In the 1930s, Germany and Europe in general suffered a depletion of a resource that they had nurtured for decades. Starting in 1932, laws con­cerning the employment of people of Jewish heritage in universities and research organizations began to have serious effects. Germany began to lose the core of its valuable cache of theoretical and experimental scien­tists as they packed up and left the country. It was an inopportune time to have the number of available nuclear physicists reduced.

Hans Bethe (1906-2005) was a loyal German, reared in a Christian household, who became known as one of the few scientists who produced significant work for 60 years. He lost his job at the University of Tubin­gen in 1933 because his mother was Jewish. He then moved to the United States, joined the faculty of Cornell University, in New York, and became head of the theoretical division at the Los Alamos Laboratory during the atomic bomb project of World War II. Bethe calculated the critical mass of the weapons and did theoretical work on the implosion method used in the plutonium-based bombs.

Edward Teller (1908-2003) was a Hungarian Jew who moved to Ger­many for his education in chemical engineering and nuclear physics, earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Karlsruhe and a Ph. D. studying under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. His job at the University of Gottingen was cut short in 1933, and he was invited to become a professor of physics at George Washington University in Washington, D. C. He joined the atomic bomb team at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during the war and went on to develop the hydrogen bomb and to

be one of the founders of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Another Hungarian Jew who immigrated to Germany to escape com­munism was Eugene “E. P.” Wigner (1902-95). Wigner is the originator of most nuclear reactor theory as it is now practiced, and he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963 for his theories of symmetry in quantum mechan­ics. He studied at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and worked at the University of Gottingen before he left Germany in 1930, seeing a dete­rioration of his fortunes as the Nazi regime coalesced. He was hired by Princeton University in New Jersey, and during the war he was named director of research and development at the Clinton Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His colleagues considered him the intellectual equal of Albert Einstein, and he was instrumental in convincing the U. S. govern­ment to begin the atomic bomb project.

These are only a few examples of the European scientists who fled to the United States because of repressive government policies. The United States had not been on the leading edge of nuclear research, but it would quickly become the world’s center of it as these refugee scientists con­verged from Europe. In Britain, scientists had conducted research on a dignified, noncommercial scale, trying not to be extravagant or make out­rageous predictions. The scientists in the United States may have been a second tier behind the Europeans, but they would not be held back by fear of extravagance. In the United States during World War II, a new type of science would be created. It would be science on a large scale, or “big sci­ence,” with a direct connection to engineering and industrial processes. Billions of dollars would be diverted into some very risky research. The expatriate Europeans would be given anything they needed to continue their quest for the energy in the atomic nucleus. The large outpouring of effort and funding under war priorities would give nuclear power a push that would not have occurred under peaceful conditions with research conducted on an academic level.