How Women Won WWII: The Booming Work of Women Scientists - The Preamble

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Hey friends, welcome. Welcome to episode six of our documentary series, How Women Won World War II. In a previous episode, we began a conversation about the combined efforts of the Allied science community to beat Germany in the race to understand and build atomic weapons. It was a team effort. And you know what? We barely scratched the surface. So let's dive in.
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I'm Sharon McMahon and this is the Preamble Podcast.
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In 1993, a set of transcripts was released. It was a set of transcripts about something only a select number of people even knew existed. Historians waited with bated breath to crack open the pages. A documentation of secret conversations among some of the world's top atomic scientists. Secret conversations that the scientists didn't even realize anyone was recording. But before we get to the secret conversations, we need to talk more about how atomic science developed. Because without the contributions of women, all I can tell you is that the world would be a very different place than it is today. Now, I get that from our current perspective, it seems like the world may be better off without nuclear weapons. And I'm not even going to argue with you. But we also can't project our current beliefs onto the past as inherently true and correct and assume that everyone else was working with the same set of facts and information, the same beliefs and morals that we have. Because unless we've lived during the Holocaust where 6 million Jews were killed, unless we witness firsthand the incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans or the Pearl harbor attack on U.S. soil, or watched as tens of thousands of young men were sent overseas with notes pinned inside their coats for good luck, unless we've lived through those exact set of circumstances, we can't judge. To many, the development of the atomic bomb was a blessing. It was a relief. It put an end to years of war and torture. It also changed the course of the future. At the beginning Of World War II, the United States was not a world superpower. And I know we like to think of ourselves as always and forever the greatest nation that has ever been. But in terms of the US military, the United States was 19th in the world. At the outbreak of World War II, we had a smaller military than Portugal. It was the development of the atomic weapon that changed our position in the world, for better or for worse. And after we dropped the atomic bomb, we were no longer young, scrappy and Hungary. The United States had arrived. The Allies were terrified that Hitler would make the bomb before they did. So it was, in their minds, truly a race against an unspeakable evil that might befall the world if he did. And the truth is, nuclear physics is what it is. Because of the scientific contributions to of women. The war ended because of the scientific contributions of women. The United States became who and what it is in the world because of the scientific contributions of women. And I'm about to tell you how. Let's revisit Europe. At the end of the 19th century, a baby named Lise was born in 1878 in Austria. She was one of eight children, but her parents immediately saw how bright she was and she sailed through all the schooling Austria had to offer. By age 14, her father, an attorney, hired private tutors so she could continue her studies. She was only the second woman to receive a PhD from the University of Vienna, and she was working in a field in which women were traditionally excluded physics. Lise moved to Berlin and studied under the father of quantum theory, Max Planck, and met her future longtime collaborator, the chemist Otto Hahn. Lise also rubbed elbows with other science giants like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. By the way, there is a growing body of evidence that Einstein's first wife, who was also a scientist, was responsible for at least assisting in the development of a lot of his early work. It's work she is completely uncredited for, and Lise Meitner experienced many of the same discriminatory attitudes. She often wasn't permitted to be in the room where it happened. She had to work alone in a basement laboratory. But her friendship with Otto Hahn grew and she was able to use her proximity to him to get herself out of the basement and into the good laboratories. Together they made important discoveries and she was able to publish her work under her own name. Lise was Jewish and she saw the writing on the wall. As the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s, even though she didn't practice religious Judaism and would later convert to Christianity, she had a second strike against her. She was a scientist. In the coming years, the Nazis sought to destroy people of talent and intellect unless they agreed to work for the Nazi agenda. She had no choice but to flee Germany before it was too late, leaving behind the world's premier physics laboratory. In Berlin, she moved to Sweden, which remained neutral in World War II was during a walk in the snowy woods of Sweden with her nephew and fellow scientist Otto Frisch, that Lise made one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in the history of physics. As the pair discussed recent advances in nuclear science, the million dollar question of could you split an atom? Came up. And it was there, in the Swedish countryside, as they built upon science done by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, that Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, figured out the process of nuclear fission. Lise imagined the nucleus of uranium being like a giant drop that could be squeezed and split into multiple parts which would then produce energy. She called her former colleague Otto Hahn, along with his working partner Fritz Strike Strassman, and together they confirmed her theory. The world changed forever. On that afternoon walk Because Lise Meitner's work on nuclear fission was in part the basis for all nuclear energy development, including the energy that went into making atomic weapons. Because history has traditionally ignored and excluded women, and because theoretical physicist was not a field many women were welcomed into in the early and mid 20th century, it would be easy to think that the story ends there, that Lise was one remarkable woman who defied the odds. But you'd be wrong. There was another woman working in that Berlin physics lab with Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn before Lee's fled to Sweden. And her name was Elizabeth Rona. Elizabeth grew up in Budapest and her father was a physician who constantly researched and tested new inventions and technologies. Rona especially loved his X ray machine, which was one of the first in Hungary. She knew she wanted to pursue science and she earned her PhD in chemistry in 1912. Her study of radioactivity is what Rona became known for. She discovered that seawater and ocean sediments are radioactive and found that this allowed her to view the ocean as a clock, to be able to look back in time to the formation of the earth, a concept known as geochronology. We know that when, when Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the importance of radium, the supply was very limited and consequently very expensive, which limited the research and experiments that labs could undertake. Marie's 1 gram of radium from the United States could only take radioactive research so far, which meant that the hunt was on for other radioactive elements and Elizabeth Rona's work filled in the gaps. Elizabeth discovered a way to prepare the element polonium so it could be used as a stand in for radium in many experiments. Elizabeth, who was also Jewish in a world fraught with anti Semitism, moved from place to place to perform her research from Sweden to Paris to Berlin. But the Nazis she was forced to leave Europe, marked as a double threat to the rise of fascism. She was Jewish and she was a scientist. Elizabeth fled to the United States and she was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. Early contributions to the world of physics didn't start with Lise and Elizabeth. They both relied heavily on another scientific great, Marie Curie, who we mentioned discovered radioactivity, founded schools in Paris and became the only person to ever have received two Nobel Prizes in different fields. In fact, Marie Curie discovered polonium and named it after her home country of Poland. