Description:
Open a survey-textbook treatment of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, and you will certainly encounter J. Robert Oppenheimer's name within the first few lines. The contributions of Hans A. Bethe, a gifted physicist who fled Nazi Germany and was quickly recruited for the Allied cause, were arguably no less important than Oppenheimer's. But, writes Silvan Schweber--himself a physicist who studied at Princeton University while Albert Einstein and Oppenheimer were in residence there--Bethe has been largely forgotten, and perhaps not accidentally. Oppenheimer, Schweber suggests, was so attentive to seeking fame and influence that he was too quickly willing to compromise his principles on such matters as the use of atomic weaponry in warfare. His nadir came when, testifying before Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949, Oppenheimer denounced several of his colleagues as Communist sympathizers--and this from a man who had been closely involved in leftist politics before World War II. By contrast, Bethe, as Schweber writes admiringly in this study of the two scientists' lives and work, went out of his way to "act courageously in the interests of community and humankind," in both the scientific and political realms. Troubled by his role in creating weapons of mass destruction and intent on taking morally correct actions, Bethe spent much of his postwar energies quietly arguing for arms reduction, an effort that contributed to the international nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. --Gregory McNamee
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