Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions / Edition 1

by Mary Palevsky

Overview

More than most of us, Mary Palevsky needed to come to terms with the moral complexities of the atomic bomb: Her parents worked on its development during World War II and were profoundly changed by that experience. After they died, unanswered questions sent their daughter on a search for understanding. This compelling, sometimes heart-wrenching chronicle is the story of that quest. It takes her, and us, on a journey into the minds, memories, and emotions of the bomb builders.

Scientists Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Joseph Rotblat, Herbert York, Philip Morrison, and Robert Wilson, and philosopher David Hawkins responded to Palevsky's personal approach in a way that dramatically expands their previously published statements. Her skill and passion as an interlocutor prompt these men to recall their lives vividly and to reexamine their own decisions, debating within themselves the complex issues raised by the bomb.

The author herself, seeking to comprehend the widely differing ways in which individual scientists made choices about the bomb and made sense of their work, deeply reconsiders those questions of commitment and conscience her parents faced. In personal vignettes that complement the interviews, she captures other remembrances of the bomb through commemorative events and chance encounters with people who were "there." Her concluding chapter reframes the crucial moral questions in terms that show the questions themselves to be the abiding legacy we all share. This beautifully written book bridges generations to make its readers participants in the ongoing dialogue about science and philosophy, war and peace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520220553
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/29/2000
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	303
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mary Palevsky directs the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project at UNLV.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

Broken Vessel

I remember standing in the living room of our Long Island home when I was about ten years old, carefully examining the series of photographs that recorded the first sixty seconds of the nuclear age. They were taken in New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, at the atomic bomb test, code named Trinity. As a little girl, I wondered how the strange, silvery bubble in the initial frame could grow larger until it finally became the huge billow of smoke, ash, and dust filling the sky in the final ones. In my child's mind, the mushroom cloud was "the bomb." I did not understand that the first, beautiful, iridescent dome rising from the flat New Mexican desert was the deadly, expanding fireball.

My mother, who had worked in the Los Alamos optics group, brought the pictures home with her after the war. My parents, both Chicagoans, met, fell in love, and married while working on the creation of the atomic bomb. They were young scientific workers, first at Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory and later at the bomb-building lab in New Mexico. Their routes to the Manhattan Project labs were like those of countless scientists of their generation. They were not among the elite handpicked by the Metallurgical Lab leader, Arthur Holly Compton, or by the Los Alamos director, Robert Oppenheimer.

My father, Harry Palevsky, received a scholarship to Northwestern University to study electrical engineering. His parents were poor, and a family crisis ensued when they could not afford to buy him a slide rule. Fortunately, they eventually obtained one, and he was able to proceed with his studies and earn a bachelor's degree. ANorthwestern professor recommended him for his first war-related work, as a civilian employee of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory near Washington, D.C., where he developed mine detection equipment under the future two-time Nobel laureate, John Bardeen. Then he went to Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory, where he worked on instrumentation to detect radiation. It was there that Enrico Fermi and his colleagues had achieved the first man-made, controlled nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942.

My mother, Elaine Sammel, attended Wright Junior College in Chicago and then worked as a dancer with the USO. At theend of the first tour, keeping a promise to her dying father, she completed her undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Chicago. It was through a Chicago professor that she got her job in the Met Lab's optics group. My parents met at a party and began dating. A short time later, my father responded to a call for more technical workers in Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was actually being built. He was assigned to the electronics group and soon learned good people were needed in optics. He recommended my mother, who joined him in Los Alamos. In early July 1945 she wrote a joyful letter home, telling her widowed mother that my father had proposed marriage and she had accepted. After asking for her mother's blessing, she cautioned, "The actual time and place of our marriage depend too much on too many things which I cannot tell you about. But these things can be discussed later." My parents bought my mother's wedding band from a Pueblo jeweler in Santa Fe and were married there on July 25, 1945, nine days after the Trinity bomb test. My mother was twenty-two years old, my father twenty-five.

Within three weeks of their wedding, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war ended. When my father returned to Chicago, he confided in his sister, Helen, that from the moment he heard of the bombings of the Japanese cities, he had thought they were wrong. And he told her he would never work on weapons again. He completed his education and went on to a long career as an experimental nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Like many of the women who worked on the Manhattan Project, my mother did not pursue a career in science. She returned to her first love,dance, and owned a studio in our community for many years. Most of the girls in my town and of my generation studied ballet with Mrs. Palevsky.

