By Larry Keough
FSU Communications Group
On the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan -- Aug. 6 -- FSU chemist and physicist Raymond Sheline is worried that history will repeat itself.
Sheline, as a 23 year-old scientist, was on the team that developed the first bomb. He has had what he describes as "mixed feelings" ever since.
"When we learned what we were doing," recalls Sheline, the discoverer of several radioactive isotopes, "we assumed that we were in a `race' with Germany and that the bomb would be used on Germany.
"Many of us had mixed feelings when we learned that the bomb would be dropped on Japan."
In 1945, Sheline considered his work on the Manhattan Project an honor and a patriotic duty.
"We were serving our country at a time when our country needed us most," said Sheline, a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor. "Yet our work led to the obliteration of a country. It doesn't help me when others rationalize that perhaps the number of people killed from the two bombs was much smaller than if Japan had fought to the bitter end.
"If I had it to do over again, I would definitely want to be a participant in the Manhattan Project. It changed my life in an important and positive way. Furthermore, I wanted to help my country in what I considered to be a life-and-death struggle with Germany and Hitler to develop the atomic bomb first.
"Having said that, I still have a considerable sense of guilt, even though I can rationalize that, by stopping the invasion of Japan, we may have actually saved lives -- both American and Japanese."
Sheline's personal stake in the future includes seven children -- five are physicians, one earned a doctorate in biology and one is a geophysicist -- he reared with his wife, Yvonne, (who holds a doctorate in comparative education from Florida State), as well as hundreds of FSU students he has taught for more than three decades.
He warns of the power of the cobalt bomb, a hypothetical mechanism never -- as yet -- built, though possible because it requires no new science to build. It would use an atomic bomb to trigger a very large hydrogen bomb that would react with a "blanket" of cobalt. If spread over the earth's surface, Sheline said, it would kill every living thing.
"That's why our greatest challenge yet will be to find moral and ethical common ground that nations can embrace and adopt to help protect us against global suicide."
If there is a lesson to be learned from World War II, he said, it is that history could repeat itself.
Sheline was a college junior when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. About a year later he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from Bethany College in West Virginia. At the top of his class, he was immediately offered a job with the Division of War Research at Columbia University, where he worked on a process to separate Uranium 235 from Uranium 238 isotopes, used in making atomic bombs. In July 1945, he moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the A-bombs were tested, to work on the mechanism used to trigger the Nagasaki bomb, which was dropped three days after the Hiroshima bomb.
He is convinced that Hitler, who boasted he would tear Europe down for a thousand years if he could not capture it, would have used the atomic bomb if he had had it.
"We were driven by the speeches of Hitler," said Sheline, who with the other scientists worked 60-hour weeks trying to win the A-bomb race with Germany.
When the Germans surrendered, the scientists' enthusiasm waned.
"Once Adolf Hitler was out of the war, there was concern whether we should drop the bomb at all, because there was not much belief that the Japanese were going to produce one," he said.
"In all honesty, I do not know the answer," he said in April at a physics colloquium on the Manhattan Project. "In the scientific realm, we can expect our students to climb on the backs of a Newton, Einstein, Dirac or Schrieffer and go on from there to further heights. That is because science is a rational pyramid. In the realm of ethics and morality, we cannot climb on the backs of a Jesus, Mohammed or Gandhi. We cannot be handed our morality on a silver plate the way our greatest scientists have handed us their knowledge.
"That then is our greatest challenge. It would seem that another step in our evolution must occur in which love of one's neighbor is fully as important as love of oneself."