Fissionline 70

FISSIONLINE

BULLETIN OF ATOMIC MATTERS ISSUE 70 SEPT 2023

IS

IS THIS PROOF WE ARE NOT ALONE?

1946 picture that sparked UFO phenomenon

Could 'freak"A-Bomb imagesignal the arrivalofalienswhocameto "save" Mankindfrom itself?

By Alan Are aliens responsible for Rimmer preventing humanity

It next saw the light of day in the early 1980s when a researcher investigating stories of UFO sightings chanced upon it in the files of a Fleet Street newspaper.

The researcher was investigating alleged connections between UFO sightings and ABomb test sites. As far as we know, the picture has never been published before and only came to light during researches currently being undertaken into Fissionline's extensive archives.

It's discovery spookily coincides with sensational new evidence from various US Government officials who believe that alien space craft visited earth soon after the first ABomb explosions to "save" mankind from destruction.

Edgar Mitchell, who was part of the Apollo 14 mission to the moon, gained notoriety with the dissemination of various conspiracy theories since his return from the moon in 1971.

from descending into a nuclear war? Did life forms from distant stars interfere with early nuclear bomb tests?

As unlikely as it sounds, this intriguing image suggests that such a bizarre notion may well be true.

Taken on July 1st, 1946, the photo shows the mushroom cloud of Test Able, the fourth A-Bomb explosion and the first after after WW2.

Thousands of photos were taken of the shot, but this one was different in that it was the only one to show a strange cone-shaped light emanating from the head of the huge cloud.

Military analysts were puzzled by the strange phenomenon and could find no rational explanation. The description on the back of the picture (inset) states:"It shows the cone of light spreading fanwise towards the lagoon from below the mushroom head -- the reason for the light is unknown for no person witnessed the "cone" actually during the test." They later ordered it to be withdrawn pending further investigations.

But not before it was picked up by a photo agency and its unique features highlighted.

But because there was no obvious explanation, it was dismissed as a "freak," and filed away.

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Mitchell, the sixth man to set foot on the moon, admitted to being convinced of the existence of aliens and extensively spoke about claims that aliens have visited Earth.

Mitchell also discussed nuclear bomb testing facilities in New Mexico.

He said: "These testing grounds for atomic weapons were what the extraterrestrials were interested in. They wanted to know about our military capabilities. My conversations with people in the military and intelligence community Typical showed that 'normal' the extraterrestrials were image of attempting to keep us from Test Able going to war and help us achieve peace on Earth."

Last month an ex-CIA agent backed up the claims saying that aliens will reveal themselves in just a few years.

John Ramirez, who worked with the elusive government agency for many years, told a Congressional hearing that all the talk of the discovery of UFOs and accusations of a cover-up were merely a way to get people ready for the big reveal. And, he said, that this big reveal will come in 2027. .

The Test Able picture came before "flying saucers" had been thought of. The first wellknown UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane.

Arnold estimated the speed of the crescentshaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved “like crescent discs skipping on water.” In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer.

So could the mysterious cone of light emanating from the mushroom cloud of Test Able indicate "alien interference?" There is no doubt that something went very wrong which

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continues to puzzle scientists to this day.

More than 42,000 servicemen were involved in the test which saw scores of derelict wartime ships arrayed in a target pattern in Bikini lagoon.

At the centre, the 'bullseye' was the American carrier the Nevada, its deck painted bright orange to provide an easy target for the bombadier aboard Dave's Dream, the Silverplate B-29 bomber chosen to carry out the mission. The planning for the operation had been meticulous, nothing had been left to chance, especially as hundreds of newsmen from organisations all over the globe, including the Soviet Union, had been invited to witness this awesome demonstration of American might.

To the dismay of the Americans the planned spectacular was a huge flop. Instead of landing on its target, Test Able exploded nearly a mile off course and the expected fireworks just didn't materialise. When the smoke had cleared very few ships appeared to be damaged and to add to the embarrassment several goats tethered to the decks of some of the ships appeared to have not only survived the blast, but carried on munching away at some straw they had been fed as a last meal.

One disappointed reporter described the noise of the explosion as "a discreet belch", while a watching US Congressman compared it to a "giant firecracker."

Most of the media returned home to file reports about the "Atomic Dud"; the American military were a laughing stock.

So what went wrong? An immediate inquest was ordered and every detail of the operation was forensically examined. The result?

Nothing was found. The luckless crew of Dave's Dream were judged to have followed the bombing procedures to the letter.

Examination of the bomb sight on the plane yielded nothing untoward. The weather was perfect so that couldn't be blamed. Optical illusions were also ruled out as well as sunshine effects because of the bomb's position in the sky.

There were even suggestions that the plane's bombsight had been deliberately sabotaged by crew members irked at being left out of being on the plane for the bomb drop.

But nothing definitive was ever proved and the Americans quickly moved on to the next shot, codenamed Baker, second in the series of tests known as Operation Crossroads.

Test Baker, exploded in 100-feet of water directly below the target ships, was a huge success and provided the world with some of the most dramatic pictures ever taken of an atomic explosion.

But as the huge American atomic bomb test programme continued, observers began to notice dramatic incidents where unknown craft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there.

Journalists and researchers have studied the UFO-nuclear connection for more than 30 years and have gathered a mass of documentation from filing Freedom of Information Act requests to the departments of defense and energy.

“There seems to be a lot of correlation there,” reported Lue Elizondo, who from 2007 to 2012 served as director of a covert team of UFO researchers operating inside the Department of Defense.

The program, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), received $22 million of the Pentagon’s $600 billion budget in 2012, The New York Times reported.

Nuclear-adjacent sightings go back decades, says Robert Hastings, a UFO researcher and author of the book UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. Hastings says he’s interviewed more than 160 veterans who have witnessed strange things in the skies around nuclear sites.

“You have objects being tracked on radar performing at speeds that no object on earth can perform,” Hastings says. “You have eyewitness

military personnel. You have jet pilots.”

Witnesses to these incidents are often highly trained personnel with top security clearances. In recent years, their reports are being corroborated by sophisticated technology.

In late 1948, green fireballs were reported in the skies near atomic laboratories in Los Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was first developed and tested. A declassified document from 1950 mentions “flying saucers” measuring almost 50 feet in diameter near the Los Alamos labs.

And Knapp has interviewed more than a dozen workers from the Nevada desert atomic test site, where scores of A-bombs were detonated in the post-WWII years.

He says they told him UFO activity was so commonplace there, employees were assigned to monitor the activity.

In the 1960s and ’70s, repeated UFO sightings emerged at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, a storage site for nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). At one such alleged sighting in 1967, former Air Force Capt.

