Bruno Pontecorvo...neutrinos and a defector to Russia

Nature has the most recent article on him...got $32?

Bruno Pontecorvo [Wikipedia]

"Bruno Pontecorvo Is Dead at 80; Physicist Defected to Soviet Union"

by

Randy Kennedy

September 28th, 1993

The New York Times

Bruno Pontecorvo, an Italian-born physicist who was a pioneer in the study of the elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos and who defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, died Friday in Dubna, outside Moscow. He was 80.

The cause was pneumonia, according to reports in Italian newspapers. He had suffered from Parkinson's disease for several years.

Mr. Pontecorvo was one of a group of talented young physicists who worked with Enrico Fermi in Rome in the early 1930's on experiments that proved radioactive isotopes of a number of elements can be produced by exposing the elements to neutrons that have been slowed down.

After Mussolini passed laws that discriminated against Jews, Mr. Pontecorvo, who was Jewish, moved to Paris to continue his work. He left for the United States in 1940 after the Nazi invasion. He worked briefly for an American oil company and then moved to Canada, where he applied to become a British citizen.

In 1948, after he completed his naturalization, he moved to England to join the Atomic Energy Research Laboratory at Harwell, near Oxford. Disappearance in Rome

But in the late summer of 1950, Mr. Pontecorvo and his family disappeared during a vacation in Rome. They were last seen in Helsinki on Sept. 2, 1950, and were believed to have taken a ship to the Soviet Union with the help of Soviet diplomats in the Finnish capital. It was not until 1955, when Mr. Pontecorvo published articles in Pravda and Izvestia, that officials were certain he was working in the Soviet Union.

His defection, which came the same year that one of his colleagues, Klaus Fuchs, was convicted of espionage in Britain, raised fears that the Italian scientist had fled with secrets that could be used to help build a hydrogen bomb. Another colleague, Alan Nunn May, was convicted of espionage charges in Canada in 1946.

But in frequent statements to the press in the Soviet Union, and during his first trip back to Italy in 1978, he maintained that his research in Canada and England had no military applications. He said he had defected to pursue nuclear research for peaceful purposes because investigations into scientific espionage had made it too difficult for him to work.

"In 1950, the atmosphere was such that I could no longer breathe," he wrote in the 1955 article in Pravda. In the article, he also said that he had signed a petition along with several other nuclear scientists calling for a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons.

His British citizenship was revoked because it was believed he defected with military secrets, but he was never charged with espionage.

He is known in his field for being one of the first physicists to suggest using a solution containing chlorine to detect neutrinos.

"Confessions of an atom spy: Forty years after Bruno Pontecorvo, a British scientist, went to work for Moscow, he tells Charles Richards in Rome why he changed sides"

by

Charles Richards

August 2nd, 1992

The Independent

He stepped out of the lift on the third floor, entered the room, and smiled. Now 78 and a victim of Parkinson's disease, Bruno Pontecorvo is short and spare, with an old tweed jacket hanging off his drooping shoulders. His pale green eyes, however, still gleam with mischief.

He spends most of his time in Italy these days, but for a year he had fobbed me off, saying over the phone that he was too sick and did not give interviews about the past. Now at last we were meeting at the home of Miriam Mafai, a columnist on the daily La Repubblica who has just published a book about him.

A physicist, Pontecorvo was deeply involved in the British nuclear research programme when, in 1950, he decided during a holiday in Italy that he would abandon the West and make a new life in the Soviet Union. His defection, following closely on the unmasking of the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, a colleague at the government atomic research centre at Harwell, deeply embarrassed the Attlee government. Had Pontecorvo taken with him more atomic bomb secrets? Had he been spying for the Russians all along? He was vilified for treachery and stripped of his adopted British nationality.

Now, for the first time, he is prepared to talk about the choice he made. But, with most Communist countries having changed their colours, how does he feel about the dedication of his life to the Communist cause?

'The simple explanation is this: I was a cretin,' he said. 'The fact that I could be so stupid, and many people close to me should have been quite so stupid . . .' The sentence was left unfinished.

Communism, he went on, was 'like a religion, a revealed religion . . . with myths or rites to explain it. It was the absolute absence of logic.' He stuck by his faith, even after the invasion of Hungary in 1956. When Andrei Sakharov, a fellow physicist, turned against the system, it made no difference. 'I had always admired him as a great scientist and a man of integrity. However, my idea was that he was naive . . . it was I who was naive.'

