Pontecorvo Returns to the West

The brilliant Jewish nuclear physicist, Italian-born Bruno Pontecorvo, returned to the West today for the first time since his defection 28 years ago. When the 64-year-old scientist vanished from Britain’s Harwell Atomic Research Station in 1950 with his wife and three children, he was assumed to have supplied the Soviet Union with vital atomic secrets.

Arriving smiling and tanned at Rome Airport, he said: “I’ll tell you a secret. I never worked on an atom, hydrogen or any other kind of bomb in the West, nor in Russia and China.” After Pontecorvo vanished, ostensibly on an Italian vacation, he turned up in the Soviet Union where the Russians built him a $2.8 million laboratory at their nuclear research station at Dubna, 50 miles north of Moscow.

Pontecorvo told besieging reporters at Rome Airport: “I am a peaceful sort of person. I don’t even give my grandson Sasha war toys.”

Pontecorvo fled fascism and anti-Semitism in pre-war Italy in the 1930s, travelling to France, the United States, Canada and Britain. He became a British citizen and worked with Dr. Alan Nunn May and Dr. Klaus Fuchs, both convicted of supplying atomic secrets to the Russians. After his disappearance, Britain stripped him of his citizenship in 1955 for “acts of disloyalty.

In the USSR, he won a Stalin Prize in 1954, joined the Communist Party in 1955, won a Lenin Prize in 1963, and became a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He is in Italy to attend ceremonies for the retirement of Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi, 70, and is due to return to Moscow Saturday. As his brothers and sisters greeted him, he said: “I am happy to be back in Italy after 28 years. I hope to come again some time.”