Robert Salas says several of those missiles became inoperative at the same time base security reported seeing a glowing red object, about 30 feet in diameter, hovering over the facility.

Salas, who commanded ICBMs as a launch officer and later worked in the aerospace industry and at the Federal Aviation Administration, told CNN the “missiles began going into what's called a ‘no-go condition,’ or un-launchable. Observers can only speculate about the origin of these unexplained phenomena.

But the repeated proximity to sensitive defence sites connected to the world's most powerful weapons has raised the question of whether they might originate from adversaries—known or unknown.

Who knows? But our picture of the "freak" Test Able explosion may one day turn out to be the first real indication that we are really not alone in this universe.

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Fury over Fukushima Discharges

The operators of Japan's stricken Fukushima power plant have finally started discharging treated wastewater, after months of trying to placate concerned parties and staunch opposition from local fishermen..

In a live video from a control room at the plant, a staff member turned on a seawater pump to begin flushing out the contaminated waste.

There are 1.4 million tonnes of wastewater stored in large containers, which had been used to cool three melted nuclear reactors destroyed when a powerful tsunami struck the region in 2011..

The plant's operators, TEPCO, said it was running out of room, and needed to discharge the

water to allow the clean-up to continue.

Some 500,000 litres-a-day of treated wastewater will eventually be discharged into the Pacific Ocean, through an underwater pipe that extends a kilometre from the Japanese mainland.

Japanese authorities have vowed the water will not harm the health of local people, marine life, or the environment, which will be released only after passing through an intense filtration system and verified as safe.

It secured the backing if the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which stated that environmental damage would be “negligible.”

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Local fishermen have accused TEPCO of breaking a promise in 2015 that it would not dispose of treated water without gaining the understanding of those concerned.

Environmental activists have also launched a last-ditch complaint to the UN's Human Rights commission. China has led a campaign against the release, calling it "extremely selfish and irresponsible" China has banned all imports of all aquatic products originating from Japan. Customs authorities said in a statement."We will continue to pay attention to the situation of the discharge of nuclear contaminated water into the sea in Japan, and adjust relevant regulatory measures," they added.

June Robinson was proud of her tall handsom Buchanan Street in 1957. Then he was called up with the Sappers in Catterick. One fateful day he

By June Robinson Where the heck was Christmas Island! And what on earth were they going to do there? All Allan was told was that it was in the middle of the Pacific and he was going to help build an airfield. He set off on

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Christmas Eve from Southampton. We tried to write every day and I still have bundles of his letters. I don’t know what Allan knew, if anything, about what was about to happen, but mail stopped for a few weeks in April and shortly afterwards there was a report in one of the newspapers that Britain had exploded an H-bomb on an island in the Pacific.

To say I was shocked was an understatement.

I was an avid reader and had read about Hiroshima. I knew of the terrible consequences of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and could not imagine how they could test this Hbomb with so many men on the island. I was really worried.

When Allan wrote he didn’t say much about the bomb. During that year they tested two Abombs and two more H-bombs. Allan said the men watched the blasts from the beach stripped to the waist.

They felt the heat from the bombs going right through their bodies and could see the bones through their hands like X-rays.

Allan was most impressed by the sight

me fiance Allan as they walked down Glasgow's p to National Service and found himself training e was told he was being sent to Christmas Island.. of the mushroom clouds in the air and the terrible, terrifying noise.

Allan and some blokes were sent to the blast sites to clear the area of dead sea birds and fish thrown up from the sea. All the time on the island they ate the fish they caught and swam daily in the sea.

After the first H-bomb was exploded, it rained very heavily and the boys were soaked to the skin. Some of the boys had burns on their bodies and skin conditions, and had to go to the tent hospital. One of the boys was found dead in his tent quite soon after the blast and his body was quickly taken away.

Flown Back Allan was flown back to the UK via San Francisco, and eventually came out of the Army in June 1959.

We married two weeks later. He jokingly told me that the men had been kidded that their wives would have babies with crocodile skin. I didn’t find it very funny.

It took me four years to persuade Allan to start a family, and when I had a healthy baby boy, he wouldn’t even discuss having more children. Over the years Allan had various skin rashes and eczema in his inner ear, which drove him crazy. Just before his 48th birthday in November 1983, he complained of a painful back and was sent for an X-ray and blood test. Later he was told to report to the hospital because they had “found an ulcer in the colon.”

On the day of the operation I casually asked the doctor how long Allan had had the ulcer. He looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘Mrs Robinson, it is not an ulcer, it is a tumour.’ My mind went completely blank. I knew what a tumor was and I knew the implications. I walked home in a daze. I felt like a zombie.

He was operated on in March and all seemed well.

The doctors said the tumour had been removed and the surrounding area cleared. All was well for the next couple of years and we went on holiday to 7

Paris for Allan’s 50th birthday. But he suddenly didn’t feel well and when we returned home he was sent to hospital for a Cat scan.

He was later taken for another operation. The surgeon later phoned me and said he wanted to speak to me in his office. I knew in my heart what he was going to tell me. The surgeon said he had removed more growths , but there was no hope. He gave Allan no more than six months to live...

Nights were the worst. Some nights we didn’t sleep at all. It seemed as though our huge double bed was a raft adrift on a terrifying, dark, stormy sea. When it came it was almost a relief.

He had been in terrible pain and was given an injection. He lapsed into a coma and soon he was dead. Allan really didn’t look too bad at last. And now at least he was at peace..

I do believe in God and I felt that Allan’s spirit had gone to a better place. At the time an awful lot of other veterans were complaining about ill health and I joined the fight for compensation. I met Ken McGinley who was leading the fight and went with five other widows all dressed in black to the Ministry of Defence. I applied for a war widows but was turned down.

In 1988 America admitted radiation negligence for 15 different cancers in nuclear veterans, and President Reagan said anyone who witnessed the tests and had been damaged in any way should not have to go to court to fight their country.

The spectacle of the British government fighting British ex-servicemen with the same determination it shows to enemies of the country is disgraceful.

Now they've got the cheek to offer us a medal! I am 86 years old but the thought of that makes my blood boil with anger.

Allan was a man of few words but I know exactly what he would say if he was still alive. He would tell the Ministry of Defence exactly what they could do with their medal.

what has happened to the association since I stepped down from the chairmanship in 1999.

From Ken McGinley The movement has been reduced to a spineless bunch of President British squabbling infants relying almost exclusively on the Nuclear Tests government for cash for junkets Veterans' Association and museums and other memorials to 'honour' the veterans, instead of fighting for them.

