Announcement of the Atomic Age

On this campus on January 26, 1939, Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr reported the splitting of the uranium nucleus with the release of two hundred million electron volts of energy, heralding the beginning of the atomic age. The announcement took place in the Hall of Government, Room 209, at the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics, organized by George Washington University professors George Gamow and Edward Teller and jointly sponsored by the Carnegie Institution and the George Washington University. Although the conference concerned low-temperature physics and superconductivity, Bohr said that his colleagues Otto Robert Frisch and Lise Meitner in Copenhagen had experimentally verified a suggestion by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann: nuclear fission by the bombardment of uranium and neutrons had been observed. From his work on the structure and excitation of nuclei, Bohr realized that a neutron-induced chain reaction of uranium-235 was possible, and physicist Leo Szilard at Columbia University had reached the same conclusion. Concerned about developments in Germany, Szilard urged secrecy among Bohr and his colleagues and helped persuade Albert Einstein to write President Roosevelt about the danger and the need for action. Bohr and Teller joined the war effort at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1943. The world was not made aware of the atomic age until 1945, when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki. Along with the power of mass destruction came the promise of long-lasting energy for human activity, and in 1950 Bohr wrote, “…widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes an increased responsibility on individuals and nations.”

Washington, District of Columbia · United States