Hans Bethe

Hans Albrecht Bethe (pronounced Bay-tuh; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005), was a German-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1967 for his discovery of stellar nucleosynthesis. During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory developing the first atomic bombs. His team worked out the critical mass of uranium-235 necessary to sustain the fission reaction that would enable the bomb to explode.

References

• Bernstein, Jeremy, Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy, 1980
• Bethe, Hans A., The Road from Los Alamos, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1991, ISBN 0671740121, some collected essays on nuclear topics.
• Schweber, S. S. In the shadow of the bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the moral responsibility of the scientist. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.