Hans Bethe (2 July 1906-6 March 2005) was a German-American nuclear physicist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on stellar nucleosynthesis. He also played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and the hydrogen bomb during the Cold War.
Biography[]
Hans Albrecht Bethe was born in Strassburg, Elsass-Lothringen, German Empire (now Strasbourg, France) in 1906 to a Protestant father and a Jewish mother; he was raised a Protestant, but later became an atheist. He studied under Enrico Fermi in Rome and became an assistant professor at the University of Tubingen in 1932, but he moved to England in 1933 after Adolf Hitler's rise to power. In 1935, he became a professor at Cornell University, and he worked at Los Alamos during World War II, helping to develop the atomic bombs. He played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the nuclear bombs used in 1945, and, after the war, he played a key role in the development of the hydrogen bomb. He later campaigned with Albert Einstein against nuclear arms testing and the nuclear arms race, lobbying during the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He died in Ithaca, New York in 2005 at the age of 98.