The career of Wernher von Braun, the brilliant German rocket engineer who worked for the Nazis on the V-2 and was then invited to work for the US military, is a familiar example of the Faustian bargain struck by scientists involved in the development of weapons. Others include Fritz Haber, the Nobel-prize-winning chemist who pioneered the use of poison gas in the First World War, and Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who directed the Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb in the Second World War. All three men were driven by a potent cocktail of scientific curiosity, patriotic duty and a desire for fame and immortality.
In the July issue of Physics World, Andrew Robinson reviews the rest of Peter Smith's book, and discovers many lesser-known stories of the devising of superweapons. These include the Japanese microbiologist Ishii Shiro, who used tens of thousands of Chinese and Korean prisoners as guinea pigs in bio-weapon development during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s.
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