America, it seems to me, has as little resistance to an idea or a mass emotion as isolated communities have to measles and whooping cough. From outside, it is as if you are watching one violent storm after another sweep across a landscape of extremes. Their Cold War was colder than anywhere else in the West, with the intemperate execution of the Rosenbergs, and grotesqueries of the McCarthy trials. In the Seventies, Black Power, militant feminism, the Weathermen—all flourished….

Everything is taken to extremes. We all know this, but the fact is seldom taken in to account when we try to understand what is going on.

—Doris Lessing, in “What We Think of America,” Granta Spring 2002

Charlottesville-The University of Virginia Center for Governmental Studies kicks off the National Symposium on Wartime Politics with a pair of exciting events on WEDNESDAY, MARCH 27, 2002:  a keynote address by Senator John Warner (R-VA), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee; and a panel discussion about the role of partisanship during times of war, which features several of America’s top political insiders.  Both events will be held on the Grounds of the University of Virginia….

—Press release [emphasis added]

Goya and the Women

The rain has been lovely in Washington, because so welcome in this drought, though toward evening the wet flowering trees look a bit frayed. Yesterday I went down to the National Gallery, to look at Goya’s pictures of women, many of which were loaned by the Prado. I had seen them once before but, for the moment separated from the enormous collection of his work in Madrid, these paintings were what I wanted to view on a spring day. Almost at once I was again aware of the accuracy of his gaze and yet its sympathetic tenderness toward persons of all classes, which many have remarked on; equally, his biting depiction of their follies.

But there were surprises. A little picture of the Duchess of Alba teasing “La Beata,” a prim upper servant of the household. You don’t see the Alba’s face, only a mass of long curly hair and a supple body in action, so luscious and so intimately drawn that you think she could indeed be the unclothed and the clothed maja, though that association is no longer officially accepted.

In their own gallery are the “gentlemen’s paintings,” of which kind Goya was considered a master, meant for viewing in the private rooms of aristocrats. The few exhibited are very beautiful. “El Sueño” is nearly as lovely as the great majas, though not a complex work: a young woman lies sleeping, her head turned aside on the pillow in shadow, but her bosom, which is just lovely, is raised. It is meant to capture the eye of the beholder; it is swathed in some soft gauzy fabric that would draw his hand toward it. On the opposite wall, side by side, are the two paintings of the maja, naked (not nude) and clothed. It is entertaining to think of that high-spirited duchess portrayed as a sort of street-gypsy. The woman is delicious, whoever she might be. Unclothed, her skin translucent, her limbs rounded, perfectly formed, inviting possession, she is self-possessed. Clothed in her semi-transparent little Empire dress and tiny court shoes, her face more vibrantly colored, she is no less desirable. You believe that if she chose to speak nothing stupid, but perhaps something quite mockingly amusing, could come out of that pretty little mouth.

Further on are rooms of album prints, including impressions from “Los Caprichos,” 1799. “An advertisement: The author has selected from a multitude of stupidities and errors common to every civil society … material deemed fit for ridicule and at the same time to exercise the author’s imagination.” Much that is merry, but also disgraceful and degenerate, appears before us – the procuresses, the girls and men of all classes making the eternal bargain of flesh for money. Goya sees everything and draws it. The images beginning in dreams. “The Follies of Women.” He cannot help looking, simultaneously drawing: eye connects directly to hand, even while the heart is appalled. Now, a few prints from the grueling “The Disasters of War: ” “They did not want this.” “Nor did they.” “Nor did they.” – Women resisting the French soldiers who will rape them.

In 1808, Goya had the terrible good luck of disaster, when Napoleon invaded Spain. His frightening paintings “The Second of May” and “The Third of May” record summary executions of Madrileños by the victorious French. Then followed The Disasters, the engravings of atrocities of that savage war. The war lasted five years. The return of a reactionary monarchy quashed the liberals, whose resistance to Napoleon had inspired the popular rising. Later, a three-year interlude of liberalism ended with more repression. In 1823, Goya left for Bordeaux, old and blind, and kept working. He drew “social outcasts, cripples and beggars …[which] might even reflect the helplessness which Goya himself felt as an old and deaf man in a strange country.” How did his mind survive what he had seen?

I could love the exhibit because the big pictures were beautiful and full of daily life and there was peace in them; the ordinary and extraordinary horrors appeared in miniature, in the album prints. Behind them hovered a memory of the Black Paintings of his old age, the album of The Disasters, and “The Colossus.” Above a wide plain across which stream tiny wagons full of frantic refugees and herds of panicked animals stands a monstrous figure, brutish and shaggy, grasping tiny bodies in his huge fist. His back is turned indifferently to the viewer. (He is a precursor of the terrifying “Saturn Devouring His Children.”) I used to have a cheap print of that painting and I used to look at it with something like wonder. That was War! War filled the mind and evacuated life, it scattered people ahead of it in pure terror, it plucked its victims at random. It was immense and terrifying. Goya had seen its image, and painted it so; that was what caused my wonder.

The Hungarian novelist Lajos Zilahy wrote in CENTURY IN SCARLET the following: “It was de la Tour du Pin, one of Talleyrand’s secretaries, who called the Napoleonic wars, not without justice, the Third World War. The first occurred in the fourth century B.C., when … Alexander (the Great) conquered the then-known world. The second was fought nearly a millennium later, when Attila, king of the Huns, lost the bloodiest battle of history on the wide Catalonian plain. Here the united Western armies beat the hordes of barbaric tribes from Asia.” The passage would strike the Hungarian ear with a certain irony; not, perhaps, ours. We have little idea of this history.

