www.indystar.com/articles/9/227610-2979-010.html
Associated Press March 8, 2005 ITHACA, NY -- Hans Bethe, a giant of 20th century physics who played a central role in the building of the atomic bomb and won a Nobel Prize fo r discovering the process that powers the sun and the stars, has died at 98. Bethe, who died Sunday, stood alongside such figures as Enrico Fermi, Rob ert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller as a member of the corps of scientists who ushered in the atomic age. During the World War II race to build the bomb, Bethe was head of the Man hattan Project's theoretical physics division at Los Alamos, NM Bethe, who fled Nazi Germany and joined the Cornell University faculty in 1935, also made major discoveries about how atoms are built from smalle r particles, what makes dying stars blow up and how the heavier elements are produced from the ashes of these supernovae. Bethe also played key roles in the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the 1 972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Even though the A-bomb designers knew its calamitous potential, the weapo n's reality "was worse than we expected," Bethe reflected in an intervie w with The Associated Press in 1996. In 1938, leading nuclear physicists were invited to solve a mystery that had long stumped the best scientific minds: the source of the sun's ener gy. Just six weeks later, Bethe came up with his "carbon cycle" formula: He showed that virtually all the energy produced by the most brilliant stars stems from a fusion reaction in which hydrogen serves as the fuel and carbon as the catalyst. His work eventually won him the Nobel in physics in 1967.
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