Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

HEAVY WATER 361
know, that Hitler had placed an embargo on Czechoslovakian uranium, the
only source of the ore then known in Europe.18'
Fermi and Leo Szilard at Columbia, Richard B. Roberts at the Car-
negie Institution in Washington and other groups at Johns Hopkins, Princeton,
and California independently confirmed the Hahn-Strassmann results.'82
Their success at once raised the fear that other scientists in Germany had
done the same, realized the probability of uranium fission, and soon the full
resources of German science would be organized in a massive assault on
the problem.
Aware that the magnitude of difficulties that had yet to be. resolved
required Government support, Szilard and Wigner in July 1939 conferred
with Einstein in Princeton. In letters addressed to President Roosevelt,
Einstein and Szilard explained the significance of the uranium experiments,
the probability of achieving a chain reaction, and the urgency of proving out
that probability before Nazi Germany did. Alexander Sachs, economist and
381 Testimony. of Alexander Sachs, Hearings before the Special Committee on Atomic
Energy * * on S. Res. 179 [McMahon Committee] (Nov. 27, 1945), Pt. 1, pp. 2—7.
There seemed reason for alarm, but German research in nuclear physics was thwarted
by Nazi ideology. That ideology is illuminated in a note that appeared in Science, 85,
262 (1937):
The Manchester Guardian prints in its issue of February 7 the following: "The Ber-
liner Tageblatt reports a lecture given by Geheimrat (Privy Councillor) Professor
Dr. Stark, president of the National Physical and Technical Institution (Physikalisch-
Technische Reichsanstalt), on Dogmatism and Experience in Atomic Research.' Pro-
fessor Dr. Stark, according to this report, rejected the theory of the form of the atom
the moment it was put forward by Lord Rutherford and Niels Bohr—less on technical
(sachlichen) grounds than from fundamental objections to their acceptance of views
and dogmas of Jewish physicists. He now wished not only to criticize but to bring for-
ward something better as an alternative. He described his new model of the atom
with the aid of a short film. Its main feature is that the electron has not the form of
a sphere, assigned to it by the Jewish physicist Abraham, but that of a vortex-ring
(Wirbélring). Jewish influence, said Professor Dr. Stark, has gone so far that even
non-Jewish scientists like Planck, Bohr, Von Laue, Schrodinger and Heisenberg had
become partisans of the false doctrine (Irrlehre), and no young lecturer who gave a
thought to his career dared to oppose the dominant theory. Some particularly pushing
physicists married Jewish women in order to advance their careers. Now that these
monstrous circumstances had been discovered, German and authentic (arteigene) physics
would forge ahead. 'Privy Councillor Stark's lecture is to serve,' the report concludes,
'as a new thrust to eliminate from German physics the effects of the Jewish mind.'
Unfortunately, Stark said in conclusion, in the two decades no important discovery had
been made by physicists of the German alignment."
Szilard and Zinn, "Instantaneous emission of fast neutrons in the interaction of slow
neutrons with uranium," Phys. Rev. 55, 799 (1939). Other confirming letters in that
issue of Phys. Rev, appeared on pp. 509, 510, 511, 516, 797. That of Bohr and Wheeler,
which suggested that fission was more likely in than appeared in Phys. Rev. 56,
426 (1939).