Table Of ContentBRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS
ROBERT JUNGK
A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists
The story of the moral and political temptations of the first atomic scientists
'One of the most interesting books I have ever read. It is more exciting than any novel
and, at the same time, is packed with information .. it's a tragic story of a group of men
with quite exceptional intellectual gifts, idealistic and single-minded in youth, but
gradually seduced by a mixture of good motives and bad to the service of the Devil. The
harm they have done cannot be undone by them. If it can be undone, this must be through
the public opinion of ordinary men and women throughout the world'
- Bertrand Russell
'Should be compulsory reading' - Spectator
Introduction
WHY are we interested only in what scientists do and not in what they are?
The question first came to my notice in an article by the American educationalist
George N. Schuster, and it has never suite left my mind. It was the question that
led me to begin the long journey from continent to continent, country to country,
atomic physicist to atomic physicist, and that produced this book.
I must confess that it fell on fertile ground. In August 1949, a few minutes
before my bus left at the end of my first visit to the American atomic city of Los
Alamos, a scientist from Central Europe who had lived there for several years
suddenly made a staggering personal confession. He said, ‘What an
extraordinary and incomprehensible thing! My whole youth was absolutely
devoted to truth, freedom, and peace; and yet fate has seen fit to deposit me here
where my freedom of movement is limited; the truth that I am trying to discover
is locked behind massive gates; and the ultimate aim of my work has to be the
construction of the most hideous weapons of war. Could fate have been more
perverse?'
After this I often found myself thinking about the life led by atomic scientists,
and I later tried to tell the tragic story of one of their number in the form of a
novel. To give the novel the necessary accuracy, I had to study the background
against which these men lead their lives. The first important nuclear physicist
whom I met was Professor Fritz Houtermans of Berne University. This was a
piece of good fortune, for Professor Houtermans - unlike many of his colleagues,
who are more at home with formulae than story-telling and with the future than
the past - had a gift for making his stories lively and exciting, whether they were
about the good old days in Gottingen, the dark years of his captivity in Russian
prisons, or the years of the Third Reich, when he and some of his colleagues had
debated how they might prevent the great nuclear discoveries from being abused
in the construction of bombs.
I shall never forget my conversations with him. They took place at night in a
Berne University laboratory. Every now and again our talks would be
interrupted, while the Professor checked a measuring device which was ticking
in the next room. (He was using it to examine the uranium content of alpine
granite.) We drank coffee made in laboratory bottles and as the night advanced it
became more and more obvious that no novel could be as revealing, as
penetrating, or as exciting as a factual account of the atomic scientists' tragedy
based on their own stories and on documents. By the time I left Professor
Houtermans I knew that I should never find the raw material for my book in my
own imagination. I should only get it by subjecting all those who had lived
through these dramatic events which had shaped our age, and were still
available, to the most detailed questioning.
The decision was easily taken but not nearly so easy to act on. Although there
were many - almost too many - accounts of the scientific and technical history of
the development of nuclear science, hardly anything had been published about
the human and moral problems. I therefore had to rely even more heavily than I
had planned on personal accounts.
Some of the scientists whom I asked for an interview agreed at once, but others
made difficulties. Unfortunately I find it difficult to force myself upon people
because I do not like to waste even short periods of important men's time - a
quality that is no great advantage to a reporter; but now my task was so
important that I had to forget my inhibitions. I followed one of my heroes
through literally half a dozen European countries and he refused to see me time
and again. Finally, I was able to have a long conversation with him during a
physicists' conference in America. Luckily for me there was a particularly boring
paper being read and the great man chose the lesser evil of a walk with me. In
the end he turned out to be infinitely more forthcoming than I had dared to
hope.
There were three barriers that I had to overcome in almost every one of my
conversations. The first was the fear that a remark might offend colleagues who
were still alive. One nuclear scientist expressed this fear particularly strikingly.