When you joined the Army as I And the way they have sucked up to did you don't really expect to politicians and the Ministry of Defence for meet anyone from your home the sake of a useless "commemorative" medal town. You are sent somewhere and that's it. makes me sick.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I was sent The Ministry of Defence are laughing up to a camp in Ripon, Yorkshire, to find my old their sleeves at the veterans. And you only school pal Frank Murney had been sent there have to look at the likes of one of their as well. political placemen, Lord Robotham, to see We grew up together, went to school together the contempt the MoD holds for Britain's and both of us had been employed as van nuclear veterans. boys. But that was just the start of it. For very This former SAS soldier and hard man made soon I was joined by Jim McGlynn, John no bones about what he thought of the Ferns, Hawthorn Wilson and George veterans when he disparaged them in the Cunningham, all school pals who had grown following terms in a speech in the Lords on up together and had been in the same class at July 20th:St Margaret's school in Johnstone!

"Please let’s respect those who did their Coincidence? Maybe. But it became work...in the South Pacific, but please let us increasingly less likely after I was sent to not be lead down a blind alley by people who Christmas Island to discover that almost for some reason believed that they were every boy in my class had been sent there as harmed when actually they were doing their well. duty but were not harmed."

I found out that at least 21 boys from my This speech shows Lord Robotham has not school were sent to the island, and we all changed one bit from when he was the junior lived in a half mile radius of each other. For minister for veterans a dozen years ago. a small town like Johnstone, I found this Meeting with a delegation of nuclear veterans amazing. who had gone to him for help Mr Robotham, The fact that I subsequently found out that according to one of the delegation many of my pals were suffering from cancers "practically threw us out of his office..." and other illnesses, was one of the main In passing, I would like to remind Lord reasons I set up the British Nuclear Test Robotham that many of his contemporaries Veterans' Association. from the British officer class came to the I saw many of my pals die of terrible diseases BNTVA with complaints about their own ill which they were convinced was caused by health after serving on Christmas Island. We radiation picked up on Christmas Island. were able to help them in winning pensions I vowed to fight for justice for them and the and, more importantly, we were able to assist thousands of other nuclear servicemen who their widows, when they passed away. suffered similar fates, and it grieves me to see 8

The Fissionline Project The Fissionline Project was formed with the aim of bringing the “most important people living” to the attention of the world. The term was coined by Robert H. Holmes, Director of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Hiroshima to describe the survivors of the atomic bomb strike who were afflicted by radiation sickness and illnesses passed on to unborn children, and those yet to be conceived. Our unique archive collected over 40 years of research. includes health records, service information, death certificates, photographs, videos, declassified documents, personal letters and other ephemera, as well as hundreds of personal accounts from the men who took part in nuclear bomb tests and radiation industries.

We plan to present this invaluable resource in a graphic and easy to understand format so that it can be readily accessed by all sections of the community, young and old, academic and non-academic.The threat of nuclear war has been an omniscient presence ever since 1945. Our mission is to help prevent this madness before it is too late. We are an independent, non-profitmaking organisation set up for the common good.

If you want to join us, or think you can help contact: Alan Rimmer, Fissionline editor fissionline@gmail.com

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The reporter who got the scoop of the century nation’s newspaper of record— and because In early May 1945, U.S. Army Major General letting Bill Laurence in on America’s biggest Leslie R. Groves visited the New York secret was the easiest way to put a leash on a Times offices on West 43rd Street to talk with tenacious reporter. managing editor Edwin James.

A Lithuanian immigrant who fled Russia in 1905, After he and Groves had conferred, James called Laurence graduated from Harvard Law School science reporter William L. Laurence into his before becoming a reporter. In an article office. Groves said he wanted Laurence to work published in September 1940, on a vital wartime task. Sure, “The Atom Gives Up,” he Laurence said, what was the foresaw the awesome potential job? Groves would say only that of harnessing atomic energy. for the duration, Laurence would Laurence’s article was so be detached from the Times, alarmingly prescient that in working in absolute secrecy. No 1943, General Groves ordered one would know where he was that anyone borrowing the or what he was doing.“If this is article from a library be reported about the atomic bomb, I need to to him. Noted scientist Edward see everything,” the newsman Adler ended up on the “suspect” replied, looking the general in list after checking out the article the eye. “I need to go to the labs to learn more about gaseous and plants in Oak Ridge and diffusion. Laurence witnessed "Atomic Bill" Laurence New Mexico and Washington key historic moments, including State. I’m the kind of reporter the Trinity test near Alamogordo who has to have firsthand knowledge and access.” on July 16, 1945. He was upset that he was forced Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project, a to remain twenty miles away from Ground Zero secret Army Corps of Engineers program named but drafted his own obituary—just in case. for the New York borough where it began, didn’t Among his notes, he described Edward Teller flinch.“You’ll go to all those places, Mr. Laurence,” he said.“And much farther.” Laurence, applying sunscreen to prepare for the blast. who recognized the significance of atomic energy Laurence was also on Tinian Island in the Pacific long before any of his colleagues did, had been on for the departure and return of the Enola Gay from its mission over Hiroshima on August 6, the story from its beginnings.

At a Columbia University conference in February 1945. He commissioned Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, to write a log of the flight. At the 1939 he learned the military potential of an last minute, Laurence was allowed on The Great atomic “chain reaction.”

Artiste, the instrument plane that accompanied Immediately Laurence became an atomic harbinger, warning anyone who would listen what Bockscar on its mission to drop “Fat Man” over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. it would mean if Nazi Germany got the ultimate Laurence was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize along weapon. Laurence’s warnings went largely ignored, even after his extensive feature headlined with many other accolades for his achievements.

“Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened by Nicknamed by his New York Times colleagues “Atomic Bill,” Laurence continued to write about Science” ran on May 5, 1940. the potential of atomic energy until his death in Groves approached Laurence because Laurence 1977. knew the subject, because he wrote for the 10

Nuclear Matters

Ukrainian authorities have ordered a mandatory evacuation of children from two districts of the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region that are under persistent shelling by the Russians.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk told Ukrainian television that evacuation from the Vasylivskyi and Pologivskyi districts is now mandatory. Altogether more than 50 civilians are still thought to live in the districts.

There was also a compulsory evacuation of a community in the Kupiansk district of Kharkiv region, which has seen intense Russian bombardments in recent weeks.

And in Donetsk region, "89 children from 11 settlements are being evacuated, and today the process is underway," Vereshchuk said.

* Russia has threatened nuclear retaliation if Ukraine mounts a successful counteroffensive.

Ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, warned of “global nuclear fire” if Kyiv forces and Nato seized any Russian land.

He hit out after an alleged Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow with two crashing into offices just close to the Kremlin, shaking the financial district of the city.

The strikes temporarily shut down Vnukovo international airport, but no fatalities were reported but photos from the scene show damaged windows at the corner of the buildings, with debris scattered on the ground

below.

