by Craig Nelson
This would become the party line of postwar German scientists for decades to come. After seeing the results of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many American and British scientists were anguished, and even those who had nothing to do with Los Alamos were disturbed that science had been used to create such a horrific weapon. There was no similar introspection, though, among the German scientists, who congratulated themselves on not having built a nuclear arsenal, and who never admitted to the outside world how much effort they had put into giving Hitler the ultimate threat. In his reworking of what had happened at his meeting with Bohr in Copenhagen, Heisenberg would expand on all these themes. Von Laue alone seemed to understand that Germany was in fact responsible, writing his son Theo that the “émigrés passionate hatred of Hitler was . . . the thing that set it all in motion.”
All this time, Leo Szilard remained in Chicago designing traditional and breeder reactors, while nearly everyone he knew was in Los Alamos, Hanford, or Oak Ridge. Since he wasn’t part of the immense no-thought-but-Trinity rush to successfully engineer the first nuclear weapons, he had time to think, and in March 1944 he tried to convince Vannevar Bush that the nation’s leaders needed to prepare for a future of “armed peace,” with several countries having atomic arsenals able to stalemate each other. Bush, and the others Leo approached, weren’t interested in what seemed so distant, but of course international stalemate would become the Cold War tenet Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD—the seemingly crazy notion that would keep the Cold War cold.
The only French resident of the Hill, Françoise Ulam, was nursing her baby when she heard Rabi playing “La Marseillaise” outside her window on his comb. It was August 24, 1944, and Paris had been liberated.
While pretending to be a scientist divorced from the politics of the real world in Vichy Paris, Frédéric Joliot made explosives and radio equipment for the Resistance and became president of the National Front. At the same time, he proved how radioactive iodine could be used as a tracer for the thyroid gland. After liberation, he was given the Legion of Honor, the Croix de Guerre, elected to the French Academy of Sciences, and named head of the French Atomic Energy Commission. But in the spring of 1942, Joliot had become a central-committee member of France’s Communist Party, and during the Cold War, both he and Irène were (like Oppenheimer in America) purged from the French AEC. Beginning in 1953, Frédéric began suffering from severe hepatitis, perhaps incurred by radiation poisoning. Irène was working with polonium in 1946 when it exploded, showering her with a staggering dose of radiation, which led to her death of leukemia—the same disease that had killed her mother—at the Curie Hospital on March 17, 1956. Two years later on August 14, 1958, Frédéric would succumb to polonium-induced liver cirrhosis. The Curies’ great ally, German chemist Friedrich Giesel, lived to seventy-five before dying of lung cancer. His lungs were so suffused with radon that when he exhaled, it would set his gold-leaf electroscopes aquiver.
On November 16, 1945, Otto Hahn, still interned and monitored at Farm Hall, was told that he had won the 1944 Nobel in Chemistry for discovering fission, and the rewriting of Lise Meitner out of scientific history began in earnest. During the Nazi era, Hahn could never have admitted that his momentous discovery was made through correspondence with a Jewess. By the end of the war, the chemist would deny the whole of Meitner’s career, and of their collaboration. He wrote on August 8, 1945, “As long as Prof Meitner was in Germany the fission of uranium was out of the question. It was considered impossible,” and the press surrounding Hahn’s Nobel referred repeatedly to Lise as Otto’s assistant. But it wasn’t solely Hahn’s doing. In Sweden, many believed that her boss Siegbahn’s jealousy of Meitner’s international stature kept the prize from her, so much so that her friends became convinced that, if she had emigrated anywhere but Sweden, she would have been a laureate.
On August 9, 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt, working to begin the United Nations, arranged to interview Lise Meitner on NBC radio. After an introduction that compared her historic importance to Marie Cure, Eleanor and Lise both expressed the need for world cooperation, with Meitner calling on women to help create a lasting peace and a responsible use of nuclear power: “They are obliged to try, so far as they can, to prevent another war.” Later that day, Nagasaki was bombed. Meitner’s refusal to then be interviewed by an invasive press led to a fanciful story, beginning with William Laurence in the Saturday Evening Post, of the “fleeing Jewess” who stole the secret of atomic bombs from Hitler and gave it to America. Magazine and newspaper articles now regularly referred to her as “the Jewish mother of the atomic bomb,” even though she had nothing to do with any weapons and was only Jewish in the eyes of German racists.
