Uranium Wars by Amir D. Aczel

Author:Amir D. Aczel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2009-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

THESE CHARACTER IMPRESSIONS give us an idea who the scientists involved in Hitler’s quest for a bomb were. But what had they really done? More than six decades after the end of the war, the answer to this question is still not known with certainty.

As far as we know, Max von Laue was not involved in the Nazi atomic project. At 66, he was older than the other scientists at Farm Hall, and had done groundbreaking physics decades earlier when he discovered X-ray diffraction—a phenomenon still exploited in crystallography today—for which he received a Nobel Prize. Laue supported Einstein against anti-Jewish attacks on relativity theory, and he generally expressed views opposed Nazism. He was in Berlin during the war, but from whatever records remain, he took no part in the effort to build a bomb.

Otto Hahn’s main culpability was that he remained in Berlin during the war and continued his laboratory work on uranium fission—the same research project he had embarked on years earlier with Lise Meitner. It is not clear that any of his wartime work in Berlin was used directly by the Nazis in a significant way, but he was a member of the Uranverein, and thus officially involved in Hitler’s push to create an atomic bomb. Hahn later claimed that by staying at his lab he was able to continue to employ a number of scientists who might otherwise have been dismissed and would have suffered in the harsh conditions of wartime Germany.

Walter Gerlach was a well-known German physicist who had done pioneering work in quantum theory and co-discovered with Otto Stern the Stern-Gerlach effect while studying the magnetic moment of silver atoms in 1922. The effect they discovered was a deflection of particles in an inhomogeneous magnetic field, and the experimental set-up that produces it is still used today in the study of quantum phenomena. Gerlach became one of the most influential members of the Uranverein, studying atomic energy and its generation. In 1943 Gerlach assumed a leadership position over the project.

Paul Harteck was a chemist working in the field of physical chemistry in Berlin, and in 1933, the year Hitler ascended to power in Ger-many, he went to England to work with Ernest Rutherford. Later, he became the head of the department of physical chemistry at the University of Hamburg. As member of the Nazi Uranverein, Harteck was responsible for research on two important problems: the production of heavy water—used in controlling nuclear reactions—and the task of isolating the rare isotope uranium 235 from uranium ore—the key work at the heart of the process that could produce the fissile material for an atomic bomb.

Harteck began working for the army’s Ordnance Research Division on uranium and its possible military applications as early as 1937, and two years later he consulted with the Nazi War Department on using fission in the production of an atom bomb. He spent the early war years developing projects aimed at producing heavy water for nuclear research and development, including supervising heavy water production in the plant in occupied Norway.

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