In 1981, after working at Brookhaven for more than thirty years, my father was forced to take an early retirement. He was only sixty-one years old but had suffered the first in a series of small strokes. That summer I visited my parents on Long Island during the Fourth of July holiday. After a few days, I understood with shocking certainty that my father had changed, that the man I had known and loved all my life would never be the same. The vessel of his mind was breaking. I wrote in my journal:

July 5, 1981
Brookhaven

My father is like a Christmas ornament that has been dropped and not broken-but when I look closely, I can see that tiny fault lines are etched in the surface, threatening to break open at any moment. My heart aches as I cradle this delicate, shattered life in my hands.

When my father retired, his doctors said that he would probably live for five years. Perhaps they could not see the fierce stubbornness behind his increasingly passive demeanor. I returned home to California and wept deeply. It was the beginning of a long mourning that would continue beyond his death nine years later. During that time, he weakened physically and mentally and suffered severe pain in one of his feet because of diminished circulation to his legs. Once a generous and gregarious man with a contemplative side, my father withdrew, was often remote—even cold. Before he was seventy he possessed the behavior and demeanor of a much older man, and my mother, silently grieving at every step, was reluctantly transformed into his caretaker.

During Christmas 1987 I visited my parents in their New York City apartment. By this time they had sold our family home in Brookhaven. My mother told me that although she loved the house, she could no longer maintain it by herself, without my father's help. But she failed to reveal her own secret: her body was already being weakened by the cancer that would soon take her life.

I remember a conversation my mother and I had, almost in passing, during that holiday visit. We were probably cleaning, or preparing dinner. Earlier in the day, some of my childhood friends had stopped by for a visit. I had read in their faces the shock at my father's premature aging; however, they had been too polite to say anything. My friends had left, and my mother stood before me declaring that she thought someone should write about my father's life and times. "He has seen and done such interesting things," she said, "and he remembers them." Her eyes filled with tears, and she angrily spit out the words, "Now all anyone sees when they look at him is a doddering old man. They don't realize that he's still in there." When I asked if she was going to write the book, she shook her head no and walked back to the kitchen.

One year later the family gathered around my mother for her final Christmas. Looking back, I see that we all knew then that she would not survive the cancer that was ravaging her body, traveling from breast to lungs to brain. But as so many do, we hoped against hope—the deterioration of this bright and vital woman had come too quickly and unexpectedly. My mother lived fully until the end. During the last years of her life, she had taken up the study of dispute resolution, becoming a valued member of the staff at the Queens Mediation Center in New York. Her love of peacemaking was most profoundly expressed when, just a few weeks before her death, she gave a speech about mediation in international affairs for the National Council of Women of the United Nations.

They say that the dying experience a life review. However, I vividly remember entering my mother's hospital room and seeing my own choices pass before my eyes. At the age of thirty-nine I had made my plans for the future and had figured out what the rest of my life would look like. With many years of experience in business and an ability with numbers, I had recently enrolled in courses to become a certified public accountant. But in the presence of my sleeping mother, I felt that my sensible, well-reasoned decision had been made from a deep resignation. Witnessing the woman who had birthed me encounter her end-of-life crisis, I felt cowardly. I had only the vaguest sense that there must be something more to my life's work. The least I could do was risk discovering whether my imaginings were real.

Later that day, during a private moment, when my mother and I admitted to each other what we could not face within ourselves, she asked, "What will become of your father?" I answered her the only way I knew how. "Don't worry, Mom, we'll take care of him." She pleaded, "But he needs me," and I replied, "I know he needs you, Mom, but we'll do the best we can." Thus I made a promise to my mother at our moment of love at last sight* (A nod to Walter Benjamin).

My mother was dead before the New Year at age sixty-six. We brought my father to California, where my husband, Joseph, and I cared for him until his death two years later. Several months before he died, remembering my conversations with my mother, I asked my father if he would like to record his memoirs. He wanted to do this, so we spent several afternoons in my sunny California living room as he recounted the essential moments of his life. Speaking slowly and carefully into the microphone, he recalled growing up in Chicago, the firstborn son of poor Eastern European Jews. His mother had come from a family of rabbis, and he told me stories that embodied her moral lessons.

My father remembered teaching himself how radios work and, as a teenager, becoming famous in his neighborhood for fixing them. And he recalled his pursuit of a career in nuclear physics with its thrilling beginnings at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Lab. He told me of being among the young scientists surrounding Leo Szilard as he held court. The Hungarian-born physicist's ideas, my father said, had influenced his own developing social conscience. He described the genius and generosity of Enrico Fermi and smiled as he recalled being at Los Alamos and first encountering Richard Feynman's penetrating insight into physical reality.