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre were so busy with their science lab in the late 1800s that for a time they left their oldest daughter Irene in the care of her grandfather, who was A retired doctor when Pierre died, Marie raised her daughters as a single parent. When you see pictures of Eren Curie as a young adult with her mother in a lab, they don't look like women who are used to fame and discovery. Instead, you see the mother and daughter seated near each other. They wear long dark dresses and have their hair pulled back into the 1920s version of a messy bun with strands falling loose, loose around their faces. They sit in wooden chairs at wooden tables, and in one image you can see what looks to be a folded piece of paper stuffed under a table leg to make the table level. The humanity of these women, with their unassuming appearances and humble laboratories, it's an incredible reminder of how humans have a tendency to to elevate people to hero status and plaster their cartoon likeness on T shirts and other merch, we forget to remember the truth that Marie Curie was one of the most talented scientific minds that has ever been. She was also once a young widow and a single mother who faced relentless criticism from the right wing French press who labeled her as a foreigner and a Jew and an atheist. In fact, Marie Curie was not actually Jewish, but that again speaks to anti Semitism in the world. To call someone a Jew was seen by some as an insult. Eren grew to be an incredible scientific mind. She too won a Nobel Prize, an honor she shared with her husband when they discovered a way to transform one element into another artificially using radioactivity. In Iren's teen years, she ran mobile hospital units In World War I, training medical staff on how to use her mother's X ray technology, which saved untold lives as doctors were able to locate shrapnel invisible to the naked eye, which would previously have caused infection, sepsis and death. When World War I ended, Irene began working on her PhD at the Radium Institute and her mother asked her to train a man named Frederic Joliot. The two became not just scientific research partners, but they married, combined their last names to Joliot Curie, and released all of their research jointly. In fact, the Joliot Curies discovered the existence of positrons and neutrons, but they didn't know enough to know it at the time. Before the Joliot Curies figured out how to transform one element into another using radioactivity, scientists had to extract naturally occurring radioactive materials from the earth, which, as we mentioned before, made the materials costly and rare. Being able to make the materials in the lab opened up entire worlds of scientific exploration. Radioactive isotopes are still widely used to this day. In the world of medicine. It was their work that set the stage for Lise Meitner to discover nuclear fission, the separating of atoms to create a tremendous amount of energy. The Joliot Curies, brilliant minds that they were, also saw the writing on the wall. They became terrified of what could happen if their work fell into the wrong hands, specifically the hands of fascist army armies springing up in Germany and Italy.
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While Marie, Irene, Elizabeth and Lise laid the groundwork for future nuclear advances, their contemporaries in the United States stood on their shoulders, using everything they had learned, learned and then building on it. Leona woods was born in 1919, and her parents knew she was going to make something of herself when she graduated from high school at 14 and earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago at the age of 19. Five years later, she had a PhD in chemistry. Before she could even finish her PhD dissertation, she was hired by RA researcher Enrico Fermi and joined a group of scientists at the Chicago metallurgical lab called the Met Lab, who were attempting something that no one had ever done before building a nuclear reactor at the behest of the US Government's Manhattan Project. And what better place to put it than underneath the University of Chicago's abandoned football stadium? Their build worked. Leona woods was the first and only woman present when the reactor was powered up. And just to give you an idea of the scope of this project, which was called Chicago Pile 1, or CP1, here is a description. It was 20ft high and 25ft wide, and it consisted of 57 layers of material with 380 tons of graphite, 50 tons of tube alloy oxide, and 6 tons of tube alloy metal. And remember, this was done in complete secrecy. They wanted to find out if nuclear fission could be created using the prototype they designed. Leona woods stood in the cold Chicago air at age 23, taking measurements of neutron activity using a counter that she had designed for the task. Leona got married the following year to fellow scientist John Marshall and was quickly pregnant with their first child. She was terrified that her pregnancy would be discovered and that she would be kicked out of the building that now housed the reactor they were working on. So she hid her pregnancy. She wore baggy denim clothes stuffed with tools to make it seem like they were the reason she was larger than normal. And when morning sickness hit, she discreetly vomited into trash cans when no one was around. After the baby was born, Leona returned to work. Just days later, John and Leona moved with their son to Hanford, Washington, where the government was building large scale plutonium reactors. By the way, plutonium is made by nuclear reaction with uranium used as fuel. When they powered up the B reactor at the Hanford, Washington site, Leona stood by watchful. It was the world's first large reactor and the room was full of big shots and officials all there to witness the event. The B reactor hissed to life. Water heating, control rods moving, and then if you few hours later, it died. Everyone was stressed because remember, this was not a science project. This was literally a race against time. The United States needed to beat Germany in its quest to build the bomb. To fail to do so would mean disaster of an unspeakable scale. Scientists couldn't figure out what was wrong with the reactor and they felt the gravity of the situation pressing on them from all sides. It was Leona who finally helped diagnose the problem. Poison, xenon gas. It took them months to craft a solution. Leona knew she was working on building a nuclear weapon. But 99% of employees in Hanford believe that they were worked for a company called Hanford Engineering Works. And they had no knowledge of precisely why they were doing what they were doing. Did Leona have qualms about working on the Manhattan Project? She later said, I think everyone was terrified that we were wrong in our way of developing the bomb and that the Germans were ahead of us. That was a persistent, an ever present fear, fed of course by the fact that our leaders knew those people in Germany. They went to school with them. Our leaders were terrified and that terror fed to us. If the Germans had got it before we did, I don't know what would have happened to the world. Germany led in the field of physics in every respect. It was a very frightening time. I think it's important to take a moment to highlight the danger of this kind of work, and not just danger on a global scale if weapons were developed and fell into the wrong hands, but actual physical danger. People died doing this work. Some died in the midst of research, others years later from illness related to exposure from dangerous elements. Louis Slotin, a physicist at Los Alamos in New Mexico, was performing an experiment permit when a screwdriver slipped. A neutron reflector fell and it created a burst of radiation. Seven scientists Watched. And as if in slow motion, the room filled with a blue glow. Warmth flushed their cheeks and a sour taste filled their mouths. Louis had been exposed to an incredible