Alvin Weinberg, 91; Helped Develop A-Bomb Technology

Alvin Weinberg, 91, a former Oak Ridge National Laboratory director who helped develop the technology behind the atomic bomb, died Wednesday at his home in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Weinberg helped develop the technology behind the atomic bomb in the 1940s at the University of Chicago. He moved from his native Chicago to Oak Ridge in 1945 to work for Clinton Laboratories, later to become Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as part of the Manhattan Project.

“We were under enormous pressure” to develop the bomb before the Germans did during World War II, Weinberg told an interviewer in 1984. “People were dying. Americans and others were being killed at an enormous rate. We knew if we succeeded, then the war would be over. I never worked so hard in my life.”

Though he remained a vigorous proponent of nuclear energy, he worried that nuclear weapons would be used again in war, after the first bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945. He led an effort in 1996 that brought a large “peace bell” cast in Japan to Oak Ridge as a symbol “that bitter enemies can become friends.”

In the 1940s, he was coauthor of the standard text on nuclear chain reaction theory with Eugene Wigner, who later won the Nobel Prize in physics.

In 1961, Weinberg was chairman of President Kennedy’s Panel of Science Information, which produced a landmark report on the communication of science to technical and lay audiences that became known simply as the “The Weinberg Report.”