A little free library which I encountered while out walking this afternoon unexpectedly furnished me with a first printing of Selig Hecht's Explaining the Atom (1947), its jacketless blue cloth covers sun-bleached and water-stained. I had run across mention of the book some years ago, but never pursued a copy for myself. I read it immediately. It was riveting. It had grown out of a series of lectures its author had delivered at the New School, describing and demystifying the history and current state of nuclear physics for the lay audience. He was not himself a nuclear physicist, as he made sure to state in the preface; he was a biophysicist and a science communicator who shared his department at Columbia with Rabi and Fermi and Szilard and the cyclotron which smashed so many historic atoms between 1939 and 1945. He cared immensely about the public understanding of science and specifically of the A-bomb, popular misconceptions of which were proliferating like the weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. He had no access to classified material while writing his book, which turns out to be part of its thesis. Early in the preface, I was struck by the bluntness with which Hecht debunked not just the origin myth of the Manhattan Project, but the essential concept of nuclear secrecy on any scientifically realistic level:
In some experience with atomic energy legislation, I have talked with enough public men to know that almost none of them understands even the elementary principles underlying the release of atomic energy. The same is true for most well-educated laymen. And yet all of us must make decisions about this weapon, which "is potentially destructive beyond the wildest nightmare of the imagination." These decisions cannot be made in ignorance; the public must be informed.
Consider the matter of secrets, of which there is still too much talk. As will become apparent there is no unique or single secret about atomic energy or even about atomic bombs. However, among the many bills introduced into Congress, one even provided the death penalty for giving away the secret of the atomic bomb. Such behavior assumes that the release of atomic energy happened suddenly without any previous history. Indeed, many people still believe this, and the newspaper stories have helped to encourage such belief. There lingers among us the idea that an inventor, a scientist, a professor is a long-haired gentleman, a little wild in the head, who has crazy ideas which occasionally work out. The atomic bomb presumably was one of those that worked.
After refuting this anti-intellectual great man theory of nuclear history by drawing the reader from the classical construction of elements through the diversity of contributors to the Cambrian explosion of theoretical physics to the Trinity test itself assessed as a fantastically expensive and fraught and representative science experiment, Hecht in the last chapter restates his point eloquently and unmistakably:
The explosion took place, and emitted the light, heat, sound, radioactivity, and blast with which the world has since become familiar. The secret was out for all the world to see. An atomic bomb was possible.
This is the real point. We have all heard about the secrets of the atomic bomb, how they were guarded, and how important it is to keep or not to keep them to ourselves. There have even been spy scares about it. The reader knows now that there are no fundamental secrets. Atomic energy was known and evaluated in 1900; the basic equation was written in 1905. Its meaning in terms of atomic structure has come slowly with each new discovery about the nature of matter and energy. If there were a secret, we gave it away in July 1945. It is that a chain reaction is possible and that it can be used to make a bomb. That was the meaning of the explosion at Alamogordo.
Can another country make an atomic bomb? Of course it can. If we can think of several ways of doing each step from uranium fission to atomic bomb, so can another group of scientists. In fact, the British were ahead of us in 1941, and they may possibly have given us a good run if Britain were not so near Germany that its plants and cities were steadily bombed and blasted. We were far away from the scene of the war, and the British sent their best people to work with us. So did the Canadians. Even Niels Bohr from Denmark came here to help. Moreover, we had on our side some of the best brains in the refugees from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy.
All these men and women worked against time and were always haunted by the possibility that the Germans might get there first, or that a chain reaction could not be established. Some of them hoped it could never be established. The social and political crises that lay ahead were all too clear and some of them even hoped against hope that some quirk of nature would make it impossible to have a chain reaction. Where that quirk was, no one knew. It might have turned up at any stage in the process and made further progress impossible. That uncertainty is gone. Alamogordo made it plain that a chain reaction with uranium and plutonium can work.
Of course there are technical and engineering secrets. They cannot involve anything fundamental. Most likely they are the kind that competing motorcar manufacturers keep from one another. In a short time competent engineers and inventors can duplicate them and probably improve them. This fact does not belittle the ingenuity, imagination, and skill involved in technical and engineering work. But it does insist that we Americans have no monopoly of such ingenuity, imagination, and skill.
The design of the actual bomb itself can be considered like the design of any other piece of ordnance. We keep the design of our submarines secret, also of our torpedoes, guns, bombsights, of practically every important piece of ordnance. Other countries do likewise. We can do so, or not; it is of no great matter. The real secret is that there is no basic secret.
I didn't know that anyone had stated this fact for the consumption of the general public in the spring of 1947—Hecht had turned in his manuscript in the fall of 1946—much less so baldly that it should not still be necessary to explain to people that you can wander into the country of restricted data just by studying the life cycle of stars. The conclusion is not the only time he pushes back against American exceptionalism in the realm of the sciences. He didn't know about Klaus Fuchs, but he wasn't wrong that espionage was unnecessary when all the materials for reverse engineering were in the public domain. I was saddened to read of his untimely death later in the same year as his book's publication, then horrified to realize he could still have suffered the misfortune of seeing the lugubriously fictionalized Manhattan Project of The Beginning or the End (1947) in theaters, which if so I can only hope he went with one of his friends who had worked on the real thing and ate both figurative and literal popcorn all the way through. I would much more strongly recommend reading Explaining the Atom, which does what it says on the tin lucidly and uncondescendingly and with a definite bent toward not blowing ourselves off the face of the planet. Incidentally his account of the discovery of nuclear fission gives full due credit to Lise Meitner, which was more than the 1944 Nobel Committee for Chemistry could manage. His model of the atom may have been superseded by atomic orbitals, but he's part of the past that isn't as streamlined as hindsight. I love when I find them, in film or little free libraries.