dose of of neutron radiation and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors urgently called the physicist's parents, imploring them to get on a plane to New Mexico. Over the next four days, Louis suffered what historians call an agonizing sequence of radiation induced traumas. He had severe diarrhea followed by intestinal paralysis and gangrene, and his skin grew severely blistered on the outside from radiation burns. The inside of his body was also blistered with what doctors described as a three dimensional sunburn. His hands swelled massively, his lips turned blue, and his mental confusion increased. Nine days after the accident, Louis experienced a total disintegration of bodily functions, slipped into a coma and died. And so, when one of the seven scientists who was in the room when Louis had his fatal accident became severely sickened, his wife went on high alert. Alvin Graves stayed in the hospital for weeks after being poisoned by radiation from the accident, and he never fully recovered. Back to his old self, Alvin met his wife, Elizabeth Graves, who went by the nickname Diz, when they were both PhD students in physics at the University of Chicago. In 1939, Al got a job at the University of Texas. But they had rules against married couples working at the same institution, so they refused to hire Dis. And let's be real, misogyny played a part in that refusal as well. Instead, Diz helped him prepare his lectures behind the scenes and gave him input to flesh out his research. The couple eventually had enough of Diz not being able to use her intellect to its fullest capacity, and they moved back to the University of Chicago to work in the Met Lab. When they received an offer to join a team on a secret project In Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1919 43, Al and Diz Graves jumped at the chance. Dis's expertise was in fast neutron scattering, and this became a crucial part of nuclear weapon design. She was given a job at Los Alamos, not as an associate scientist like most women, but as a ranking scientist, which was a higher title. And in July 1945, Diz was there for the the moment that her work in creating a neutron reflector for the core of the bomb became a booming reality. Historians describe what it was like the night the United States tested the first ever nuclear weapon called Trinity. In Cabin four, the Graves spread out their equipment on the creaky double bed and told the inquiring owner that they were on a cross cross country trip and would stay only two nights. Al Graves anxiously watched his wife puttering with the Geiger counter that rested on the windowsill facing Trinity, 40 miles westward. Dis Graves was seven months pregnant, and Al worried that the strain of the last hours might injure her health. He put a steady arm around her and drew her to him over the shoulder. Shortwave set they could hear Sam Allison conversing excitedly with the pilot of the B29. The graves made a last check of their instruments, and then together they waited. Like Leona Woods, Diz worked until the moment she gave birth, timing her contractions with the stopwatch she used to conduct labor experiments.
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After immigrating to the United States, Elizabeth Rona was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship to continue studying the radioactivity of seawater. This caught the attention of higher ups at the Manhattan Project. And when they discovered the military needed a lot of polonium to trigger the fission needed to detonate an atomic bomb, they approached her without competition compensation. Elizabeth gave the Manhattan Project her methods for concentrating polonium. When the Nazis began their fateful march across the continent of Europe, Irene and Pierre Joliot Curie were terrified their work would be seized and fall into the wrong hands, allowing the Nazis to develop weapons. So they locked up their work in a vault. For 10 years, they purposely made no scientific discoveries. In 1949, they finally took it back out and began working on non weapon nuclear developments. While officials tried to recruit the brilliant mind of Lise Meitner to the Manhattan Project in 1942, she refused, saying she wanted nothing to do with the bomb. She lived the rest of her life in Sweden, having received no official recognition for her discovery of nuclear fission. But her scientific partner, Otto Hahn did. He received the Nobel Prize. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee couldn't contact him and he found out about it in the press. Why, you might ask, could the Nobel committee not send world renowned scientist Otto Hahn a congratulatory telegram informing him of his award? I'll tell you. It's because after the war ended, the United States had to know, did we barely win the race? How far did Germany advance in their scientific research? Did the Nazis have an atomic weapons program? To find that out, the allies rounded up 10 of Germany's top atomic scientists, including Otto Hahn. They transported them to an estate in England called Farm Hall. And there for six months, the Allies secretly recorded these German scientists as they lived together. The scientists didn't even know for sure why they were there. One of the reasons they speculated about was the Allies were trying to keep themselves safe from the Soviet Union. After six months, the Allies made transcripts of the portions of the tapes they deemed important. And then they destroyed the tapes themselves. The transcripts were classified until 1993. We now know that no, Germany was not at all close, close to developing an atom bomb. They had never even built a nuclear reactor capable of such a thing. But what was even more fascinating were some of the questions the scientists who were interned discussed amongst themselves they didn't know they were being recorded. Someone joked shortly after they arrived that maybe there were recording devices. And then someone else answered that the Allies were no Nazis. They were too backwards to have done something as devious as bugging a house in the English countryside. Two copies of the Farmhall transcripts exist, one in England and one in the US National Archives. And researchers had a field day when they were declassified. They identified four central questions that the scientists brought up over and over. Were we Nazis? Did we know how to make atomic bombs? Could Germany have created nuclear weapons under the Nazis? Were we trying to produce atomic bombs? Imagine not knowing if you were a Nazi or not. It seems impossible today to be unaware. While Lise Meitner was sparing herself the fate of being killed by the Nazis, Otto Hahn found himself wondering if he even was one. And then he received the scientific community's most prestigious award for work that found its genesis in Lise's mind. While Lise was snubbed by the Nobel committee, Otto gave her a portion of his prize money. When he won, Lise in turn gave the money to an organization that worked against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Lise was nominated for a Nobel Award 48 times, but never received even one. She did have a chemical element named after her, meitnerium, and she is one of only two women to have received that honor. Marie Curie is the other one. Otto Hahn later tried to deny that Lise Meitner had anything to do with the discovery of nuclear fission. Attempting to rewrite history and to cast the scientific community in Nazi Germany in a purely benevolent role, Meitner realized what Hahn was doing. He suppresses the past with all his might, she wrote to a friend. Even though he always truly hated and despised the Nazis, and as one of his main motives is to gain international respect for Germany, once again he deceives himself about the facts. And oh, what a human statement. He deceives himself about the facts. We can say the same about the authors of history many thousands of times over. Join me next time as I talk about another master deceiver, a woman spy master who oversaw hundreds of secret agents in the fight against the Nazis. I'll see you again soon. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback and Amy Watkin, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.
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Summary7 min read

