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By Gordon Fraser

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, neither the Atomic Bomb nor the Holocaust were on anybody’s agenda. Instead, the Nazi’s top aim was to rid German culture of perceived pollution. A priority was science, where paradoxically Germany already led the world. To safeguard this position, loud Nazi voices, such as Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard,  complained about a ‘massive infiltration of the Jews into universities’.

The first enactments of a new regime are highly symbolic. The cynically-named Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, published in April 1933, targeted those who had non-Aryan, ‘particularly Jewish’, parents or grandparents. Having a single Jewish grandparent was enough to lose one’s job. Thousands of Jewish university teachers, together with doctors, lawyers, and other professionals were sacked. Some found more modest jobs, some retired, some left the country. Germany was throwing away its hard-won scientific supremacy. When warned of this, Hitler retorted ‘If the dismissal of [Jews] means the end of German science, then we will do without science for a few years’.

Why did the Jewish people have such a significant influence on German science? They had a long tradition of religious study, but assimilated Jews had begun to look instead to a radiant new role-model. Albert Einstein was the most famous scientist the world had ever known. As well as an icon for ambitious young students, he was also a prominent political target. Aware of this, he left Germany for the USA in 1932, before the Nazis came to power.

How to win friends and influence nuclear people
The talented nuclear scientist Leo Szilard appeared to be able to foresee the future. He exploited this by carefully cultivating people with influence. In Berlin, he sought out Einstein.

Like Einstein, Szilard anticipated the Civil Service Law. He also saw the need for a scheme to assist the refugee German academics who did not. First in Vienna, then in London, he found influential people who could help.

Just as the Nazis moved into power, nuclear physics was revolutionized by the discovery of a new nuclear component, the neutron. One of the main centres of neutron research was Berlin, where scientists saw a mysterious effect when uranium was irradiated. They asked their former Jewish colleagues, now in exile, for an explanation.

The answer was ‘nuclear fission’. As the Jewish scientists who had fled Germany settled into new jobs, they realized how fission was the key to a new source of energy. It could also be a weapon of unimaginable power, the Atomic Bomb. It was not a great intellectual leap, so the exiled scientists were convinced that their former colleagues in Germany had come to the same conclusion. So, when war looked imminent, they wanted to get to the Atomic Bomb first. One wrote of ‘the fear of the Nazis beating us to it’.

Szilard, by now in the US, saw it was time to act again. He knew that President Roosevelt would not listen to him, but would listen to Einstein, and wrote to Roosevelt over Einstein’s signature.

When a delegation finally managed to see him on 11 October 1939, Roosevelt said “what you’re after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up”. But nobody knew exactly what to do. The letter had mentioned bombs ‘too heavy for transportation by air’. Such a vague threat did not appear urgent.

But in 1940, German Jewish exiles in Britain realized that if the small amount of the isotope 235 in natural uranium could be separated, it could produce an explosion equivalent to several thousand tons of dynamite. Only a few kilograms would be needed, and could be carried by air. The logistics of nuclear weapons suddenly changed. Via Einstein, Szilard wrote another Presidential letter. On 19 January 1942, Roosevelt ordered a rapid programme for the development of the Atomic Bomb, the ‘Manhattan Project’.

Across the Atlantic, the Germans indeed had seen the implications of nuclear fission. But its scientific message had been muffled. Key scientists had gone. Germany had no one left with the prescience of Szilard, nor the political clout of Einstein. The Nazis also had another priority. On 20 January, one day after Roosevelt had given the go-ahead for the Atomic Bomb, a top-level meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee outlined a “final solution of the Jewish Problem”. Nazi Germany had its own crash programme.

US crash programme – on 16 July 1945, just over three years after the huge project had been launched, the Atomic Bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert.

Nazi crash programme – what came to be known as the Holocaust rapidly got under way. Here a doomed woman and her children arrive at the specially-built Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination centre.

As such, two huge projects, unknown to each other, emerged simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The dreadful schemes forged ahead, and each in turn became reality. On two counts, what had been unimaginable no longer was.

Gordon Fraser was for many years the in-house editor at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. His books on popular science and scientists include Cosmic Anger, a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim Nobel scientist, Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror, and The Quantum Exodus. He is also the editor of The New Physics for the 21st Century and The Particle Century.

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Image credits: Atomic Bomb tested in the New Mexico desert. Photograph courtesy of  Los Alamos National Laboratory; Auschwitz-Birkenau, alte Frau und Kinder, Bundesarchiv Bild, Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

The post How Nazi Germany lost the nuclear plot appeared first on OUPblog.