In the gallery, serenity, and its shadow. How does the mind bear the shadow? By making. Goya made these pictures.

The West Building is traversed by a long, high-vaulted corridor off which open room after room of marvels, and which is modulated by small, round atria where discreet pairs and trios of seats are arranged for those wishing to pause. Regularly, musicians play. In one of the atria is a vibrant display of potted Karume azaleas from a collection left to the National Gallery on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. This was a charming sight. Spent blossoms had fallen to the marble floor around the pots, a small, unexpected dishevelment. Although the number of tourists is said to be low since September, I saw many people that day from many nations and our own, adults and small children, and again marveled at how this was open to us, all and any, without fee. As for security, at each entry stood two guards behind a table. I entered by the west door. A woman guard examined my bag by using a dowel to poke gently, briefly among the contents. She paid no attention to my cell phone. I did not mention the small dictating machine in my coat pocket. In one of the rooms another guard politely asked me to carry my bag, a small backpack, over one shoulder to avoid impeding the flow of the crowd.

What did Heisenberg say? What did Bohr hear?
How does science enter the imagination?

In early March I was in Washington to attend a symposium at the Smithsonian, “Copenhagen Interpretation: Science and History on Stage.” Here is the situation. In September 1941, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg went to Copenhagen to talk to his revered master and colleague Niels Bohr. Denmark had been invaded by the Germans; Heisenberg was director of the German atomic program. Bohr and his wife, Margarethe, were safe though under constant watch by the Gestapo (as was Heisenberg), while his Institute continued in operation. The two colleagues had done great work together in the late twenties, years that have been called the golden age of physics: the discovery of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Bohr’s principle of complementarity; and there was an intimacy between them. It was said that at one time they could finish each other’s sentences. Both had won the Nobel.

At some point during Heisenberg’s week in Copenhagen, the two men met in private. Apparently the meeting was very brief; Bohr cut it short and came away furious. By 1943, he and his son Aage (also a physicist, and would himself win the Nobel) had escaped; gone to London, where Bohr tried to persuade Churchill (who would have none of it) to encourage the Allied effort to build an atomic bomb; and come then to America, where in Los Alamos Bohr convinced his colleagues that the Germans were building an atomic bomb, and that the Americans must build one first. As they did: and used it.

This is a fascinating and deeply disturbing history. The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory is a momentous event in our understanding of the movement of the universe on the smallest scales. The discovery of atomic fission intersected with a terrible war and therein lay the crux of a great moral dilemma. The meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg remains a subject of speculation because they are dead and neither ever was able to describe clearly what caused the bitter rift between them. Exactly what Heisenberg told Bohr, and what Bohr heard, are still not agreed upon by scholars. Here enters the writer and his imagination – along with the journalist, the historian, the physicist, the stage director, and the reader.

The English novelist Michael Frayn wrote a play, “Copenhagen,” re-imagining that meeting of Bohr and Heisenberg in September 1941. The play opened in London several years ago to respectful but not overwhelming reviews. When it was brought to New York, however, “Copenhagen” captured high interest at once: enthusiastic reviews, dissenting essays, public symposia; in 2000 it won a Tony Award. I saw it performed in New York; I was, and remain, enthralled by the play and its repercussions, the incident that inspired it, and its repercussions. There is, too, fact of the atomic bomb.

By August 6, 1945, the Germans had capitulated. Their atomic scientists, including Heisenberg, had been brought to England and were interned at Farm Hall, a safe house used by British intelligence, where for six months their conversations were secretly recorded by their British Army hosts. In the transcripts of those conversations,[1] we read that Heisenberg and his colleagues had just listened to the B.B.C. report of the bombing of Hiroshima and were utterly amazed and disbelieving. And they are aghast. How could the Americans have enriched enough of the rare isotope uranium-235 to make a fission bomb? How could they have used so “inhuman” a weapon? Heisenberg had roughly calculated the necessary “critical mass” early on and determined that the Germans could never manufacture enough U235 to make a fission bomb – ten tons were needed, he had told his colleagues. He  refused to believe what he heard and suggested the bomb was a huge chemical – not fission – reaction. Within a week he saw the basis of his mistake, worked backward from the correct answer, and gave his colleagues a “brilliant” lecture on the proper calculation.

So: the Germans had not had an atomic-bomb program.

Then what exactly had Bohr believed? What had Heisenberg told him in Copenhagen?

No one knows what they said to each other. Thus, the speculation of the play: the conversation imagined from each of their points of view: the uncertainty principle as Frayn’s dramatic conceit.

As I understand the history, the central question is, Had Heisenberg calculated the critical mass accurately? If he had not, he was a “second-rater,” as one of the German physicists said bitterly on August 7. But if he had calculated it accurately, as he should have done, when had he done it? And why had he not told his colleagues the correct  number?

Had Bohr asked him about the calculation? What had he replied?

The question of the critical mass has both technical and moral importance. Technically, it seems that Heisenberg’s reported calculation determined that ten tons of uranium were needed to produce the required critical mass of fissionable material.[2] (Fewer than ten kilograms were needed for making a bomb, as was reported in Washington in March 1941.) In effect,  Heisenberg and the German physicists followed the wrong path of discovery.  The moral question is, Why? Were they simply doing the wrong physics or, were they – especially Heisenberg – deliberately retarding the fission program in order not to give Hitler an atomic bomb?

