Some of the finest scientists of the 20th century produced the most awesome weapons in history, the atomic and the hydrogen bombs. Few of them can have an easy mind about this, even those who believe that nuclear weapons have played a valuable role in preventing war between the superpowers.
Two recent books - Stalin and the Bomb, by D. Halloway (Yale University Press, 1994), and Critical Assembly, by L. Hoddeson, P. Henricksen, R. Meade, and C. Westfall (Cambridge University Press, 1993) describe the early development of nuclear weapons in the US and Russia.
In April 1943, a team of scientists, headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, began the work (codenamed the Manhattan Project) of designing and building the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
By coincidence, a Soviet team, under Igor Kurchatov, began similar work that same month.
Stalin appointed his head of secret police, Lavrentrii Beria, in charge of the nuclear weapons programme. Stalin chose Beria to ensure that the job would be carried out as expeditiously as possible.
He was conscious of the consequences of America having a monopoly on the superbomb. He knew Beria's orders would be acted on without fail; to do otherwise would be to invite imprisonment, perhaps death.
Beria reminded the scientists that there was no shortage of empty prison-places to accommodate them should they fail.
The calibre of the teams assembled in America and the USSR was remarkable. Both include names familiar to a wide audience because of their contribution to 20th century physics.
And many are Nobel Prize (NP) winners. The teams included Niels Bohr (NP), Enrico Fermi (NP), Hans Bethe (NP), Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, John von Neumann on the Los Alamos team, and Iulii Khariton, Lev Artsimovic, Igor Tamm (NP), Andrei Sakharov (NP), and Lev Landau (NP) on the Soviet team.
The Los Alamos and Soviet teams worked intensively on the project. The Los Alamos team built and tested the first bombs in three years and nine months.
The Soviets succeeded in four years, benefiting significantly from secret intelligence reports on the US work. The most important of these reports came from Klaus Fuchs who worked at a high level on the Manhattan Project and passed on detailed technical information to Beria.
The hydrogen bomb, which is much more powerful than the original atomic bomb, was developed a few years later.
The Soviets certainly worked independently on the hydrogen bomb, without the benefit of US intelligence reports.
The first tests of both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs made an indelible impression on all who witnessed them. Kurchatov was particularly shaken after seeing the results of test explosions of the hydrogen bomb.
He related his feelings to Nikita Khrushchev who was unable to sleep for some nights afterwards until he comforted himself with the thought that this weapon need not be used.
One might have thought that the atmosphere at Los Alamos, and at Arzamas, where the Soviet bomb project was based, would be grim, given the essentially tragic nature of the enterprise. But this was not the case.
A British physicist, Freeman Dyson, described the atmosphere at Los Alamos: "It was youth, it was exuberance, it was a shared ambition to do great things together in science without any personal jealousies or squabbles over credit."
The Soviet scientists worked under the eye of a sadist to develop a bomb for one of the greatest tyrants in history. Nevertheless, apparently, the atmosphere in the group was not so different from that at Los Alamos.
Most of the Soviet physicists seemed to take it for granted that, after the war, the US monopoly on nuclear weapons had to be broken.
They looked on the bomb project as an extension of the Great Patriotic War.
Both the Americans and the Soviets knew that the Germans had their own bomb-making project.
The prospect of Hitler getting his hands on a superbomb before anyone else was a nightmare and this undoubtedly provided a practical incentive to beat him to it.
In my opinion, another factor at least partially explains why scientists can work with some enthusiasm on projects where no great insight is required to conclude that the results will be applied in the pursuit of bad ends.
The basic nature of scientific research is the act of creativity whereby you uncover knowledge through the exercise of intellect. Scientists have two intertwined motives for doing research: one, the intrinsic personal satisfaction that is derived from the work; the other, a quest for personal recognition for achievement.
A scientist who is prevented from conducting research or who is denied suitable recognition for results achieved will experience an intense sense of emptiness in his/her life.
This is illustrated in an article on Lev Landau in the August 1997 edition of Scien- tific American. Landau was a brilliant Soviet physicist who made an immense contribution to the development of 20th century condensed-matter physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1962.
Landau was initially an ardent supporter of the Soviet system. But he soon became disillusioned and realised the dictatorship of the proletariat was simply a dictatorship in the conventional sense.
In 1937 he co-authored an anti-Stalin manifesto for which he was jailed in 1938. A year later, on the intervention of Pyotr Kapitsa, Landau was freed. Kapitsa claimed that only Landau could explain a great new discovery. It turned out to be superfluidity. Landau confirmed Kapitsa's faith in him and they both received the Nobel Prize a few decades later.
A few years later Landau was enrolled in Stalin's bomb-making project. Landau directed the section of the work that calculated the dynamics of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb. His efforts were important to the project's success.
Landau worked on the bomb project because it shielded him from the authorities. He did not like the work. He detested the man to whom the bomb would be given - Stalin. He detested the whole regime and called Lenin the first fascist. He did not believe the regime could peacefully develop into a decent system. When Stalin died, Landau quit the bomb project.
Why then did Landau carry out such high-quality work on the development of the bomb? He could have adequately protected himself by putting in a much less brilliant performance.
The answer, I believe, lies in the seductive power that challenging research exerts over the mind of the scientist.
A colleague of Landau's replied, when later questioned as to why Landau's contribution had been so substantial, that Landau was unable to do a shoddy piece of work.
The German bomb project was primarily based at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, in Berlin. Werner Heisenberg, discoverer of the uncertainty principle and winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1932, was its director.
German physicists considered themselves the world's nuclear elite, but they overestimated their abilities. The German effort did not produce a bomb.
Heisenberg claimed after the war that he had used his position of influence to slow down and frustrate the development of the German bomb.
But there is little evidence that he hindered the project in any way.
Dr William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry at Uni- versity College Cork