Herman F. Mark

Herman F. Mark was an Austrian chemist who became an eminent figure in polymer science. He was a colleague of Ernst David Bergmann at the Emil Fischer Institute of the University of Berlin in the early 1920s, where they worked together and published joint papers on the chemical structure of rubber, paint, and adhesives.¹

Mark was driven out of Europe in 1938 by the Nazis and eventually became dean of faculty at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, turning it into a haven for Jewish refugees, including Chaim Weizmann. He remained a close friend and colleague of Ernst David Bergmann, sharing Bergmann's view on the inevitability of Israeli nuclear weapons research. Mark believed that whether it was for desalination, power, or a bomb, nuclear energy still involved fission, and that Israel needed to be fully cognizant of nuclear physics.¹

Mark became a constant commuter between Brooklyn and Israel after World War II, serving on planning boards and as a scientific adviser to the fledgling Weizmann Institute of Science. He insisted that without Bergmann, there would have been no Israeli bomb, stating that Bergmann was in charge of every kind of nuclear activity in Israel and completely understood nuclear fission.¹

His son, Hans M. Mark, served as secretary of the Air Force in the Carter administration and was head of the executive committee of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), responsible for the development, procurement, and targeting of America's intelligence satellites. Hans Mark also worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a main U.S. nuclear weapons facility.¹