It has been asserted – not too strong a word – that Heisenberg intentionally redirected the German program toward building a nuclear reactor and away from a bomb, not only for technical reasons, or because a bomb-building program would take longer than the war would last, but (in the physicist Jonothan Logan’s skeptical words) “as a conscious, principled choice.” Logan disagrees vehemently that this was so. The writer Thomas Powers, whose book HEISENBERG’S WAR, The Secret History of the German Bomb, has caused him to be a vocal participant in the continuing discussion, believes that Heisenberg did retard the effort out of conscious principle. He argues  that

one thing is clear: Heisenberg’s remark to Hahn at Farm Hall after the war that the German scientists ‘did not want [Hitler] to win’ would be strongly supported by evidence that he and his colleagues had actively tried to impede the bomb program in its early stages. Heisenberg’s visit to Bohr in September 1941 is thus no minor detail—what he said then might confirm, or undermine, his later claim that the Germans lacked single-minded zeal for success. The intense feelings aroused by this matter go beyond the point in question—why the Germans did what they did—to  focus on a sensitive moral question: If German scientists were at the least reluctant and perhaps even refused to build a bomb for Hitler, how would Allied scientists justify the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima? (New York Review of Books, March 28)

The symposium I attended at the Smithsonian – latest of many convoked by the intense discussion arising from Frayn’s play – was organized by Brian Schwartz, a physicist at the Graduate Center, NYU, and co-hosted by an old colleague of mine from graduate school, Arthur Molella, founding director of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.[3] The meeting coincided with the run of “Copenhagen” at the Kennedy Center and (explained the well-produced program booklet, which contained two essays by Frayn), was meant to explore “the science and history surrounding the play and its protagonists, as well as offering a glimpse of the issues involved in presenting science and history as drama.”[4]

Copenhagen enters the conversation

It happened I had with me two sets of somewhat blurred (because several times reproduced) copies of documents referred to as the Farm Hall transcripts, translations made of the recorded conversations of the ten German physicists who had worked on the Nazis’ “uranium project.” The man who had interned them was Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch physicist who had escaped the Nazis and become head of the Allied “Alsos” mission to uncover the progress of the German atomic fission program. That program was by then directed by Walther Gerlach, a physicist and member of the Nazi party. From documents recovered by the Allies from Gerlach’s institute, Goudsmit discerned that the German physicists, because of “some important technical errors, according to Logan, “had abandoned their initial goal of atomic bombs.”

Why I had these transcripts is another story. At a party in mid-February, the novelist John Casey asked if I knew anything about a “random walk.” I said I thought I didn’t. Casey explained that, as best he understood, it had to do with calculating the critical mass at which uranium-235 would be fissionable.[5]I mentioned “Copenhagen.” Instantly, he produced a packet of papers: two thick, legal-sized sheaves marked “Top Secret,” a letter (to and from persons he didn’t know) talking about Heisenberg and his stated unwillingness to become involved in building an atomic bomb, and an article by Jonothan Logan in The American Scientist, about Fermi, Heisenberg, and the calculation of the critical mass of fissionable material required for an atomic reaction.

I asked John Casey where he had gotten these papers. Some years ago, he said, he had been moving furniture in Cambridge, Mass., with another man, and they had gotten to talking. It turned out the other man was a physicist and historian of science and was working on a book. He wanted to find out if non-scientists could understand its subject. He said to Casey, “You’d be just the guy, because you read a lot but don’t know much about science.” He gave the Casey the Farm Hall transcripts, the letter, and the article about the critical mass, of which he happened to be the author, and asked, “Are there any bits of science you don’t get?” Casey read the transcripts. It was clear to him that Heisenberg had not calculated the critical mass, but was brilliant enough to be able to figure it out, without experimentation, within a week. But Logan’s article was more difficult to follow. “I had a vague idea of what a random walk was,” he told me, “and when I explained it to him, he said, ‘Oh, dear.’”

“Why don’t you take this pile and see what you make of it,” John Casey proposed and handed papers to me..

It had been a very long time since I had read any history of twentieth century science, and the reading was slow-going, technically – physics has changed completely since I was a student – but, as Casey had promised, wholly absorbing dramatically.

A week later, in Washington, I had dinner with two old friends, both of whom were in the history of science. One was Arthur Molella, of the Smithsonian. “Gents,” I said, “you won’t believe what I’ve brought: two of the Farm Hall transcripts.” Arthur Molella replied, “Did you know we’re sponsoring a symposium on ‘Copenhagen’?”

It also happens that one of my brothers is an astrophysicist. The evening of the symposium he arrived at my house, coming to give a talk at the University of Virginia. I handed over the transcripts, the article, and the letter, which contained an excerpt of an interview Heisenberg gave in 1967,[6] opening a conversation that went on for days. My brother found Jonothan Logan’s article convincing. That he hadn’t done the calculation correctly was bad – although (my brother hazarded) if you don’t want to do something, for whatever reason known or unknown to yourself, you will find a way not to do it. The Germans had expelled or frightened off nearly all their best scientists because they were Jews or had Jewish “blood,” and they had gone to America, then to Los Alamos to join the Manhattan Project. The American government had backed the scientists to the hilt, as it were; while the German government had not trusted their atomic scientists and never given them adequate resources. So my brother suggested.

He had not yet seen the play but thought the transcripts alone would make an excellent script. “Why don’t you publish them?” he suggested

In fact, the transcripts have been available for some time,[7] although reading the pages of files marked TOP SECRET adds to one’s sense of immediacy and the human scale of the event. These were men, after all, using their minds to produce a physical action that would cause, in Bohr’s words, “a far deeper interference with the course of natural events than anything before.” What follows is a short excerpt from August 6-7, 1945, in the hours after the German physicists have listened to the radio report of the bomb. I have included little of their technical  discussions, which nonetheless are absorbing, and convincing, reading for those such as my brother.