Podcast Summary: The Preamble with Sharon McMahon Episode: How Women Won WWII: The Booming Work of Women Scientists
Date: August 3, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode of The Preamble, hosted by Sharon McMahon, explores the pivotal yet often overlooked roles that women scientists played in World War II’s atomic race. Sharon dives deep into the stories of pioneering female physicists and chemists—mainly European women—whose discoveries laid the foundation for nuclear science and, ultimately, for the Allied victory. The episode highlights both their triumphs and the injustices they faced, emphasizing how history has often left them in the shadows while their male counterparts received the credit.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context: The Atomic Race and the Role of Women (02:16–04:30)

Sharon frames the urgency and morality of building the atomic bomb, emphasizing the period’s unique challenges—Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, Japanese-American incarceration.
Explains how the U.S. was far from a superpower at the war’s outset, and how the atomic bomb altered global power structures.

"The war ended because of the scientific contributions of women. The United States became who and what it is in the world because of the scientific contributions of women. And I’m about to tell you how." (03:54, Sharon McMahon)

2. Lise Meitner: Mother of Nuclear Fission (04:30–11:30)

Background: Born in Austria in 1878, Meitner became the second woman to earn a PhD from the University of Vienna. She studied under Max Planck and collaborated with Otto Hahn in Berlin, overcoming great gender-based barriers.
Breakthrough: Fled Nazi Germany for Sweden; during a snowy walk with her nephew Otto Frisch, she conceptualized and validated nuclear fission—the process that would power both reactors and bombs.
Erasure: Despite her breakthroughs, the credit mainly went to Otto Hahn, with Meitner often excluded from recognition.

"She had to work alone in a basement laboratory. But her friendship with Otto Hahn grew…and she was able to use her proximity to him to get herself out of the basement and into the good laboratories." (06:21, Sharon McMahon)

3. Elizabeth Rona: Seawater Radioactivity & the Manhattan Project (11:30–14:30, 32:18–34:20)

Background: Hungarian scientist who pioneered studies in radioactivity and geochronology.
Contribution: Developed a method to concentrate polonium, vital for chain reactions in atomic bombs. Fled Europe due to anti-Semitism, worked on the Manhattan Project in the U.S., and later provided her methods without compensation.

"Elizabeth discovered a way to prepare the element polonium so it could be used as a stand-in for radium in many experiments. …She was Jewish and…moved from place to place to perform her research. …She was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project." (12:46, Sharon McMahon)

4. The Curie Legacy: Marie, Irène, and Science Under Seige (14:30–19:00)

Marie Curie: Iconic scientist, double Nobel laureate, and single mother, facing prejudice and xenophobia.
Irène Curie (and husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie): Carried her mother’s scientific torch; discovered artificial radioactivity and won a Nobel. Paused scientific discovery to prevent knowledge from falling into Nazi hands.

"Marie Curie was one of the most talented scientific minds that has ever been. She was also once a young widow...faced relentless criticism...labeled as a foreigner and a Jew and an atheist." (15:47, Sharon McMahon)

5. Leona Woods: The Only Woman at Chicago Pile-1 (19:56–24:20)

Leona Woods: American physicist, joined Enrico Fermi’s team at 23; the only woman present when the first nuclear reactor was activated under the University of Chicago’s football stadium.
Obstacles: Hid her pregnancy to avoid being dismissed; contributed critical technical solutions, such as diagnosing “xenon poisoning” which stalled the Hanford, WA reactors.
Climate of Secrecy: Most employees thought they worked for Hanford Engineering Works, not realizing their role in the bomb effort.

"She wore baggy denim clothes stuffed with tools to make it seem like they were the reason she was larger than normal. And when morning sickness hit, she discreetly vomited into trash cans when no one was around." (21:30, Sharon McMahon)

"Did Leona have qualms about working on the Manhattan Project? She later said, 'I think everyone was terrified that we were wrong...and that the Germans were ahead of us. That was a persistent, an ever-present fear...'" (23:00, Sharon McMahon quoting Leona Woods)

6. Diz (Elizabeth) Graves: Los Alamos and the Neutron Reflector (24:20–29:57)

Background: Physicist married to Alvin Graves. Hindered by anti-nepotism and sexism, secured a scientist position at Los Alamos.
Contribution: Designed neutron reflectors crucial to the bomb’s core; worked while pregnant, even timing her labor contractions with a stopwatch she used for experiments.
Danger: Describes radiation accidents (e.g., physicist Louis Slotin’s agonizing death) and the personal risks involved.