Although he felt privileged to have worked alongside some of the century's greatest scientists to end the war, my father was deeply troubled by the terror they had wrought to achieve the peace. I had long known his profound misgivings about the use of the bomb and his complicated feelings about his participation in its creation. As we spoke, I had the sense that his effort to reconcile the moral complexities of the bomb was being transmitted to me. When he died, it became his legacy.

Traveling with my parents to the ends of their lives constituted a major turning point in my own. I never returned to my accounting classes. Eighteen months after my father's death, I entered graduate school. I could not know then that I would study the moral legacy of the bomb. I only knew that I wanted to continue an education that I had left behind in my confusion amid the societal explosion we now label "the sixties." Early in my graduate career, during a human development seminar, a colleague raised the issue of the atomic bomb. She characterized as amoral a Manhattan Project scientist she knew who felt no remorse for the fates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I understood why she made that judgment, but for me the question was not at all simple or clear. I replied that this man's reasoning and his support of the use of the bomb were not, in and of themselves, proof of his amorality. I suggested that for him using the bombs to end the war may have been moral. Naturally, our conversation brought to mind my own relationship with the bomb.

A year and a half later, during the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of D day, for the first time in my life I became completely engrossed in the news stories about World War II and those who had fought it. Watching television documentaries, I was struck by how little I knew about the Normandy invasion and was surprised to learn that many D day veterans had never discussed their experiences with their families, in particular, their children. Listening to them reminisce, I began to sense the hell that had been World War II.

Soon I was reading the early press reports about the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum's exhibit for the fifty-year commemoration of the war's end. I heard the first public rumblings of what was to erupt into a battle over the competing meanings of the bomb and how it should be remembered. It was then that I decided to play the tapes of my father's memoirs, which had remained untouched on my bookshelf since his death. I removed the first cassette from its dusty box and listened, expecting the sound of my dead father's voice to be eerie, even frightening. Instead I found strange comfort in his halting but determined effort to speak to me through all that had separated us.

I gathered everything my father and I had done together—the three audiotaped interviews; some notes from a memoirs writing class we had taken at the local senior center; a scant printout of a family history program I tried to help him complete. I discovered a scrap of paper with my father's words scribbled on it; listening to the tapes, I heard stories without endings; I sifted through a damp cardboard box filled with files and photographs salvaged from my dad's long-abandoned Brookhaven Lab desk.

I awoke from dreams with deep unease; my memories faded and then seemed to change. Time had shifted when my mother died. I recalled that evening, when my father was reminiscing and mistook me for his sister, Helen. Perhaps his stories had carried him back in time so that he could not imagine that the dark-eyed, listening woman was his own daughter. He asked impatiently, "Don't you remember when we . . . ?" And I, leaning across my kitchen table, gently answered, "Dad, you must be thinking of Helen. I am Mary." He blinked and with a lost, then hurt look replied, "Right." This was not the book of my father's life my mother had envisioned, but then her own story had not turned out as planned.

Transcribing the tapes, I heard my father's quiet words: "When the word got out they were going to use the bomb, there were people at Chicago who opposed it. And they visited Los Alamos and talked about their opposition. They thought we ought to tell the Japanese that we were going to use it, and then, after we used it, they thought the Japanese would surrender." I stopped typing and gazed back, beyond my dad's end-of-life recollection, to the time I first remember hearing a rendition of the story. It was the 1950s, and my father, my younger brother, and I were at Brookhaven. I see this childhood picture:

Dad, Alan, and I are sitting at one of the long cafeteria tables. There is the noise of the lunch crowd in the background. We have just come from seeing the giant machine where he does his experiments. We have our food and we are excited to be with Dad at his work. Then he tells us about the bomb, that he and Mom worked on this very important project. He says he helped build the trigger mechanism that made the bomb explode. We ask if that was like a trigger on a gun, and he explains it was not, that it was electronic. Then he tells us the most important thing: he and Mom didn't want the bomb to be used on people in the war. They wanted it to be exploded on an island in the middle of the ocean, where no one lived, but where the Japanese people could have seen how big it was. Then they would have surrendered. The war would have ended and no Japanese grown-ups or children would have been hurt by the bomb my parents had helped make.

