H-Hostage

In 1934, Russian-born Peter Kapitsa, after a distinguished career as one of Britain's top physicists, went to Moscow for a scientific conference. He never came back. In the months that followed, while Kapitsa himself lived in silence, the Western world's topmost scientists clamored furiously for his release. The Russians ended by paying hard cash to Cambridge University for the special laboratory Cambridge had built for the scientist to work in, but as to releasing Kapitsa, they would hear none of it.

From then on, as scientific experiment became more and more a closely guarded secret the world over, nobody heard much of anything about Peter Kapitsa. But in the years following World War II, when the menace of the hydrogen bomb loomed large and black, the thoughts of many a scientist who had known Kapitsa harked back to the days of his early and significant experiments on the behavior of hydrogen. It was presumed that if Russia had indeed perfected an H-bomb, Kapitsa's vast knowledge must have been of considerable help. The Russian government granted him a long list of honors.

Last week brought further news of the kidnaped scientist. A party of Western scientists, recently returned from a scientific conference in Moscow, reported that Kapitsa, far from helping the Soviet H-bomb project, had run afoul of Dictator Stalin for refusing on moral grounds to devote himself to the development of thermonuclear weapons. For the last seven years of the Stalin regime, he had, in fact, been kept under house arrest. One of the first acts of the post-Stalin government had been to release the hostage scientist, give him a couple of chauffeur-driven cars and restore him to his former post as Director of the Soviet Institute for Physical Problems, so that he can dabble with his favorite problem: the behavior of matter at extremely low temperatures.

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