He Lit Nuclear Fire; Now He Would Douse It

by William J. Broad

from the Congressional Records
©1997 All rights reserved.

"FOR the things I do, it's accurate enough," Dr. Hans A. Bethe said as he rummaged through his briefcase and pulled out a slide rule, a relic from the days before computers took over tedious number-crunching for most scientists. Its battered case told of considerable use.

What Dr.Bethe does at the age of 90, and has done for more than seven decades, is ponder such riddles of nature as how stars live and die. It is his passion. Once it won him a Nobel Prize in Physics and now it keeps him excited and in his office at Cornell University, where he arrived more than 60 years ago after fleeing Nazi Germany.

A combination lock on a metal cabinet hints at what else he does, his sideline, as he puts it, an avocation of more than a half century that helped change history. The atomic bomb.

Dr. Bethe knows how it lives -- having overseen its birth during the World War II, having felt its blistering heat across miles of desert sand, having watched its progeny fill superpower arsenals -- and now he is working hard to make it die.

In April, he wrote a letter to President Clinton that some advocates of arms control regard as historic. As the most senior of the living scientists who begat the atomic age, Dr. Bethe called on the United States to declare that it would forgo all work to devise new kinds of weapons of mass destruction.

But his dream, it turns out, is larger than that, much larger. In an interview last week, Dr. Bethe said that a concerted push by the world's nations and people might yet cut nuclear arsenals down from their current levels of thousands of arms to perhaps 100 in the East, 100 in the West and few in between.

"Then," added this survivor of Hitler and Mussolini, his voice gentle but words sharp, "even if statesmen go crazy again, as they used to be, the use of these weapons will not destroy civilization."

Eventually, perhaps late next century, Dr. Bethe said, the right social conditions may finally arise so that the bomb is no more, so that no nation on earth will want to wield the threat of nuclear annihilation. The nightmare will be over.

He paused.

"That is my hope," he said. "My fear is that we stay where we are," with each side keeping thousands of nuclear arms poised to fly at a moment's notice. "And if we stay where we are, then additional countries will get nuclear weapons" and the earth may yet blaze with thermonuclear fire, the kind that powers stars and destroys most everything in its path.

Hans Albrecht Bethe (pronounced BAY-ta) was born on July 2, 1906, in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine. His father, a physiologist at the university there, was Protestant and his mother Jewish. Hans was their only child.

Displaying an early genius for mathematics, he excelled in school and received a Ph.D. in physics in 1928 at the University of Munich, graduating summa cum laude. He fled Germany after Hitler came to power, going first to England and then to America, arriving at Cornell in 1935.

While helping to found the field of atomic physics, he became fascinated by nature's extremes. In 1938 he penned the equations that explain how the Sun shines and how stars in the prime of life feed their nuclear fires. In 1967 he won a Nobel Prize for the discovery.

From 1943 to 1945 he headed the theoretical division of Los Alamos, the top-secret laboratory in New Mexico where thousands of scientists and technicians, fearful that Hitler might do it first, labored day and night to unlock the atom's power.

Dr. Bethe coaxed some of world's brightest and most idiosyncratic experts to success as they toiled behind rows of barbed wire. Their atomic bomb shook the New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945. The next month the American military dropped similar ones on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war, Dr.Bethe devoted himself not only to nuclear science but to the social dangers posed by that knowledge, in particular to keeping the bomb from ever killing people again.

He advised the Federal Government on matters of weapons and arms limitation, becoming a prime mover behind the first East-West arms accord, the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which ended nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and permitted them only beneath the earth.

That stopped the rain of radioactive fallout that had raised the risk of cancer and birth defects among many people. But Dr. Bethe wanted more. He campaigned for a complete cessation to all testing, contrary to Pentagon planners and politicians intent on redoubling the size of the nation's nuclear arsenal.