As a child, listening to this story given in love, I did not visualize the terrible destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could not imagine what had actually occurred. My mind created a picture of what my mother and father had wanted to have happen: the big bomb exploding on an island where no one lived; families kept from harm. I did not think of the Japanese asenemies to be feared. I envisioned adults and children living safely and happily on the other side of the world. My father told us that the bomb demonstrated in this way would have been a noble effort to end the war without hurting anyone, so this is what I saw. The story defined my parents' connection to the bomb and their personal goodness.

Thus, with the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bomb, I began writing from a lifetime of fragments that are my father's story of his wartime work on the Manhattan Project. Now the task seemed even more urgent. What had it been like for my father and mother, and for the others who were brought together by the forces of history, chance, and talent to build the first atomic bomb? How did my parents' lives relate to the larger picture? Sometimes, like a jigsaw puzzle, aha! the pieces would fit together perfectly. Other times, like shards from long-buried vessels, the edges were worn down, the shapes changed, the colors muted. I could not possibly know whether I had put them together as they once were. Then I relied on my own imagination and judgment, my particular sense of form. One moment everything seemed to achieve a kind of unity. At others I stepped between the pieces into emptiness and was shattered. What had made sense lost meaning, my wholeness dissolved, I walked without bearings. Yet my desire remained. As I began my exploration, I discovered I was not alone in my search for the meaning in the remnants left by the bomb.

I watched as the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian's exhibit developed. The comprehensive presentation was to display the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima. It was also to include life-sized photographs of the bomb's victims, along with artifacts from the bomb site. Opponents argued that early drafts of the script characterized the Allies' Pacific war as vengeful and racist. Veterans' groups complained that the "revisionist" exhibit lacked balance by not also addressing Japanese atrocities in China, the Bataan death march, and the prisoner of war camps.

In addition, the presentation was to explore how the bombs thrust the world into the nuclear age. Arguing against assertions that the American public had never "come to terms," critics said that it understood very well what the atomic bombings had meant: the end to the worst war in history and the saving of hundreds of thousands of American lives that would have been lost in an invasion. Members of Congress asserted that the function of such an exhibit was to honor Americans who had died fighting Nazism and Japanese militarism. At the other end of the spectrum were those who felt that the planned exhibit did not go far enough in exposing the impact of nuclear denial and secrecy on Americans, physically and psychologically, or the larger worldwide environmental and health consequences. In the end, the National Air and Space Museum displayed only the Enola Gay's fuselage, along with a video of the flight crew's recollections.

I wanted to enter the larger debate from the perspective of my relationship with my father. I was particularly interested in the moral dilemmas that the scientists faced and the context in which the difficult wartime decisions were made. I also wondered how, in light of fifty years' experience, Manhattan Project participants reflected on those extraordinary times. I began by doing library research. Since my field of graduate study was human development, I had spent many hours in the humanities sections of the university library. But when I stood at the double doors marked by the sign Sciences and Engineering Library I was anxious. Crossing the threshold, I felt confused and disoriented. I was only a few feet from the stacks of sociology and philosophy texts that I explored with ease and enjoyment, but here I felt like an interloper—a spy in the house of science.*(A nod to Anais Nin.)

However, driven by my desire to better understand my late parents and the forces that had shaped their lives, I wandered deeper into the stacks. As I came upon books that could hold answers to my questions, my anxiety was replaced by the excitement of discovery. I pulled the atomic bomb histories from the shelves and hungrily searched for clues in the indexes of the scientists' biographies. Bibliographic leads sent me down unexpected paths and into unanticipated corners.

During my first hours at the library, I found two books that have become treasures to me. Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts contains the emigre Manhattan Project physicist's selected recollections and correspondence from 1930 through 1945. The title came from one of Szilard's recollections:

In 1943 Hans Bethe from Cornell visited in Chicago and we discussed the work conducted there under the Manhattan Project in which I was involved. The things that were done and even more the things that were left undone disturbed me very much particularly because I thought (quite wrongly as we now know) that the Germans were ahead of us. "Bethe," I said, "I am going to write down all that is going on these days in the project. I am just going to write down the facts-not for anyone to read, just for God." "Don't you think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked. "Maybe he does," I said—"but not this version of the facts."

I was interested to read about the change in atmosphere at Chicago's Met Lab once Germany's defeat was assured and the lab's most vital work completed. Szilard recalled that he and other scientists "began to think about the wisdom of testing bombs and using bombs." "Initially," he wrote, "we were strongly motivated to produce the bomb because we feared that the Germans would get ahead of us, and the only way to prevent them from dropping bombs on us was to have bombs in readiness ourselves. But now, with the war won, it was not clear what we were working for."

