By Brian Cathcart
The Star (Section 2) - Monday July 31, 1995
It has been written that the men who made the atom bomb drew a line across history beyond which nothing was the same. Sir Rudolf Peierls was a founding father of the atomic age. Without him, the horrors of Hiroshima, and the subsequent 50 years of nuclear angst, minght have been avoided.
HIROSHIMA was not the first atomic explosion, for the Americans had bomb, and Rudolf Peierls had been there to witness it.
A physicist at the secret atomic laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, he waited with colleagues on a hill 20 miles from "point zero" through the long night 50 years ago on July 16 while the weapon was prepared.
As the final phase of the countdown began, he lay on the ground and then, a little before dawn, through a piece of thick dark glass, he watched what happens when plutonium atoms burst.
"We were struck with awe," he wrote later. "We had known what to expect, but no amount of imagination could have given us a taste of the real thing."
Peierls had reason to feel a special awe, for it was to him the revelation had come five years earlier - that atomic weapons were possible.
Now aged 88, Sir Rudolf lived in a retirement home near Oxford. He is a small man with thick, whitening hair and a face that is slightly twisted, perhaps by his years of pipe-smoking or the struggle with poor eyesight. Though he settle in Britain more than 60 years ago, his accent and occasionally his grammar are unmistakably German.
His special relationship with the atomic bomb was born at Birmingham University one spring morning in 1940, when Otto Frisch, an Austrian colleague and fellow refugee from Nazism, asked him a question. They knew that ordinary uranium could not be made to explode, Frisch said, but what about the rare strain of uranium known as U-235? If you could refine enough of it, could it be made into a bomb?
So Peierls and Frisch performed the calculations and the answers revealed that an atomic bomb, until that moment dismissed by all the best min's as impossible, could be made - and made within a few years.
What do you do, when you have in your hands such appalling knowledge? Do you lock it away and hope no one else notices?
Peierls and Frisch did not. Instead they committed their discovery to paper - the first theoretical blueprint ever written for a "superbomb," as they called it - and ensured that this was passed to the British government.
Before long, a full-scale feasilility study was underway which led to the creation of a British atomic bomb programme. After the United States had entered the war, it was recognised that only the Americans had the resources to make the bomb.
The Manhattan Project was born, Frisch and Peierls went to the US to join it, and Peierls eventually became head of the team of British scientists at Los Alamos. Peierls not only provided the inspiration; he was among the handful of men most intimately involved with creating the atomic bomb, working closely with two giants of physics - Hans Bethe, later a Nobel Prize winner, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory director.
We know what happened there after. Half the population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed - just two bombs, and more than 300,000 dead. The Cold War followed, and an arms race that led from atomic weapons to hydrogen bombs that were 1,000 times more powerful, to intercontinental missiles and tok Mutual Assured Destruction.
Half a century on, you wonder: how does anyone live with such a thing?
Peierls has clearly managed to do so. He has led a happy and fruitful existence in Britain, first at Birmingham and then at Oxford, where he was Wykeham Professor of Physics from 1963-74. He has taught thousands of grateful students, published widely both for the scientific and the general reader, become a Fellow of a Royal Society, a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and a knight. He is not a monster, and nor he is tormented by guilt; he has a view of his part which is both simple and firm, and it does not require him to lose sleep.He identifies two moments when he made important moral choices. The first was when he and Frisch decided to alert the British government to their discovery. The reasoning was straightforward, as he says now: "We knew that the Germans had good physicists and our main incentive in urging rapid action was the fear that the Germans would get there first."
The other important moment foe Peierls came when the fear that the Germans were developing the bomb turned out to be unfounded - this was only established with certainty as the Third Reich collapsed. This meant that the original rationale for developing the bomb was gone; Germany was not making a nuclear weapon and was all but beaten. There was, moreover, no possibility that the Japanese might have a serious atomic bomb programme.
Why not quit then?
One scientist in the British team, Joseph Rotblat, did so, leaving Los Alamos on grounds of conscience, but Peierls and the rest worked on.
"So far as I can reconstruct the situation," he says, "first of all there was still a bloody war going on, and here was a weapon that would obviously end it. It should of course be used in a humane and sensible way, and we felt, or I felt, that we trusted our government to be responsible enough to think about this. We felt that provided the Amereican authorities were made aware of the implications, one could trust them to use it in a reasonable way."
In this he was disappointed. He expected that the power of the bomb would be demonstrated to the Japanese before it was used in anger, perhaps by dropping it over some remote area of Japan, or by inviting observers to a test. This was, he admits, a naive view. The US government always intended to drop the bomb on a city and the scientists had no power to prevent that.
Bird Of Passage, Peierls's autobiography which was published in 1985, contains just six lines on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referring to the elation with which Los Alamos greeted this news that meant the war must soon end, and expressing sorrow at the suffering the bombs must have caused.
Peierl elaborated that he will not dismiss the use of the atom bomb as immoral (although he believes the attack on Nagasaki was "unnessary and irresponsible"). Instead, he deploys an arresting argument.
"One has to remember that the bombs that were used on Japan fitted into the pattern of warfare at the time. The number of casualities in Hiroshima was no greater than in the fire raids of Tokyo, or Dresden, or Hamburg."
"The interesting thing is how public attitudes changed. In the beginning, when you had the air raids on Guernica and later Rotterdam, everybody was indignant. This was not a civilised way of behaving."
"A few years later, afyer Dresden, nobody turned a hair. If it were nit for that change of attitude, it might have been harder to drop the bombs on Japan."
In other words, if the scientists had shifted their moral ground, they did so in step with the rest of the world. The responsibility for the bombing of Hiroshima, he implies, is shared with the mass of people who supported the fire-bombing raids and who welcomed with relief the news of the devastating new weapon.
All of these Peierls spells out slowly, toughtfully, looking down at the floor or into the middle distance as he searches for the right words. His language is studiously unemotional; only once does he lapse into something like rhetoric, when he remarks: "As regards the casualties, I don't know whether I would rather be blown up by an atom bomb or perish in a fire raid."
The arguments he has just elaborated - the need to start making the bomb in case the Germans were doing it too, the need to complete is because it could end the war, the change in attitudes to the mass killing od civilians - add up to a framework of thought with which Peierls is comfortable.
Not, perhaps, completely comfortable ("I do think about it, of course," he says), but sufficiently so. "Nobody enjoys being associated with a horrible weapon like that, but I still have a feeling that what we did was right in the circumstances."
Nobody alive today under the age of 65 can have any memory of the world on the far aside of the line, the world as Peierls knew it when he made his contribution to the bomb.
And yet we on this side of the line are quick to judge the bomb-makers. As we mark the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we will be tempted into horror and disbelief that men could have made such a machine of destruction.
Rudolf Peierls is proof that the men who did so were not monsters or fools. Most of them are dead, and he is a kind of spokesman, that they were generally honest, thoughtful men who willingly applied their remarkable talents to the war effort in the manner that their governments requested.
If there is guilt, it falls much more widely than on the men of Los Alamos. - Independent On Sunday.