It was only after Czechoslovakia that his views began to change. 'After 1968 I would say, I will not talk of such things. Then, after a few years, I understood what an idiot I was.'

He speaks clear, idiomatic English. He is a man of immense charm and elegance of language, quoting from Dante, which he read in the Soviet Union to remind himself of Italy.

Born in Pisa in 1913, Pontecorvo was the fourth of eight children of a textile merchant. He showed early academic promise, and in 1934 went to Rome to join an extraordinary circle of world- class physicists led by Enrico Fermi, later to become one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. When Mussolini passed racial laws that discriminated against Jews, four of the Pontecorvos went to Britain. (The eldest, Guido, a distinguished geneticist, remained in Britain and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.)

Bruno went to France and then, in 1940, to the United States. Three years later he was asked to join an Anglo-Canadian team conducting secret research at Montreal. This was Britain's wartime nuclear reactor programme, which was separate from the American-led Manhattan Project working on the first atomic bombs. In 1948, while still working in Canada, Pontecorvo became a British subject. In January 1949 he left with his family to take up a senior post in the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, near Oxford. It was not a nuclear weapons plant, although such was the secrecy surrounding its work that it was popularly believed to be.

In the late summer of 1950, Pontecorvo went on holiday to Italy with his family, and disappeared. It was widely assumed that the Pontecorvos flew to Stockholm, spent the night in a building belonging to the Soviet Union, and flew on to Helsinki. Then a Soviet vessel left the city's harbour shortly afterwards.

Two weeks passed before the alarm was raised in Britain, and another sensational security scandal broke over the government's head. How much did Pontecorvo know? Had he been vetted? Had he been in league with Fuchs? As always with these matters, the principal casualty was Britain's standing in Washington, where once again it was exposed as a soft touch for Soviet subversion. Very soon the relevant minister was forced to admit: 'I have no doubt that he is in Russia.'

It was not until 1955 that Pontecorvo surfaced in Moscow, giving a press conference at which he said he had defected to correct the balance between East and West and that he had only ever worked on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. 'I became convinced,' he said, 'that in the Soviet Union the people wanted peace, and that their government was doing everything possible that there should be no war.'

What had prompted him to defect at that moment, who had helped him through the Iron Curtain and how exactly he made that journey, remained a mystery. Now, the first new evidence is emerging. A week ago, an old Italian Communist Party hardliner, Giulio Seniga, said that he had been a member of an underground party network that arranged Pontecorvo's flight to Moscow. And Pontecorvo himself revealed to Miriam Mafai how he crossed the Soviet border. 'We did not go by ship,' he said. 'We went straight to the Soviet embassy, and then we left in two cars, with me locked in the boot.'

But had he spied for Moscow before then? He still does not talk about it. Fuchs himself told the British that he believed someone else, probably at Harwell, was talking to the Russians, and spy writers Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky are in no doubt that it was Pontecorvo. 'KGB officers,' they have written, 'said that they rated Pontecorvo's work as an atom spy almost as highly as that of Fuchs.'

In 1950, certainly, the press was quick to denounce him, but today the available evidence does not appear to support the suggestion that he was an important atom spy. His research at Harwell had no military application and in Canada he had worked on reactors rather than weapons.

At any rate, Pontecorvo today is not a wanted man. He has been visiting Italy regularly since 1978, although his home remains in Dubna, the research centre outside Moscow where he has been living with his wife and children. He has, he says, a lingering nostalgia for the country whose citizenship he held for a dozen years in the middle of his life, and to which he insists he did no harm. 'I love England, the cathedrals. It is also the least corrupt country.'

For a verdict on the life of Bruno Pontecorvo, there may be no better judge than his brother Gillo, the director who won international acclaim for his film, The Battle of Algiers. 'The case of Bruno was very simple,' he told me. 'Forget all the lies told about it. We were living at a period of great change. There was this belief in a city of the future. The belief was almost irrational, but was held by a whole generation of men, above all intellectuals . . . He had that religion, that sense of capitalism equalling war and recurrent crisis and racism. All that had to be overthrown to go towards the new world. They were like the early Christians, who believed in something beautiful, which did not exist.

'We bet on something which turned out to be false. It is like stepping out of a window, and hoping to descend slowly without taking the boring route of the stairs or the lift. We ignored the problem of the law of gravity.'