Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions

297 Pages·2000·2.52 MB·English

by  Mary Palevsky

Atomic Fragments:
A Daughter's Questions
Mary Palevsky
(p.iv)

This book is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufactured
using
toner is place of ink. Type and images may be less sharp than
the same material seen in traditionally printed University of
California Press editions.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2000 by Mary Palevsky
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Palevsky, Mary, 1949–
Atomic fragments: a daughter's questions / Mary Palevsky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–520–22055–2 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Manhattan Project (U.S.)—History. I. Title.
QC773.3.U5 P35 2000
3S5.8′25119′0973—dc21 99–087422
ClP
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
The author is grateful for permission ro reprint excerpts
from: Freeman Dyson, “Non-use and Non-violence,” talk
given at Oak Ridge Symposium of Nuclear Weapons, May
4, 1995; Bernard J. Lonergan, “Insight: A Study of Human
Understanding,” The Philosophical Library, 1957.
Dedication
(p.v) For my parents
[UNTITLED]
(p.vi)

We are struggling to come to terms with a drama
too large for a single mind to comprehend.
FREEMAN DYSON
“Non-Use and Non-Violence”
The totality of documents cannot be interpreted scientifically
by a single interpreter or even a single generation of interpreters.
There must be a division of labour, and the
labour must be cumulative.
BERNARD LONERGAN
Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
Contents
Title Pages
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue Broken Vessel
Chapter 1 Hans A. Bethe, Tough Dove
Chapter 2 Edward Teller, High Priest of Physics
Chapter 3 Philip Morrison, Witness to Atomic History
Chapter 4 David Hawkins, Chronicler of Los Alamos
Chapter 5 Robert R. Wilson, the Psyche of A Physicist
Chapter 6 Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash Pioneer
Chapter 7 Herbert F. York, Inside History
Epilogue Mosaic
Selected Bibliography
Sources of Illustrations
Index
(p.ix) Preface
September 1, 1989, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's invasion of
Poland. Six years later, after a series of half-century commemorations, our
nation celebrated the end of World War II, while fiercely debating the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought it to a close. This era of
public remembering coincided with a private turning point in my life: it was the
season of my parents' deaths, and of my mourning for them. Through my mother
and father, I am connected to one of the great and controversial issues of the war
—the creation of the atomic bomb.
This is a study in memory and meaning, an exploration of the intersection of the
personal and public, through life spans and across generations. Questions about
the moral and ethical implications of the bomb have always been in the
background of my life. I write in an attempt to organize and freeze the
experience of stepping into a stream that has been flowing through my
subconscious for as long as I can remember. Over the years there have been
times when these issues have come to the foreground. This occurred most
powerfully during the fiftieth anniversary of World War II's end.
A January 1995 meeting with Nobel laureate Hans A. Bethe proved to be the
starting point from which I traveled to interview sixteen Manhattan Project
scientists and several of their colleagues. Our dialogues focused on the web of
relationships connecting the war, the bomb, science, and society at large. The
controversies surrounding the fiftieth (p.x) nniversary of the war's end served as
the backdrop for many of our discussions and brought to light the ways in which
questions of morality and ethics exist in the real world of human history. The
multiple narratives emerging a half century after the making of the bomb formed
the warp on which the weft of the interviews was anchored and woven.
It was in the context of the discovery of fission, followed by World War II, that
traditionally academic scientists, fearing a Nazi nuclear bomb, became the
creators of the first weapon of mass destruction. My endeavor was to
comprehend the ways in which individual scientists made choices about the
bomb and made sense of their work. At best our conversations were creative
encounters during which we struggled with the meaning of one of the twentieth
century's most daunting legacies. This work is an attempt to make explicit the
human intersubjectivity that embodies such meaning.
human intersubjectivity that embodies such meaning.
The location for our dialogues was “the laboratory.” I am referring not to one
laboratory but to a collective of the many historical places where the scientists