He said, with a laugh: 'I can't tell you what really happened unless you can
deposit a million dollars in my bank, because, if I did, when your book appeared
I should have to retire from nuclear circles for the rest of my life and work
privately!' Fortunately I am not a physicist, so, as an outsider, I am in a position
to write down what I discovered without any fear of boycott or reprisals by
angry colleagues or Government departments. I was also able to promise those
who were uncertain that, where they wanted me to, I would withhold the source
of items of information.
Another objection that was often raised was that I could not possibly
understand the truth about their story, because I was not a member of the
'physicists' family circle'. There was perhaps some truth in this when I began my
researches, but the deeper I got into my subject the more clearly I began to see
the position that these men occupied in a wider personal and historical context.
Indeed, I finally acquired a broader view of the way in which the destinies of this
vitally important and influential group had been shaped than had most of those
who told me their own experiences and opinions; for, with only very few
exceptions, they of course had only seen their own little part of the total pattern
of events, whereas I, the chronicler, was familiar with a host of details and thus
had a broader view of the interplay of many different events that had in many
cases not been grasped by the protagonists themselves. Often a single
conversation with a man I had gone to see was not enough. Facts that I got from
a second and a third might lead me back to my first informant for further
clarification of certain points that he had thought unimportant because of his
ignorance of the whole context and so had not bothered to mention.
The third difficulty which I encountered was an attitude shared by many of the
scientists: that their personal, human story was unimportant and only their
actual achievements counted. This was the attitude that produced many of the
pangs of conscience and the tragedies described in this book. Any scientist who
believes that he and his colleagues are mere 'tools of discovery' whose personal
character, ambitions, hopes, and doubts are insignificant is guilty of unscientific
thinking, for he is disregarding an important, perhaps the decisive, element in
scientific experiment - namely his own nature - or labouring under the delusion
that he can arbitrarily eliminate that element.
Nothing less than this arbitrary and unnatural separation of scientific research
from the reality of the individual personality could have allowed the creation of
such monstrosities as the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. I shall never
forget the picture of the brilliant mathematician whom I saw wallowing along
the street during my last visit to Los Alamos in 1956. His face was wreathed in a
smile of almost angelic beauty. He looked as though his inner gaze were fixed
upon a world of harmonies. But in fact, as he told me later, he was thinking
about a mathematical problem whose solution was essential to the construction
of a new type of H-bomb.
In the course of our subsequent conversations it turned out that this man had
never watched the trial explosion of any of the bombs which he had helped to
devise. He had never visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki even though he had been
invited. He even refused to look at pictures of the destruction wrought in these
two cities. To him, research for nuclear weapons was just pure higher
mathematics, untrammelled by blood, poison, and destruction. All that, he said,
was none of his business.
There are many scientists who no longer think as this man does. They
appreciate that they are not mere brains, but complete human beings, with all the
weaknesses, the grandeur, and the responsibility that this implies. I have tried to
explore the genesis of their great crisis of conscience and their attempt to solve it,
and then to give as truthful a picture as all the contradictory accounts on which it
is based allow. The attention that my book has aroused in the many countries
where it has appeared suggests that the human destiny of these scientists, who
are the great reformers and innovators of our age, is no less interesting than their
achievements. As one reader put it in a letter to me: 'In our age it is the scientists
who stand in the aura of tragedy like the kings of old. If Shakespeare had written
Hamlet in our decade he would not have made him a prince but a nuclear
scientist!'
I
A TIME OF CHANGE 1918-23
IT is said that during the last year of the First World War Ernest Rutherford,
already famous for his work on atomic research, failed to attend a meeting of the
British committee of experts appointed to advise on new systems of defence
against enemy Submarines. When he was censured for his absence, the vigorous
New Zealander retorted without embarrassment: 'Talk softly, please. I have been
engaged in experiments which suggest that the atom can be artificially
disintegrated. If it is true, it is of far greater importance than a war.
