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By Root 1304 0

in Copenhagen, and Bohr himself frequently seemed to be in several places at once. He consulted men who would stay and work in Nazi Germany, most famously Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker and Werner Heisenberg. He also welcomed those escaping the oppressions of dictators and helped hundreds get safely off the Continent as Hitler’s darkness fell. (He himself would escape, first to Sweden, then to Britain and the United States, in late 1943.) In Polanyi’s scientific republic, Bohr was primus inter pares. He embodied the ideal of a scientific community, offering by example a model of integrity and probity, encouraging others in their work, sharing, with his wife, Margrethe, his hospitality, and most of all failing, in the most admirable ways, to respect political and national boundaries that stood in the way of scientific progress.

Bohr’s supreme cosmopolitanism would bring him to understand that a terrible explosive based on the energy of the atom was no more susceptible to monopoly than the atom itself. More than anyone else, Bohr would grasp the ultimate unity of the world’s scientific community. The secret of the atomic bomb was in his judgment no secret at all, since intelligent men and women across the globe had come together to understand the forces that made it work. Borders between nations, hardened by mistrust and war, were finally ineffective against the spread of scientific knowledge. ‘The chain of scientific events that led to the threshold of the bomb’, wrote Laura Fermi, had gone ‘zigzagging without interruption from one country to another’. In 1943, Bohr felt that the republic of science, looming transcendently over the artificial collection of nation states, would be the final arbiter of the bomb. He knew the Russian scientists, including Peter Kapitsa, and he knew that they would figure out how to build a bomb. Why not admit that secrets were impossible to keep in a polity based on sharing, and acknowledge the scientific republic by letting the Soviets know that an international group of scientists was making a bomb in the United States?11

Bohr’s teacher, colleague, and friend Ernest Rutherford was gone by then; he would never see his ‘moonshine’ made horribly manifest at Hiroshima. Rutherford apparently once claimed that he could do his research at the North Pole, provided he had a lab and the right equipment. Rudolf Peierls, a German who came to work in England in 1933 and later helped to develop the bomb in Los Alamos, knew Rutherford (and Bohr) well, and doubted either could have worked successfully in isolation. ‘The Rutherford and Bohr types thrive on contacts,’ he wrote. ‘They are kept going by their own initiative, but they must share their knowledge and their discoveries with friends and colleagues.’ Both men were too much part of the scientific republic to have left it for a smaller, more parochial place.12

3. The republic threatened: the advent of poisonous gas

Despite the creation of Chadwick’s prison camp lab, despite the determination of Bohr and Rutherford to maintain the flow of scientific information across national boundaries, the First World War challenged international cooperation and threatened republican scientific loyalties. It did so in part because many scientists in the belligerent nations went to work for their governments and helped develop weapons that destroyed men in the name of national honor, security, or purpose. Probably the most notorious of these, and a sobering harbinger of nuclear arms, were chemical weapons, often (though not always) dispensed in the form of poisonous gas. Near the Belgian town of Ypres, at 5.00 in the afternoon on 22 April 1915, the air was suddenly filled with ‘thick yellow smoke... issuing from the German trenches’. ‘What follows’, reported the British Field Marshall Sir John French, ‘almost defies description. The effect of these poisonous gases was so virulent as to render the whole of the line held by the French... practically incapable of any action at all... Hundreds of men were thrown into a comatose or dying condition, and within an hour