I also read Szilard's July 1945 petition to President Harry Truman, by which he hoped to enable the signers to go on record with their opposition, on moral grounds, to the use of the bomb against the Japanese at that stage in the war. The petition asked that, before any atomic bombings, the Japanese be informed of the terms to be imposed after the war and be given a chance to surrender.

Alice Kimball Smith's history of the atomic scientists' movement, A Peril and a Hope, describes the wartime evolution of an uneasy awareness among atomic scientists like my father regarding the larger social and political consequences of their work. I read a 1944 Met Lab document titled "Prospectus on Nucleonics," known as the Jeffries Report, which addressed "the dilemma of technological progress in a static world order" and warned that "technological advances without moral development are catastrophic." Smith's volume also contains a copy of the June 1945 Franck Report, which exposed the roots of my father's views on the bomb.

I had heard of Chicago's Franck Report but had only a vague sense of its contents. It is a fascinating historical document for several reasons, not the least of which is the way it addressed the relationship between science and war. A committee of Met Lab scientists, headed by the highly respected German-born Nobel laureate James Franck, had been charged with studying the social and political implications of nuclear weapons. Franck was deeply committed to the report's conclusions and recommendations. In early June 1945 he traveled to Washington, hoping to deliver it to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Unable to arrange a meeting, Franck had to settle for leaving the document with Stimson's assistant. The scientist-authors predicted the coming arms race with remarkable accuracy. And most important, they linked the postwar implications of the bomb with its wartime use.

We cannot hope to avoid a nuclear armament race either by keeping secret from the competing nations the basic scientific facts of nuclear power or by cornering the raw materials required for such a race. . . .

From this point of view, a demonstration of the new weapon might best be made, before the eyes of representatives of all the United Nations, on the desert or a barren island. The best possible atmosphere for the achievement of an international agreement could be achieved if America could say to the world, "You see what sort of a weapon we had but did not use. We are ready to renounce its use in the future if other nations join us in this renunciation and agree to the establishment of an efficient international control."

After such a demonstration the weapon might perhaps be used against Japan if the sanction of the United Nations (and of public opinion at home) were obtained, perhaps after a preliminary ultimatum to Japan to surrender or at least to evacuate certain regions as an alternative to their total destruction.

As I read the words "a demonstration . . . on the desert or a barren island," I felt a deep sense of relief. Finally, I might begin to understand where my father's story had come from. Then, as I glanced at the report's seven signatories, one name jumped out at me, Donald J. Hughes. Don had been my father's closest friend. They had first met while working at the Naval Ordnance Lab, where, one day, Don received a call from Metallurgical Lab director A. H. Compton, under whom he had studied at Chicago, calling him back. It was Don who first told my father the secret of the chain reaction and the plans to build a bomb. And when my father returned to Chicago to visit his parents, Don recommended him for a job at the Met Lab.

After the war Don went to Brookhaven Lab, and in 1950 he invited my father to join the neutron physics group he was forming there. Brookhaven's early years were full of excitement and challenge for the young scientists, and Don and my dad grew even closer. Then, in 1960, Don died suddenly and tragically. But my father did not speak to me about his friend until thirty years later, when, as we recorded his memoirs, his own death was approaching. That Donald J. Hughes had signed the Franck Report was one more piece in the puzzle that is my attempt to understand my father.

I searched my mind for someone who might know more about Don Hughes, the Franck Report, and what the atmosphere had been like at Los Alamos during the spring and summer of 1945. Then I remembered William A. Higinbotham, a Brookhaven scientist whom I had also known from childhood. Willy had been my father's group leader at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos laboratory. After the war they were active in the atomic scientists' movement as members of the Federation of American Scientists, of which Willy was a founder and guiding light. During the 1950s the Hughes, Higinbotham, and Palevsky families all lived on the same Long Island country road. When my father retired, Willy wrote a letter remembering his scientific work. However, he stated that most important to him had been their thirty-seven-year association at Los Alamos and Brookhaven, "as regards our proper role as scientists toward society."

I had not seen Willy for many years and remembered him as a small, sparkling man, famous for playing a mean accordion. I telephoned him, and the moment he answered, I knew from his weak voice that he was very ill. As I explained my call, he told me it was difficult for him to concentrate his thoughts but that he would be happy to respond to my questions by letter. "Sure, baby," Willy said. "I've got a lot to tell you and a lot to ask you."