On January 27, 1946, Meitner followed in Curie’s footsteps with a six-month lecture tour of the United States, the National Press Club’s Woman of the Year award, and a meal with Harry Truman, who joked, “Ah, so you’re the little lady who got us into this mess!” Her lectures included such advice as that a professional woman needed to be well groomed and “never to let her petticoat show.” She saw, for the first time in many years, her sisters Lola in Washington and Frida in New York, was reunited with her nephew and historic partner, Otto Robert, in Los Alamos, and appeared in a San Francisco News crossword puzzle and an American Scholar sonnet. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had a biopic developed, The Beginning of the End, and showed her the script. She told Frisch that it was “nonsense from the first word to the last . . . based on the stupid newspaper story that I left Germany with the bomb in my purse.” When she refused, MGM raised its offer; she threatened to sue, saying, “I would rather walk naked down Broadway.”
Otto Hahn was released from internment in February of 1946 to become the new president of KWI, which during the Allied occupation was renamed the Max Planck Institute, as it is called to this day. During his Nobel ceremony in 1946, he repeatedly insisted that Germans were victims, first of the Nazis, and now of the Allies. The Allies policing of Germany, according to Hahn among others, was the same as Hitler’s takeover of Poland. In all his public statements as a laureate, he never once mentioned Meitner and gave less than 10 percent of the prize moneys to Strassmann. He did give Lise some money, and she immediately donated it to Einstein’s Emergency Committee of Concerned Scientists. As one biographer described it, Hahn “was Germany’s anointed postwar scientific icon, the decent German, great scientist, Nobel laureate, discoverer of fission but against the bomb, nationalist but never a Nazi, decorated veteran of WWI, personable, affable, witty, photogenic, a symbol of all that was good about the pre- and post-war Germany, made an honorary member of nearly every scientific society on earth, his face on a stamp, his name on buildings, institutes, schools, libraries, trains, a nuclear-powered ship, a moon crater, coins, an element, and an Antarctic island.” Meitner meanwhile, who had begun and headed KWI’s physics section for twenty-one years, was now depicted as his assistant. It was so egregious that on June 22, 1953, she wrote Hahn directly: “After the last 15 years which I wouldn’t wish on any good friend, shall my scientific past also be taken from me? Is that fair? And why is it happening?” He never replied. She wrote to sister Lola about Hahnchen that “perhaps one cannot be such a charming person and also very deep.” Niels’s wife, Margrethe, said to Lise on February 8, 1948, “It is a difficult problem with the Germans, very difficult to come to a deep understanding with them, as they are always first of all sorry for themselves.” Meitner finally wrote a summation on June 27, 1945, and gave it to Moe Berg, who promised to take it to the interned Hahn, but never delivered it:
That is indeed the misfortune of Germany, that all of you lost your standards of justice and fairness. You yourself told me in March 1938 that Hörlein had told you that horrible things would be done to the Jews. He knew about all the crimes that had been planned and would later be carried out; in spite of that he was a member of the Party and you still regarded him—in spite of it—as a very respectable man, and let him guide you in your behavior toward your best friend [me
aning Meitner]. . . . All of you also worked for Nazi Germany, and never even attempted passive resistance. Of course, to save your troubled consciences, you occasionally helped an oppressed person; still, you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there was never a sound of protest. I must write you this because so much of what happens to you and the third Reich now depends on your recognizing what all of you allowed to happen. . . . I believe, as do many others, that one possibility would be for you to make a statement, namely that you know you bear responsibility for the occurrences as a result of your passiveness, that you feel it is necessary to help out in making reparations for the occurrences as far as that is even possible. . . . You really can’t expect the world to pity Germany. We have heard recently about the unfathomable atrocities of the concentration camps that exceeds everything we had feared. When I heard a very objective report prepared by the British and Americans for British radio about Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, I began to wail aloud and couldn’t sleep all night. If only you had seen the people who came here from the camps. They should force a man like Heisenberg, and millions of others with him, to see the tortured people. His performance in Denmark in 1941 cannot be forgotten.
