Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [28]
The experiences of physicist refugees in the United Kingdom during the 1930s obviously varied, and so did their responses to being uprooted. Max Born loathed Hitler, but wanted nothing to do with making an atomic weapon. Leo Szilard had no hesitation contributing his expertise to the bomb project, so great was his hatred for Nazism and so avid his interest in solving scientific puzzles, yet he believed that the bomb should belong to the world or to no one; the trick was to arrive at the conclusion of Wells’s The World Set Free without first living its apocalyptic narrative. Klaus Fuchs, like Szilard, thought the bomb was no single nation’s property, and that the Soviet Union in particular must be told its secrets. Yet the process of exodus might perhaps have had some common influence on those who undertook it. For their departed homelands, they felt anger, sadness, worry, resentment, and affection. Germany had not turned against them, they reasoned: the Nazis had. Their efforts to destroy Hitler, to help Britain win the war, were fueled by a hope of redemption for their land and people. The metaphors they imagined were surgical—cut off the diseased limb that was the regime, excise the rot or infection or tumor, and thus save the patient, without altogether erasing his memory of his illness. Toward the country that took them in they felt gratitude, suspicion, inferiority, confusion, and delight. They were safe, but usually poor. They had places in laboratories, but generally far lower in status than those they had occupied in Germany. The food was wrong, the buildings too, and when they spoke English their accents might be mocked. (Sir Francis Simon, self-mockingly, styled himself ‘vice-president of the Broken English-Speaking Union’.) And many of them were interned by the British government as ‘enemy aliens’ once the war began, and even after their release were forbidden to work on the most sensitive military projects. So, ironically, a good number found themselves working to turn ‘moonshine’ into a war-winning nuclear weapon.16
Above all, the refugee scientists must have felt their identities at least bifurcated, sensing that they were two people at once—or more, if they then went to the United States, as many did. Such a bifurcation can be disorienting. A man’s nationality is not the whole of his identity, of course, but when he is removed from his language, his home, his favorite coffee house or beer hall, his tools and his newspaper and the streets where he once walked freely, he cannot help but lose something essential of himself. And yet, is there a better citizen for Polanyi’s Republic of Science than a scientist with more than one national loyalty? Belonging no more to just one nation, the refugee has seen the tragedy of nationalism and the potentialities of cosmopolitanism. His perspective is broader, his sensibility more generous. The late Edward Said wrote several times of the twelfth-century Saxon monk Hugo of St Victor, who once said: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.’ So it was with the refugee scientists who came to Great Britain during the 1930s.17
It is not fully clear to what extent, or when, the nuclear physicists understood that their findings might be weaponized. Szilard was at least intrigued at the prospect of an atomic bomb. On receiving the Nobel Prize for discovering radioactivity with his wife, Irene Curie, in 1935, Frederic Joliot described ‘nuclear transformations of an explosive character’—language difficult to misunderstand. Still, even in 1939 many leading physicists remained in denial about the implications of their work, among them Einstein, Niels Bohr, and one of the discoverers of fission, Otto Hahn, who insisted that a nuclear explosive ‘would surely be contrary