"Like Leona Woods, Diz worked until the moment she gave birth, timing her contractions with the stopwatch she used to conduct labor experiments." (29:33, Sharon McMahon)

7. Aftermath, Recognition, and the Farm Hall Tapes (32:18–37:05)

Elizabeth Rona: Provided critical polonium refinement to the Manhattan Project, which proved instrumental in detonating the first bombs.
The Curies: Hid their research for a decade to prevent Nazi misuse; only resumed non-weapon nuclear science after the war.
Lise Meitner: Refused to join the Manhattan Project. Lived in Sweden, largely unrecognized for Nobel awards while Otto Hahn received the prize for their collective work.
Farm Hall Tapes: Allies secretly recorded interned German atomic scientists post-war to gauge how close Nazi Germany came to making an atomic bomb.
- Found Germany never built a functioning reactor, let alone a bomb.
- Reveals German scientists’ confusion about their own complicity and the nature of their involvement.
"Imagine not knowing if you were a Nazi or not. It seems impossible today to be unaware." (36:28, Sharon McMahon)

"Meitner realized what Hahn was doing: 'He suppresses the past with all his might…he deceives himself about the facts.'" (36:50, Sharon quoting Lise Meitner)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On projecting present values on the past:
"We also can't project our current beliefs onto the past as inherently true and correct and assume that everyone else was working with the same set of facts and information, the same beliefs and morals that we have." (04:18, Sharon McMahon)
On erased female contributions:
"Because history has traditionally ignored and excluded women… it would be easy to think the story ends there, that Lise was one remarkable woman who defied the odds. But you’d be wrong." (09:34, Sharon McMahon)
On the humanity behind scientific heroes:
"The humanity of these women, with their unassuming appearances and humble laboratories…it's an incredible reminder of how humans have a tendency…to elevate people to hero status…we forget to remember the truth." (15:22, Sharon McMahon)
On the cost of nuclear science:
"People died doing this work. Some died in the midst of research, others years later from illness related to exposure from dangerous elements." (24:48, Sharon McMahon)
On recognition for Lise Meitner:
"Lise was nominated for a Nobel Award 48 times, but never received even one. She did have a chemical element named after her, meitnerium, and she is one of only two women to have received that honor." (35:40, Sharon McMahon)

Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | Description | |-----------|-----------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:16 | Start of Episode Content | Sharon introduces the theme and urgency of women in atomic science | | 04:30 | Lise Meitner’s early career in Europe | Personal history, work with Otto Hahn, discrimination | | 09:34 | Introduction of Elizabeth Rona | Contributions to radioactivity, polonium refinement, Manhattan Project | | 14:30 | The Curie family legacy | Marie and Irène Curie’s impacts, facing discrimination | | 19:56 | Leona Woods and Chicago Pile-1 | U.S. atomic research, secrecy, gender-based obstacles | | 24:20 | Diz Graves at Los Alamos | Role in bomb development, gender/family challenges | | 29:33 | Dangers of nuclear research | The Slotin accident and human costs | | 32:18 | Aftermath and legacy of women’s work | Recognition, Farm Hall tapes, erasure and rewriting of history | | 35:40 | Lise Meitner’s lack of Nobel recognition| Meitnerium, quote about Hahn’s postwar actions | | 36:28 | Reflection on moral complexity | “Imagine not knowing if you were a Nazi or not.” |

Tone & Style

Tone: Clear, empathetic, accessible, blending deep respect for the science and steely honesty about historical prejudice and moral complexity.
Style: Narrative-driven, framing individual scientists’ stories within broader events; uses vivid anecdotes, grounded quotes, and historical context.

Closing

The episode closes by reflecting on the unreliability of official history and the self-deception of those who write it. Sharon previews the next installment—which will focus on a female spymaster during WWII.

"He deceives himself about the facts. We can say the same about the authors of history many thousands of times over." (36:54, Sharon McMahon)

For further insight into untold contributions of women in WWII, especially in scientific fields, this episode is a must-listen.

