Thanks for the link to your paper, which gives a good overview of the nuclear science developments that eventually resulted in the atomic bombs of WWII.
Your paper, with its Appendix I and II, emphasizes nuclear scientists who were female or Jewish. One woman not mentioned is Mary Lou Curtis (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/mary-lou-curtiss-interview). During WWII, Mary Lou Curtis developed new methods for counting and measuring polonium at the then-secret polonium production laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. Polonium was used in the neutron initiators for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
About the news that the atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, Mary Curtis notes: "I never felt guilty about that because in the first place I had two brothers in the service and my husband and Tinker's husband. There was the fact that that had ended the war and thousands of lives were saved on both sides that would have died if we had to have invaded Japan. So I think that we saved lives."
Under the section, Nuclear Fission Discovery, you refer to the "Austrian-born Jewish physicist Lise Meitner." While the Nazis considered Meitner a Jew by birth, she was baptized as a Lutheran Christian in 1908 after she had earned her doctorate and had started her research career at the University of Berlin. Meitner remained a Christian for the rest of her life. When she died in 1968, Lise Meitner was buried near her brother Walter's grave, at St. James Church in Bramley, Hampshire.
In your paper it is noted that Edwin McMillian and Glenn Seaborg made "the discovery of neptunium and plutonium." McMillian and Philip Abelson are credited with the discovery of neptunium in 1940. However, it was Arthur C. Wahl (http://lbl.webdamdb.com/image_dir/album123509/md_XBD9502-00458.TIF.jpg?1289373333), along with Seaborg, who discovered plutonium with the first successful cyclotron synthesis and the chemical isolation of element 94 (the Pu-238 isotope) during the night of February 23, 1941, in Room 307 of Gilman Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, Art Wahl was Glenn Seaborg's graduate student. On May 12, 1941, Wahl also separated and purified a sub-microgram amount of Pu-239 (labeled "Sample B"). In 1966, Seaborg and Emilio Segrè presented the Smithsonian Institution with the oldest known man-made Pu-239 in the world, "Sample B," stored in a cigar box (http://cen.acs.org/articles/87/i14/Tracing-Plutoniums-Roots.html).
Rick Strickert
Austin, TX
-----Original Message-----
From: Phys-l [mailto:phys-l-bounces@phys-l.org] On Behalf Of Ekaterina Michonova-Alexova
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2014 3:10 PM
To: Phys-L@phys-l.org
Subject: Re: [Phys-L] A bomb without Einstein?
Fascinating details, Rick, thanks for sharing.
I just published a paper on this topic in the Asian Journal of Physics co-authored with two students majoring in physics as a part of their Physics Seminar requirement. The title is, "From the Dawn of Nuclear Physics to the First Atomic Bombs".
There are many other speculations related to the making of the atomic bombs, including on a possible work on atomic bomb project in Japan. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish speculations from scholar publications, but Alex Wellerstein is a reliable historian of science, even though not a physicist.
E. Michonova-Alexova, PhD
Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy Department of Chemistry and Physics Room 203 DMSC, Erskine College
2 Washington Street, Box 338
Due West, SC 29639-0338, USA
1-864-379-6569
emichon@erskine.edu http://www.erskine.edu/academics/majors/physics/
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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
- Carl Sagan
On Fri, June 27, 2014 3:21 pm, Strickert, Rick (Consultant) wrote:
Regarding speculation about Einstein's letter that initiated the Manhattan Project...
It was Leo Szilard who wrote the letter to the President and then went to Einstein and got him to sign it. If Einstein had not been available or refuse to sign it, Szilard probably would have gotten other prominent scientists to sign it. While Einstein's name was significant, the contents of Szilard's letter, especially to President's military advisors also carried significant weight.
Ironically, six years later when Szilard got 69 scientists at the Met Lab to sign a petition to the President against using the atomic bomb on a Japanese city, his petition was ignored, or at least counteracted by a July, 1945, poll requested by Arthur Holly Compton in which 131 out of 150 participants favoring options favoring the military use of the atomic bomb against Japan, and by the June 16th recommendation of the Interim Committee (Compton, Fermi, Lawrence, and Oppenheimer) that "we can see no acceptable alternative to direct military use."
Of course, that recommendation was to a different President, who later stated, "We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history - and won." (The New York Times, Tuesday, August 7, 1945, p. 1) and still later stated: "The atom bomb was no 'great decision'... It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness." - Harry S. Truman, at a Columbia University Seminar, April 28, 1959, New York City, as quoted in _The Buck Stops Here: The 28 Toughest Presidential Decisions and How They Changed History_, Thomas J.
Craughwell, Edwin Kiester Jr., Quarry Books, 2010, p. 178.
In a related speculative mood, could the plutonium bomb have been successful in 1945 without chemists Arthur Wahl and Stanley Thompson, or physicists Richard Tolman and Seth Neddermeyer?
Rick Strickert
Austin, TX
-----Original Message-----
From: Phys-l [mailto:phys-l-bounces@phys-l.org] On Behalf Of Savinainen Antti
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2014 1:32 PM
To: phys-l@phys-l.org
Subject: [Phys-L] A bomb without Einstein?
Hi,
I read a blog on Einstein's role in the atomic bomb with interest:
<http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/06/27/bomb-without-einstein/>.
I confess that I may have given too much credit (or blame, depending on your moral views) for Einstein on providing a crucial impulse for the Manhattan Project.
Cheers,
Antti
Finland
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