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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