Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

Most of the scientists who found refuge in the United States before the war made their permanent home there. Albert Einstein continued to live quietly in Princeton, walking slowly each morning to the Institute of Advanced Study, then under Oppenheimer’s direction. Suggestions that his letter to President Roosevelt was the catalyst for the bomb troubled him. He told his secretary, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger. Not a single finger!” Einstein died in 1955.

Hans Bethe returned from Los Alamos to the Cornell physics department. In 1967 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on energy production in stars.

Leo Szilard focused his energies on trying to halt the arms race. He urged the sharing of technology as a way of fostering peace and devised methods for checking that nuclear arms control agreements were being honored. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 he fled to Geneva for safety. From there he typically tried to contact President Khrushchev to urge dialogue with the United States. Szilard died two years later.

Of the British team that contributed to the bomb, James Chadwick was knighted in 1945 and returned to Liverpool University. Chadwick’s role had been mentally and physically stressful. A perceptive colleague observed that he “had plumbed such depths of moral decision as more fortunate men are never called upon to peer into.” In 1948 he moved back to Cambridge University as master of Gonville and Caius College. On his recommendation William Penney took charge of the British atomic weapons program—effectively his successor. The first British atomic bomb was exploded in 1952. Chadwick died in 1974.

The authors of the catalytic Frisch-Peierls memorandum both returned to Britain to become university professors at Cambridge and Oxford respectively. Frisch’s much-loved aunt, Lise Meitner, moved to Cambridge in old age to be near him. She died in 1968, just a few weeks after Otto Hahn and shortly before her ninetieth birthday. The inscription on her gravestone in an English country churchyard reads, “A physicist who never lost her humanity.” In 1994 a new element—109 in the periodic table—was named “meit­nerium” in her honor.

After the war Joseph Rotblat tried vainly to discover the fate of his wife in Warsaw and concluded she must have perished in the Holocaust; he never remarried. Rotblat returned to Liverpool University to work once more with James Chadwick before becoming professor of physics at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, studying nuclear medicine and campaigning for nuclear nonproliferation. He worked with Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and others to found the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, whose aim was to bring scientists of the rival nuclear powers closer together. In 1995, at the age of eighty-six, Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and he was knighted three years later.

Niels Bohr went home to Copenhagen, where he resumed control of his institute. He continued to campaign for scientific openness and the peaceful applications of nuclear power and against the arms race, remaining, until his death in 1962, one of the most respected senior statesmen of the scientific community.

Klaus Fuchs was finally arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950. By then he was a senior scientist at the Harwell atomic research establishment near Oxford. He was unmasked following the FBI’s cracking of the Soviet codes. For the first time they were able to decipher messages between the United States and the Soviet Union that they had intercepted during the war. One of these messages was a report on the Manhattan Project by Fuchs. This, in itself, did not mean Fuchs was a Soviet agent, but detailed correlations between Fuchs’s movements and the passage of information revealed the truth. The evidence of Fuchs’s spying thoroughly alarmed the U.S. authorities, who feared that he might have passed H-bomb technology to the Soviets. This evidence of espionage in the heart of Los Alamos fueled the suspicion that would fall on Oppenheimer, though no connection between Oppenheimer and Fuchs’s spying was ever established by the FBI. [44] FBI investigations also led to the unmasking of Fuchs’s handler, Harry Gold, as well as David Green­glass and the Rosenbergs. Alerted by the FBI, British counterintelligence coaxed a confession from Fuchs. And a confession was important; had Fuchs denied the charges at his trial, the British and Americans would have had to produce evidence revealing to the Russians that their codes had been broken.

Colleagues and friends were shocked. Rudolf Peierls learned of Fuchs’s arrest from a journalist. It seemed “quite unbelievable.” He hurried to Brixton prison to ensure that Fuchs had proper legal representation. There Fuchs confessed to Peierls that he now regretted his actions as he had since “learned to appreciate [the British] way of life and values.” When Peierls expressed surprise that Fuchs, “as a sceptical scientist… had been willing to accept the Marxist orthodoxy,” Fuchs replied, “You must remember what I went through under the Nazis. Besides, it was always my intention, when I had helped the Russians to take over everything, to get up and tell them what is wrong with their system.” Peierls was “shaken by the arrogance and naiveté of this statement.”

Fuchs was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. With time off for good behavior, he served only two-thirds of that sentence. To his regret the British government revoked his citizenship, and on his release in 1959 Fuchs went to East Germany to become deputy director of a nuclear research laboratory. By a strange irony, his boss, Heinz Barwich, later defected to the West. Fuchs’s powers of self-delusion remained undiminished. A visiting Western scientist wrote, “I have never before known a person who possesses such a marvellous ability to think in abstract terms who is at the same time so helpless when it comes to either observe or evaluate reality.” Fuchs died in 1988.

The interned German scientists were eventually returned to Germany in early 1946 and, soon after, released back to their scientific work. As he had hoped and anticipated, Werner Heisenberg became an influential figure in West German postwar science. He promoted the peaceful uses of nuclear power, opposed nuclear weapons, and helped launch CERN, the European center for nuclear research. From 1946 until his retirement in 1970 he headed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. [45] The Max Planck institutes were the postwar successors to the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes. Nevertheless, his wartime behavior—especially his visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen—dogged him, and he became involved in a heated dispute with Sam Goudsmit over allegations in the latter’s book about the nature of Germany’s wartime atomic program. He died in 1976.

Heisenberg’s close colleague Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker also had a successful postwar career in physics and philosophy. His younger brother, Richard, who had defended their father at the Nuremberg war crimes trials—where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to prison—became president of Germany from 1984 to 1994.

Otto Hahn, after rebutting unfounded allegations that he had been a Nazi, also helped shape West Germany’s science policy, surviving an assassination attempt in 1951 by a frenzied, frustrated inventor. He remained in touch with Lise Meitner but, despite the changed political circumstances, never publicly acknowledged her contribution toward the discovery of fission—or Otto Frisch’s. His Nobel Prize acceptance speech made no mention of either, and in his autobiography he gave himself the full credit for the discovery. Hans Bethe thought his attitude “very nasty.” Meitner remained fond of Hahn and grateful to him for helping save her from the Nazis. However, she believed him guilty of “suppressing the past,” recognizing with bleak clarity that “I am part of that suppressed past.” Hahn died in 1968.