In June 1919, while the attempt was being made in Versailles and other
suburbs of Paris to draft peace treaties designed to put an end to the four bloody
years of war, Rutherford published in the Philosophical Magazine certain studies
of his experiments. They showed conclusively that he had succeeded in making
an ancient dream of mankind come true. By bombarding the element of nitrogen
with tiny alpha particles he had transformed it at various times into oxygen and
hydrogen.
The "transmutation of matter' for which the alchemists had searched so long
was now a fact. But those precursors of modern science, who took the whole
world for their province, considered not only the material but also the moral
consequences of such an undertaking. 'Deny the powerful and their warriors
entry to your workshops,' they warned the coming generations of research
workers. 'For such people misuse the holy mysteries in the service of power.
Rutherford's well-known explanations of the process of transforming the
nitrogen atom contain no such warning. It would have transgressed the valued
principles of the twentieth century. Philosophical considerations by the modern
scientist of the incidental effects of his discoveries would be regarded as
improper, even if his studies appeared in the Philosophical Magazine. Such has
been the rule ever since the scientific academies of the seventeenth century
determined that no discussions of political, moral, or theological problems
should be allowed at their meetings.
As early as 1919, however, the isolation of scientific research had become a
working hypothesis only, which actual conditions had already rendered out of
date. The war which had just ended had shown only too clearly, by its use of
weapons made possible through the practical application of scientific
discoveries, the fateful connexion between the remote laboratories and the
bloodstained realities of the battlefield. Alfred Doblin, the Berlin author later
driven by Hitler half round the world, wrote in October 1919: 'The decisive
assaults upon mankind now proceed from the drawing boards and the
laboratory.'
Rutherford's workshop, too, had been rudely invaded by war. His 'boys', as he
called his assistants and students, who looked upon him as a father, had almost
been conscripted for military service. Moseley, the most gifted of all his
colleagues, had fallen at the Dardanelles in 1915. The source of the radium which
he used for all his atomic experiments had been confiscated. It happened to be,
by an irony of fate, 'enemy alien property'.
Before the war, the Vienna Radium Institute had loaned to their highly
esteemed British colleague, Rutherford, 250 milligrams of the precious substance.
It was a gesture which pre- 1914 Austria could easily afford to make; the only
productive deposits of uranium ore in Europe lay in the Bohemian district of
Joachimsthal, at that time still part of the Imperial and Royal Dual Monarchy.
Rutherford never acquiesced in his government's confiscation of the radium
loaned him by Austria, nor was he satisfied with the permission of the
authorities to use this valuable metal for the time being. He was known to be a
scientist of unbending temper and high principles, and insisted on his right to
return the personal loan to his colleagues on the Danube at the end of hostilities
or else to acquire it from them by paying for it. Rutherford's resolute attitude
eventually won out. On 14 April 1921 he was at last able to write to his old
colleague, Stefan Meyer, in the inflation-stricken city of Vienna: 'I was much
disturbed by your statement of the financial side of the Radium institute of
Vienna and have been active in trying to raise some funds to buy at any rate a
small quantity of the radium which the Vienna Academy so generously loaned
me so long ago and which has been of so much aid in my researches.'
Meyer warned that the price of radium in the world market was for the
moment 'monstrously high'. This did not frighten Rutherford. He raised a sum of
several hundred pounds which tided the Vienna Radium Institute over the worst
years of the currency devaluation.
