Otto Hahn Quotes

The crimes of the Germans are really the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the so-called civilized nations,” he wrote the physicist Otto Hahn. “The conduct of the German intellectuals—viewed as a class—was no better than that of the mob.

As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics.

Gewönlich wird eine Entdeckung nicht auf den einfachsten, sondern auf einem komplizierten Wege gemacht; die einfachen Fälle zeigen sich erst später.

O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations that this type of nuclear reaction may be described in an essentially classical way like the fission of a liquid drop, and that the fission products must fly apart with kinetic energies of the order of hundred million electron-volts each.

They thought the Allies would be desperate to “buy” their reactor research in the postwar era. Apparently they were not moved to check to see whether this arrogance was founded, and the depression and desperation one hears them going through after Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals their sudden irrelevance. As Otto Hahn chided them right after they learned of Hiroshima: “If the Americans have a uranium bomb, then you’re all second-raters.” The

In a 1978 memoir von Weizsäcker remembers discussing the possibility of a bomb with Otto Hahn in the spring of 1939. Hahn opposed secrecy then partly on the grounds of scientific ethics but also partly because he “felt that if it were to be made, it would be worst for the entire world, even for Germany, if Hitler were to be the only one to have it.” Like Szilard, Teller and Wigner, von Weizsäcker remembers realizing in discussions with a friend “that this discovery could not fail to radically change the political structure of the world”:1207

In Farm Hall, a quiet country house outside Cambridge, ten Uranium Club scientists were waiting for a decision to be made about their fate. They had been held there since July 3, 1945, rounded up when the Nazi regime fell, along with their papers, laboratory equipment, and supplies of uranium and heavy water. Among them were Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, and Kurt Diebner.

Nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin by two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, in 1938. It was explained theoretically (and named) by the Austrian-born physicists Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch in 1939. The possibility of a nuclear chain reaction leading to “large-scale production of energy and radioactive elements, unfortunately also perhaps to atomic bombs” was the insight of the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd. The possibility that such a chain reaction might also be harnessed in a nuclear reactor to generate heat was also recognized at that time. Yet it took little more than five years to build the first atomic bomb, whereas it was not until 1951 that the first nuclear power station was opened.

The atom bomb, created by Oppenheimer and others, ended World War II. Its creation was aided by immigrants from Germany like Einstein, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassman. This is back when we decided who we let into the country. Nuclear weapons have threatened the world ever since. Cockroaches can survive a nuclear bomb, but they cannot live if you swat them with a newspaper. That, my friends, tells you all you need to know about how lethal the media are.