Shortly after lunch on Dec. 2, 1942, a group of scientists working in a subterranean squash court beneath the University of Chicago's football field completed one of the world's most important experiments. The team, led by the charismatic and brilliant Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, had created a primitive nuclear reactor in which they launched a self-sustaining uranium chain reaction.
Fermi and the other researchers in Chicago were, of course, sorting out the early science of the atomic bomb. They had created a situation where a subatomic particle called a neutron smashed into the nucleus of a uranium atom and split it apart into lighter elements and more neutrons, which would go on to pummel and split additional uranium atoms. Their success, celebrated with a bottle of Chianti poured into paper cups, was the result of nearly 50 years of international scientific research aimed at understanding the uranium atom and the power stored within its nucleus, and the experiment would shape world politics for decades to come.
Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry That Created the Nuclear Age, by Amir D. Aczel, Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $34.50
In his newest book, Uranium Wars, Israeli-born mathematician, professor and author Amir D. Aczel, long a U.S. resident, tells the stories of the competition and collaboration among the world's brightest scientists that led to the Chicago experiments and allowed the United States – and later other countries – to become nuclear powers.
After providing a short history of uranium, Aczel begins with Lise Meitner, a young and ambitious Austrian physicist who, unable to find a job in her field, winds up teaching at a girls' school by day and carrying out her research in a university laboratory by night.
By the summer of 1907, Meitner was fed up with her situation and she travelled to Berlin, where she hoped to mingle with Germany's greatest minds and learn some new scientific methods. It wasn't long before others recognized her scientific gifts and she was granted a research position at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, where she began a 30-year collaboration with chemist Otto Hahn.
Like others, Aczel ponders the moral conduct of the scientists involved in making the U.S. bomb
By the early 1930s, we learn that Meitner and Hahn were in competition with the French duo of Irène Joliot-Curie (the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie) and her husband Frédéric Joliot, and a young Italian, Enrico Fermi. All three groups were eager to discover what happens to uranium when it is bombarded by neutrons.
Fermi hypothesized that the nucleus of the uranium atom would absorb the neutron and create heavier elements, which he dubbed transuranium elements. In 1934, he devised an experiment that seemed to indicate that he was right. Then, in 1935, Irène Joliot-Curie performed her own analysis of neutron irradiation and came up with a surprisingly different result: that lanthanum, an element lighter than uranium, was produced by the reaction. Hahn and Meitner were convinced that Joliot- Curie was wrong and set out to prove it.
But their efforts were cut short. It was 1938 and Meitner, an Austrian Jew, had to flee to Sweden to escape the Nazis. (In Italy, Fermi was facing similar predicament: His wife, Laura, came from a Jewish family. After he received the Nobel Prize in physics in December, 1938, Fermi and his family boarded a ship for New York.) But Meitner struggled in Sweden and her career stagnated. Just before Christmas that year, Hahn sent Meitner a letter describing his latest results and asking Meitner for help interpreting them. During a morning outing with her nephew – she hiking as fast as he skied – Meitner solved Hahn's problem and developed the theory of nuclear fission.
