Sam Kean Quotes
Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret.
Kean, Sam. The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. Little, Brown and Company, 2010.
Morrison was then a graduate student of Oppenheimer. The quotation is important, not because it shows how quickly the “father of the atomic bomb” realized that a nuclear bomb could be made and how, but how relatively easy and rapid it was for a competent theoretical physicist could conceptually design a nuclear weapon if they first had knowledge of the Hahn / Strassmann Experiment and the Meitner / Frisch explanation of what had happened ({640924}). Note Leo Szilard’s letter at about the same time--{640925}.
The letter was actually delivered to President Roosevelt on October 11. It was the stimulus for the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. It had been drafted in large part by physicist Leo Szilard whose idea it was that Einstein sign the letter. As the world’s most prestigious scientist Einstein, Szilard felt, would make more of an impression on FDR than he, Fermi or other scientists even though Einstein was a theoretician and never did work on the development of the bomb. The military men did not understand Szilard and thought him a danger to the nation. So the two men who initiated the idea of the development of an atom bomb did not do any, of the work on it.
Germany had some world class physicists. Our scientists, military intelligence people, and political leadership assumed that the Germans were also seeking to develop the Atomic Bomb. Ironically, it turned out that they were not, and what Truman reported in this quotation was untrue (although that was not fully known at the time.) Einstein and several of the scientists who were early pioneers in modern physics were Jewish, and Hitler referred to the study of nuclear fission and fusion as “Jewish Science.” As a result, the German government did not commit the resources to the development of an atomic bomb. Instead, they were betting on the development of the Jet Airplane which they succeeded in deploying against the Allies at the end of the war. But they did not have enough or enough pilots left alive to fly them, and Germany was overrun by the Allied Troops. Prior to Truman’s erroneous report about the German development of an atomic bomb, there had only been one piece of evidence that the Germans were not developing one. An OSS secret agent, Moe Berg, had talked with Werner Heisenberg, at a Swiss scientific conference during the war. He was going to assassinate the greatest of the German physicists if Berg thought he was working on a nuclear device. Berg concluded from his discussions that Heisenberg did not know enough about nuclear fission to have been working on that. Berg did not kill Heisenberg, and reported that he did not think the Germans were developing a bomb as if they were Heisenberg would have been deeply involved. However, the American intelligence people and the American scientists, did not trust Berg’s analysis and conclusion. Berg was not a trained scientist. He was a professional baseball player—the NY Yankee backup catcher to Bill Dickey. He was a college graduate, a brilliant guy and a very fast learner who had studied physics books and papers before his assignment. Berg turned out to have been right, but that was not confirmed until a few years after the war. Truman had relied on an incorrect intelligence estimate when he made this quotation. It was not the first such error of intelligence analysis in American history and it would not be the last.
3 days later, President Truman, announced that the Russians had successfully developed an atomic weapon. This quotation gives us another example where the Central Intelligence Agency failed to predict and/or warn America about a crucial event. Others included the North Korean invasion of South Korea, the Arab Spring, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Sam Kean is an American writer. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, Psychology Today, and The New Scientist. He has also published five books which discuss scientific discoveries in a narrative style. His books received positive reviews in The Wall Street Journal Library Journal, and The New York Times. He was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and lives in Washington, D.C..
