Episode Details

Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission in 1938, a finding that led directly to the atomic bomb. When he learned what his discovery had done to Hiroshima, he was so shattered that his fellow internees at Farm Hall feared he might take his own life.

This episode examines his breakthrough, the critical role of Lise Meitner that the Nobel committee ignored, and the moral weight that the discovery of fission placed on one man's conscience.

• The experiment that split uranium and changed the world
• Why Lise Meitner deserved to share the Nobel Prize
• His complicated position in Nazi Germany as a non-Nazi scientist
• His reaction at Farm Hall when the Hiroshima bomb was announced