Perhaps you remember that when I was still in Germany (and I know today that it was not only stupid, but a great injustice that I didn’t leave immediately), I often said to you, “As long as just we [the Jewish people] and not you have sleepless nights, it won’t get any better in Germany.” But you never had any sleepless nights: you didn’t want to see—it was too disturbing. I could prove it to you with many examples, large and small. Please believe me that everything I write here is an attempt to help you.
In his memoirs, Hahn would call Meitner “a bitter, disappointed woman.”
After the war, Lise retired to Cambridge, joining Otto Robert. She died at the age of eighty-nine on October 27, 1968, never receiving the Nobel she so obviously deserved. But in 1997, element 109 was named meitnerium for her, and she is memorialized with a lunar crater. Frisch oversaw her England headstone as a rejoinder to both sides of the war. Apart from her equation for fission, it read, “A physicist who never lost her humanity.”
The arrival of Niels Bohr in the United States triggered what would become the great political battle in American nuclear physics: Do you believe in arms race, or arms control? Robert Oppenheimer: “Bohr at Los Alamos was marvelous. He took a very lively technical interest. But his real function, I think for almost all of us, was not the technical one. He made the enterprise seem hopeful, when many were not free of misgiving. Bohr spoke with contempt of Hitler, who had tried to enslave Europe for a millennium. His own high hope that the outcome would be good, that the objectivity, the cooperation, of the sciences would play a helpful part, we all wanted to believe.” In his office, Oppenheimer kept an April 2, 1944, letter Bohr had written to President Roosevelt about the conversations he’d had with Frankfurter and Halifax in Washington on his way to Los Alamos, that when it came to nuclear weapons research, the Soviets would have to be included, or the Anglo-Americans would risk a postwar global nuclear arms race: “It is already evident that we are presented with one of the greatest triumphs of science and technique, destined deeply to influence the future of mankind. . . . A weapon of unparalleled power is being created which will completely change all future conditions of warfare. . . . Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security. . . . Knowledge is itself the basis of civilization [though] any widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes an increased responsibility on individuals and nations to the possibilities it gives for shaping the conditions of human life.”
Historian Jim Baggott: “Atomic weapons have similar complementary properties, Bohr now realized. Under one set of circumstances, atomic weapons heralded an arms race leading, perhaps inevitably, to nothing less than the destruction of human civilization. At the same time, under different circumstances, atomic weapons heralded the end of war, because in a war fought with atomic weapons there could be no victor. If political, cultural or religious differences were to be settled without an end of the world, no-win scenario, then the advent of atomic weapons meant that recourse to war would no longer be thinkable. Differences would have to be settled in other, less violent, ways. The choice was plain. Arms race or international arms control?”
Physicist David Hawkins: “The implication was that Roosevelt had fully understood. And this was a great source of joy and optimism. . . . We all lived under this illusion, you see, for the rest of our time at Los Alamos, that Roosevelt had understood.” In fact, at the same time that Bohr was traveling to Los Alamos, Igor Kurchatov arrived in Moscow to begin the Soviet atomic weapons program. Within a year, on August 20, 1945, the USSR had begun a Special State Committee on Problem Number One, headed by the NKVD’s Beria. Problem Number One was the creation of a Soviet nuclear arsenal to match the weaponry of a postwar United States.
