How Germany never managed to build the bomb

It was a coincidence and an educative one. As the political fires raged around the India-US nuclear deal, I happened to catch a film called Copenhagen on TV, about a meeting in 1941 between two of the greatest physicists of the 20th century: the Danish Niels Bohr, father of quantum theory, and his protégé, the German Werner Heisenberg, who discovered the Uncertainty Principle, backbone of quantum mechanics. No one knows for sure what the two men spoke about during their post-dinner walk, yet the conversation possibly changed history. All that is known is that they parted angrily. Heisenberg, the original wunderkind (Nobel laureate at the age of 31), went back to Berlin, where he was heading the German nuclear bomb mission, and soon after the meeting, Bohr fled Denmark to join the Manhattan Project, which would create the world’s first nuclear bomb.

I must here clarify that this column has no relevance to the current nuclear deal impasse. I am for India-US nuclear cooperation, but the lives of Bohr and Heisenberg have nothing to do with it.

Copenhagen postulates that during that fateful walk, Heisenberg asked Bohr to join the German effort, which Bohr curtly refused. Heisenberg then tried to explain to Bohr — indirectly — that he had no intention of making the bomb, because he had made a moral decision that the bomb would be Evil. But Bohr misunderstood, and abused the German race, which Heisenberg would not stand. He was a profoundly patriotic German. The two never clarified what actually happened, but this is a plausible explanation. Germany never managed to build the bomb, even though the effort was led by Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, the man who discovered nuclear fission, which is what the bomb is about.

My dear friend Ravi Vyas, who mentioned Copenhagen to me years ago, has been kind enough to send me an article from the New York Review of Books on the “Farm Hall transcripts”. After Germany fell, all top German nuclear scientists were interned for about six months in a country estate called Farm Hall near Cambridge. They were treated graciously, and they never knew that all their conversations were being recorded. The transcripts are now in the public domain. How the Germans reacted to the news of the Hiroshima bombing is fascinating.

The British officer in charge of Farm Hall writes: “Their first reaction... was an expression of horror that we (the Allied forces) should have used this invention for destruction.” Hahn “felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which made the bomb possible. He told me that he had contemplated suicide when he realised the terrible potentialities of the discovery... With the help of considerable alcoholic stimulant, he was calmed down, and we went down to dinner.”

... contd.

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