Robert Jungk

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Robert Jungk (May 11, 1913 - July 14, 1994), also known as Robert Baum and Robert Baum-Jungk, was an Austrian writer and journalist who wrote mostly on issues relating to nuclear weapons.

Jungk was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. When Adolf Hitler came to power, Jungk was arrested, released, moved to Paris, then back to Nazi Germany to work in a subversive press service. These activities forced him to move through various cities, such as Prague, Paris, Zürich, during World War II. He continued journalism after the war.

He is also well known as the inventor of future workshop which are a method for social innovation, participation by the concerned and visionary future planning "from below". There is an international library in Salzburg called Robert Jungk Bibliothek fur Zukunftsfragen (...for Future Matters).

His book Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists was the first published account of the Manhattan Project and the German atomic bomb project, and its first Danish edition included a passage which implied that the project had been purposely driven away from developing a weapon by Werner Heisenberg and his associates (a claim strongly contested by Niels Bohr), and lead to a series of questions over a 1941 meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen, Denmark, which was later the basis for Michael Frayn's 1998 play, Copenhagen.

In 1986, he received the Right Livelihood Award.

In 1992 he made an unsuccessful bid for the Austrian presidency on behalf of the Green Party.

[edit] References

Jungk, Robert. Tomorrow Is Already Here, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. Reportage on scientific and technical breakthroughs, a work of nascent dystopian 'futurism'. Much of it was about what developed from the Manhattan Project, as well as things like "electronic brains".
---- Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958
---- Children of the Ashes, 1st English ed. 1961. About Hiroshima
---- The Nuclear State
---- The Everyman Project
---- Future Workshops