Loading summary

Transcript18 lines

[00:00]
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[02:16]
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Hey friends, welcome. Welcome to episode six of our documentary series, How Women Won World War II. In a previous episode, we began a conversation about the combined efforts of the Allied science community to beat Germany in the race to understand and build atomic weapons. It was a team effort. And you know what? We barely scratched the surface. So let's dive in.
[02:44]
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I'm Sharon McMahon and this is the Preamble Podcast.
[02:51]
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In 1993, a set of transcripts was released. It was a set of transcripts about something only a select number of people even knew existed. Historians waited with bated breath to crack open the pages. A documentation of secret conversations among some of the world's top atomic scientists. Secret conversations that the scientists didn't even realize anyone was recording. But before we get to the secret conversations, we need to talk more about how atomic science developed. Because without the contributions of women, all I can tell you is that the world would be a very different place than it is today. Now, I get that from our current perspective, it seems like the world may be better off without nuclear weapons. And I'm not even going to argue with you. But we also can't project our current beliefs onto the past as inherently true and correct and assume that everyone else was working with the same set of facts and information, the same beliefs and morals that we have. Because unless we've lived during the Holocaust where 6 million Jews were killed, unless we witness firsthand the incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans or the Pearl harbor attack on U.S. soil, or watched as tens of thousands of young men were sent overseas with notes pinned inside their coats for good luck, unless we've lived through those exact set of circumstances, we can't judge. To many, the development of the atomic bomb was a blessing. It was a relief. It put an end to years of war and torture. It also changed the course of the future. At the beginning Of World War II, the United States was not a world superpower. And I know we like to think of ourselves as always and forever the greatest nation that has ever been. But in terms of the US military, the United States was 19th in the world. At the outbreak of World War II, we had a smaller military than Portugal. It was the development of the atomic weapon that changed our position in the world, for better or for worse. And after we dropped the atomic bomb, we were no longer young, scrappy and Hungary. The United States had arrived. The Allies were terrified that Hitler would make the bomb before they did. So it was, in their minds, truly a race against an unspeakable evil that might befall the world if he did. And the truth is, nuclear physics is what it is. Because of the scientific contributions to of women. The war ended because of the scientific contributions of women. The United States became who and what it is in the world because of the scientific contributions of women. And I'm about to tell you how. Let's revisit Europe. At the end of the 19th century, a baby named Lise was born in 1878 in Austria. She was one of eight children, but her parents immediately saw how bright she was and she sailed through all the schooling Austria had to offer. By age 14, her father, an attorney, hired private tutors so she could continue her studies. She was only the second woman to receive a PhD from the University of Vienna, and she was working in a field in which women were traditionally excluded physics. Lise moved to Berlin and studied under the father of quantum theory, Max Planck, and met her future longtime collaborator, the chemist Otto Hahn. Lise also rubbed elbows with other science giants like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. By the way, there is a growing body of evidence that Einstein's first wife, who was also a scientist, was responsible for at least assisting in the development of a lot of his early work. It's work she is completely uncredited for, and Lise Meitner experienced many of the same discriminatory attitudes. She often wasn't permitted to be in the room where it happened. She had to work alone in a basement laboratory. But her friendship with Otto Hahn grew and she was able to use her proximity to him to get herself out of the basement and into the good laboratories. Together they made important discoveries and she was able to publish her work under her own name. Lise was Jewish and she saw the writing on the wall. As the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s, even though she didn't practice religious Judaism and would later convert to Christianity, she had a second strike against her. She was a scientist. In the coming years, the Nazis sought to destroy people of talent and intellect unless they agreed to work for the Nazi agenda. She had no choice but to flee Germany before it was too late, leaving behind the world's premier physics laboratory. In Berlin, she moved to Sweden, which remained neutral in World War II was during a walk in the snowy woods of Sweden with her nephew and fellow scientist Otto Frisch, that Lise made one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in the history of physics. As the pair discussed recent advances in nuclear science, the million dollar question of could you split an atom? Came up. And it was there, in the Swedish countryside, as they built upon science done by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, that Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, figured out the process of nuclear fission. Lise imagined the nucleus of uranium being like a giant drop that could be squeezed and split into multiple parts which would then produce energy. She called her former colleague Otto Hahn, along with his working partner Fritz Strike Strassman, and together they confirmed her theory. The world changed forever. On that afternoon walk Because Lise Meitner's work on nuclear fission was in part the basis for all nuclear energy development, including the energy that went into making atomic weapons. Because history has traditionally ignored and excluded women, and because theoretical physicist was not a field many women were welcomed into in the early and mid 20th century, it would be easy to think that the story ends there, that Lise was one remarkable woman who defied the odds. But you'd be wrong. There was another woman working in that Berlin physics lab with Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn before Lee's fled to Sweden. And her name was Elizabeth Rona. Elizabeth grew up in Budapest and her father was a physician who constantly researched and tested new inventions and technologies. Rona especially loved his X ray machine, which was one of the first in Hungary. She knew she wanted to pursue science and she earned her PhD in chemistry in 1912. Her study of radioactivity is what Rona became known for. She discovered that seawater and ocean sediments are radioactive and found that this allowed her to view the ocean as a clock, to be able to look back in time to the formation of the earth, a concept known as geochronology. We know that when, when Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the importance of radium, the supply was very limited and consequently very expensive, which limited the research and experiments that labs could undertake. Marie's 1 gram of radium from the United States could only take radioactive research so far, which meant that the hunt was on for other radioactive elements and Elizabeth Rona's work filled in the gaps. Elizabeth discovered a way to prepare the element polonium so it could be used as a stand in for radium in many experiments. Elizabeth, who was also Jewish in a world fraught with anti Semitism, moved from place to place to perform her research from Sweden to Paris to Berlin. But the Nazis she was forced to leave Europe, marked as a double threat to the rise of fascism. She was Jewish and she was a scientist. Elizabeth fled to the United States and she was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. Early contributions to the world of physics didn't start with Lise and Elizabeth. They both relied heavily on another scientific great, Marie Curie, who we mentioned discovered radioactivity, founded schools in Paris and became the only person to ever have received two Nobel Prizes in different fields. In fact, Marie Curie discovered polonium and named it after her home country of Poland. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre were so busy with their science lab in the late 1800s that for a time they left their oldest daughter Irene in the care of her grandfather, who was A retired doctor when Pierre died, Marie raised her daughters as a single parent. When you see pictures of Eren Curie as a young adult with her mother in a lab, they don't look like women who are used to fame and discovery. Instead, you see the mother and daughter seated near each other. They wear long dark dresses and have their hair pulled back into the 1920s version of a messy bun with strands falling loose, loose around their faces. They sit in wooden chairs at wooden tables, and in one image you can see what looks to be a folded piece of paper stuffed under a table leg to make the table level. The humanity of these women, with their unassuming appearances and humble laboratories, it's an incredible reminder of how humans have a tendency to to elevate people to hero status and plaster their cartoon likeness on T shirts and other merch, we forget to remember the truth that Marie Curie was one of the most talented scientific minds that has ever been. She was also once a young widow and a single mother who faced relentless criticism from the right wing French press who labeled her as a foreigner and a Jew and an atheist. In fact, Marie Curie was not actually Jewish, but that again speaks to anti Semitism in the world. To call someone a Jew was seen by some as an insult. Eren grew to be an incredible scientific mind. She too won a Nobel Prize, an honor she shared with her husband when they discovered a way to transform one element into another artificially using radioactivity. In Iren's teen years, she ran mobile hospital units In World War I, training medical staff on how to use her mother's X ray technology, which saved untold lives as doctors were able to locate shrapnel invisible to the naked eye, which would previously have caused infection, sepsis and death. When World War I ended, Irene began working on her PhD at the Radium Institute and her mother asked her to train a man named Frederic Joliot. The two became not just scientific research partners, but they married, combined their last names to Joliot Curie, and released all of their research jointly. In fact, the Joliot Curies discovered the existence of positrons and neutrons, but they didn't know enough to know it at the time. Before the Joliot Curies figured out how to transform one element into another using radioactivity, scientists had to extract naturally occurring radioactive materials from the earth, which, as we mentioned before, made the materials costly and rare. Being able to make the materials in the lab opened up entire worlds of scientific exploration. Radioactive isotopes are still widely used to this day. In the world of medicine. It was their work that set the stage for Lise Meitner to discover nuclear fission, the separating of atoms to create a tremendous amount of energy. The Joliot Curies, brilliant minds that they were, also saw the writing on the wall. They became terrified of what could happen if their work fell into the wrong hands, specifically the hands of fascist army armies springing up in Germany and Italy.
[16:58]
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[18:05]
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[18:35]
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[19:56]
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While Marie, Irene, Elizabeth and Lise laid the groundwork for future nuclear advances, their contemporaries in the United States stood on their shoulders, using everything they had learned, learned and then building on it. Leona woods was born in 1919, and her parents knew she was going to make something of herself when she graduated from high school at 14 and earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago at the age of 19. Five years later, she had a PhD in chemistry. Before she could even finish her PhD dissertation, she was hired by RA researcher Enrico Fermi and joined a group of scientists at the Chicago metallurgical lab called the Met Lab, who were attempting something that no one had ever done before building a nuclear reactor at the behest of the US Government's Manhattan Project. And what better place to put it than underneath the University of Chicago's abandoned football stadium? Their build worked. Leona woods was the first and only woman present when the reactor was powered up. And just to give you an idea of the scope of this project, which was called Chicago Pile 1, or CP1, here is a description. It was 20ft high and 25ft wide, and it consisted of 57 layers of material with 380 tons of graphite, 50 tons of tube alloy oxide, and 6 tons of tube alloy metal. And remember, this was done in complete secrecy. They wanted to find out if nuclear fission could be created using the prototype they designed. Leona woods stood in the cold Chicago air at age 23, taking measurements of neutron activity using a counter that she had designed for the task. Leona got married the following year to fellow scientist John Marshall and was quickly pregnant with their first child. She was terrified that her pregnancy would be discovered and that she would be kicked out of the building that now housed the reactor they were working on. So she hid her pregnancy. She wore baggy denim clothes stuffed with tools to make it seem like they were the reason she was larger than normal. And when morning sickness hit, she discreetly vomited into trash cans when no one was around. After the baby was born, Leona returned to work. Just days later, John and Leona moved with their son to Hanford, Washington, where the government was building large scale plutonium reactors. By the way, plutonium is made by nuclear reaction with uranium used as fuel. When they powered up the B reactor at the Hanford, Washington site, Leona stood by watchful. It was the world's first large reactor and the room was full of big shots and officials all there to witness the event. The B reactor hissed to life. Water heating, control rods moving, and then if you few hours later, it died. Everyone was stressed because remember, this was not a science project. This was literally a race against time. The United States needed to beat Germany in its quest to build the bomb. To fail to do so would mean disaster of an unspeakable scale. Scientists couldn't figure out what was wrong with the reactor and they felt the gravity of the situation pressing on them from all sides. It was Leona who finally helped diagnose the problem. Poison, xenon gas. It took them months to craft a solution. Leona knew she was working on building a nuclear weapon. But 99% of employees in Hanford believe that they were worked for a company called Hanford Engineering Works. And they had no knowledge of precisely why they were doing what they were doing. Did Leona have qualms about working on the Manhattan Project? She later said, I think everyone was terrified that we were wrong in our way of developing the bomb and that the Germans were ahead of us. That was a persistent, an ever present fear, fed of course by the fact that our leaders knew those people in Germany. They went to school with them. Our leaders were terrified and that terror fed to us. If the Germans had got it before we did, I don't know what would have happened to the world. Germany led in the field of physics in every respect. It was a very frightening time. I think it's important to take a moment to highlight the danger of this kind of work, and not just danger on a global scale if weapons were developed and fell into the wrong hands, but actual physical danger. People died doing this work. Some died in the midst of research, others years later from illness related to exposure from dangerous elements. Louis Slotin, a physicist at Los Alamos in New Mexico, was performing an experiment permit when a screwdriver slipped. A neutron reflector fell and it created a burst of radiation. Seven scientists Watched. And as if in slow motion, the room filled with a blue glow. Warmth flushed their cheeks and a sour taste filled their mouths. Louis had been exposed to an incredible dose of of neutron radiation