Time, Place, Actors

Time: August 6-7, 1945. Germany had capitulated. America has just dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Place: Farm Hall, a country house in England. Characters: a group “Aryan” German physicists, all of whom worked on the “uranium” project for the German, i.e., Nazi, government, and a commentator, the “I,” provisionally identified as a member of British intelligence.

Werner HEISENBERG former pupil and colleague of Niels Bohr; Nobel Laureate in physics

Carl Friedrich von WEIZSÄCKER pupil (with Wirtz), then colleague, of Heisenberg (he accompanied Heisenberg to Copenhagen in 1941 to visit Bohr); son of the Nazi foreign minister

Walther GERLACH  head of the Uranium project when Germany capitulated to the Allies

Otto HAHN  who (with Fritz Strassmann) discovered fission (1939); a chemist by training, he received the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of nuclear fission

Karl WIRTZ pupil, then colleague, of Heisenberg

Max von LAUE won the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of the diffraction of x-rays by crystals

Paul HARTECK physical chemist

Erich BAGGE physicist

Kurt DIEBNER physicist

Horst KORSHING physicist

TOP SECRET

 

Capt. Davis for Gen. Groves.

Ref. F. H. 4.

To:   Mr. M. PERRIN and Lt. Cdr. WELSH.

From:   Major T.H. RITTNER.

 

OPERATON “EPSILON”
(6-7th August, 1945)

1. This report covers the first reactions of the guests to the news that an atomic bomb had been perfected and used by the Allies.

2. The guests were completely staggered by the news. At first they refused to believe it and felt that it was bluff on our part, to induce the Japanese to surrender. After hearing the official announcement they realised that it was a fact. Their first reaction, which I believe was genuine, was an expression of horror that we should have used this invention for destruction.

…….

1. Shortly before dinner on the 6^th August I informed Professor HAHN that an announcement had been made by the B.B.C. that an atomic bomb had been dropped. Hahn was completely shattered by the news and said that he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which had made the bomb possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realised the terrible potentialities of his discovery and he felt that now these had been realised and he was to blame. With the help of considerable alcoholic stimulant he was calmed down and we went down to dinner where he announced the news to the assembled guests.

2. As was to be expected, the announcement was greeted with incredulity. The following is a transcription of the conversation during dinner.

HAHN: They can only have done that if they have uranium isotope separation.

WIRTZ: They have it too.

HAHN: I remember SEGRE’s, DUNNING’s and my assistant GROSSE’s work; they had separated a fraction of a milligramme before the [obscured by UK declassification stamp]….

LAUE: 235?

HAHN: Yes, 235.

HARTECK: That’s not absolutely necessary. If they let a uranium engine run, they separate ’93.’

HAHN: For that they must have an engine which can make sufficient quantities of ‘93’ to be weighed.

GERLACH: If they want to get that, they must use a whole ton.

HAHN: An extremely complicated business, for ‘93’ they must have an engine which will run for a long time. If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second-raters. Poor old HEISENBERG.

LAUE: The innocent!

HEISENBERG: Did they use the word uranium in connection with this atomic bomb?

ALL: No.

HEISENBERG: Then it’s got nothing to do with atoms, but the equivalent of 20,000 tons of high explosive is terrific.

WEIZSACKER: It corresponds exactly to the factor 10⁴.

GERLACH: Would it be possible that they have got an engine running fairly well, that they have had it long enough to separate ‘93’.

HAHN: I don’t believe it.

HEISENBERG: All I can suggest is that some dilettante in AMERICA who knows very little about it has bluffed them in saying “If you drop this it has the equivalent of 20,000 tons of high explosive” and in reality it doesn’t work at all.

HAHN: At any rate Heisenberg you’re just second-raters and you may just as well pack up.

HEISENBERG: I quite agree.

HAHN: They are fifty years further advanced than we.

HEISENBERG: I don’t believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their £500,000,000 in separating isotopes; and then it’s possible.

WEIZSACKER: If it’s easy and the Allies know it’s easy, then they know that we will soon find out how to do it if we go on working.

HAHN: I didn’t think it would be possible for another twenty years.

WEIZSACKER: I don’t think it has anything to do with uranium.

HAHN: It must have been a comparatively small atomic bomb – a hand one.

HEISENBERG: I am willing to believe that it is a high pressure bomb and I don’t believe that it has anything to do with uranium but that it is a chemical thing where they have enormously increased the speed of the reaction and enormously increased the whole explosion.

……

HARTECK: Who is to blame.

(?) VOICE: Hahn is to blame.

WEIZSACKER: I think it’s dreadful of the Americans to have done it. I think it is madness on their part.

HEISENBERG: One can’t say that. One could equally well say “That’s the quickest way of ending the war[”].

HAHN: That’s what consoles me.

HEISENBERG: I still don’t believe a word about the bomb but I may be wrong. I consider it perfectly possible that they have about ten tons of enriched uranium, but not that they can have ten tons of pure U. 235.

HAHN: I thought that one needed only very little 235.

HEISENBERG: If they only enrich it slightly, they can build an engine with will go but with that they can’t make an explosive which will —

HAHN: But if they have, let us say, 30 kilogrammes of pure 235, couldn’t they make a bomb with it?

HEISENBERG: But it still wouldn’t go off, as the mean free path is still too big.

HAHN: But tell me why you used to tell me that one needed 50 kilogrammes of 235 in order to do anything. Now you say one needs two tons.