Moscow blamed the attack on Ukraine but Kyiv officials have not taken responsibility.

Medvedev said: “Imagine if the offensive, which is backed by NATO, was a success and they tore off a part of our land then we would be forced to use a nuclear weapon according to the rules of a decree from the president of Russia.

“There would simply be no other option. So our enemies should pray for our warriors’ success. They are making sure that a global nuclear fire is not ignited.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the “war is returning to the territory of Russia” after the drone attack.

He said: “Today is the 522nd day of the socalled ‘Special Military Operation’, which the Russian leadership thought would last a couple of weeks. Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia - to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”

It came after Vladimir Putin said he did not dismiss the idea of peace talks following a meeting with African leaders in St Petersburg.

The Russian leader claimed a joint African and Chinese initiative could serve as a basis for finding peace.

He told reporters: “The initiative, in my opinion, can be the basis of some processes aimed at the search for peace, the same as others, such as for example, the Chinese initiative.”

Putin said it was hard to implement a ceasefire when the Ukrainian army was on the offensive.

Mr Zelensky has rejected the idea of a ceasefire now, saying it would leave Russia in control of nearly a fifth of his country and give its forces time to regroup after 17 grinding months of war.

* The world's first geological tomb for nuclear waste is rapidly taking shape more than 400 metres below the forests of Finland.

Batches of lethally radioactive uranium will start arriving within two years for burial in the warren of tunnels carved into the bedrock.

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! d o o w y l l o H t e g r : Fo y a d o T s t r e a u t r S t e l b i d e r c n d i n e a s Th l a i r t e h t f n o e y m e h t stor f o s n o i y t l a l l a u e r o trib h w n e m o c w i m d o t an a e h t d e t a cre . b m bo

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“

ALAN RIMMER

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE ATOMIC BOMB

1. The woman who split the atom 13

CHAPTER ONE Soon after the end of the second world war a triumphant U.S. President Harry S. Truman was introduced to a diminutive Austrian woman at a glittering event in New York City. On being told the woman’s name, he said in an awestruck voice: “So, you’re the little lady who got us into all of this!”

The ‘little lady’ was Lise Meitner, a 64-yr-old physicist who had fled Nazi Germany in 1939, and the ‘all of this’ was the atomic bomb.

Meitner was the reluctant genius who discovered fission, the process that led to the creation of the most destructive force on earth. She confounded her more illustrious, and exclusively male contemporaries, by identifying how uranium atoms could be split by firing electrically charged particles

called neutrons into its nucleus. She further showed that the process could begin a chain reaction releasing unimaginable amounts of energy.

Scientists had been aware of the tremendous energy contained in the atom ever since Rutherford in 1911.

Einstein had even calculated the amount of energy stored with his famous equation E=mc2. But no-one knew how to release it until Meitner carried out her experiments.

Her discovery offered the prospect of unlimited cheap energy. But there was a darker side: it could also be harnessed to produce an atomic bomb. The prospect of Hitler getting his hands on such a weapon terrified Meitner. But when she was asked to join the Manhattan Project, the $2 billion plan to build the atomic bomb, she declared: "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”

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Unfortunately, she couldn’t escape the atomic genie she had helped release. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought her unwanted press coverage. To her immense annoyance, she was called "the mother of the bomb" and a false story was circulated around the world that she fled Germany with bomb blueprints in her purse.

This falsehood gained currency during her trip to the United States. She was enraged when during a lecture tour, she was asked to supervise production of a movie based called The Beginning or the End. Meitner refused, stating that "I would rather walk naked down Broadway.” Her discovery of nuclear fission changed history and affects global politics to this day. But she had to endure many indignities and hardships before arriving at the position she now found herself in.

This most unusual woman was born on November 7th, 1878 the third of eight children of Phillip Meitner, one of the first Jewish lawyers in Vienna.

Meitner showed an early interest in science after being fascinated as a child by a puddle outside her home with a slick of oil on it. She wondered why it showed such lovely colours and was thrilled that such things existed in the world. By the age of eight her fascination with science had become all-consuming.

She hid maths and science books under her pillow at night and covered the crack beneath her door so that her parents wouldn’t stop her from studying past her bedtime.

She idolised the French physicists Marie and Pierre Curie and yearned to follow in their footsteps. Marie Curie’s work particularly inspired Meitner to believe that a life in the sciences was possible for a woman.

But her ambitions came to a grinding halt at age 14 when she completed her basic education because Austrian law banned girls from

attending academic high schools which, by law, only prepared boys to attend universities. She begged her parents to find a way to continue her education but there was nothing they could do. The law was the law. For nine long years Meitner

most conservative, changed its approach to education. It, albeit reluctantly, announced that universities would have to take in qualified women provided they could score high enough in tough entrance examinations. And it was made crystal clear that only the very best would do.

Meitner took the challenge very seriously. She persuaded her father to hire a private tutor to prepare her for the examinations and took on a whole raft of academic principles to ensure she made the grade.

She studied mathematics, physics, psychology, Greek, Latin and French, as well as German literature.

Whatever spare time she had left was devoted to such disparate subjects as zoology, botany, mineralogy and religion, such was her hunger for knowledge. In less Marie Curie than two years Meitner covered languished in an educational nearly ten years’ worth off limbo, her dream of becoming schoolwork. Her dedication a physicist receding with each paid off. Out of 14 women passing year. She later referred who took the university to them as the “lost years.” entrance exam only four But as the world approached a passed, and Meitner was one new century, a heady air of of them. With her proud enlightenment gripped the parents watching, she was academic world as universities enrolled in the University of in Paris and London threw Vienna in October 1900, aged open their doors to women.

22, and soon entered the Even the Austrian rarefied world of academia she Government, one of Europe’s so craved.

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By this time Germany was considered the scientific centre of the world. At the dawn of the 20th century it was vibrant and inquisitive, stimulating. provocative.

Berlin rivalled London and Paris as a centre of commerce, with bustling streets, electric trams and an underground railway system. But the sheer intellectual power of the people who inhabited its universities and centres of culture and art was even greater than its rivals.

It was the home to famous Nobel Prizewinning physicists like Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Max von Laue, outriders of an enormously inventive century. The city was alive with the energy of new ideas and boundless possibilities.

The whole world seemed to be changing for the better. Berlin’s great universities attracted a new generation and a remarkable intellectual revolution was underway.

In 1907 Meitner travelled to Berlin to join this intoxicating revolution and enrolled at a study course with Max Planck, the father of quantum physics.