I immediately wrote, sending a list of questions. I wanted to know what the young Los Alamos scientists had talked about among themselves during the months leading up to the bombings. Did they, like the Chicago scientists, discuss alternatives such as a demonstration? Were there any means for them to express opposition to the use of the bombs on civilians? Did he remember discussing such questions with my father? I do not know whether Willy Higinbotham ever saw my letter. The following month, I read his obituary in the New York Times. I experienced a kind of despair, having lost the chance to speak to someone who knew my father's world in a way that had always been closed to me. Another strand connecting me to my past, and to my parents, was severed. I clipped the obituary—one more fragment for my files.

In December 1994, several weeks after Willy Higinbotham's death, I woke up early thinking, why not call Hans Bethe? I knew that the German-born Nobel laureate had headed the theory division at wartime Los Alamos and had been at Cornell for nearly sixty years. Then in his late eighties, he remained active in both science and arms control. Over the years, I had read his reasoned discussions of both. If anyone could provide insight into the bomb and its era, it was Bethe. To someone of my background, the physicist was scientific royalty, so before I had time to lose my nerve I hopped out of bed, threw on my robe, splashed water on my face, and placed the call.

I did not know then that Hans Bethe would become my Janus. Facing both beginnings and endings, he stood guardian at the portal as I embarked on my quest to understand the people and times that had created the first weapon capable of breaking the vessel of the world.

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Excerpted from Atomic Fragments by Mary Palevsky. Copyright © 2000 by the Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Preface 
Acknowledgments 

Prologue 
Broken Vessel 
Chapter 1 Hans A. Bethe, Tough Dove 
A Thousand Cranes 
Chapter 2 Edward Teller, High Priest of Physics 
Martyrs to History? 
Chapter 3 Philip Morrison, Witness to Atomic History 
Pacific Memories I
Chapter 4 David Hawkins, Chronicler of Los Alamos 
Pacific Memories II 
Chapter 5 Robert R. Wilson, the Psyche of a Physicist 
Professor Bethe at Home in His Office 
Chapter 6 Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash Pioneer 
The Old Country 
Chapter 7 Herbert F. York, Inside History 
Outsider History 
Running to Ground Zero 

EPILOGUE Mosaic 
The Problem of Power 
The Bohr Phenomenon 
Being God or Seeing God? 
An Atomic Scientist's Appeal 
What Science Is and What Science Makes 
Life Understood Backward 
Farewell 

Notes 
Selected Bibliography 
Sources of Illustrations 
Index 

What People are Saying About This

David Hawkins

She is a very remarkable young woman, a help to all of us. I call her our ethnographer, visiting this strange tribe, befriending them, learning much from them, helping them!
— (David Hawkins, one of the scientists interviewed for the book)

Ruth Lewin Sime

The author's quest for insight into her parents' lives has genuine emotional appeal. She is sensitive and careful--ready to change her mind, reshape her approach. The result is a narrative that is honest and suspenseful. We know these questions will not have answers, but we remain fascinated with the attempt to resolve them.
— (Ruth Lewin Sime, author of Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics)

Freeman Dyson

Mary Palevsky has thrown new light on the history of the atomic age, by recording the thoughts and memories of leading actors in the drama before they are all gone.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan

An eloquent volume. Mary Palevsky has stimulated the greatest of the bomb builders to think and speak in new ways about the nuclear weapons they created and their meaning for mankind.
— (Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Davis Center, Harvard University)

Editorial Reviews

A complex and thought-provoking dialogue about the intersection of science, history, conduct, and necessity.

Orange The County Register

Palevsky's parents worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, developing the atomic bomb, and she grew up with their ambivalence toward their weapons work. After their deaths, she began to explore the subject, interviewing Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Joseph Rotblat, Herbert York, Philip Morrison, Robert Wilson, and David Hawkins, among others. At the outset, she seems relatively clear about what she hopes to learn from these interviews, but the more she introduces her own philosophical considerations, the more difficult it becomes to determine just what she is thinking. Even more confusing is some of her thoughts on Robert Oppenheimer's role in the development of nuclear weapons. The epilog, ranging from discussions with Freeman Dyson to musings about confrontations with her parents, seems particularly fragmented. The body of the work, however, is quite interesting, and one is impressed by the graciousness of the people with whom Palevsky discussed these still controversial subjects. Recommended for public and academic libraries and relevant special collections.--Hilary Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Livermore, CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

An eloquent volume. Mary Palevsky has stimulated the greatest of the bomb builders to think and speak in new ways about the nuclear weapons they created and their meaning for mankind.
—Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Davis Center, Harvard University

John