Feld, Bernard
Feld, Bernard (1919 - 1993) was an American physicist who helped develop the first atomic bomb. He later became a leading supporter of nuclear disarmament.
Bernard Taub Feld was born in New York City. After graduating with a B.S. degree from the City College of New York in 1939, he became a graduate physics student and teaching assistant to the physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Isaac Rabi at Columbia University. While at Columbia, Feld joined Fermi and Leo Szilard in their work to produce a controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. In 1941, he joined Fermi and Szilard at the University of Chicago as a research associate. They worked on the process of setting up aself-J sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The first such reaction was achieved at Chicago on Dec. 2, 1942.
In 1943, Feld worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los ALamosJ New Mexico, on the Manhattan Project, a project created by the United States government in 1942 to produce the first atomic bomb. He contributed to the development of the experimental plutonium bomb later detonated near the desert at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.
In 1945, he earned his doctorate from Columbia University. Affected by witnessing the plutonium bomb explosion at Alamagordo and the military use of atomic weapons against Japan that year, 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 and teaching with a campaign for the peaceful uses of atomic research and against the development and use of nuclear weapons. He was an essayist and contributor to scholarly journals. He served as president of the Albert Einstein Peace Foundation and editor in chief of the Bulletin the Atomic Scientists, which publishes a “doomsday clock” as a measure of nuclear danger. Feld was a leader of the Pugwash movement established in 1957 to bring together scientists and others hoping to reduce armed conflict and encourage cooperative solutions for global problems.