Even during the war Rutherford had kept in touch, at least by correspondence,
through neutral countries with his pupils and friends in Germany and Austria-
Hungary, particularly with his old and loyal assistant, Hans Geiger, inventor of
the Geiger counter for the measurement of invisible radioactivity, later to prove
indispensable. The international family of physicists had kept together to the best
of their ability, at all events better than men of letters and intellectuals in other
fields, who bombarded each other with spiteful manifestoes. Physicists who had
worked together before the war, often for years, either by correspondence or side
by side in the laboratory, could never become enemies at a command from
above. They helped one another whenever they could. Nernst and Rubens, the
German teachers of James Chadwick, helped their pupil set up a small laboratory
in the camp at Ruhleben near Berlin, where he had been interned at the
beginning of the war. Chadwick, who had been a close associate of Rutherford
and was later to win a Nobel prize, carried out a number of interesting
experiments with other prisoners in the camp. In May 1918, when the terrible
offensives in northern France were daily sacrificing the lives of so many Britons
and Germans, he wrote to Rutherford:
'We are now working, or rather about to work, on the formation of carbonyl
chloride in light ... within the last few months I have visited Rubens, Nernst, and
Warburg. They were extremely willing to help, and offered to lend us anything
they could. In fact, all kinds of people lent us apparatus.'
As soon as regulations at the frontiers were somewhat relaxed, physicists
immediately resumed contact to exchange information about the progress made
during the years of war. Letters and telegrams were sent to hasten the exchange
of information. Telegraph clerks at Copenhagen often found it difficult to pass on
correctly the messages, full of mathematical formulae which they did not in the
least understand, from the Institute of Professor Niels Bohr to England, France,
Holland, Germany, the United States, and Japan.
At that time there were three main centres of attraction on the map of atomic
research. From Cambridge Rutherford ruled like a sharp-tongued and easily
irritated monarch that kingdom of the smallest possible dimensions he had been
the first to re veal. Copenhagen decreed through the mouth of the learned Niels
Bohr the laws of the bewilderingly new and puzzling territory of the microcosm.
Meanwhile Gottingen's triumvirate - Max Born, James Franck, and David Hilbert
- instantly asked questions about each new discovery made in England and
supposed to have been correctly explained in Denmark.
Many fascinating problems presented by the world of atoms could no longer
be satisfactorily solved by correspondence. The era of congresses and
conferences now began. Bohr only needed to announce that he would lecture in
Gottingen for a week on his studies and every physicist tried to make the
journey. News of interesting experiments and results achieved came even from
lands which before the war either had conducted no physics research at all or
only insignificant experiments. India and Japan, the United States and
revolutionary Russia tried to exchange scientific information. During these years
most zealous efforts were made by the Soviet Union to make contact with
Western scientists. The Bolshevist state not only wished its scientists to learn
from those 'out there'. It also took care to have its own publications translated
into English, French, and German. Even that dictatorial state, in those days,
imposed no rules of secrecy or censorship upon the held of research.
A famous physicist remarked at the time that his profession was behaving like
a community of ants. Each one hurried excitedly to a breach in the anthill with
the tiny fragments of knowledge he had just picked up, only to find that as soon
as his back was turned another had taken it away. Planck, Einstein, the Curies,
Rutherford, and Bohr one after the other administered a series of severe shocks
to the edifice of physics, which had seemed at the turn of the century so
splendidly easy to survey and so firmly based. Arnold Sommerfeld of the
University of Munich, probably the most successful teacher of the post-war
generation, said that eager students before they entered the study of physics
ought to be warned: 'Caution! Dangerous structure! Temporarily closed for
complete reconstruction!'
Rutherford unhesitatingly blamed the theoretical, not the experimental,
physicists, for the confusion. ‘They’re getting too big for their boots,' he growled.
'We practical physicists will have to take them down a peg or two.
What had really happened? In the midst of the post-war troubles of the world,
its revolutions and inflations, people hardly had the time, the patience, or
perhaps simply the vitality to grasp the meaning of the most profound of all
revolutions, the most significant of all devaluations, the radical change of our
image of the world. Planck had shaken the belief, which had been regarded as
self-evident for thousands of years, that Nature makes no sudden advances.
Einstein had defined as relative the 'facts' of space and time until now supposed
to be fixed quantities. He had identified matter as 'frozen' energy. But now the
Curies, Rutherford, and Bohr were proving that the indivisible could be divided
and that the solid, when one came to scrutinize it precisely, was not stable but in
constant motion and change.