In some experience with atomic energy legislation, I have talked with enough public men to know that almost none of them understands even the elementary principles underlying the release of atomic energy. The same is true for most well-educated laymen. And yet all of us must make decisions about this weapon, which "is potentially destructive beyond the wildest nightmare of the imagination." These decisions cannot be made in ignorance; the public must be informed.
Consider the matter of secrets, of which there is still too much talk. As will become apparent there is no unique or single secret about atomic energy or even about atomic bombs. However, among the many bills introduced into Congress, one even provided the death penalty for giving away the secret of the atomic bomb. Such behavior assumes that the release of atomic energy happened suddenly without any previous history. Indeed, many people still believe this, and the newspaper stories have helped to encourage such belief. There lingers among us the idea that an inventor, a scientist, a professor is a long-haired gentleman, a little wild in the head, who has crazy ideas which occasionally work out. The atomic bomb presumably was one of those that worked.
After refuting this anti-intellectual great man theory of nuclear history by drawing the reader from the classical construction of elements through the diversity of contributors to the Cambrian explosion of theoretical physics to the Trinity test itself assessed as a fantastically expensive and fraught and representative science experiment, Hecht in the last chapter restates his point eloquently and unmistakably:
The explosion took place, and emitted the light, heat, sound, radioactivity, and blast with which the world has since become familiar. The secret was out for all the world to see. An atomic bomb was possible.
This is the real point. We have all heard about the secrets of the atomic bomb, how they were guarded, and how important it is to keep or not to keep them to ourselves. There have even been spy scares about it. The reader knows now that there are no fundamental secrets. Atomic energy was known and evaluated in 1900; the basic equation was written in 1905. Its meaning in terms of atomic structure has come slowly with each new discovery about the nature of matter and energy. If there were a secret, we gave it away in July 1945. It is that a chain reaction is possible and that it can be used to make a bomb. That was the meaning of the explosion at Alamogordo.
Can another country make an atomic bomb? Of course it can. If we can think of several ways of doing each step from uranium fission to atomic bomb, so can another group of scientists. In fact, the British were ahead of us in 1941, and they may possibly have given us a good run if Britain were not so near Germany that its plants and cities were steadily bombed and blasted. We were far away from the scene of the war, and the British sent their best people to work with us. So did the Canadians. Even Niels Bohr from Denmark came here to help. Moreover, we had on our side some of the best brains in the refugees from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy.
All these men and women worked against time and were always haunted by the possibility that the Germans might get there first, or that a chain reaction could not be established. Some of them hoped it could never be established. The social and political crises that lay ahead were all too clear and some of them even hoped against hope that some quirk of nature would make it impossible to have a chain reaction. Where that quirk was, no one knew. It might have turned up at any stage in the process and made further progress impossible. That uncertainty is gone. Alamogordo made it plain that a chain reaction with uranium and plutonium can work.
Of course there are technical and engineering secrets. They cannot involve anything fundamental. Most likely they are the kind that competing motorcar manufacturers keep from one another. In a short time competent engineers and inventors can duplicate them and probably improve them. This fact does not belittle the ingenuity, imagination, and skill involved in technical and engineering work. But it does insist that we Americans have no monopoly of such ingenuity, imagination, and skill.
The design of the actual bomb itself can be considered like the design of any other piece of ordnance. We keep the design of our submarines secret, also of our torpedoes, guns, bombsights, of practically every important piece of ordnance. Other countries do likewise. We can do so, or not; it is of no great matter. The real secret is that there is no basic secret.
I didn't know that anyone had stated this fact for the consumption of the general public in the spring of 1947—Hecht had turned in his manuscript in the fall of 1946—much less so baldly that it should not still be necessary to explain to people that you can wander into the country of restricted data just by studying the life cycle of stars. The conclusion is not the only time he pushes back against American exceptionalism in the realm of the sciences. He didn't know about Klaus Fuchs, but he wasn't wrong that espionage was unnecessary when all the materials for reverse engineering were in the public domain. I was saddened to read of his untimely death later in the same year as his book's publication, then horrified to realize he could still have suffered the misfortune of seeing the lugubriously fictionalized Manhattan Project of The Beginning or the End (1947) in theaters, which if so I can only hope he went with one of his friends who had worked on the real thing and ate both figurative and literal popcorn all the way through. I would much more strongly recommend reading Explaining the Atom, which does what it says on the tin lucidly and uncondescendingly and with a definite bent toward not blowing ourselves off the face of the planet. Incidentally his account of the discovery of nuclear fission gives full due credit to Lise Meitner, which was more than the 1944 Nobel Committee for Chemistry could manage. His model of the atom may have been superseded by atomic orbitals, but he's part of the past that isn't as streamlined as hindsight. I love when I find them, in film or little free libraries.
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