Feld, Bernard (1919-1993), was an American physicist who helped develop the first atomic bomb. He later became a leading supporter of nuclear disarmament.
After graduating with a bachelor of science degree from the City College of New York, Feld became a graduate physics student and teaching assistant to the physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor I. Rabi at Columbia University. In 1941, he joined Fermi and Leo Szilard at the University of Chicago to help set up a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The team of scientists achieved the first such reaction at Chicago in December 1942.
In 1943, Feld became one of the scientists assigned to the Manhattan Project, the secret United States military project to create the first atomic bomb. At the Los Alamos Laboratory at the University of California, he contributed to the development of the experimental plutonium bomb later detonated in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico. See Nuclear energy (The development of nuclear energy).
In 1945, Feld gained his doctorate from Columbia University. Affected by witnessing the experimental explosion at Alamogordo and the military use of atomic weapons against Japan in 1945, Feld spent six months in Washington, D.C., where he and other physicists spoke out against military control of nuclear research and arms development. In 1946, Feld joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he combined a career in physics research with a campaign for the peaceful uses of atomic research and against the development and use of nuclear weapons. Feld became professor of physics at MIT in 1957. He was director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science from 1975 to 1980. He retired in 1990.
A prolific essayist and contributor to scholarly journals, Feld was an authority on high-energy physics, particularly interactions among the fundamental particles. Among his most important scientific efforts was his contribution to the development of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, jointly owned and operated by MIT and Harvard University. Feld was one of the founding editors of Annals of Physics.
Bernard Taub Feld was born on Dec. 21, 1919, in the Brooklyn section of New York City. He died there on Feb. 19, 1993.
