Fathers of the bomb deserve Nobel Peace Prize

Jewish refugees to our shores used their genius to defend freedom against the threat of tyrants

Afew years ago I was asked to write a book about the development of the atom bomb. The project came to mind this week, with successive announcements by the Nobel Prize committee – for physics, medicine, and on Friday, for peace. To my mind the former were glorious, the latter ludicrous.

Though the book didn’t work out, there was great consolation because I got to know the story of Otto Frisch, a Jewish physicist born in Vienna who, with his aunt, Lise Meitner, first explained the process of nuclear fission. That was in Christmas 1938. Frisch’s father was then in Dachau. Otto himself was desperate. And it was Britain where he found refuge, at the University of Birmingham.

There Frisch met Rudolf Pereils, a German Jew who had himself fled to Britain in 1933. Together, these two men turned the course of the war. In the first months of fighting they worked to produce a memorandum – effectively a recipe for making an atom bomb. As a conceptual and practical breakthrough it was transformative, leading first to serious British efforts to produce the bomb, then to the Manhattan Project.

This memorandum, devastatingly brief and simple, is one of the most politically profound documents of the 20th century. For these two scientists, seeing tyranny in their homeland, decided to hand illimitable power to freedom. And they were not alone. The bomb itself was the fruit of the efforts of countless refugee scientists.

Think of Leo Slizard, who fled Berlin in 1933; or Franz Simon (later Sir Francis Simon), who had won the Iron Cross (First Class) for his service to Germany in the First World War, but chose to serve our side in the Second. Or Edward Teller, who fled fascism in his native Hungary. Think of Enrico Fermi, Italian creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor. Never was a Nobel Prize better bestowed than in 1938, when he took the opportunity of the trip to accept his prize in Stockholm to flee his homeland.

It would be easy to assume that this astonishing gift was confined to history. But just take a look at this year’s Prize for Physics. Some 79 years after Fermi was accorded the same accolade, it was awarded last Tuesday to Rainer Weiss. Weiss was born in Berlin in 1932. Fleeing the Nazis with his family via Czechoslovakia, he ended up in New York. Michael Rosbash, who shared the Prize for Medicine, was born in Kansas after his father, a synagogue kantor, managed to get out of Germany in 1938.

Even Britain’s most celebrated Nobel laureate this week, Kazuo Ishiguro, is in this country because his father chose to leave Japan to work on a secret Cold War project at The National Institute of Oceanography. Ironically, Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, the city synonymous with the destruction unleashed by that previous generation of emigrees. But that did not stop his father leaving to help Britain in its next confrontation with tyranny.

These tales of courage and contribution to our national story need remembering at a time when so many seem to be doubting Britain and America. For huge numbers of people around the world, our two countries remain the greatest places on Earth to live, beacons whose light many will risk their lives to help shine brighter.

This message is written through the brief text of the Frisch-Pereils memorandum. Though it starts by advising how the Allies might build an “irresistible super-bomb”, it moves swiftly on to how Germany should be prevented from doing so. From there it advises that if Germany does acquire one “the most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar bomb … even if it is not intended to use the bomb as a means of attack.”

Here is the story of the 20th century in three bullet points in a scientific paper: “We want the free world to win. We want to see tyranny defeated. If tyranny acquires the means to win, we must ensure we have the means to deter it.”

That is why Friday’s peace prize – to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican) – is so absurd. The Nazis may not have acquired nuclear weapons. But Otto Frisch knew they might, and that others surely would. He calculated that it was not enough to stand aside and hope. So rather than bury his discovery he risked everything to ensure the manufacture of terrifying weapons which not only delivered freedom over tyranny in the Second World War, but guaranteed it afterwards. It is he and Pereils, not Ican, who better merit the Nobel Peace Prize. Their contribution, like that of so many Jewish refugees to these shores, is incalculable.