, supplies, a shortwave radio and eighteen sets of plastic explosives, one for each of the eighteen stainless-steel electrolysis cells of the High Concentration Plant—which happened to have been designed by a refugee physical chemist, Lief Tronstad, who was now responsible to the Norwegian High Command in London for intelligence and sabotage. Haukelid, a powerfully built mountaineer, says they weathered “one of the worst storms I have ever experienced in the mountains” to rendezvous some days later with the four
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It also, as the Japanese government had before Pearl Harbor, underestimated American dedication. Collective dedication was a pattern of Japanese culture more than of American. But Americans could summon it when challenged, and couple it with resources of talent and capital unmatched anywhere else in the world.
But a few among the men and women gathered at Los Alamos—certainly Robert Oppenheimer—sniffed a paradox. They proposed in fact to win the war with an application of their science. They dreamed further that by that same application they might forestall the next war, might even end war as a means of settling differences between nations. Which must in the long run have decisive consequences, one way or the other, for nationalism.
Interesting