From their first encounters with Joseph Stalin to the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, it seemed as if most American leaders considered their counterparts at the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics simultaneously powerful, menacing, backward, and unsophisticated. In fact, in the fields of physics, mathematics, and chemistry, for almost the whole of the twentieth century Russia was as advanced as any country besides Germany, and often far more sophisticated than the United States. In the wake of the Great War, Lenin proclaimed, “The war taught us much, not only that people suffered, but especially the fact that those who have the best technology, organization, and discipline, and the best machines, emerge on top. . . . It is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed.” A mineralogist trained under Curie’s Radium Institute, Vladimir I. Vernadski, told the Russian Academy of Sciences as early as 1910 that radioelements meant “new sources of atomic energy . . . exceeding by millions of times all the sources of energy that the human imagination has envisaged.”
Immediately after the Joliot-Curies demonstrated artificial irradiation, Petrograd’s Institute of Physics and Technology (Fiztekh) began a nuclear physics department, selecting as its leader the thirty-one-year-old Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov. Like Fermi, Kurchatov had a chance meeting with a physics textbook that set the course of his life, but in his case it was Accomplishments of Modern Engineering, written by Orso Corbino, who played such a signature role in Fermi’s career. Also like Enrico, Igor “worked harder than anyone else. He never gave himself airs, never let his accomplishments go to his head,” as one colleague described him, and by 1934 Kurchatov had built the only cyclotron in the world outside Lawrence’s Republic. He was nicknamed the Beard because he had stopped shaving until Russia was victorious over Germany, which was distinctive as only old men had beards in post-Peter-the-Great Russia.
Soviet scientists were just as fearful of an atomic Hitler as their American émigré counterparts. Flerov: “It seemed to us that if someone could make a nuclear bomb, it would be neither Americans, English, or French but Germans. The Germans had brilliant chemistry; they had technology for the production of metallic uranium; they were involved in experiments on the centrifugal separation of uranium isotopes. And, finally, the Germans possessed heavy water and reserves of uranium. Our first impression was that Germans were capable of making the thing. It was obvious what the consequences would be if they succeeded.”
Beria wanted to hire one of Russia’s most famous scientists to head an atomic program, but Stalin disagreed, saying (as Groves might have about Oppenheimer) “that it was necessary to promote a young, not well-known scientist for whom such a post would be . . . his life work.” On February 11, 1943, Kurchatov became the Soviet Oppie, and in March 1943, as part of Lend-Lease, the Soviet Purchasing Commission placed orders for uranium oxide and uranium nitrate, which Groves authorized, but only after being pressured by the Lend-Lease Administration. “Where that influence came f
rom,” Groves told a congressional committee after the war, “you can guess as well as I can. It was certainly prevalent in Washington, and it was prevalent throughout the country, and the only spot I know of that was distinctly anti-Russian at an early period was the Manhattan Project. . . . There was never any doubt about [our attitude] from sometime along about October 1942.” Then in early 1945, the Russians cleared Czechoslovakia of Germans and began buying pitchblende from Joachimsthal—the same Bohemian source used by the Curies. On August 12, 1945, Henry D. Smyth published “Atomic Energy for Military Purposes,” which deliberately left out crucial details, but the Soviets were able to use the materials supplied by Fuchs, Greenglass, Hall, and their other agents to reinstate those details. When they were finished, World War II was essentially over and the Cold War, with its nuclear arms race so long predicted and feared by Leo Szilard and Niels Bohr, had begun.
In early 1945, German surrender seemed inevitable, yet in the same period, 110,000 Japanese died defending Okinawa. Day after day, the mesa was rocked with explosions from the canyons, rattling windows and filling the air with the smell of pine and ordnance.
When Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, Oppenheimer held a memorial service for the community and said in his speech about hearing that the president was gone, “Many of us looked with deep trouble to the future; many of us felt less certain that our works would be to a good end; all of us were reminded of how precious a thing human greatness is. We have been living through years of great evil, and of great terror. Roosevelt has been our president, our commander in chief, and, in an old and unperverted sense, our leader. All over the world men have looked to him for guidance and have seen symbolized in him their hope that the evils of this time would not be repeated; that the terrible sacrifices which have been made, and those that still have to be made, would lead to a world more fit for human habitation. . . . It is right that we should dedicate ourselves to the hope that his good works will not have ended with his death.”