Professor Rutherford's alpha particles ought really, at that time, to have upset
not only atoms of nitrogen but also the peace of mind of humanity. They ought
to have revived the dread of an end of the world, forgotten for many centuries.
But in those days all such discoveries seemed to have little to do with the realities
of everyday life as men perceived them. The conclusions reached by the
physicists through their complicated instruments and their even more
complicated calculations about the true character of our world were still, it was
generally agreed, solely their own affair. And in fact they themselves did not
appear to expect any immediate practical consequences from their revelations.
Rutherford had expressly stated his opinion that the world would never be able
to exploit the slumbering energy in the atom. It was an error to which he held
firm until his death in 1937.
The German physicist and Nobel prize winner Walter Nernst wrote in
1921:'We may say that we are living on an island of guncotton.' He was trying to
give the latest results of Ruther- ford's researches greater publicity. Yet he
immediately added the consoling comment: ‘But, thank God, we have not yet
found a match that will ignite it.'
Why then should man be troubled?
It was true that the physicists themselves were worried. For the time being
actually, they were worrying less about the world than about their own science,
in which already hardly any of the old ideas were making sense. But for that
very reason much that was new and amazing much that earlier centuries had
never known, was coming to light.
This was the miraculous and exciting era of which one of the youngest, the
American Robert Oppenheimer, wrote later:
Our understanding of atomic physics, of what we call the quantum theory of
atomic systems, had its origins at the turn of the century and its great synthesis
and resolutions in the nineteen-twenties. It was a heroic time. It was not the
doing of any one man. It involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from
many different lands, though from first to last the deeply creative and subtle and
critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened, and finally transmuted
the enterprise. It was a period of patient work in the laboratory, of crucial
experiments and daring action, of many false starts and many untenable
conjectures. It was a time of earnest correspondence and hurried conferences, of
debate, criticism, and brilliant mathematical improvisation. For those who
participated it was a time of creation. There was terror as well as exaltation in
their new insight.
Another witness to those years, the great German physicist Pascual Jordan,
remembers:
Everyone was filled with such tension that it almost took their breath away.
The ice had been broken ... It became more and more clear that in this connexion
we had stumbled upon a quite unexpected and deeply embedded layer of the
secrets of Nature. It was evident that wholly new processes of thought, beyond
all the previous notions in physics, would be needed to resolve the
contradictions - only later recognized as merely apparent - which now came to a
head.
Young physicists from all over the world were studying under Sommerfeld in
Munich. They even took their problems with them into the cafes. Marble-topped
tables were covered with scribbled mathematical formulae. The waiters of the
Cafe Lutz in the Hofgarten, regularly frequented by the Munich physicists, had
strict instructions never to wipe the tables without special permission. For if a
Problem had not been solved by the time the cafe closed for the night, the further
necessary calculations were carried out the following evening. It happened fairly
Often, moreover, that some unknown person would have the audacity to jot
down the solution during the interval. Some young physicist would have been
too impatient to wait until the next meeting.
2
THE BEAUTIFUL YEARS
1923-32
THIS tremendous transformation of the scientific view of Nature could only be
compared with the change of outlook brought about by Copernicus. It
originated, like all really important intellectual revolutions, in places where, to
all appearance, deep tranquillity reigned. The most far-reaching revolution of the
twentieth century was born in an idyll: a picturesque park in Copenhagen, a
quiet side street in Berne, the shore of the island of Heligoland, the meadows and
tree-shaded river at Cambridge, the Hofgarten in Munich, the quiet
neighbourhood of the Pantheon in Paris, the gentle slopes of Zurichberg, and the
ancient fortifications of Gottingen, bordered by rustling tall trees.
In the 1920s Gottingen was the real centre of the restless intellectual activities
of the physicists. Eminent visitors came from other universities. There were so
many of them, especially in the summer months, that the Dutch physicist
Ehrenfest observed with his sharp wit: 'We really ought to avoid the rush of our
