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Authors: Brian Van DeMark
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PREFACE
This is the story of nine men who helped create the atomic bomb, which forever changed their lives and the world. Their story is a compelling one, filled with elements of great drama, emotion, irony, and tragedy. It is not surprising, therefore, that the story of the bomb’s creation has been told often, and well, by others much more knowledgeable about nuclear physics than I. 1 My aim is different. It is to explore the human story behind the atomic bomb by probing its creators’ thoughts, feelings, and judgments. What motivated them? How did they relate to one another? How did they deal with the political and moral issues posed by nuclear weapons? Put simply: Why did they do it, and what did it mean to them?
People usually think about what the atomic scientists did, instead of who they were, because they do not see them as human beings with personal histories and emotional lives, hearts—sometimes broken—as well as heads. Scientists themselves have contributed to this popular image. Very often they have represented themselves as calmly rational and coldly objective—above human frailty and unaware of man’s condition. But scientists are first and foremost people, people who know just how imaginative and human an enterprise science really is.
All of this suggests that the history the atomic scientists made is not as simple as people have usually portrayed it. Numerous myths and caricatures have grown up around the atomic scientists (and the bomb) since 1945. Too often these men (and they were almost all men) have been flat screens on which one-dimensional fictions and fantasies were projected. But the atomic scientists were not all good; they were not all bad. To understand them is to recognize their good intentions and at the same time to confront the doubtful morality of their achievement. Good history does not fear ambiguity, nor does it reduce complex and sometimes contradictory individuals to simple stereotypes.
Physics, like everything that is potentially constructive, can be put to destructive ends. It has two faces, benign and threatening, bringing blessings and curses. Each of the atomic scientists, like each of us, can make imperfect choices that seem reasonable—even responsible—in the context of the times but are impossible to undo once the course is set. They, like us, do things they think are right at the time, and later come to regret them. They, like us, have rich human stories of ambition and disappointment, achievement and failure, cooperation and rivalry, jealousy and revenge. Their story helps illuminate how people deal with circumstances, the legacy of creation, and an imperfect world that sometimes forges good from evil and evil from good. Their story has moral reverberation, that strange and haunting quality generated by a tale that is not always pleasant but that entrances us because it has an effect beyond itself. This effect may be as simple as inspiring us to do something practical about the legacy of their creation, or at least to feel that we should.
Many physicists contributed to the making of the atomic bomb. Clearly, not all of them can be treated, not even in a big book like this one. I therefore used three criteria to select the subjects of this study: 1. those who contributed centrally to the bomb’s creation; 2. those who voiced moral and political judgments about the bomb; and 3. those whose views represented a range of opinions and responses. Based on these criteria, I chose to write about the following nine physicists, in alphabetical order:
Hans Bethe
Niels Bohr
Arthur Compton
Enrico Fermi
Ernest Lawrence
Robert Oppenheimer
I. I. Rabi
Leo Szilard
Edward Teller 2
This book treats these nine physicists as a group rather than as discrete subjects. It seeks to integrate what might otherwise be a string of disparate biographies into something like a history of a scientific generation, and to do so without slighting either the individual physicist or the
This is the story of nine men who helped create the atomic bomb, which forever changed their lives and the world. Their story is a compelling one, filled with elements of great drama, emotion, irony, and tragedy. It is not surprising, therefore, that the story of the bomb’s creation has been told often, and well, by others much more knowledgeable about nuclear physics than I. 1 My aim is different. It is to explore the human story behind the atomic bomb by probing its creators’ thoughts, feelings, and judgments. What motivated them? How did they relate to one another? How did they deal with the political and moral issues posed by nuclear weapons? Put simply: Why did they do it, and what did it mean to them?
People usually think about what the atomic scientists did, instead of who they were, because they do not see them as human beings with personal histories and emotional lives, hearts—sometimes broken—as well as heads. Scientists themselves have contributed to this popular image. Very often they have represented themselves as calmly rational and coldly objective—above human frailty and unaware of man’s condition. But scientists are first and foremost people, people who know just how imaginative and human an enterprise science really is.
All of this suggests that the history the atomic scientists made is not as simple as people have usually portrayed it. Numerous myths and caricatures have grown up around the atomic scientists (and the bomb) since 1945. Too often these men (and they were almost all men) have been flat screens on which one-dimensional fictions and fantasies were projected. But the atomic scientists were not all good; they were not all bad. To understand them is to recognize their good intentions and at the same time to confront the doubtful morality of their achievement. Good history does not fear ambiguity, nor does it reduce complex and sometimes contradictory individuals to simple stereotypes.
Physics, like everything that is potentially constructive, can be put to destructive ends. It has two faces, benign and threatening, bringing blessings and curses. Each of the atomic scientists, like each of us, can make imperfect choices that seem reasonable—even responsible—in the context of the times but are impossible to undo once the course is set. They, like us, do things they think are right at the time, and later come to regret them. They, like us, have rich human stories of ambition and disappointment, achievement and failure, cooperation and rivalry, jealousy and revenge. Their story helps illuminate how people deal with circumstances, the legacy of creation, and an imperfect world that sometimes forges good from evil and evil from good. Their story has moral reverberation, that strange and haunting quality generated by a tale that is not always pleasant but that entrances us because it has an effect beyond itself. This effect may be as simple as inspiring us to do something practical about the legacy of their creation, or at least to feel that we should.
Many physicists contributed to the making of the atomic bomb. Clearly, not all of them can be treated, not even in a big book like this one. I therefore used three criteria to select the subjects of this study: 1. those who contributed centrally to the bomb’s creation; 2. those who voiced moral and political judgments about the bomb; and 3. those whose views represented a range of opinions and responses. Based on these criteria, I chose to write about the following nine physicists, in alphabetical order:
Hans Bethe
Niels Bohr
Arthur Compton
Enrico Fermi
Ernest Lawrence
Robert Oppenheimer
I. I. Rabi
Leo Szilard
Edward Teller 2
This book treats these nine physicists as a group rather than as discrete subjects. It seeks to integrate what might otherwise be a string of disparate biographies into something like a history of a scientific generation, and to do so without slighting either the individual physicist or the
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