Japan reassesses anti-war actions of Austrian physicist labeled ‘Mother of A-bomb’

OSAKA (Kyodo) — A movement is underway in Japan to re-evaluate Lise Meitner, the Austrian physicist who was key to the discovery of nuclear fission and labeled the “Mother of the atomic bomb” despite her refusal to contribute to the Manhattan Project that developed the world’s first nuclear weapons.

In Japan, essays and a biography about Meitner by an American writer were published in Japanese this year. Manga artist Fumiyo Kono also produced the short story “Lise to Genshi no Mori” (Lise and the Forest of Atoms) in 2018.

“She was devoted to science but did not stray from the path of humanity,” Kono said of Meitner, who was overlooked for the Nobel Prize despite being one of the first to discover that uranium atoms split when bombarded with neutrons, releasing a large amount of energy and radiation in the process she named nuclear fission.

In contrast to Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist known as the “Father of the atomic bomb,” who directed the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and whose life was portrayed in the 2023 biopic “Oppenheimer,” little is known of Meitner, a Jewish woman from Vienna who fled Nazi Germany for Stockholm, Sweden, where she continued her research in exile.

Chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, her colleagues at the institute in Berlin where she had worked for years, found evidence for nuclear fission.

But in 1938 Meitner and her nephew, fellow physicist Otto Frisch, were the first to explain in correspondence with Hahn the theoretical process behind the data the chemists had collected.

Hahn, with whom Meitner had a close but complicated relationship due to her being Jewish, later received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work which led to the development of the atomic bomb, but never acknowledged Meitner’s contribution to the discovery.

In the United States, a podcast introducing Meitner’s life was released last year after the release date of “Oppenheimer.” Marissa Moss, author of the biography “The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner,” based on Meitner’s correspondence with long-time collaborator Hahn and other materials, appeared in the show.

Mentioned in Moss’s biography is Meitner’s conversation with former U.S. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, which took place in August 1945. When approached by colleagues to work on the Manhattan Project, Meitner famously declared: “I will have nothing to do with a bomb.”

Meitner — only the second woman to earn a doctorate degree in physics at the University of Vienna — was praised by Roosevelt in the radio interview for her contributions.

Asked by Roosevelt about the atomic bombings at the end of World War II, Meitner replied: “Women have a great responsibility and they are obliged to try, so far as they can, to prevent another war.”

“I hope that the construction of the atom bomb not only will help to finish this awful war, but that we will be able to also use this great energy that has been released for peaceful work.” Meitner later expressed dismay about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saying, she was “sorry that the bomb had to be invented.”

Moss’ biography released in Japan was proposed to publisher Iwanami Shoten by the book’s translator, Reiko Nakaigawa, who lives in Hong Kong. Nakaigawa argues that Meitner did not deserve the A-bomb moniker, saying rather, the focus should be on her remarkable achievements as a woman whose work made her a target of the Nazis before she fled to Sweden where she made her historic discovery.

“Meitner, who refused to cooperate in the development of the bomb, is not the ‘Mother of the atomic bomb.’ She was one of the few female physicists at the time, and I would like people to look back at history through the life of a woman who was forced to leave Germany by the Nazis,” Nakaigawa said.

Manga artist Kono, who is from Hiroshima, learned about Meitner from a book on radioactive materials she read at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that resulted in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and produced a short manga about the Austrian physicist.

Kono, who portrays families suffering from radiation sickness as a result of the Hiroshima atomic bombing in her one-volume manga “Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cheery Blossoms,” and in “In This Corner of the World,” noted that Meitner was aware of the danger of radiation and was concerned about protecting people from it.

The single-volume manga was released in 2007 as a live-action film called “Yunagi City, Sakura Country” in English, while the latter was adapted into a Japanese theatrical anime wartime drama of the same name in 2016.

Meitner’s epitaph on her gravestone in Britain, written by her nephew Frisch, reads, “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity” — in the hope, he explained, people will learn about a way of life that builds humanity through a love of physics.

Kono’s fictional short story based on Meitner concludes with the Austrian physicist saying, “I believe that if science makes things difficult for people, it is because we have not yet become the ‘good people’ we are supposed to be.”

Kono said she had originally conceived of a full-length manga depicting Meitner’s childhood and life story, and that she still hopes to “complete it someday.”

(By Sachie Nakada)