One of the truly great physicsist of the 20th century, Bethe did fundamental work
in most major branches of physics, including atomic, nuclear, solid state, high
energy and astrophysics. One might expect that his
selected works would be fairly inaccessable, but surprisingly this is not
always the case since much of his work (but not all, since some was previously
classified
or unpublished and some was previously not translated from the original German) has found its way into the textbooks and
so might be somewhat
familiar.
Bethe was put in charge of the theoretical division at
Los Alamos during the atomic bomb project by Oppenheimer, and had a singularly unique
insight on what is required to design an atomic weapon. Therefore, his commentary
on the famous case of
The A-Bomb Kid (also see
here), while not as well known as the case itself, is authoritative:
"I have seen the paper of the Princeton student, and to the professional it is not
impressive. He presents with great seriousness a calculation of the energy yield
of a bomb, assuming a certain amount of fissile material, and assuming the efficiency
of the nuclear reaction - a grade-school exercise in multiplication - but he never
gives any argument for assuming this particular efficiency, which in fact is much
too high for an amateur bomb. He mentions a few types of explosive that could be
used to assemble the fissile material, but he does not discuss the intricate shapes
in which the explosives has to be cast. To cast the correct shapes, and to prove
experimentally that they were indeed correct, took us months at Los Alamos, with
hundreds of technicians, and this is just one of the many problems that are not
discussed in the open literature." -- (cf. Hans Bethe: Prophet of Energy
by Jeremy Bernstein for an excellent and even more detailed discussion)
Here is a video of Bethe giving a lecture on quantum mechanics.