The Best of Benchley:
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
Atomic Pioneer Atoms in the Family. By Laura Fermi. Chicago. 267 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Peter Kihss Former UN correspondent, "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" SINCE Enrico Fermi died on...
...Teller, was bothered by scruples...
...Fermi, Dr...
...Five visits to this country, starting in 1930, had made America seem increasingly attractive by contrast with the Fascist dictatorship in Italy...
...At the same time, he had the opportunity of looking at Italy and at Fascism from the outside, of gaining a perspective that one inside entirely lacked...
...Fermi went to Stockholm for his Nobel Prize and kept going --to the United States...
...A 1938 Nobel Prize-winner for his pioneer work with neutrons, he helped usher in the atomic age four years later by setting off the first successful uranium chain reaction...
...Teller "had not joined the uranium project by the spring of 1940...
...He could not make up his mind...
...Fermi brought his family here from Italy in 1939...
...This is worth a thought, too...
...It can also serve as a reminder of how much America has gained by welcoming people from other lands who were attracted by our freedom...
...In October, the President started the governmental chain reaction...
...Yet, "his work, his duties toward it and toward his family, his responsibilities as a thinking citizen and as a scientist in wartime, all aroused questions in his mind, which mankind has not answered yet...
...Reviewed by Peter Kihss Former UN correspondent, "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" SINCE Enrico Fermi died on November 28 at the age of 53, this fine book by his wife has become an all too premature epitaph...
...Was it right or wrong for science to serve war...
...It is also good to have these gossipy sketches of the men who shaped the atom, and to be reminded at this juncture in American history that even the father of the hydrogen bomb, Dr...
...Nevertheless, writes Mrs...
...Men can have doubts...
...Fermi's account of her husband's earlier visits: "At each trip, he came to like the United States better, to appreciate and understand the American people more, deeply...
...Teller then went to Columbia, Chicago and, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, to Los Alamos...
...In July 1939, Szilard, Wigner and Einstein decided to write to President Roosevelt...
...George Pegram tried vainly to interest the Navy in the uranium possibilities being explored at Columbia University by Fermi, Szilard, Walter Zinn, Herbert Anderson and others...
...So, too, came such men as Albert Einstein and Hans Bethe from Germany, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller from Hungary, Niels Bohr from Denmark, and Emilio Segre and Bruno Rossi from Italy to help give the use of atomic energy to the United Slates...
...And yet the qualms and the wrongness need not have sinister meaning or exclude them from decent company...
...So Dr...
...they can even be wrong...
...His doubts were dispelled by President Roosevelt"--the President's May 10, 1940 speech on scientists and the war...
...By 1938, moreover, Italian totalitarianism had entered its anti-Semitic phase, and Laura Fermi was Jewish...
...In March 1939, Dr...
...This is a rewarding biography, told with entertaining and enlightening incident...
...That August, Teller drove Szilard to Einstein's Long Island retreat with the fateful letter...
...At a time of increasing restrictions on freedom of entry into this country, Americans might well ponder Mrs...
...they can have moral qualms...
...There is a stirring picture of the Americanization of immigrants, which points up the fact that birth is not the decisive test of who is a good democrat...
Vol. 37 • December 1954 • No. 49
