On the facing page (Ill. 15) you will also see Seaborg and Meitner together during the Nobel dinner in Stockholm. He is smiling proudly at the camera, she characteristically shy next to him. One side of her face is looking happier, as ever. The other paler, almost sickly. It looks like two different people, if one covers up one side at a time.
This is the source of the working title for this dissertation, “The Two Faces of Lise Meitner”. Before my supervisor and I decided instead to use the title, “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.
Her strangely ambiguous face can be seen in other photographs in these pages. For example in (Ill. 41), the only known picture of Lise Meitner with Edward Teller, the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb. Enrico Fermi, who was central to the development of the atom bomb in Los Alamos, also appears in the photograph. On the reverse is written: “Meeting, Chicago, June 1946”. That is to say, toward the very end of Meitner’s guest professorship at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
But there is no reference to what the meeting might have been about. In her diary, Meitner says only that it was surrounded by “stifling security arrangements”. And then adds: “It felt more like being a member of a secret society than participating in a scientific discussion.”
Opposite this mysterious photograph is another much later one (Ill. 42). It shows Seaborg at Meitner’s home in Oxford in 1966. He had gone there to present to her in person the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize, for her “extensive experimental studies leading to the discovery of fission”. A belated consolation for having been denied the Nobel Prize and all the other distinctions which Meitner was never awarded. When the honor was announced, Meitner stated that she did not want to travel across the Atlantic to receive the prize, which was interpreted to mean that she still did not wish to be associated with the bomb. But when Seaborg then offered to travel to her home in Oxford instead, she accepted immediately—and is said to have received him with joy and pride.
The photograph shows Meitner, now close to ninety, looking with apparent delight at a small, black case which Seaborg is handing to her. It cannot have been the medal itself in the case, because that is already lying in a velvet box on her lap together with the plastic-covered diploma.
What the case really contained I have been unable to discover, despite extensive researches in the context of this dissertation. In my concluding section (Chapter 10) I nevertheless describe some of my hypotheses—and what their significance might be for how we should view the woman, and the mystery, that is Lise Meitner.
6.03
I closed my dissertation, tried to get some sleep for the first time in more than a day, just as Ingrid was doing in the seat next to me.
But the questions would not stop buzzing around in my head. Why had Ingrid agreed to return to D.C.? Why had Edelweiss let us run free? What had actually happened in the restroom at Dulles, causing that massive explosion? Who had won and who lost? What was the relevance of californium in it all?
And still I did not think of putting any of the questions to Ingrid—since she so rarely answered them in a way which made sense to me.
When finally I started to fall asleep, I kept being woken by a series of flash-like dreams of the mushroom cloud outside the airplane window. That unfathomable power, billowing outward slowly and mercilessly like a colossal thunderstorm. Something so far beyond human scale and yet so near. I felt totally drained, depressed and bewitched, like a drug addict after his first kick.
It may well sound particular to me, personal, perverse. But this longing for the forbidden, the worst thing imaginable in human history, was a universal symptom. To the extent that our psychologists even had a name for it, a diagnosis: the “Doomsday syndrome”.
Yet what I had experienced was such a tiny part of what would happen in the actual moment. Edelweiss had done his best to make us understand how high the stakes were. The weight and importance of our assignment. The enormous difference between the atomic and the hydrogen bomb, fission and fusion, nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. That the first ever hydrogen bomb, on just its first test, had an explosive force of 10.4 megatons: one thousand times more than the atom bomb over Hiroshima.
He kept reading out the stories in his frighteningly gentle voice, from my very first time at West Point, the attempts at descriptions, the eyewitness accounts.
“I could have sworn that the entire world stood in flames. The heat rays burned my back even though our ship was thirty miles from ground zero. The blinding ball of fire had a three-mile diameter, seemed to hover motionlessly before slowly rising toward the heavens, like a gigantic gas balloon, a foreign planet, another sun”.
This from a marine, a former Harvard literature student, in a letter home after his first experience of a hydrogen bomb test.
Edelweiss then turned to actual footage and simulations in the Team’s headquarters. Hour-long sessions four storeys below ground, the lecture hall’s lights dimmed as the giant screen lowered softly from the ceiling. Always starting with what it would have looked like if the “Bikini Baker” atom bomb, with an explosive force equivalent to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had exploded directly above Manhattan.
The cloud spread out gradually, as if in slow motion, with a final width of a few hundred yards hanging over our slender island. When the shock wave came, the soundless picture just trembled fractionally, before the fires and destruction. Soon the simulation faded out and the room fell into total darkness. Leaving us in suffocating silence.
Then the Manhattan skyline once again came hovering out of the darkness. The clock in the bottom corner of the image was counting in thousands of seconds. But now the heavens above the skyscrapers were entirely, blindingly white. The ball of fire covered Manhattan’s width. Then came the devastation itself, whole skyscrapers being snapped off like matches.
The first time none of us had said a word, we were just trying to fathom what we had seen. After a minute or so of absolute silence, Edelweiss explained—still through loudspeakers with the lights down and not making the slightest effort to create any comfort zone—that this was the clearest way to illustrate the difference between an atom bomb and a hydrogen bomb.
The first simulation, he went on, showed an old atomic bomb; the second represented the scenario for an early model of the hydrogen bomb, the first ever tested, codenamed “Mike”. Even that would have wiped out the whole of New York’s downtown in one single moment. The greater part of the city.
Then came all the secondary effects: the fires, the asphalt bubbling on the streets, melting together with the human masses into some sort of new organic composition. The water starting to boil in New York harbor. The unimaginable levels of radiation.
What Edelweiss was doing, as I now see it, was to imprint the whole situation visually onto us. How vulnerable the world had become with effect from the first test of the first atomic bomb—when the technology showed itself, against all odds, to be possible. How very much more so with the hydrogen bomb.
And that there was always a small human being sitting deep within the system, carrying out the rituals or even pushing the button. The last link in the chain. So susceptible to temptation, the whole scope of his own humanity.
Out of the loudspeakers in the jet-black lecture hall, Edelweiss then proclaimed that the “Balance of Terror” was no longer a question of states, military alliances or political or religious ideas. That in peacetime it lay more within each individual person who came sufficiently close to nuclear weapons. That those of us who are furthest within the system first and foremost have to stand up to ourselves. At any given moment.