Mystery defector takes trip home

Press, 8 September 1978, Page 6

Mystery defector takes trip home

NZPA Rome Bruno Pontecorvo, a top nuclear physicist who defected to the Soviet Union in 1950. has returned to his native Italy and said he has never worked on an atomic bomb. r , “I’m a very peaceful man,” said the 65-year-old Mr Pontecorvo, tanned and smartly dressed in a bluegra suit and brown tie. He has gone to Rome to attend a two-day scientific forum honouring the seventieth birthday of the Italian scientist, Edoardo Amaldi, his former partner on a nuclear research team assembled by the Nobel laureate, Enrico Fermi, in the 19305. . ~ The Italian weekly, “Domenica del Corrie re,” claimed that Mr Pontecorvo

was the one who took the secret of the H-bomb to the Soviet Union, but the scientist has never been charged with espionage. Upon arrival at Rome on Wednesday he told reporters at the airport: ‘Til tell you la secret. I have never worked on the atomic, hydrogen, or any other bomb in the West, in Russia, or in China.” Mr Pontecorvo became a Soviet citizen in 1952, joined the Communist Party three years later, and changed his last name to Maximovic, after his father, Massimo. His sisters, Giuliana and Laura, greeted him at the airport and his brother, Giulio, the Leftist film director whose works include ’The Battle of Algiers,” led the group to a waiting car.

Mr Pontecorvo, who has been awarded the Order of Lenin, is director of a research laboratory at Dubna. He will deliver a paper on neutrons to the forum at the University of Rome. Mr Pontecorvo, fled to Russia after nuclear work in Italy, France, Canada, and Britain. He disappeared after two men he had worked with — Alan Nunn May, in Canada, and Klaus Fuchs, in England — were jailed for giving atomic secrets to the Russians.

A doctor of physics at 19, Mr Pontecorvo was hailed as a genius in Italy in the 19305, serving on the nuclear research team assembled by Enrico Fermi, a Nobel laureate, and including Amaldi and another Nobel prize winner, Emilio Segre. i But the group disbanded

in 1936, a victim of anti- f semitism of Italy’s Fascist 1 dictator, Benito Mussolini. . Mr Pontecorvo, a Jew, left s for the Paris Institute of Radium and fled the Nazis I in 1940, arriving in the I United States. s Mr Pontecorvo moved to J Canada in 1943 and became ' a member of the joint AngloCandadian Atomic Research s Commission and the Chalk ; River Atomic Project, work- ' ing with Nunn May in the s latter project. Nunn May ! was jailed for spying in ( 1946. ’ 1 Mr Pontecorvo has never < been formally charged with c espionage but Italian papers say he had been a devoted Communist years before his ' defection, pointing out that I momentous events in 1950 ‘ imay have hastened his de- i

fection — file arrests of Fuchs and later Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the start of the Korean War. The Pontecorvo mystery thickened in England when he took up British citizenship and started work in 1949 with Fuchs in the Harwell atomic centre. After 18 months he resigned to become a professor at the University of Liverpool, but he never assumed his position. In the summer of 1950, Mr Pontecorvo took his Swedish wife, Marianne, and their three children on an Italian holiday and disappeared. For many, he is the one who took the secret of the H-bomb to the Soviet Union, “Domenica del Corriere” said.