Physicist turned science writer, Gordon Fraser, most recent book Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam - The First Muslim Nobel Scientist, is a biography of Salam who despite wining the Nobel Prize was excommunicated and branded as a heretic in his own country. A staunch Muslim, he was ashamed of the decline of science in the heritage of Islam, and struggled doggedly to restore it to its former glory. Undermined by his excommunication, these valiant efforts were doomed. In the article below Fraser looks at the history of Muslim winners of the Nobel Prize.

Amid all the international reaction to Israel’s offensive in Gaza, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has stirred up more controversy in Iran. In December the Iranian authorities closed the Tehran office of Ms Ebadi’s Human Rights Defenders Centre, saying it had operated for eight years without permission. Whatever the context, the perception of a Nobel Prize in Islamic countries often appears to clash with the traditional veneration in which it is held elsewhere.

The Iranian lawyer’s Nobel acknowledged ‘her efforts for democracy and human rights. She has focused especially on the struggle for the rights of women and children.’ While people around the world applauded this recognition, others maintained that it was an insult to and part of a continuing conspiracy against Islam. In a statement carried by the Iranian Jomhuri Eslami newspaper, a group from a major seminary said ‘The decision by the Western oppressive societies to award the prize to Ebadi was done in order to ridicule Islam.’ How can what is supposed to be one of the world’s highest honours also be perceived as insult and ridicule?

Shirin Ebadi is one of the few Muslims to have been honoured by the Nobel authorities. The first was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who shared the Peace Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 for their unexpected Middle East peace overture. In 1981 Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian hard-liners who condemned his rapprochement with Israel. So much for Nobel honor.

One year after Sadat’s award, in 1979 the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam (1926-1996) became the first Muslim to win a Nobel Science Prize, and the first Pakistani to win any Nobel. The achievement was greeted in the West with the customary apotheosis. But the accolade in Salam’s home country was very different. Salam belonged to the fringe Ahmadi sect of Islam, which was formally excommunicated in 1977 for its belief in a 19th-century promised messiah. Salam, once the Pakistan President’s chief scientific adviser, was ostracized. Revivalist Muslim voices criticized his Nobel award as a desperate attempt to restore Ahmadi credibility. In a grotesque eructation of prejudice and hate, the award was scorned as a deliberate insult to Islam.

After his funeral in 1996, Salam’s tombstone in Rabwah, Pakistan was inscribed ‘Abdus Salam, the First Muslim Nobel Laureate’ (innocently ignoring Sadat’s 1978 award). Soon the grave was visited by contemptuous outsiders and the inscription edited - and the error magnified - by an imperious hammer and chisel to read ‘Abdus Salam, the First … Nobel Laureate’. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, and the now absurd epitaph was daubed with black paint.

After Salam’s award, the 1988 Nobel Literature Prize went to the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), whose initial literary success in the 1960s and 70s created a new hub of Arabic culture. This became overshadowed by his controversial Awlad Haratina (Children of the Alley) which was banned in much of the Arab world after reactionary Islamic scholars declared its portrayal of religious figures to be blasphemous. In the darkness of such bigotry, writers who can still write are deemed more dangerous than what they actually publish. In 1994 Mahfouz almost died after being knifed in the neck, and was left unable to work.

In 1994 Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shared the Peace Prize with Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for their resolute but eventually futile efforts towards resolving the perennial Israel-Palestine conflict. Such a pairing of names which not that long before had been sworn enemies soon created a new conflict of its own, and in 1995 Rabin was assassinated in his own country, a macabre reflection of the Sadat episode.

(On a less controversial note, in 1999, the Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail was awarded the Nobel Chemistry Prize for his work in using laser beams to track chemical reactions, ‘freeze-framing’ their evolution. 2005, Mohamad ElBaradei, the Egyptian Director General of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), and the IAEA itself received the Peace Prize for their efforts in preventing nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and for promoting its safe use for peaceful aims. In 2006, Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh received the Peace Prize for his idea of ‘micro-credits’ – mini-loans to help disadvantaged people haul themselves out of poverty.)

The world’s 800 million Muslims make up about ten per cent of the world’s population, but have garnered just a handful of Nobel awards, many of them generating more controversy than honour. Jews make up a small fraction of one per cent of the world’s population, but have won hundreds of Nobel prizes. This track record alone is enough to convince ultraconservative Muslims that the Nobel dice are loaded. But why such disparity and dissent?

The West has grown to view the Orient from afar through a thick prism which distorts the transmitted image. For more than a thousand years, the membrane between Islam and the West, inflamed by lack of understanding, has been rubbed raw by mutual hypersensitivity, and the ulcerated wound periodically erupts. It appears to be especially sensitive to Nobel Prizes.