HEISENBERG: I wouldn’t like to commit myself for the moment, but it is certainly a fact that the mean free paths are pretty big.

……

HAHN: I was consoled when, I believe it was WEIZSACKER said that there was now this uranium – 23 – minutes [sic]– I found that in my institute too, this absorbing body which made the thing impossible consoled me because when they said at one time one could make bombs, I was shattered.

WEIZSACKER: I would say that, at the rate we were going, we would not have succeeded during this war.

HAHN: Yes.

WEIZSACKER: It is very cold comfort to think that one is personally in a position to do what other people would be able to do one day.

HAHN: Once I wanted to suggest that all uranium should be sunk to the bottom of the ocean. I always thought that one could only make a bomb of such a size that a whole province would be blown up.

HEISENBERG: If it has been done with uranium 235 then we should be able to work it out properly. It just depends upon whether it is done with 50, 500, or 5,000 kilogrammes and we don’t know the order of magnitude. We can assume that they have some method of separating isotopes of which we have no idea.

……

3. All the guests assembled to hear the official announcement at 9 o’clock. They were completely stunned when they realised that the news was genuine. They were left alone on the assumption that they would discuss the position and the following remarks were made.: -

HARTECK: They have managed it either with mass-spectrographs on a large scale or else they have been successful with a photo-chemical process.

WIRTZ: Well, I would say photo-chemistry or diffusion. Ordinary diffusion. They irradiate it with a particular wave-length. – (all talking together).

HARTECK: Or using mass-spectrographs in enormous quantities. It is perhaps possible for a mass-spectrograph to make one milligramme in one day – say of ‘235’. They could make quite a cheap mass-spectrograph which, in very large quantities, might cost a hundred dollars. You could do it with a hundred thousand mass-spectrographs.

HEISENBERG: Yes, of course, if you do it like that; and they seem to have worked on that scale. 180,000 people were working on it.

HARTECK: Which is a hundred times more than we had.

BAGGE: GOUDSMIT led us up the garden path.

HEISENBERG: Yes, he did that very cleverly.

HAHN: CHADWICK and COCKCROFT.

HARTECK: And SIMON too. He is the low temperature man.

KORSHING: That shows at any rate that the Americans are capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would have been impossible in Germany. Each one said that the other was unimportant.

GERLACH: You really can’t say that as far as the uranium group is concerned. You can’t imagine any greater cooperation and trust than there was in that group. You can’t say that any one of them said that the other was unimportant.

KORSHING: Not officially of course.

GERLACH: (Shouting). Not unofficially either. Don’t contradict me. There are far too many other people here who know.

HAHN: Of course we were unable to work on that scale.

HEISENBERG: One can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942 after that meeting with RUST when we convinced him that we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done.

BAGGE: It wasn’t much earlier here either.

HARTECK: We really knew earlier that it could be done if we could get enough material. Take the heavy water. There were three methods, the most expensive of which cost 2 marks per gramme and the cheapest perhaps 50 pfennigs. And then they kept on arguing as to what to do because no one was prepared to spend 10 millions if it could be done for three millions.

HEISENBERG: On the other hand, the whole heavy water business which I did everything I could to further cannot produce an explosive.

HARTECK: Not until the engine is running.

HAHN: They seem to have made an explosive before making the engine and now they say: “in future we will build engines”.

HARTECK: If it is a fact that an explosive can be produced either by means of the mass spectrograph we would never have done it as we could never have employed 56,000 workmen. For instance, when we considered the CLUSIUS-LINDE business combined with our exchange cycle we would have needed to employ 50 workmen continuously in order to produce two tons a year. If we wanted to make ten tons we would have had to employ 250 men. We couldn’t do that.

WEIZSACKER: How many people were working on V 1 and V 2?

DIEBNER: Thousands worked on that.

HEISENBERG: We wouldn’t have had the moral courage to recommend to the Government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up.

WEIZSACKER: I believe the reason we didn’t do it was because all the physicists didn’t want to do it, on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded.

HAHN: I don’t believe that but I am thankful we didn’t succeed.

HARTECK: Considering the figures involved I think it must have been mass-spectrographs. If they had had some other good method they wouldn’t have needed to spend so much. One wouldn’t have needed so many men.

WIRTZ: Assuming it was the CLUSIUS method they would never have been able to do anything with gas at high temperatures.

HARTECK: When one thinks how long it took for us to get the nickel separating tube [—] I believe it took nine months.

KORSHING: It was never done with spectrographs.

HEISENBERG: I must say I think your theory is right and that it is spectrographs.

WIRTZ: I am prepared to bet that it isn’t.

HEISENBERG: What would one want 60,000 men for?

KORSHING: You try and vaporise one ton of uranium.

HARTECK: You only need ten men for that. I was amazed at what I saw at I. G. [Farben?-ed.]

HEISENBERG: It is possible that the war will be over tomorrow.

HARTECK: The following day we will go home.

KORSHING: We will never go home again.

HARTECK: If we had worked on an even larger scale we would have been killed by the ‘Secret Service’. Let’s be glad that we are still alive. Let us celebrate this evening in that spirit.

DIEBNER: Professor GERLACH would be an Obergruppenfuhrer and would be sitting in Luxembourg as a war criminal.

KORSHING: If one hasn’t got the courage, it is better to give up straightaway.

GERLACH: Don’t always make such aggressive remarks.

KORSHING: The Americans could do it better than we could, that’s clear.

(GERLACH leaves the room.)

HEISENBERG: The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we were not 100% anxious to do it, on the other hand we were so little trusted by the state that even if we had wanted to do it it would not have been easy to get it through.

