I was given a copy of Frank Close’s biography of Bruno Pontecorvo
(1913-1993) entitled Half Life (Basic
Books, 2015). Dr. Shari Cohn Simmons, a
former student who now lives in Edinburgh sent it to me. She remembered talking with me about Muller’s
life when he was in Edinburgh (1937-1940) after fleeing the USSR where two of
his students were executed as alleged Trotskyites and genetics was condemned as
a science. One of the students getting a
PhD with Muller was Guido Pontecorvo, the oldest brother of Bruno. I knew Guido Pontecorvo professionally and interviewed
him in London when I was writing Muller’s biography.
I also
knew, from newspaper accounts, that Bruno Pontecorvo defected to the USSR and
was considered an atomic spy who passed on nuclear weapons secrets in Canada,
the US, and England. Close writes a history of both the Pontecorvo family and
Bruno’s involvement in the working out of atomic physics, a story that begins
in the early 1930s. Bruno was one of
eight children born in Pisa to a wealthy manufacturer of textiles. Their father was a non-observant Jew whose
wife was Protestant. The children were
raised without a religious identification. Of the eight children, Guido became
a geneticist, teaching and doing research mostly in Glasgow. Bruno became a physicist and Gillo became a
motion picture director (The Battle of
Algiers is his most famous picture).
Bruno
studied physics in Rome with Enrico Fermi, but after Mussolini formed an
alliance with Hitler, Jews were no longer permitted to hold university
positions because Jews were defined by fascist ideology as a biological
condition and not a chosen religious belief.
Bruno went to Paris and worked with the Joliot Curies until Paris fell
to the Nazis. Bruno escaped and found
his way out with other refugees to Lisbon and to the United States. He worked in Tulsa, Oklahoma devising instruments
to detect atomic signatures in drill holes for the presence of radioactive
heavy elements that were found in oil shale but not in limestone or sandy rock
formations. Bruno Pontecorvo was well
known among physicists in the US for his discovery that slow neutrons were
effective in inducing fission in atomic nuclei and for his skills in devising instruments
to detect the products of nuclear fission.
Bruno
worked in Chalk river in Canada in the early 1940s. He was interested in nuclear reactor
construction, an idea developed by his mentor, Enrico Fermi. One product he hoped to study from the use of
nuclear reactors was the production and detection of neutrinos. His theoretical work on neutrinos was widely known.
While his work was considered secret, it was not in weapons development. Bruno was a pacifist who opposed scientific
applications to war. His experiences in Italy
and France led him to believe the USSR was the only country where people would
be treated as equals and where peace, and not war, was its goal. This became his religion. He had become a communist
party member while in Paris.
Was Pontecorvo
a spy? Frank Close believes he was but there
is no direct evidence to prove this.
Close believes most of Pontecorvo’s spying was done after the end of
World War II and involved passing on information on nuclear reactor design and
not on weapons manufacture. Nuclear reactors, of course, were a major source of
enriched Uranium and Plutonium, both of which entered into weapons making.
In 1950 Pontecorvo
and his Swedish wife and his three sons took a vacation from their home in Harwell,
England (the British equivalent of Los Alamos) and never returned. They disappeared. It took five years before Pontecorvo made
contact with the western world releasing a statement that he left England to do
research on neutrino in the USSR and to avoid “persecution” from western
governments.
I much
enjoyed the history of atomic physics that Close provides and the scholarly
analysis of both Pontecorvo’s career and his troubled life. Only after the collapse of the USSR did Pontecorvo
admit to his colleagues that his defection was a mistake and that his faith in
communism was wrong and that he “must have been a cretin” for his naïve embrace
of Stalin’s speeches.
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