Photo: Gerd Altmann/PixabayIn December 125 years ago, Marie Curie discovered radium, and in December 85 years ago, Otto Hahn proved the fission of the atomic nucleus. Their works paved the way to mankind's deadliest invention - the atomic bomb. I spoke with one of the participants in the race to develop atomic weapons
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have increased humanity's fear that one of the conflicting parties will reach for atomic weapons, the other will respond, the consequences would be unimaginable. Russia, the USA and Israel possess the infernal sword, Iran is most likely on the way to forge it.
In this regard, two events, whose anniversary falls now, deserve awe: on December 26, 1898, the Polish Marie Curie discovered the new element radium, and on December 22, 1938, the German Otto Hahn succeeded in proving the fission of the atomic nucleus and concluded that the the procedure can release previously unimaginable energy. They will call that process fusion. Han based his experiments on the work on the chain reaction that can be created by the splitting of some elements using the example of uranium, the daughter of Maria Kiri Joliot and the Serb Pavel Savić.
The three were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the award was postponed due to the outbreak of World War II. When it ended in 1945, only Hahn received the award.
He told his former collaborator Lisa Meitner, who had fled to Sweden because of her Jewish origin, immediately wrote about her discovery: "We cannot keep silent about this result, even though it is absurd from the point of view of physics." Han himself did not immediately believe that what his work proved was even possible.
In August 1945, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki will show in practice that the experiments carried out by Kiri and Savić, Otto Hahn, then Werner Heisenberg and many others led to the weapon that is the deadliest invention of mankind. People have been given the ability to destroy the planet they live on in an instant. Is that absurd?
What did Professor Bage say?
A professor told me about all this in Hamburg 70 years ago Erich Bagge who during the war worked on the "Uranus project" - an attempt by German scientists to create an atomic bomb for Hitler. At that time, as a young journalist, eight years after I was released from the concentration camp, I wrote reports and conducted interviews in Germany. I was lucky enough to run into Professor Bage just as he was about to speak, I didn't miss the opportunity. The interview I published in the Yugoslav newspaper "Omladina" had quite a resonance.
He told me that Hitler did not care much about their work because they told him that concrete results would eventually come only in a few years, and he knew that it would be too late for his war. But what if it had its own rockets "IN" could send to London with a nuclear charge?
At the time I interviewed Professor Bage, he was working on the design of nuclear-powered cargo ships, which at the time sounded like science fiction, but 15 years after our conversation, he launched a ship named "Otto Hahn" into the sea - the third such ship in the world after the Russian "Lenin" and the American "Savanna". Old Otto Hahn attended the ceremony, he died soon after on June 28, 1968, aged 89. Since then, countless nuclear-powered submarines, a few cargo ships, and a great many icebreakers have been built.
How close was Hitler to the atomic bomb
Towards the end of the war, in April 1945, the British secret service, in agreement with the American, arrested 10 German scientists who worked on the "Urano project", among them were Bage and Hahn. They were housed comfortably at the Farm Hall estate near Cambridge, but were under guard. They thought that by eavesdropping on their conversations, they would learn more than by hearing them. They were right. Those minutes were later published, and today they are exhibited in the German Museum in Bonn.
It is interesting that they were very surprised when the information was communicated to them and a film was shown about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They didn't expect the activation of the atomic bomb to happen so quickly, in fact they weren't sure if it was even possible. They began a lively discussion about what path had to be taken to make Han's old "absurd" experiment a terrible reality. Physicist Werner Heisenberg, who received the Nobel Prize in 1932 for the invention of quantum mechanics, knew the most about it. He was the scientific manager of "Uranprojekt".
Heisenberg already held a seminar in Farm Hall on August 14 with an analysis of how the bomb that leveled Hiroshima was made. He was close to the truth, only that he overestimated the amount of uranium needed - half the amount he assumed was enough. That was proof that "Uranprojekt" could have reached the same result. I still shudder at the thought to this day.
How Heisenberg Alarmed Roosevelt
What kind of man was this Heisenberg, the head of the team that tried and almost succeeded in giving Hitler the atomic bomb? Was he an ardent Nazi? The answer is not at all simple, because he already traveled to Copenhagen in 1941, visited his former mentor Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate from 1922, and told him that Germany was looking for an atomic bomb. He encouraged him to immediately travel to America and tell Albert Einstein everything. Einstein discussed the theoretical possibilities of splitting atoms even before that with the Hungarian physicist and inventor Leo Szilard, who would later become the head of the production of the first American atomic bombs in Los Alamos.
A frightened Einstein wrote a worried letter to President Roosevelt and begged him to mobilize all American material and human resources to forestall the gruesome Nazi plans. The result is known. Under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer, The bombs of Edward Teller and others were made, tested experimentally, and used against Japan.
Soon after, the Soviet Union also began to develop nuclear weapons. It entered the Cold War, the escalation of which was prevented by the fear of infernal weapons.
Meanwhile, Great Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel also possess nuclear weapons... Anyone else?
The development of the threat of the worst imaginable war horrors began exactly 85 years ago. Seven decades ago, I learned a lot from an active participant in this story, but I understood nothing. To be honest, I don't understand enough even now.
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Eight years after the end of World War II, I spoke in Hamburg with Professor Erich Bagge, who worked with Heisenberg in Nazi Germany on the atomic bomb project. They didn't even realize how close they were. Fortunately for humanity, Hitler did not realize that the atomic bomb was not the imagination of mad scientists
There is no war objective large enough to justify the immediate death of tens and hundreds of thousands of people – to say nothing of the long-term consequences. The case is such that it applies on the side of the one who is hit by it, but also on the side of those who would use the atomic bomb. Can he prepare for the end of the world and what would happen then?
