Hans A. Bethe - The Supreme Problem Solver of the 20th Century

	Photo: Charles Harrington/ Cornell University Photography

Hans Albrecht Bethe, 98, a leading Manhattan Project scientist who was active with the FAS, died March 7 at his home in Ithaca, New York. He inspired a generation of scientists by showing how scientific expertise can help to shape sensible U.S. policy on nuclear weapons and many other areas.

According to nuclear historian Robert S. Norris, Bethe was "the almost perfect expression" of the scientist-activist, driven by a sense of responsibility for his own atomic breakthroughs and those of his physicist colleagues. "He saw his role as to educate the public and the policymakers about the new dangers and to help figure out ways to control them," Norris said in the New York Times' obituary March 8.

Richard Rhodes, who wrote about Bethe in his 1986 history of the U.S. atomic bomb, said Bethe "more than any other leading figure of the Manhattan Project, agonized over his participation, first in the bomb itself and then in thermonuclear research" to see if a hydrogen bomb was possible.

Born in 1906 in Alsace-Lorraine, Bethe fled to England in 1933 and came to the United States two years later. He became an immediate star of U.S. physics and was recruited in 1942 to assist the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

Bethe later did not regret his role in creating the atomic bomb because of the Nazi threat at the time. But the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused him and other atomic scientists, in an unprecedented wave, to argue publicly for nuclear restraint to Congress and the press. The FAS was founded in October 1945 as the Federation of Atomic Scientists and became a key vehicle for these concerns.

Bethe's advice to the President in 1956 led to the pathbreaking 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. In a tireless career of activism, Bethe called on scientists to renounce research on nuclear arms. He hoped nations would cut their nuclear arsenals to a few hundred weapons or less. Throughout his life he advocated nuclear power as an answer to fossil fuel shortages. Aside from his star power, Bethe remained one of Cornell's most stimulating faculty members until his death.