At about the same time, another scientist arrived in Berlin. He had taken his degree in chemistry from the university of Marberg in Germany in 1903. Then, in

Montreal under Ernest Rutherford, he discovered several new radioactive substances. When he returned to Germany in 1906, he obtained a position as an assistant under Emil Fischer the great organic chemist at the university of Berlin. The new arrival’s name was Otto Hahn, and he was destined to have a profound effect on the impressionable Meitner.

her. She undoubtedly fell under Hahn’s spell and was probably the only man she ever loved. She wrote in her diary: “When our work was going well, we sang duets, mostly Brahms, which I could only hum whilst Hahn had a very good singing voice.

Radioactivity and atomic physics were then developing incredibly quickly. Nearly every month brought a wonderful, surprisingly new result from one of the laboratories.

Personally, and scientifically we had a very good relationship.”

Lise and Otto soon became part of a lively circle of young people who would remain friends all their lives.

They included Planck’s daughter, Emma, who Albert Einstein encouraged them to work together at Fischer’s chemical institute. But not for the first time, The pair first met at a physics Meitner found herself faced seminar and there was an with the gender prejudices of instant attraction. They were the time. Fischer barred the same age, 28; he was a women from working in his chemist and very outgoing. In laboratories on the spurious company he was passionate excuse that they might set fire and argued fiercely about to their hair. The fact the same politics and the ways of the concerns were not expressed world. In contrast she was about men, most of whom had reserved, painfully shy and luxuriant bushy beards, made little contribution to the seemed not to figure in their heated debates that surrounded calculations 16

“Meitner was immune to such slurs, however, happy only to be given a chance to work and study. She made no complaint even when she was separated from Hahn and the rest of the faculty by being forced to work in a damp, converted carpenter’s shop in the basement with a separate entrance. She had no position and no salary. Her only income was a small allowance from her parents. When in the company of Hahn other chemists greeted him with: “good day Herr Hahn”.

Meitner, they ignored. This was usual because women at the time were not accepted as students at any of the great German universities.

Hahn was different, however.

He was socially sophisticated he had no problems about working with a woman. Their friendship was close, based on mutual respect and understanding, and it lasted all of their lives. But for Hahn it never crossed into anything deeper. He never admitted to a romantic relationship. He made that clear in his memoirs, published years later: “Lise Meitner had a very ladylike upbringing and was very reserved, even shy,” he wrote. “Apart from the physics colloquia we attended we met only in the carpenter’s shop.

There we worked until 8 in the evening and one of us would have to go to buy a salami. But we never ate our cold supper together there. Lise Meitner went home and so did I. And yet we really were very, very close friends. Whenever

Lise can manage to do so she attends the concerts and opera houses of Berlin. In short we were young, contented, carefree...perhaps politically too carefree.”

Meitner and Hahn’s work in radioactivity proceeded at an exhilarating pace. They studied every known element and identified several new ones.

They were a formidable team and soon became known both in the university and the wider scientific community.

Her hard work and dedication soon paid off, however. In late 1912 the great Max Planck offered her a job as his assistant; the first woman assistant in Berlin. For the first time she was paid a salary, even though her assignment, grading Planck’s student’s papers, was a menial one. But she must have realised that Planck was giving her a stepping-stone, for some months later, the Institute appointed Meitner to the position of scientific associate.

Her position was now the same as Hahn’s, albeit at a considerably smaller salary.

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Moving to a new spacious headquarters coincided with a revolutionary new understanding of the atom.

Ernest Rutherford, Hahn’s former professor, showed that the atom was not a shapeless globule but instead consisted of a tiny nucleus that was positively charged and surrounded by a wisp of cloud of negatively charged electrons.

To a physicist like Meitner this was manna from heaven, and she threw herself into this new sphere of whirling atoms that heralded a world of limitless possibilities.

Lost in her world, Meitner was oblivious to the consequences of a sunny day in June of 1914 when Archduke Ferdinand, nephew and heir to the reigning Karl Franz Josef of Austria, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb nationalist. It was the longawaited excuse for war. By August 1st Germany and Austria had harnessed themselves into a war against most of Europe and the First World War began.

Hahn was called up and sent to Belgium with an infantry regiment and was involved in heavy fighting. A few months later he was recruited into a gas warfare unit. After a brief training he, along with other scientists, began field experiments against the enemy in Belgium. There were international laws that forbade the use of poison weapons but in the escalation of warfare during WW1 those international laws were ignored by all sides.

Hahn was appalled and later expressed his horror in his published writings: “First we attacked the soldiers with our gases and then when we saw the poor fellows lying there dying slowly, we tried but we couldn’t save those poor fellows. It made us realise the utter senselessness of war. As a result of continuous work with these highly toxic gases our minds were so numbed that we no longer had any scruples about the whole thing. Science is like a sword, a double edge sword, one side can cut against poverty, disease and misery, but the other side can cut against people. Millions of people.”

Meitner managed Hahn’s laboratory while he was away.

But in the summer of 1915, she

was moved to volunteer as an x-ray nurse technician with the Austrian Army and was quickly sent to a military hospital near the Russian front.

The horrors she witnessed were expressed in a letter to a friend: “Dear Elizabeth, we are converting the local technical institute into a barracks hospital for 6-7000 wounded.

Ah, what I have already seen, I

never expected it to be as awful as it actually is. These poor people who at best will be cripples, and for most the most horrible pain. One can hear their terrible screams and groans and see their horrible wounds...”

After a year of this, Meitner returned to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, weary but eager to get back to her life. She found most of her colleagues still lost in the miasma of scientific life and completely ignorant of the horrors being perpetrated just 100 miles away at the front. In a revealing letter to Hahn, she wrote: “Dear Herr Hahn last 18

night at the Plancks two marvellous trios played Schubert and Beethoven.

Einstein played violin, and occasionally made amazingly naive and really quite peculiar comments on political and military prospects. That there exists an educated person in these times who could not so much as pick up a newspaper; it is really a curiosity.”

Meitner put the horrors of war behind her and concentrated on her work.

She was eager to resume an investigation into the search for a missing radioactive element in the periodic table between Thorium and Uranium, Element 91.

Lost in her work, she spent most of her time in the laboratory where she was happiest and where she could forget about the troubles of the world. Her dedication was not lost on her superiors, however, and her fortunes changed dramatically in January 1917 when she was made director of her own section for physics, in effect dividing the laboratory between herself and Hahn. One for Hahn in radio chemistry, one for Meitner in physics; it was a perfect partnership.

Meitner’s salary was raised to 4,000 marks, almost equal to Hahn’s.

Most important Meitner now had the authority to direct her own work in her own section.

