The Göttingen Eighteen () was a group of eighteen leading nuclear researchers of the newly founded

Federal Republic of Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between ...

who wrote the

Göttingen Manifesto The Göttingen Manifesto was a declaration of 18 leading nuclear scientists of West Germany (among them the Nobel laureates Otto Hahn, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Max von Laue) against arming the West German army with tactical nuclear weapons ...

on 12 April 1957, opposing Chancellor

Konrad Adenauer Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (; 5 January 1876 – 19 April 1967) was a German statesman who served as the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of the Christian Dem ...

and Defense Secretary

Franz-Josef Strauß Franz Josef Strauss ( ; 6 September 1915 – 3 October 1988) was a German politician. He was the long-time chairman of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) from 1961 until 1988, member of the federal cabinet in different positions between ...

's move to arm the West German army, the

Bundeswehr The ''Bundeswehr'' (, meaning literally: ''Federal Defence'') is the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany. The ''Bundeswehr'' is divided into a military part (armed forces or ''Streitkräfte'') and a civil part, the military part con ...

, with

tactical nuclear weapon A tactical nuclear weapon (TNW) or non-strategic nuclear weapon (NSNW) is a nuclear weapon that is designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, mostly with friendly forces in proximity and perhaps even on contested friendly territo ...

s. The eighteen atomic scientists were:

Fritz Bopp Friedrich Arnold "Fritz" Bopp (27 December 1909 – 14 November 1987) was a German theoretical physicist who contributed to nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He worked at the '' Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik'' and with the '' Ura ...

, Max Born,

Rudolf Fleischmann Rudolf Fleischmann (1 May 1903 – 3 February 2002) was a German experimental nuclear physicist from Erlangen, Bavaria. He worked for Walther Bothe at the Physics Institute of the University of Heidelberg and then at the Institute for Physics ...

Walther Gerlach Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 – 10 August 1979) was a German physicist who co-discovered, through laboratory experiment, spin quantization in a magnetic field, the Stern–Gerlach effect. The experiment was conceived by Otto Stern in 1921 an ...

Otto Hahn Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...

Otto Haxel Otto Haxel (2 April 1909, in Neu-Ulm – 26 February 1998, in Heidelberg) was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project. After the war, he was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Phy ...

Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent serie ...

Hans Kopfermann Hans Kopfermann (26 April 1895, in Breckenheim near Wiesbaden – 28 January 1963, in Heidelberg) was a German atomic and nuclear physicist. He devoted his entire career to spectroscopic investigations, and he did pioneering work in measuring ...

, Max von Laue,

Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (28 March 1911, in Esslingen am Neckar – 16 December 2000, in Allensbach) was a German physicist. He made contributions to nuclear spectroscopy, coincidence measurement techniques, radioactive tracers for biochemistry and m ...

, Josef Mattauch,

Friedrich Adolf Paneth Friedrich may refer to: Names *Friedrich (surname), people with the surname ''Friedrich'' *Friedrich (given name), people with the given name ''Friedrich'' Other *Friedrich (board game), a board game about Frederick the Great and the Seven Years' ...

, Wolfgang Paul, , Fritz Straßmann, Wilhelm Walcher,

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (; 28 June 1912 – 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...

and

Karl Wirtz Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (24 April 1910 – 12 February 1994) was a German nuclear physicist, born in Cologne. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation ...

. These eighteen people were leading researchers and members of public institutions for research on nuclear energy and technology in

West Germany West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...

in that time. The group's name was chosen because many of the signatories were connected with the

university town A college town or university town is a community (often a separate town or city, but in some cases a town/city neighborhood or a district) that is dominated by its university population. The university may be large, or there may be several sma ...

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The ori ...

, and as a reference to the 19th century

Göttingen Seven The Göttingen Seven (german: Göttinger Sieben) were a group of seven liberal professors at University of Göttingen. In 1837, they protested against the annullment of the constitution of the Kingdom of Hanover by its new ruler, King Ernest Augus ...

References

1957 in West Germany Cold War history of Germany German anti–nuclear weapons activists 20th-century German physicists Göttingen Otto Hahn {{Germany-hist-stub

See also

References