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On the History and Technology of the Atomic Bomb. The Commitment of the Scientists

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A Bridge between Conceptual Frameworks

Part of the book series: History of Mechanism and Machine Science ((HMMS,volume 27))

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Abstract

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The development of the atomic bomb in the first half of the twentieth century marked a turning point in the history of nuclear science because it revealed the close relationships that exist among science, technology and society. In this paper the main discoveries that led to the scientific and technological development of the atomic bomb are presented together with the commitment of scientists who tried to avoid possible harmful uses of the results of their researches.

In this work a deep examination of the writings of some of these scientists is introduced, some of which are still unpublished, although already quoted by several authors, with the purpose to highlight the relevance of their position against the bomb to the present day. In this sense the content of the paper may appear as a novelty within the history of science and technology; even if it cannot be a unique story.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    1Rutherford won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances”, although the chemist of the team was Soddy. He gained due recognition only with the Nobel Prize in 1921 “for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes”. In 1913, in fact, he had found that certain elements exist in two or more forms with different atomic weights but they are chemically indistinguishable. Between 1911 and 1913, he had also formulated the Law of radioactive displacement, which refers to the fact that the emission of an α particle by an element moves it back two places in the periodic table, while the emission of a β particle situates it in one position forward. His naming to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was proposed by Rutherford (and supported by Thomson), as if to repay the debt contract with Soddy on the occasion of the Nobel Prize in 1908.

  2. 2.

    In March 1903, Pierre Curie (1859–1906) and Albert Laborde (1878–1968) had measured the heat developed in a Bunsen ice calorimeter from a known amount of radio in a defined time. They found enormous values of the order of 100 calories per hour for a single gram of radium (Curie and Laborde 1903). These authors, however, did not consider it possible that this heat was developed at the expense of the internal energy of the radium but they thought that it came from a source outside the atom, of unknown nature (on this topic see Soddy 1904b, Chap. XI entitled “The energy of radio-active change”, pp. 165–170).

  3. 3.

    Soddy (1953, f 282, 2, line 6).

  4. 4.

    In this science fiction novel, H. G. Wells predicts, about 20 years in advance, the discovery of artificial radioactivity, the industrial use of atomic energy and a global conflict resulting from the use of “atomic bombs”, with the devastation of the main cities of the planet (Wells 1914).

  5. 5.

    See the 6th paragraph and Cioci (2008).

  6. 6.

    Soddy (1915, p. 13, line 19).

  7. 7.

    The Sydney Morning Herald (1935, f 124, line 43).

  8. 8.

    Soddy (1949, p. 128, column 1, line 52). For the significant contribution made by Soddy to economics, linked to his commitment to the prevention of war, see Cioci (2009a).

  9. 9.

    Heavy water was considered to be slow motion par excellence because deuterium has a light nucleus, suitable to subtract kinetic energy from neutrons, and being already formed by a neutron and a proton it was believed to be not “inclined” to absorb neutrons. The research started eventually in Montreal after the war with construction of the atomic pile ZEEP, the origin of the CANDU reactors.

  10. 10.

    F. Rasetti (1958–1968, p. 11, line 2). Information about this document can be found in Amaldi (1990, p. 175, footnote 15). The document was widely quoted by Battimelli and De Maria in the “Preface” of Amaldi (1997) and by Maltese (2003).

  11. 11.

    Ivi, line 4.

  12. 12.

    Battimelli (2002), Maltese (2003). These authors reported Edoardo Amaldi’s assessments; he considered the decision to work in the Manhattan Project as a necessary assumption of responsibility by scientists to prevent the world being conquered by the Nazis using nuclear weapons: “If I had found myself there (in front of this dramatic dilemma), after deep and painful considerations on which it was my moral duty of man asked to decide whether cooperate in the defense of democracies … or lock myself in my private life, doing nothing to fight the dictatorship, I would have eventually opted for the first solution” (Amaldi 1997, p. 98, line 32).

  13. 13.

    Amaldi (1979, p. 199, column 2, line 13).

  14. 14.

    Associated Press (1933, p. 1, line 18). A summary of the presentation at the British Association is published in the Times of September 12, 1933, p. 7 and of Nature, no. 132, pp. 432–433 (16 September 1933).

  15. 15.

    Szilard (1972, pp. 729–732; 1978, pp. 45–46).

  16. 16.

    E. Amaldi (1984, p. 160, line 27).

  17. 17.

    The exact critical mass for uranium 235 is 52 kg. The critical mass for plutonium 239 is 10 Kg.

  18. 18.

    Frisch and Peierls (1940b, p. 86, line 15).

  19. 19.

    United States Atomic Energy Commission (1971, p. 12, line 4).

  20. 20.

    Weisskopf (1967, p. 40, column 1, line 19; 42, column 1, line 11).

  21. 21.

    Smyth (1945, p. 254, line 16).

  22. 22.

    Rotblat (1985, p. 18, line 22).

  23. 23.

    Committee on Social and Political Implications (1946, p. 3, column 3, line 34).

  24. 24.

    Oppenheimer (1948, p. 66, line 45).

  25. 25.

    The account of A. K. Smith is entitled “A peril and a Hope” by a famous expression of Oppenheimer according to which nuclear weapons would constitute a danger and a hope for humanity because given the power of these terrible means of destruction humankind would have to give up war to settle international disputes and would have to create a united world under the law and humanity.

  26. 26.

    Smith and Weiner (1980).

  27. 27.

    Oppenheimer (1966, line 20).

  28. 28.

    Lilienthal et al. (1946, p. 24, line 15).

  29. 29.

    For further arguments in favour of this conclusion see Cioci (2004).

  30. 30.

    General Advisory Committee (1949, p. 155, line 39).

  31. 31.

    Ivi, line 21.

  32. 32.

    Ibidem, 156, line 6.

  33. 33.

    See Capuozzo and Cioci (2010).

  34. 34.

    E.g. see: Teller (1950).

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Acknowledgments

I thank Professor Giovanni Battimelli, Referent for Documents and Sources for the History of Physics, Department of Physics, University “La Sapienza” of Rome, who helped me in the consultation of the Edoardo Amaldi Archives.

My special thanks is addressed to Colin Harris, Superintendent of the Special Collections Reading Rooms, for his help in finding the unpublished writings of Frederick Soddy , to Dr. Chris Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections, and to the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, which owns them, for permission given on the basis of ‘non-exclusive rights’ to quote and to paraphrase them.

I am grateful to Bonnie Coles for helping me in the examination and retrieval of the writings of Robert Oppenheimer at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress (USA).

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  1. Research Centre for the Theory and History of Science, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Vincenzo Cioci

  2. Research Group on Physics Education and History of Physics, University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy

    Vincenzo Cioci

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  1. Department of Physics, Lille 1 University Science and Technology, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

    Raffaele Pisano

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Cioci, V. (2015). On the History and Technology of the Atomic Bomb. The Commitment of the Scientists. In: Pisano, R. (eds) A Bridge between Conceptual Frameworks. History of Mechanism and Machine Science, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9645-3_7

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