and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors urgently called the physicist's parents, imploring them to get on a plane to New Mexico. Over the next four days, Louis suffered what historians call an agonizing sequence of radiation induced traumas. He had severe diarrhea followed by intestinal paralysis and gangrene, and his skin grew severely blistered on the outside from radiation burns. The inside of his body was also blistered with what doctors described as a three dimensional sunburn. His hands swelled massively, his lips turned blue, and his mental confusion increased. Nine days after the accident, Louis experienced a total disintegration of bodily functions, slipped into a coma and died. And so, when one of the seven scientists who was in the room when Louis had his fatal accident became severely sickened, his wife went on high alert. Alvin Graves stayed in the hospital for weeks after being poisoned by radiation from the accident, and he never fully recovered. Back to his old self, Alvin met his wife, Elizabeth Graves, who went by the nickname Diz, when they were both PhD students in physics at the University of Chicago. In 1939, Al got a job at the University of Texas. But they had rules against married couples working at the same institution, so they refused to hire Dis. And let's be real, misogyny played a part in that refusal as well. Instead, Diz helped him prepare his lectures behind the scenes and gave him input to flesh out his research. The couple eventually had enough of Diz not being able to use her intellect to its fullest capacity, and they moved back to the University of Chicago to work in the Met Lab. When they received an offer to join a team on a secret project In Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1919 43, Al and Diz Graves jumped at the chance. Dis's expertise was in fast neutron scattering, and this became a crucial part of nuclear weapon design. She was given a job at Los Alamos, not as an associate scientist like most women, but as a ranking scientist, which was a higher title. And in July 1945, Diz was there for the the moment that her work in creating a neutron reflector for the core of the bomb became a booming reality. Historians describe what it was like the night the United States tested the first ever nuclear weapon called Trinity. In Cabin four, the Graves spread out their equipment on the creaky double bed and told the inquiring owner that they were on a cross cross country trip and would stay only two nights. Al Graves anxiously watched his wife puttering with the Geiger counter that rested on the windowsill facing Trinity, 40 miles westward. Dis Graves was seven months pregnant, and Al worried that the strain of the last hours might injure her health. He put a steady arm around her and drew her to him over the shoulder. Shortwave set they could hear Sam Allison conversing excitedly with the pilot of the B29. The graves made a last check of their instruments, and then together they waited. Like Leona Woods, Diz worked until the moment she gave birth, timing her contractions with the stopwatch she used to conduct labor experiments.
[29:57]
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stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word.
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[32:19]
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After immigrating to the United States, Elizabeth Rona was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship to continue studying the radioactivity of seawater. This caught the attention of higher ups at the Manhattan Project. And when they discovered the military needed a lot of polonium to trigger the fission needed to detonate an atomic bomb, they approached her without competition compensation. Elizabeth gave the Manhattan Project her methods for concentrating polonium. When the Nazis began their fateful march across the continent of Europe, Irene and Pierre Joliot Curie were terrified their work would be seized and fall into the wrong hands, allowing the Nazis to develop weapons. So they locked up their work in a vault. For 10 years, they purposely made no scientific discoveries. In 1949, they finally took it back out and began working on non weapon nuclear developments. While officials tried to recruit the brilliant mind of Lise Meitner to the Manhattan Project in 1942, she refused, saying she wanted nothing to do with the bomb. She lived the rest of her life in Sweden, having received no official recognition for her discovery of nuclear fission. But her scientific partner, Otto Hahn did. He received the Nobel Prize. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee couldn't contact him and he found out about it in the press. Why, you might ask, could the Nobel committee not send world renowned scientist Otto Hahn a congratulatory telegram informing him of his award? I'll tell you. It's because after the war ended, the United States had to know, did we barely win the race? How far did Germany advance in their scientific research? Did the Nazis have an atomic weapons program? To find that out, the allies rounded up 10 of Germany's top atomic scientists, including Otto Hahn. They transported them to an estate in England called Farm Hall. And there for six months, the Allies secretly recorded these German scientists as they lived together. The scientists didn't even know for sure why they were there. One of the reasons they speculated about was the Allies were trying to keep themselves safe from the Soviet Union. After six months, the Allies made transcripts of the portions of the tapes they deemed important. And then they destroyed the tapes themselves. The transcripts were classified until 1993. We now know that no, Germany was not at all close, close to developing an atom bomb. They had never even built a nuclear reactor capable of such a thing. But what was even more fascinating were some of the questions the scientists who were interned discussed amongst themselves they didn't know they were being recorded. Someone joked shortly after they arrived that maybe there were recording devices. And then someone else answered that the Allies were no Nazis. They were too backwards to have done something as devious as bugging a house in the English countryside. Two copies of the Farmhall transcripts exist, one in England and one in the US National Archives. And researchers had a field day when they were declassified. They identified four central questions that the scientists brought up over and over. Were we Nazis? Did we know how to make atomic bombs? Could Germany have created nuclear weapons under the Nazis? Were we trying to produce atomic bombs? Imagine not knowing if you were a Nazi or not. It seems impossible today to be unaware. While Lise Meitner was sparing herself the fate of being killed by the Nazis, Otto Hahn found himself wondering if he even was one. And then he received the scientific community's most prestigious award for work that found its genesis in Lise's mind. While Lise was snubbed by the Nobel committee, Otto gave her a portion of his prize money. When he won, Lise in turn gave the money to an organization that worked against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Lise was nominated for a Nobel Award 48 times, but never received even one. She did have a chemical element named after her, meitnerium, and she is one of only two women to have received that honor. Marie Curie is the other one. Otto Hahn later tried to deny that Lise Meitner had anything to do with the discovery of nuclear fission. Attempting to rewrite history and to cast the scientific community in Nazi Germany in a purely benevolent role, Meitner realized what Hahn was doing. He suppresses the past with all his might, she wrote to a friend. Even though he always truly hated and despised the Nazis, and as one of his main motives is to gain international respect for Germany, once again he deceives himself about the facts. And oh, what a human statement. He deceives himself about the facts. We can say the same about the authors of history many thousands of times over. Join me next time as I talk about another master deceiver, a woman spy master who oversaw hundreds of secret agents in the fight against the Nazis. I'll see you again soon. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback and Amy Watkin, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.
[39:13]
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