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Bethe (pronounced Bey-ta) studied physics at Frankfurt and obtained his doctorate from the University of Munich. He left Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, moving first to England and in 1935 to the USA where he taught at Cornell University. During World War II, he served as part of a special summer session at the University of California, Berkeley at the invitation of Robert OppenheimerLos Alamos National Laboratory beginning in 1943. Robert Oppenheimer ( April 22, 1904 February 18, 1967) was a Jewish-American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop nuclear weapons, at the Los A, which outlined the first designs for the atomic bomb. When Oppenheimer started the secret weapons design laboratory, Los AlamosLos Alamos National Laboratory (LANL is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed by the University of California, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Laboratory is one of the largest multidisciplinary institutions in the, he appointed Bethe as Director of the Theoretical Division. After the war, Bethe argued that a crash project for the hydrogen bomb should not be attempted, though after President Truman announced the beginning of such a crash project, and the outbreak of the Korean WarThe Korean War from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953, was a conflict between communist North Korea and anti-communist South Korea. It was also a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The principal combatants were North and South Korea., he signed up and played a key role in the weapon's development. Though he would see the project through to its end, in Bethe's account he was primarily hopeful that the weapon would be impossible to produce.
During 1935– 1938Events January -June January 3 The March of Dimes is established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. January 11 Frances Moulton is the first woman to become president of a US national bank. January 20 Wedding of king Farouk I of Egypt and Farida Zulficar in Cai, he studied nuclear reactions and reaction cross sections. This research was useful to Bethe in more quantitatively developing Niels Bohr's theory of the compound nucleus . He received the Max Planck medal in 1955. In 1961 he was awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for his work in identifying the energy generating processes in stars. In 1967, Bethe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his studies of the production of solar and stellar energy, stellar nucleosynthesis. He postulated that the source of this energy are thermonuclear reactions in which hydrogen is converted into helium.
Bethe is noted for his theories on atomic properties.
During the ' 80s and ' 90s he campaigned for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. In 1995, at the age of 88, Bethe wrote an open letter calling on all scientists to "cease and desist" from working on any aspect of nuclear weapons development and manufacture.
He won the Bruce Medal in 2001.
The asteroid 30828 Bethe is named after him.