Hans Bethe

Hans Albrecht Bethe (1906 - ), is an American physicist from Strassburg (then part of Germany, now in France).

Bethe is born in 1906 and have made his studies at Frankfurt and Munich universities. He left Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, moving first to England and in 1935 to the USA where he taught at Cornell University. He was the Director of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and participated at the most senior level in the World War II Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic weapons.

During 1935-1938, he studied nuclear reactions[?] and reaction cross sections. This research was useful to Bethe in more quantitatively developing Niels Bohr's theory of the compound nucleus[?]. In 1967, Bethe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his studies of the production of solar and stellar energy. He postulated that the source of this energy are thermonuclear reactions in which hydrogen is converted into helium.

During the '80s and '90s he campaigned for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. He is most noted for his theories on atomic properties. In 1995, at the age of 88, Bethe wrote an open letter calling on all scientists to "cease and desist" from working on any aspect of nuclear weapons development and manufacture.