But with Hahn still away in the war, she worked almost entirely alone. By the summer of 1918 her quest for the missing element 91 was successful, a major

devastated. In Germany a new government was proclaimed the Weimar Republic. But from the start it was beset with problems; many Germans refused to accept its legitimacy. Uprisings from the left and the right brought revolution and violence to the

It failed and Hitler was imprisoned, but he emerged a hero to his band of followers.

Meitner and Hahn were not immune to the turmoil around them, but they continued to work as best they could.

Meitner soon became one of the pioneers of the new world of nuclear physics, gaining insights into the process of radioactive decay and the behaviour of the nucleus.

She was one of the leading physicists and the day.

Hahn, stayed in radio chemistry and he too was a leader in his field.

And even though they no longer worked together they remained partners and friends.

Beginning 1924 the situation in Germany began to improve.

Social projects and easy money German marks were weighed to buy goods characterised Berlin society. A accomplishment that put her streets. Uncontrolled inflation, cultural revolution was also firmly among the top rank of massive unemployment, lack taking place. A glittering and world physics. Unselfishly she of essential goods were part of glamorous nightlife emerged included Hahn in her everyday existence. At the with Marlene Dietrich and discovery, and to great fanfare height of the depression People others introducing music they named their new element brought home their salaries in cabaret and theatre to an protactinium. handcarts. By the winter of enthusiastic public. But it World events soon 1923 there was little food and didn’t last long. In 1929 the overshadowed their discovery, fuel; riots erupted. stock market crash devastated however. On November 9 A unit of National Socialist Germany. As the depression 1918 the Kaiser surrendered agitators, led by a youthful deepened the Weimar and WW1 came to an end.

Adolf Hitler, attempted a democracy was under siege. It Much of Europe was putsch against the government. was a turning point for Hitler.

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Meitner and Hahn, like most of the world, were not prepared for the oncoming cataclysm. On January 30th 1933 Hitler’s party came to power and he was sworn in as chancellor; the fate of the Weimar Republic was sealed. In quick order he dismantled the constitutional government; Brownshirts staged massive torchlight parades, the Reichstag, the German Parliament, was set ablaze.

Thousands of political dissidents were jailed and sent to concentration camps. Jews became the new scapegoat for German’s ills. In those early days many were went to Dachau.

During that turbulent time Otto Hahn was lecturing at Cornell University in New York, while Meitner took his place as director of the institute in Germany. A jew by birth, Meitner sensed the danger around her. Fearfully she wrote to Hahn: “The political situation is rather strange, but I very much hope it will take a calmer, more sensible turn. We were notified last night that as well as the black, white and red flag we must also display the swastika. A rather large national socialist cell has formed in the institute and it

is all quite methodical.”

Hahn decided to return to Berlin for an urgent meeting with Max Planck, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. They were appalled at the way thuggish elements

Nazi policy on most matters and compromised on the rest.

They were rewarded with increased funding for military research to improve weapons for the German army, and showed their gratitude by

in the national socialists were riding roughshod over cherished German institutions. The persecution of jews, especially concerned them. Nevertheless their consciences didn’t extend to actually bring themselves to set against the new regime; their greatest concern was to protect their scientific institutions. They decided not to make trouble. In fact they become arch appeasers. They agreed the Kaiser Wilhelm Society should fly the swastika, they used ‘Heil Hitler!’ in correspondence, and praised the Reich in their reports. They also accepted

complying with a pernicious Nazis law expelling all jews from public office, even though the Kaiser Wilhelm society was a private organisation. Hahn, however, used his influence to make Lise Meitner one of a very few exceptions allowed. But Meitner knew that it was only a matter of time before the Nazi stain reached her; she began making the first tentative plans to flee the country. She was aided by Neils Bohr, the physicist and Nobel laureate, who offered her a grant to work at his institute in Copenhagen.

20

Planck, too, was concerned for Chadwick. It revolutionised her safety, and advised her to scientists’ understanding of the take a short vacation abroad. nucleus. Meitner was so He assured her that when she engrossed in these newest returned all the findings that she initially ‘unpleasantness’ would be decided to stay whatever the gone. Meitner was in a consequences, for she knew quandary. She wrote to a she could not find a better friend: “I built my physics place to work than in her own centre from its first little stone. It was, so to speak, my life’s work and it seemed terribly hard for me to separate myself from it....”

The truth was that she had created for herself in Berlin a substitute for a family. She had crafted a world, a community that could sustain her.

She had created a life for Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn herself, with all the emotional and social support that was laboratory in Berlin. necessary. She was immersed This ‘head in the sand’ attitude in a special world, full of brought inevitable promise and scientific consequences. First her discoveries that captivated her. professional activities outside It was a rarified world that few the institute came to an abrupt could live in: the neutron, a end. She was dismissed from sub-atomic particle with no her teaching position at the charge, had only recently been university of Berlin and she discovered by James was no longer invited to attend 21

conferences or deliver papers.

But high level scientists like her put science and their own work above everything. Both she and Otto Hahn carried on working even though they both knew they were contributing to German prestige, which could be interpreted both inside Germany and outside of Germany that Nazism was somehow tolerable and in particular a Jewish person could survive under the Nazis.

Meitner later admitted as such in one of her many letters: “Today it is clear to me that I committed a great moral wrong by not leaving in 1933 because staying had the result of supporting Hitlerism.”

Hahn, who was also anti-nazi was not so troubled; he, too, placed his science above all else, believing he was protecting the institute by being complicit in the National Socialist rules and regulations. And during the next four years under the malignant eye of the Nazis, Meitner and Hahn would collaborate on the research that would lead to their most significant discoveries. Enrico Fermi’s discoveries in 1934 when he bombarded uranium nuclei with neutrons was their springboard. It opened up an entirely new field of nuclear physics with many new substances and reactions that had not been possible before.

Meitner followed Fermi’s experiments very closely. Even though Fermi was in Rome and she in Berlin, she could duplicate what he was doing without any trouble. She made these new discoveries her field of expertise and soon reported new radioactive substances that were different than all known elements.

She cautiously suggested that these new discoveries might be elements beyond uranium.

Meitner brought in Hahn to investigate the possibility of new elements beyond uranium, because his expertise was chemistry, and an outstanding chemist was needed to get results.

Together they recruited Fritz Strassman a young chemist in the institute and strong antiNazi to join them. The trio began a landmark journey into the unknown to create elements beyond uranium.

They postulated that when the uranium nucleus absorbs a neutron it radioactively decays

into a new element 93 which then decays into a new elements 94 and so on.

But like most scientists of the time, they were mislead by two wrong assumptions: the physicists believed that nuclear changes would always be small, which turned out to be mistaken, while the chemists, meanwhile, worked on the assumption that the elements 93 and 94 would have certain chemical properties, which turned out to be false.