DIEBNER: Because the official people were only interested in immediate results. They didn’t want to work on a long-term policy as America did.

WEIZSACKER: Even if we had got everything that we wanted, it is by no means certain whether we would have got as far as the Americans and the English have now. It is not a question that we were very nearly as far as they were but it is a fact that we were all convinced that the thing could not be completed during this war.

HEISENBERG: Well, that’s not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making an uranium engine but I never thought that we would make a bomb and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb. I must admit that.

WEIZSACKER: If you had wanted to make a bomb we would probably have concentrated more on the Spartan of isotopes and less on heavy water.

(HAHN leaves the room.)

WEIZSACKER: If we had started this business soon enough we could have got somewhere. If they were able to complete it in the summer of 1945, we might have had the luck to complete it in the winter 1944/45.

WIRTZ: The result would have been that we would have obliterated LONDON but would still not have conquered the world, and then they would have dropped them on us.

WEIZSACKER: I don’t think we ought to make excuses now because we did not succeed. If we had put the same energy into it as the Americans and wanted it as they did, it is quite certain that we would not have succeeded as they would have smashed up the factories.

DIEBNER: Of course they were watching us all the time.

WEIZSACKER: One can say it might have been a much greater tragedy for the world if Germany had done the uranium bomb. Just imagine, if we had destroyed LONDON with uranium bombs it would not have ended the war, and when the war did end, it is still doubtful whether it would have been a good thing.

WIRTZ: We hadn’t got enough uranium.

WEIZSACKER: We would have had to equip long distance aircraft with uranium engines to carry out airborne landings in the CONGO or NORTH WEST CANADA. We would have had to have held these areas by military force and produce the stuff from mines. That would have been impossible.

HARTECK: The uranium content in the stone at the radium mines near GASTEIN was said to be so great that the question of price does not come into it.

BAGGE: There must be enormous quantities of uranium in UPPER SILESIA. Mining experts have told me that.

DIEBNER: Those are quite small quantities.

HARTECK: If they have done it with mass-spectrographs, we cannot be blamed. We couldn’t do that. But if they have done it through a trick, that would annoy me.

HEISENBERG: I think we ought to avoid squabbling amongst ourselves concerning a lost cause. In addition, we must not make things too difficult for HAHN.

HARTECK: We have probably considered a lot of things which the others cannot do and could use.

WEIZSACKER: It is a frightful position for Hahn. He really did do it.

HEISENBERG: Yes. (Pause) About a year ago, I heard from SEGNER (?) [sic] from the Foreign Office that the Americans had threatened to drop a uranium bomb on Dresden if we didn’t surrender soon. At that time I was asked whether I thought it possible, and, with complete conviction, I replied: ‘No’.

WIRTZ: I think it characteristic that the Germans made the discovery and didn’t use it, whereas the Americans have used it. I must say I didn’t think the Americans would dare to use it.

4. HAHN and LAUE discussed the situation together. HAHN described the news as a tremendous achievement without parallel in history and LAUE expressed the hope of speedy release from detention in the light of these new events.

5. When GERLACH left the room he went straight to his bedroom where he was heard to be sobbing. VON LAUE and HARTECK went up to see him and tried to comfort him. He appeared to consider himself in the position of a defeated General, the only alternative open to whom is to shoot himself. Fortunately he had no weapon and he was eventually sufficiently calmed by his colleagues. In the course of conversation with VON LAUE and HARTECK, he made the following remarks: -

GERLACH: When I took this thing over, I talked it over with HEISENBERG and HAHN, and I said to my wife: “The war is lost and the result will be that as soon as the enemy enter the country I shall be arrested and taken away”. I only did it because I said to myself, this is a German affair and we must see that German physics are [obscured by UK “Declassified” stamp] …. moment thought of a bomb but I said to myself: “If HAHN has made this discovery, let us at least be the first to make use of it”. When we get back to Germany we will have a dreadful time. We will be looked upon as the ones who have sabotaged everything. We won’t remain alive long there. You can be certain that there are many people in Germany who say that it is our fault. Please leave me alone.

6. A little later, HAHN went up to comfort GERLACH when the following conversation ensued: -

HAHN: Are you upset because we did not make the uranium bomb? I thank God on my bended knees that we did not make an uranium bomb. Or are you depressed because the Americans could do it better than we could?

GERLACH: Yes.

HAHN: Surely you are not in favour of such an inhuman weapon as this uranium bomb.

GERLACH: No. We never worked on the bomb. I didn’t believe that it would go so quickly. But I did think that we should do everything to make the sources of energy and exploit the possibilities for the future. When the first result, that the concentration was very increased with the cube method, appeared, I spoke to SPEER’s right hand man, as SPEER was not available at the time, and Oberst GEIST first, and later SAUCKEL at WEIMAR asked me: “What do you want to do with these things?”, I replied: “In my opinion the politician who is in possession of such an engine can achieve anything he wants”. About ten days or a fortnight before the final capitulation, GEIST replied: “Unfortunately we have not got such a politician”.

HAHN: I am thankful that we were not the first to drop the uranium bomb.

GERLACH: You cannot prevent its development. I was afraid to think of the bomb, but I did think of it as a thing of the future, and that the man who could threaten the use of the bomb would be able to achieve anything. That is exactly what I told GEIST, SAUCKEL and MURR. HEISENBERG was there at STUTTGART at the time.

