Bethe, Hans Albrecht

▪ 2006

      German American theoretical physicist (b. July 2, 1906, Strassburg, Ger. [now Strasbourg, France]—d. March 6, 2005, Ithaca, N.Y.), was the head of the Theoretical Physics Division of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., which designed and built the first atomic bomb, and the recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research on the production of energy in stars. Bethe received his doctorate in 1928 from the University of Munich. Following appointments at several European universities, including a post working with Enrico Fermi in Rome, Bethe in 1935 accepted a position with Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., where he remained, except for wartime leave, until his retirement in 1975. Bethe became a U.S. citizen in 1941, shortly before the U.S. entered World War II. Following his reading in the Encyclopædia Britannica that the armour-piercing qualities of grenades were not well understood, he formulated a theory that became the foundation for research on the problem. His work on the subject was quickly classified, and he earned a security clearance to work on radar development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving on to Los Alamos. Bethe's main research interest to this point had been atomic nuclei. In particular, in 1938 he had discovered the main sequence of stellar nuclear chain reactions, and his contributions to the construction of the first atomic bomb were considerable. Bethe was a longtime director of and contributor to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication devoted to informing the world about the dangers of nuclear war. During the 1980s he was a vociferous opponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.” Bethe was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1955 and the Atomic Energy Commission's Enrico Fermi Award in 1961.

* * *