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The spy who flunked it: Kurt Gödel’s forgotten part in the atom-bomb story

Robert Oppenheimer’s isn’t the only film-worthy story from the nuclear age. Kurt Gödel’s cameo as a secret agent was surprising — and itself a bomb.
By
  1. Karl Sigmund

    1. Karl Sigmund is emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna, Austria, and author of The Waltz of Reason (2023).

The 2023 film Oppenheimer narrates the story of the atomic bomb entirely from the perspective of its eponymous hero. But there’s much that is left out. It is well-known that US efforts to build the bomb started years before physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer took over as director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico in 1943. That project was initiated by fellow physicist Leo Szilard. Concerned by the pace at which nuclear-science discoveries were being made in Germany, Szilard persuaded Albert Einstein in August 1939 to write a letter to then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning him of the risk of an atomic bomb in Adolf Hitler’s hands.

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Nature 627, 26-28 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00644-1

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 20 March 2024: Owing to a late editorial change, the originally published text of this Essay made an erroneous statement about the nature of the continuum hypothesis, and stated mistakenly that Hans Thirring had lost contact with former colleagues.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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