……

7. HAHN and HEISENBERG discussed the matter alone together. HAHN explained to HEISENBERG that he was himself very upset about the whole thing. He said he could not really understand why GERLACH had taken it so badly. HEISENBERG said he could understand it because GERLACH was the only one of them who had really wanted at German victory, because although he realised the crimes of the Nazis and disapproved of them, he could not get away from the fact that he was working for GERMANY. HAHN replied that he too loved his country and that, strange as it might appear, it was for this reason that he had hoped for her defeat. HEISENBERG went on to say that he thought the possession of the uranium bomb would strengthen the position of the Americans vis-‡-vis the Russians. They continued to discuss the same theme as before that they had never wanted to work on a bomb and had been pleased when it was decided to concentrate everything on the engine. HEISENBERG stated that the people in Germany might say that they should have forced the authorities to put the necessary means at their disposal and to release 100,000 men in order to make the bomb and he feels himself that had they been in the same moral position as the Americans and had said to themselves that nothing mattered except that HITLER should win the war, they might have succeeded, whereas in fact they did not want him to win. HAHN admitted however that he had never thought that a German defeat would produce such terrible tragedy for his country. They then went on to discuss the feelings of the British and American scientists who had perfected the bomb and HEISENBERG said he felt it was a different matter in their case as they considered HITLER a criminal. They both hoped that the new discovery would in the long run be a benefit to mankind. HEISENBERG went on to speculate on the uses to which AMERICA would put the new discovery and wondered whether they would use it to obtain control of RUSSIA or wait until STALIN had copied it. They went on to wonder how many bombs existed.

These few pages surely should do little more than encourage an interested reader to seek out the complete transcripts. They are raw material. They are essential reading; they are almost thrilling, in a faintly horrifying way. Bit by bit, in the symposia, the scholarly and popular books, the stream of papers, the long discussions public and private, the historical picture is gradually being drawn, even in such detail as to cause the picture to blur.

Because of the controversy Frayn’s play has excited, a series of drafts of a letter written in 1957 by Niels Bohr to Werner Heisenberg have now been published.[9] It seems that Bohr took stern issue with Heisenberg’s stated memory of their meeting in September 1941. Bohr never sent the letter, if indeed he wrote a final draft. Upon his death, in 1962, the drafts were sealed in his archive, not to be made public until fifty years later. Now, the Bohr Archive, under the direction of Finn Asrud and with the co-operation of the Bohr family, has released the seven drafts for public reading. When this development was announced – with some fanfare – in the New York Times,[10] it brought a series of critical exchanges to the Letters page, including one from Heisenberg’s son, Jochen Heisenberg, a physicist living in this country, who wrote: “I am disturbed by the article’s suggestive tone. One example: labeling Heisenberg ‘the leader of Hitler’s atomic bomb program’ suggests his sympathy for the Nazis and that there was indeed such a bomb program. Neither one of those implications is true, not before the Niels Bohr letters nor after.”[11]

Much of the controversy depends on the words one uses to describe what happened. Scientists look at the documents, the transcripts, and follow the calculations. As I read it, they seem to agree that Heisenberg miscalculated the critical mass and that his unwillingness to go on with a bomb-building program came from his belief that the German scientists could  not succeed before the war ended, for lack of resources. As for his supposed moral reservations, opinion varies, often hotly. Similarly among historians of science: they take other positions, often strongly opposed to each other; the historian Gerald Holton, for instance, hold that there was a German atomic-bomb program. Journalists like Powers tend to take a more essayist or psychological approach, making inferences and suppositions to build their theses. Powers continues to defend his position, that Heisenberg’s was a principled refusal to build the bomb, although his case is weakened if not undermined by the fact that he wrote his book before the Farm Hall transcripts were declassified. Jochen Heisenberg, a physicist, continues to deny that there was a program to build a bomb.

This difference in use of the language and kind of knowledge employed begs the question all over again: How does science enter the artistic imagination?

For myself, I do note several things to think more about. One is Hahn’s appalled question, “Surely you are not in favour of such an inhuman weapon as this uranium bomb?” He, a chemist, was the co-discoverer of fission, and expressed moral horror at the knowledge of possibility that came from his discovery. Yet he and his colleagues were German, although not Nazi, scientists. When they  talked about hundreds, and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of workers in German factories and research areas, they meant slave workers. When they talked about “Aryans” they meant that their colleagues the Jewish scientists had fled or been expelled from Germany. Those scientists went to America, as did Bohr, where they worked on the Manhattan Project. They – and Bohr, and Fermi, who escaped from Fascist Italy, and their American and British colleagues – were the scientists whose invention, we should remember, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and terrible long-term wounds. They had enough resources to complete the task they had thought was necessary, because they believed the Germans too were building the bomb. They worked against Hitler; for many of them, that must have been justification enough.

In the last panel of the Smithsonian symposium, devoted to “Copenhagen” as a dramatic construction, Elizabeth Ireland McCann, the producer who brought the play to New York, was asked why it had received such strong attention in there, rather than in London. She guessed, Because we don’t often get to see a theater of ideas rather than mediocre entertainment, and are hungry for it. We are interested in history, particularly history we don’t know. And we are still uneasy as citizens about the role our country has played in the development and use of the atomic bomb.

Targets

History has its own fascination, as does the great pleasure of listening to learned people such as the physicist and Nobel laureate Jerome I.Friedman, of MIT, speak on physics “from the Bohr atom to Quarks,” or the astonishingly young Danish physicist Lene Vesergaard Hau describe with great excitement and justified pride her truly marvelous experiments in stopping light! At the Smithsonian symposium the auditorium was packed; an over-flow room was set up with video coverage. That keen interest surely reveals how enduring is the historical interest and moral concern of many thoughtful people.

