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done tours of duty in the Leipzig area of Germany, a hundred-odd miles
southwest of Berlin. All of that, surely, was too much to be coincidence.
And Ferracini knew well that nothing Winslade was mixed up with ever happened
purely by chance.
CHAPTER 7
THE TRAIL THAT HAD eventually led to the unravelling by U.S. intelligence of
the real story behind Nazism began back in the scientific world of the 1930s
with the birth of atomic physics.
In the early years of that decade, Enrico Fermi, then working at the
University of Rome, had speculated on the possibility of producing artificial
radioactive isotopes by bombarding substances with neutrons, which had been
discovered recently by Chadwick at Cambridge. He went on to conduct a series
of experiments along such lines and published various papers. But in late
1938, his work was interrupted when he visited Stockholm to collect his Nobel
Prize and seized the opportunity to escape to the West from Mussolini's
Fascism, accompanied by his wife, Laura, and their two children.
By that time, however, similar investigations were under way in other places,
notably the
Joliot-Curie Laboratory in Paris and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry
at Dahlem, in
Berlin. Further experiments on the neutron bombardment of uranium had proved
puzzling: analysis of the reaction products failed to reveal the heavy
elements, such as radium, that should have resulted from the decay of
artificially activated heavy nuclei. Finally, in December 1938, Otto
Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin conducted an experiment which showed
conclusively that while radium and other predicted elements were definitely
not created by the neutron bombardment of uranium, certain much lighter
substances, such as barium and krypton, were. For a while, the experts were
unable to offer a satisfactory interpretation.
Hahn wrote a letter detailing these puzzling results to a former colleague of
the two scientists, Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jewess forced to flee the
country after Hitler's annexation of Austria, who was by then working at the
Nobel Institute in Stockholm. It so happened that
Meitner's nephew, Otto Frisch, who worked with Niels Bohr at Bohr's Institute
of Theoretical
Physics in Copenhagen, had come to Sweden to spend Christmas with her, and
between them they worked out what had happened.
The uranium nuclei, instead of simply absorbing neutrons to become heavier,
unstable isotopes as had been expected, were splitting into nuclei of lighter
elements of approximately half the original weight. Unlike spontaneous
radioactive decays, which undergo comparatively small changes in mass by
ejecting single particles and therefore involve only minor releases of
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internal binding energy, the uranium nuclei had been induced to split, or
"fission," resulting in enormous
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ration.txt yields of energy.
At the end of his Christmas vacation, Frisch brought the news back to Denmark
just as Bohr was about to leave for the U.S. to attend the Fifth Washington
Conference of Theoretical Physics.
Bohr announced the findings to the conference on January 26, 1939, and the
proceedings degenerated into a flurry of frantic scientists, many still in
black tie, rushing through the exits to set up repeat experiments in their own
laboratories at Johns Hopkins University, the Carnegie Institute, Columbia,
Chicago, Princeton, Berkeley, and elsewhere.
The experiments confirmed the practicability of fission -- as isolated atomic
events, that is. The list of unknowns that would have to be answered before
the energy theoretically available from the nucleus could be tapped on a
usable scale was daunting, however. Accordingly, after their initial
excitement, the American scientists resigned themselves to many more years of
patience and perseverance before a working device of any kind -- bomb or power
source -- would be even in sight.
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