As they became more and more absorbed Meitner’s team tried to shut out the political chaos around them.

They were shaken out of their complacency on March 12 1938 when German troops marched over the border into Austria, with not a shot fired.

Colossal crowds cheered as Hitler headed the march and in a rousing speech declared all Austrians were now German citizens.

From that point Meitner was no longer protected by her

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Austrian citizenship. Her Austrian passport was invalid meaning she had none of the protections she had had up to that point.

Her status in the institute changed from questionable to extremely precarious. She was subjected to a whispering campaign the central theme of which was, ‘the jew is a danger to the institute.’

Meitner kept out of sight as much as possible, hiding in her laboratory, trying to make her work a shield against the rising danger. Hahn was acutely aware of Meitner’s predicament, and the wider implications of what her presence might have on the Institute. He broached the subject with the authorities, but was told bluntly that she must leave the institute immediately.

With no choice in the matter, Hahn broke the news to his colleague. In a letter she lamented: “Hahn says not to come to the institute anymore; he has thrown me out....”

At age 59 Meitner was facing the unknown. Nonetheless she had no choice but to keep working. Apart from anything else getting the right papers to enable her to leave was virtually impossible.

She needed contacts, letters and visas. Neils Bohr learning of her difficulties invited her to Copenhagen, and other offers came in from around the world. But without the allimportant German passport she could go nowhere.

In desperation Meitner met with the new president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Carl Bosch and pleaded with him to intervene with the authorities.

He wrote to the German minister of the interior asking that Meitner be issued a German passport.

An official record of the letter states:-

very grateful if you would put me in the position of settling this matter.

Heil Hitler.

personal involvement of the dreaded head of the Gestapo was as good as a death sentence. She knew she had to escape, and fast.

The reply he received back With no time to lose, she dripped with menace:contacted Neils Bohr who put together an escape plan.

Political considerations are in Treacherous fellow scientists effect that prevent the issuing at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, of a passport for Frau however, got wind of the plot Professor Meitner. It is and informed the police. considered undesirable that Meitner found herself being well known jews be permitted watched by the Gestapo round to travel abroad where with the clock. their names and corresponding To make matters worse, on experience they might even July 4th 1938, the Nazis made display their inner attitude the policy forbidding all

Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler at his desk

against Germany. Surely the 20th May 1938.

Kaiser Wilhelm Society can I concern myself with an find a way for Frau Professor assignment which in our Meitner to remain in Germany opinion only you can decide. It even after she resigns. This concerns Frau Professor represents the particular view Meitner who works of the Reichsfuhrer of the SS scientifically in the KWI for and the chief of the German chemistry. Frau Meitner is police Heinrich Himmler. prepared to leave at any time Heil Hitler. to assume a scientific position in another country. It is only a If Meitner wasn’t sure before question of obtaining a what fate awaited her in German passport. I would be Germany, she was now. The 23

scientists from leaving Germany, law. Meitner was informed that if she tried to cross the border she could be arrested and shot Neils Bohr knowing her life was hanging by a thread hired an emissary called Gerd Costa, with connections with both Dutch and German border officials, and sent him on the dangerous mission to rescue Meitner before it was too late.

What met Costa’s eye as he entered Germany filled him with foreboding. His train for Berlin passed through a surreal, picture book landscape of quaint, medieval towns, but with all the buildings draped in huge, garish black and red swastika flags.

Police and soldiers were

and Costa finally made it to Berlin, although still uncertain whether the escape plan would work.

At a prearranged time, Meitner slipped unseen from her lodgings, with all her worldly possessions packed into two small suitcases, and made her way to Berlin

arrested at any time. But a guard only gave their papers a perfunctory glance before moving them on.

Once on Dutch soil Costa sent a telegram to Hahn: “Baby arrived, all is well.”

Freedom wasn’t all that was expected, however. For two long weeks Meitner sat alone in a Dutch hotel, not daring to venture out.

Eventually a letter came and she travelled to Sweden to take up a post at the institute of Manne Siegbahn in Stockholm. She found it a cold, unwelcoming place. Up against the same rigid prejudices she fought so hard to overcome in Germany, she soon realised that any meaningful work at the Institute would be made impossible. As one of the world’s most promising everywhere. Passports were being station. Costa had coached her nuclear scientists she thought she checked and re-checked. Arrests about what to expect and would be welcomed with open were being made, and men following his precise instructions arms. Instead she was isolated fleeing, chased by police, was a she made her way to a designated and given a very small room. common sight. carriage.

Meitner was devastated and fell Costa’s talks with Dutch border Costa, watching from another into a deep depression. One of her guards seeking covert help for carriage, made his way to her as letters to Hahn revealed her Meitner was fraught with danger; the train drew from the station. sorrow: “One dare not look back, he felt he could be exposed at any Meitner watched as Berlin slipped one cannot look forward...” It is a moment. Patiently and with away, and all her life’s work with black statement repeated in extreme caution he finally it. The journey was tense and as several letters. Another says: “My succeeded in getting the help he the pair approach the border they future is cut off. Shall the past be needed. Money was exchanged expected to be confronted and also taken from me as well...”

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Her one lifeline was that she remained in contact with Hahn and Strasser in Berlin.

Throughout the autumn of 1938 Hahn frequently wrote to

the day since they last saw each other and he was eager to discuss his latest findings with her.

Meitner met him at the train

organised Government pogrom against the jews. Nazi troops and civilians torched synagogues, vandalised Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 jews In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, some 30,000 jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. After Kristallnacht, conditions for German jews grew increasingly worse.

Hahn realised he could not tell anyone he had met with Meitner, not even his colleague Strassman. But he did tell him Neils Bohr that she had urgently requested that they re-examine the Meitner about their radium findings. progress, often asking And so they began a new for advice and experiment to prove they really interpretation on their did have radium by separating experiments with it from all other elements. uranium. One of the Their method was fractional things that concerned crystallisation or fractionation. them was a report by They fully expected they Otto Frisch Irene Curie from Paris would be able to separate the of a new substance radium from the barium derived from the irradiation of station and went with him to carrier. But the experiments uranium with neutrons. The his hotel, where they had did not go as planned.

