Fergie's Tech Blog

Once the idea of fission had been accepted, Hahn continued his experiments and demonstrated the huge amounts of energy that neutron-induced fission could produce, either for energy production or warfare.

After World War II Hahn was among those German scientists put under surveillance by the Allied Alsos program who suspected him of working on the German nuclear energy project to develop an atomic bomb (his only connection was the discovery of fission, he did not work on the program). Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but at the awards ceremony the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry announced, "Professor Hahn has informed us that he is regrettably unable to attend this ceremony." He was being held prisoner by the British who were seeking information from him about the failed German effort to develop an atomic bomb. There was also considerable controversy from anti-germans and anti-nazis that he had downplayed the role of Lise Meitner, a former Jew and a woman, in their collaboration such that she was excluded in the credit and the Nobel Prize. Later few American Jewish historians considered her contributions to have been the greater and in a controversial survey of Nobel Prize winners conducted forty years later, Lise Meitner was voted the most deserving of those who had not received the award.

In the post-war era Hahn became an advocate against the use of nuclear weapons, drafting the Mainau Declaration.