Otto hahn atomic bomb

Pulitzer Prize – winning author Richard Rhodes gave an enlightening lecture at the Hanford site for ... [+] the 70th anniversary of the Manhattan Project. The lecture cuts through our modern rose-colored glasses to delineate what led to the bomb. Photo credit: Nancy Warner This is a very, very important question, as relevant today as it was in 1943. Richard Rhodes recently gave a lecture at the Hanford site in Washington State for the 70 th Anniversary of the Manhattan Project that provides more insight into this issue than any other I have ever heard. It is rare to get a glimpse of what emotions, paradigms, and philosophies motivate people during such world-changing events as entering a World War or developing atomic weapons. But understanding humans and history is what Richard Rhodes does best. Rhodes is renowned as the Pulitzer Prize – winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb as well as dozens of other non-fiction and fiction books, biographies and documentaries. But he has also been a scholar at Harvard, MIT and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. For the present and the future, we need to understand these past events from the perspective of that time period, not our own. The horrors of that War - fifty million dead, hundreds of millions of lives destroyed, whole cities wiped off the map from run-of-the-mill carpet bombing - rarely make it into discussions of the ethics of developing the atomic bomb. As much as we like t...

So it goes. As is well known, several Jews were essential to the development of Nuclear weapons. The intellectual father of the bomb was Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-Jewish refugee from Nazism. Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and patented the idea of a nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, a physicist who had fled Mussolini’s Italy to save his Jewish wife Laura Capon. In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting that they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here too Jewish and anti-Nazi connections abound: Hahn was a vocal opponent of Nazism (praised by Einstein as “”one of the very few who stood upright and did the best he could in these years of evil”) and Strassman hid Jews during the war. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch correctly interpreted Hahn and Strassman’s results as being due to the splitting of the uranium atom. Meitner was a Viennese Jew, and her Austrian nephew Frisch was Jewish as well. Frisch then collaborated with Rudolf Peierls to designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940. Peierls was a Jewish refugee from Germany who worked on the Manhattan Project under its team director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was a Jew born in New York. And so on. In the February 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum they stated that: “The energy liberated in the explosion of such a super-bomb…will, for an instant, produce a tempera...

At an exhibition organised by the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany to mark the 75th anniversary of the discovery of nuclear fission at the Vienna International Centre, a replica of Dr. Otto Hahn's laboratory table on which the fission experiment was performed was displayed. The laboratory replica was on loan from the Deutsches Museum, Munich. Vienna, Austria, 25 November 2013. (Photo: D. Calma/IAEA) "The pioneering work of Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassman was a crucial step in the long scientific journey that led to the development of nuclear technology as we understand it today." With these words, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano marked the 75th anniversary of the discovery of nuclear fission, celebrating the scientists who deduced the process upon which all nuclear technology depends. Nuclear fission, the process by which an atom splits into lighter atoms, releasing considerable energy, has had a profound effect on our world in delivering energy, influencing geopolitics and opening new frontiers in science and medicine. 75 years ago three scientists Dr. Otto Hahn, Dr. Lise Meitner and Dr. Fritz Strassman working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin developed an experiment grounded on the then-evolving concept that splitting an atom of an element would produce two atoms of smaller different elements. Their historical experiment when compared to examples of today's breakthrough experimental setups seem like nothing more t...

washingtonpost.com: The Woman Behind the Bomb LISE MEITNER: A Life In Physics By Ruth Lewin Sime University of California Press. 526 pp. $30 Go to the Lise Meitner: A Life In Physics Go to The Woman Behind the Bomb By Marcia Bartusiak Sunday, March 17, 1996 In the history of modern physics there are names that perpetually resonate: Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr for unveiling the secrets of atomic structure, Erwin Schroedinger and Werner Heisenberg for establishing the rules of the quantum game, and Albert Einstein for recognizing that mass is frozen energy. In this company the name Lise Meitner has diminished to a footnote. Yet in her day she had a reputation as one of Germany's best experimentalists. Einstein fondly referred to her as "our Marie Curie." Meitner's perceptive realization that atomic nuclei can be split in half was the first step in a cascading set of discoveries that would relentlessly lead to the atomic bomb. But, in the midst of these revelations, Meitner had to flee from Nazi Germany, which cut her off from her laboratory and colleagues. While this exile saved her life, it cost her the Nobel Prize and a prominent niche in many annals of physics. Fortunately, attention is gradually being refocused on this remarkable woman. Richard Rhodes devoted an appreciable section in The Making of the Atomic Bomb to Meitner's work on nuclear fission. And now Ruth Lewin Sime, a chemist at Sacramento City College, has written the definitive scientific biography of Me...

It was 75 years ago, beneath the bleachers of a University of Chicago football field, that scientists took the first step toward harnessing the power of the nuclear fission chain reaction. Their research initiated the Atomic Age, and kicked off in earnest the Manhattan Project’s The story begins in late 1938, when the work of chemists The trio of researchers knew instantly that they were onto something major. Changing the very identity of an element was once the fancy of alchemists: now, it was scientific reality. Yet at the time, they had only an inkling of the many scientific and cultural revolutions their discovery would spark. Theoretical work undertaken by Meitner and her nephew After an American team at Columbia University promptly The bulky reactor was erected beneath the stands at Staggs Field. University of Chicago For some chemists and physicists, the situation felt even more dire. “Scientists, some of whom [including Albert Einstein, and the Hungarian physicist physics professor Particularly frightening was the possibility of stringing together a chain of fission reactions to generate enough energy to bring about real destruction. In August of 1939, this concern prompted Einstein and Szilárd to meet and One month later, Hitler’s army marched into Poland, igniting World War II. As Isaacs describes, a reluctant Roosevelt soon came around to Szilárd’s way of thinking, and saw the need for the Allies to beat Germany to a nuclear weapon. To achieve that end, he forma...

As the co-discoverer of nuclear fission and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Otto Hahn (1879–1968) took part in Germany‘s nuclear-fission project throughout the Second World War. I outline Hahn’s efforts to mobilize his institute for military-related research; his inclusion in high-level scientific structures of the military and the state; and his institute’s research programs in neutron physics, isotope separation, transuranium elements, and fission products, all of potential military importance for a bomb or a reactor and almost all of it secret. These activities are contrasted with Hahn’s deliberate misrepresentations after the war, when he claimed that his wartime work had been nothing but “purely scientific” fundamental research that was openly published and of no military relevance. In 1933 Strassmann resigned from the Verein Deutscher Chemiker when it became part of the NS-controlled Arbeitsfront, and he refused industrial positions that required membership in NS-organizations; he was not permitted to teach in a university. He and his wife Maria helped save a Jewish friend by hiding her in their apartment in 1943; see Krafft, Im Schatten (ref. 18), pp. 40–41. • Alfred O. Nier of the University of Minnesota separated a minute amount of 235U and mailed it to Columbia University, where its fissibility was confirmed in February 1940 by Eugene Booth, John Dunning, and Aristide von Grosse. The publication of this report in Physical Review in May 194...