In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the
Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had
mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday
trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the
UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate
concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became
known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet
Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive
information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear
scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and
journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive
and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since,
some have downplayed Pontecorvo's knowledge of atomic weaponry,
while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that
infiltrated the Manhattan Project. "The Pontecorvo Affair" draws
from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to
solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of
Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for
defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of
nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and
reveals that as the discipline's promise of military and industrial
uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy
provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its
application.
General
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