have spent their working lives. There is the “Metallurgical Lab,” the Manhattan
Project site at the University of Chicago. Its name was a code, meant to disguise
the real activities of Enrico Fermi and his colleagues as they worked to create the
first man-made chain reaction. Suspended in the midst of a great university in a
major American city, the shifting boundaries of the Met Lab were defined not by
architecture but by awareness. Fermi's atomic pile was hidden beneath the West
Stands of Stagg Field, the university's athletic stadium. Even Robert Maynard
Hutchins, the university's president, did not know what was transpiring there.
In contrast, “Site Y,” Los Alamos, was built in the isolation of the northern New
Mexico mesas, on the evacuated campus of a private boys' school. Under J.
Robert Oppenheimer's leadership, scientists from institutions nationwide and
from Europe joined intellectual forces to produce the bomb. Many Manhattan
Project scientists came from or had studied in the great tradition of the
laboratories of Europe's ancient universities, Cambridge and Oxford, Göttingen
and Tübingen; in Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute; at Fermi's Roman
laboratory; and with Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie in Paris.
(p.xi) Refugee physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch were in the
Swedish countryside when they discovered nuclear fission. Together during the
1938–39 Christmas holiday, Meitner and her nephew, Frisch, labored over
experimental results that radiochemist Otto Hahn and his assistant, Fritz
Strassman, had sent from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Their
discussions during long walks in the snow led to the insight that Meitners
German colleagues had split the uranium nucleus. Thus the laboratory also exists
in each scientist's consciousness.
The first laboratory in my experience was Brookhaven National Laboratory,
where my father worked as an experimental nuclear physicist. Unlike the fine
old institutes of Europe or their elegant Ivy League descendants, Brookhaven is
plain. A converted World War I army barracks at Camp Upton on the Long
Island flatlands is where I went with my father to meet his international
colleagues and tour the giant machines they were building. Although nuclear
weapons are not made at Brookhaven, other post-World War II laboratories are
devoted to them. There is, of course, Los Alamos. Then, in 1952, the University
of California Radiation Laboratory at Livermore was built, inland and
equidistant from the halls of Stanford and the Berkeley hills. The scientists move
equidistant from the halls of Stanford and the Berkeley hills. The scientists move
among the many laboratories with ease.
I traveled to Cornell University and to the Institute for Advanced Study. I saw
the great earthworks of the Stanford Linear Accelerator and the circular, secular
cathedrals of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. I visited the site of the first chain
reaction at the University of Chicago, where Henry Moore's bronze sculpture
“Nuclear Energy” now stands. Moore hoped to evoke the feeling of a cathedral.
Chicago physicist Robert Sachs explained to me that some people say the work
suggests a mushroom cloud and others see a human skull. With the trinity of
explosions at Alamogordo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, the world became the
laboratory.
Throughout the interview process I kept a personal journal, recording
observations, examining insights, and developing ideas and further questions. I
have included selected journal entries in the text. The interviews tended to cover
a broad range of subject matter; however, I have (p.xii)
focused on those themes that are
central to my inquiry. As a rule,
interview quotations are in
chronological order, but on occasion,
to clarify a particular discussion,
quotations are grouped according to
theme. The reader is asked to bear in
mind that the quotations represent
spoken, not written, words. In the
interest of readability, the normal
redundancies of speech have been
taken out and bridge words and
phrases have been inserted when
needed to express language
Figure 1. “Nuclear Energy” by Henry Moore,
understood in conversation. 1967, on the site of the first controlled, self-
sustained nuclear chain reaction, December

2, 1942, the University of Chicago.
Although my dialogues with the
scientists were intersubjective, there were also intrasubjective aspects to the
work that have relevance on many levels: emotional, psychological, intellectual,
rational, and moral. I wrote this chronicle in the “relational I”—an effort to stay
true to my interiority in dialogue with others. Looking in and reaching out, I