The development of new types of nuclear arms requires numerous test firings and, as flaws inevitably come to light, design improvements. The absence of explosive testing sharply increases the odds of failure and virtually rules out the possibility of perfecting new designs.

In the 1980's, Dr. Bethe was on the losing side of the political war over nuclear-arms development as the Reagan Administration pressed ahead with dozens of underground explosions. One series aimed at perfecting a new generation of bombs that fired deadly beams.

In the 1990's, he was on the winning side as President Clinton signed, and the United Nations endorsed, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Its goal is to halt the development of new weapons of mass destruction by imposing a global ban on nuclear detonations.

A remaining trouble, as Dr. Bethe sees it, is that the United States over the decades has become so good at designing nuclear arms that it still might make progress despite the ban. Indeed, the Clinton Administration recently began a $4-billion-a-year program of bomb maintenance that is endowing the weapons laboratories with all kinds of new tools and test equipment, including a $2.2 billion laser the size of the Rose Bowl that is to ignite tiny thermonuclear explosions.

Critics fear the custodians might get carried away, begetting new designs and perhaps even new classes of nuclear arms.

So it was that Dr. Bethe wrote President Clinton in April, asking for a pledge of no new weapons.

"The time has come for our nation to declare that it is not working, in any way, to develop further weapons of mass destruction," he wrote.

The United States "needs no more," Dr. Bethe stressed. "Further, it is our own splendid weapons laboratories that are, by far and without question, the most likely to succeed in such nuclear inventions. Since any new types of weapons would, in time, spread to others and present a threat to us, it is logical for us not to pioneer further in this field."

In the interview, Dr.Bethe waxed philosophic about the odds that his personal appeal might engender new Federal policy. "It's a big step for the President to say so, but it's a small step for me," he mused. "Maybe the laboratories will feel that my letter was useful and maybe they'll even follow my advice. I think that's all one can expect."

The issue is important, he added. If the community of nations comes to view the United States as a nuclear hypocrite, whether true or not, that perception could threaten to undermine the new treaty and its ratification around the world. Instead, Dr. Bethe said, the United States must be seen as striving to obey the letter of the law.

Dr. Bethe's face comes alive as the topic turns to his current scientific research: how a single aging star can suddenly explode with the power and brilliance of an entire galaxy of 100 billion stars.

It seems like pure poetry given the light he himself is now shedding in his final years.

"I want to understand just how the mechanism works," Dr. Bethe said, "how you get a shock wave that propels most of the star outward, propels it at very high speed."

Most days, he said, he spends about four hours studying the nature of the exploding stars, which are known as supernovas. Occasionally, he works up to six hours.

Theoretic physics is a quintessential young man's field, where geniuses often peak at the age of 30, like athletes. Very few make significant contributions at 50. But at 90, Dr. Bethe, a living legend among his peers, is still going strong. "Here's my latest paper," he said with a grin, displaying it proudly on his cluttered desk. "It has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal." The main point, he said, "is that it's easy to get the supernova to expel the outside material," eliminating the problems theorists once encountered.

Dr.Bethe is not interrupting his research to write memoirs. Instead, a biographer is at work. "It's much easier to have a biographer," he remarked, "and he writes much better than I do."

The back of his office door, in an easy-to-view position, held a poster of the Matterhorn. For nearly a half century, a small town at the foot of the great Swiss mountain has been a vacation spot for Dr. Bethe and his wife, Rose Ewald, whom he met in Germany and married in 1939 while the two were newcomers to the United States.

"I couldn't live without her," he said.

His hair askew, his eyes agleam, Dr.Bethe looked a bit like an aged wizard on the verge of disappearing in a puff of smoke. He seemed at ease with his many lives over many decades and appeared to have reconciled his early work on the bomb with his current push to eliminate it. For him, doing the right thing in different periods of history seemed to call for different kinds of actions.

"I am a very happy person," he said with a relaxed smile. "I wouldn't want to change what I did during my life."