Sitting next to me was a woman from the Energy Department, co-sponsor of the symposium, herself a Russian specialist who works in “nuclear cities.” I mentioned that I was about to publish Corinna Hasofferett’s conversation with Svetlana Vasilievna Vasilenko, the Russian writer who grew up in Kasputin Iar, a closed military enclave that was the first Soviet missile test site. My new acquaintance knew well the history of the closed cities, whereas this history was new to me. Our conversation about nuclear cities has begun.

In how many minds, in how many places, in how many kinds of thoughtful endeavor, is this topic urgent again? What is the nature of this endless war, that it echoes down the corridors of memory; of so many minds across the archipelago of thinking people?

I now live part-time in Washington. I travel often to New York. Both cities are said to be targets of these unidentified terrorists by whom we are menaced. Should I feel this nameless dread with which we are meant to be afflicted? I am more afraid of fear, which is contagious and mind-numbing.

For these notes I set myself a task, to write about what has been on my mind in the weeks after the Pentagon’s “Nuclear Posture Review” was leaked to the media by this administration. We have now learned that the American President is thinking seriously about the possibility of using what the military calls, astonishingly, tactical nuclear weapons against any of seven countries listed in the review. How are we expected to live with this idea? Why does this possibility seem to me more blameworthy than that of attack by the (very real) enemies who threaten us? Are nuclear weapons even more horrifying than biological weapons? I don’t yet know the answer to my questions.

I am deeply uneasy, and I am not soothed by the Administration’s explanation that such a review is part of normal procedure. Why, then, did they leak it, rather than either keeping it internal or releasing it formally? Certainly one accepts that civilian and military strategists must consider every weapon – yet, even biological weapons? – in its arsenal; particularly now, when Americans cannot deny that we in the Western nations have genuine enemies willing to kill civilians because they/we are “infidels.” Even so, is it truly imaginable that an American force would use – again – a nuclear weapon? The President and his cohort believe intensely that they have the right to govern; to govern by their own rules; and they are remaking terribly important rules by which this nation is governed. Their expansion of executive and legal powers, without clear recourse; their unwillingness to share information, necessary to our democracy; and their determination to involve this nation in a long, formless “war” – it looks like real war but has not been formally declared by Congress – for which they are unwilling to make an accounting: this is a watershed in our history. The Republicans since Nixon have not been shy about circumventing the Constitution; their arrogation of power continues and, if not opposed, will, I fear, become unalterable. In that case, we Americans will no longer know ourselves as the people we were before the presidential election of 2000. Perhaps this is already true.

(First of two parts)

—KM

Reading:

ATOMIC BOMB SCIENTISTS’ MEMOIRS, 1939-1945. Ed. Joseph J. Ermenc. (Westport, Conn.: Meckler

Corp., 1989)

Bohr Archive

“Copenhagen Interpretation: Science and History on Stage.” Smithsonian symposium program

Michael Frayn, “Copenhagen Revisited,” New York Review of Books, March 28, 2002

James Glanz, “New Twist on Physicist’s Role in Nazi Bomb,” New York Times, Feb. 7, 2002, and Letters,

 New York Times, subsq.

GOYA: The Disasters of War. Selected Prints from the Collection of the Arthur Ross Foundation. (New

 York: The Spanish Institute, November 17,1984-January 6, 1985)

HITLER’S URANIUM CLUB: THE SECRET RECORDINGS AT FARM HALL. Intr. David Cassidy;

notes and essay Jeremy Bernstein. (New York: Copernicus Books, 2001)

Gerald Holton, “Notes on Comparing the Documents of Heisenberg and Bohr Concerning Their Encounter

in 1941,” distributed at the Smithsonian symposium, March 2, 2002. Letter, “‘Copenhagen’: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, April 11, 2002

Jonothan Logan, “The Critical Mass,” The American Scientist, May-June 1996. Letter, “‘Copenhagen’: An

Exchange,” New York Review of Books, April 11, 2002

Christina Hofferett, “Svetlana Vasilievna Vasilenko,” Archipelago, Vol 6, No. 1 Spring 2002

OPERATION EPSILON: THE FARM HALL TRANSCRIPTS. Intr. Thomas Frank. (University of California

Press,1993)

Thomas Powers, HEISENBERG’S WAR, The Secret History of the German Bomb. (New York: Knopf,

1993) “What Bohr Remembered,” New York Review of Books, March 28, 2002. Letter, “‘Copenhagen’: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, April 11, 2002

Lajos Zilahy, A CENTURY IN SCARLET. (Great Britain: Prion Books, 2000)

Previous Endnotes:

The Bear, Vol. 5 No. 4

Sasha Choi Goes Home, Vol. 5, No. 3

Sasha Choi in America, Vol. 5, No. 1

A Local Habitation and A Name, Vol. 5, No. 1

The Blank Page, Vol. 4, No. 4

The Poem of the Grand Inquisitor, Vol. 4, No. 3

On the Marionette Theater, Vol. 4, Nos. 1/2

The Double, Vol. 3, No. 4

Folly, Love, St. Augustine, Vol. 3, No. 3

On Memory, Vol. 3, No. 2

Passion, Vol. 3, No. 1

A Flea, Vol. 2, No. 4

On Love, Vol. 2, No. 3

Fantastic Design, with Nooses, Vol. 2, No. 1

Kundera’s Music Teacher, Vol. 1, No. 4

The Devil’s Dictionary; Economics for Poets, Vol. 1, No. 3

Hecuba in New York; Déformation Professionnelle, Vol. 1, No. 2

Art, Capitalist Relations, and Publishing on the Web, Vol. 1, No. 1

next page