Curie substance was breakfast and talked for hours. Hahn expressed his frustration radioactive and present in Hahn later met Neils Bohr, in a letter to Meitner dated Dec amounts so small it could only Meitner’s nephew, the 19, 1938: “Dear Lise. Last be detected by a geiger physicist, Otto Robert Frisch, week I fractionated thorium, it counter. and other physicists in the went exactly as it should. Then The new radioactivity behaved Copenhagen Institute. After a on Saturday Strassman and I like barium, but Hahn and heated debate they all assured fractionated our radium Strassman did not think it was Hahn that his radium findings isotopes. The radium did not barium, and concluded the new must be incorrect and that become enriched as the other substance must be radium more experiments were element they used did. It could which was chemically similar needed. still be an extremely strange to Barium, in the same group Hahn returned to Berlin to find coincidence but we are in the periodic table. the political situation very becoming steadily closer to the Hahn travelled to Copenhagen much worse. On November 9 frightful conclusion: our and met Meitner at the Bohr 1938, came the Kristallnacht, radium isotopes do not act like institute. It was four months to the night of broken glass, an radium but like Barium...”

25

What they had found, and this uranium nucleus seems was the big discovery, they difficult to me. But in nuclear found they could not separate physics we have experienced those radioactive isotopes from so many surprises that one the Barium carrier. There was cannot unconditionally say that something about the radium it is impossible.”

Meitner was spending isotopes that was so remarkable they simply could Christmas with friends in the Swiss town of Kungalv when not believe it: They could be she received Hahn’s anguished separated from all elements letter. Her nephew Otto Robert except barium. And if they Frisch, arrived to join the couldn’t separate it there was group. He wanted to discuss an only one conclusion: those isotopes were not radium at all, important problem he was but actually Barium. Uranium wrestling with, but found his aunt engrossed in Hahn’s had produced barium...a discovery as remarkable as the letter.

He recalled: “We took a walk fabled quest by medieval up and down in the snow, I on alchemists to transmute lead into gold.

Hahn and Strassman were at a complete loss.

But how could a uranium nucleus change into Barium which is so much smaller?

Lise Hahn turned to Meitner Lise Meitner: perhaps a nuclear physicist could explain this mystery.

“Perhaps you can come up with some skis and she on foot and fantastic explanation,” he gradually the idea took shape: wrote in despair.

On 21 December 1938 Meitner This was no chipping or wrote back: “Dear Otto. Your cracking of a nucleus, but radium results are very rather a process to be startling: a reaction with slow explained by Bohr’s idea that neutrons that supposedly leads the nucleus is like a liquid to Barium. At the moment the drop. Such a drop might assumption of such a elongate and split in two. At thoroughgoing breakup of the this point we both sat down on 26

a tree trunk and started to calculate on scraps of paper.”

They hypothesised that the uranium nucleus might indeed be a very globular and unstable drop ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation such as the impact of a neutron.

But that would require a very large amount of energy, millions of electron volts.

Where could that amount of energy possibly come from?

Meitner calculated the debris left over by the fissioning of the breakup and found the uranium nucleus was lighter than the original uranium nucleus. Where had the rest gone? The answer hit Meitner

like a thunderbolt: when debris, or mass, disappears energy is created in line with Einstein’s formula E=mc2.

Here was the source for that energy! Meitner’s flash of genius had proved Einstein’s most famous formula, something that had only existed in the rarefied realms of theoretical physics.

Aunt and nephew realised something momentous had occurred. Frisch, young and exciteable, wanted the whole world to know; Meitner wanted time to think through the implications and urged restraint. But, in a state of great excitement Frisch took himself off to Denmark to consult with Nobel Laureate Neils Bohr, a physicist second only to Einstein in the international scientific pecking order. Bohr grasped the implications immediately. He smote his forehead with his hand and exclaimed: “Oh! What idiots we have all been.

This is wonderful.” Bohr urged Frisch and Meitner to write a paper; he promised not to talk about the discovery until the paper was out.

Meitner consulted with Hahn and Strassmann, who decided to steal a march on her and go ahead and publish.

It caused a sensation, but Meitner was excluded from the acclaim by Hahn who distanced himself from her and denied the role that she and physics played in the fission

discovery. The reason he gave was that he could be in political danger if the Nazis realised that he had continued to collaborate with a jew in exile.

Hahn told the world that fission resulted only from the experiments he and Strassmann had carried out in December. The discovery of fission, he believed, would protect him, and by extension, the institute from the ever watchful eye of the Nazis.

Belatedly Meitner and Frisch published their own paper in the magazine Nature, and were soon bombarded with telegrams from all over the world.

But it was some months before the Danish scientist Christian Moller pointed out the most important part of fission, the chain reaction. He suggested the fission fragments from the bursting uranium nucleus might contain enough surplus energy to eject a neutron or two, each of which would cause another fission and generate more neutrons. By such a chain reaction, the

neutrons would multiply in uranium ‘like rabbits in a meadow’, to use Frisch’s colourful phrase, opening up the exciting vision of a controlled chain reaction that would liberate nuclear energy on a scale never previously imagined.

Scientists began delving further and it wasn’t long before the disturbing spectre of an uncontrolled chain reaction resulting in a ‘super bomb’ of huge destructive power hove into view.

With this realisation came the dread thought that with war imminent, German scientists were almost certainly working along similar lines. On September 1st 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Within days the German military instigated a new research project into the military applications of nuclear fission. Otto Hahn committed his institute to fission research for the duration of the war.

It started alarm bells ringing all over the world.

Next Time: Meitner's nephew Otto Frisch flees to England with the secret of atomic fission locked in his brain. He meets an old colleague Rudolph Peierls at Birmingham university and together they work out how an atomic bomb can be made. But they encounter many difficulties, braving prejudice and ignorance (not to mention Hitler's Blitz), as they struggle to bring their discovery to the attention of Churchill and Roosevelt.

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The ballyhoo over the 'Boris Gong' nuclear test medal continues with veterans Minister Johnny Mercer popping in to the factory where the medals are being made. And very pretty the medals look too!

government in carrying out four major studies into the health of the veterans.

But even that figure, many

According to the Johnny Mercer commentary up to 2,000 test participants were still alive to felt, was a gross collect the medal in time for exaggertation. When the Remembrance Day. plight of the nuclear veterans One startling point made was was first brought to the wider that there were up to 40,000 public attention back in 1983 participants in the nuclear the number of test testing programme, which participants as described by came as a big surprise to Margaret Thatcher in many.

Parliament was put at just Up to now it was generally 8,000 men. thought that just over 21,000 This was soon revised to people had taken part in the 12,000 after the Australian tests, which was the official tests were taken into account. figure used by the But as the furore grew over

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the dreadful effects of the tests on the men, the Government came up with a further revised figure of 18-20,000 participants.

In the end everyone settled on a figure of 21,357 test participants.

So who are the 18,000 or so new test participants? Where on earth did the government suddenly find all these extra people?

Dock workers in Fiji? Sailors passing within 100 miles of Christmas Island? Someone who made the tea for the crew setting sail for the Pacific? The ship's cat? Who knows. But whatever the answer, Britain's nuclear veterans must be one of the very few growth industries left in the UK.