Heisenberg's War: The Secret History Of The German Bomb

"As a science student, you grow up with these names. These guys have their fingerprints all over quantum theory and relativity: Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer. You’ve got all of these people making tremendous contributions to the structure of physics. Although it’s moved on since their day, we owe them a tremendous vote of thanks for the work that they did in getting us to where we are today. It always struck me as quite extraordinary that these same people then found themselves embroiled in a project to build the most horrendous weapons that mankind has ever seen. I had read some books about the development of the atomic bomb—the Manhattan Project—and had some understanding of a parallel project that Heisenberg led in Germany during the war to build, it turned out, not a bomb—they were trying to build a nuclear reactor. They didn’t succeed. Thomas Powers’ book, Heisenberg’s War , is a somewhat flagrant…I was going to say misinterpretation of the historical record, but I don’t think that’s wholly fair. Powers argues that Heisenberg’s motive for a lot of what he did, working on that project, was to delay it, so that they would never be in a position where they’d have weapons that Hitler could use. I don’t agree with that thesis. I don’t think that that’s true. But reading the book really got me interested in the parallels between these different projects. And the story. With the book that I eventually wrote, what I tried to do was almost to tell it like a work of fiction, to try and keep it dramatic and pacey. It starts with the discovery of nuclear fission at the end of 1938—look at that timing, war broke out in September 1939—all the way through to the Soviet Union detonating its first atomic bomb in August 1949. So it’s effectively ten years. You’ve got spies like Klaus Fuchs. There was an American spy called Theodore Hall also working at the heart of the Manhattan Project. Again, I was interested not only in the relationship with the German project but also with the Soviet project that followed. And I was always fascinated to ask myself the question, ‘Whatever happened to all the espionage materials that were gathered by Klaus Fuchs that were transmitted to Moscow?’ With the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the end of the 1980s, it started to become possible to get access to Soviet historical archives. And the Soviet spies themselves were quite keen to tell the story of their own role in helping to build Soviet atomic weapons. And, obviously, then you had the beginnings of the arms race that certainly clouded my childhood when I was growing up. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in ’63. So my book is (a) about physics which is obviously a passion, but (b) it’s about these people that had their sticky fingers all over quantum physics and particle physics also getting involved in building this weapon. I was just fascinated by the nature of the story. You’ve got commando raids on the heavy water plant, you’ve got all sorts of Boy’s Own stories to tell. What I wanted to do, really, was to put them together. I honestly think I was able to do that. I got some quite nice reviews. And, certainly, if you were to look at it in the cold hard light of day and declare it as a work of fiction, you’d be criticised for not making it realistic. But it happened. Hitler’s views on the Jews was probably an immovable object. A lot of the Jewish physicists—Einstein, for example—went to America in 1933 and never went back. A lot of the physicists that found themselves working on the Manhattan Project were Jews that had emigrated from Germany at the time of Hitler’s rise, when he became chancellor, five or six years before he declared war. So, to a certain extent, yes. But there were still plenty of smart cookies left in Germany. What I learned from Thomas Powers’ book was how quickly the idea of nuclear power and nuclear weapons were brought to the attention of Germany army ordnance, and to Hitler himself, right at the beginning of the war. This was a project that wasn’t an afterthought. I was just fascinated by Heisenberg’s role and the role of other German physicists who were involved in the Uranverein or ‘Uranium Club’. All of the physicists like Heisenberg who were still in Germany—Heisenberg was no Nazi but he was very much sympathetic to the idea of being German and wanting to do the best for Germany—saw the whole project as an opportunity to do physics. You can have an interesting debate about the naivety of that view, given the nature of Hitler and what he was capable of, with hindsight. Perhaps, it was not quite so obvious in 1939/1940. What was not known to me was that towards the end of the war, as Germany was capitulating, there was an Allied project called Alsos, involving a Dutch physicist called Samuel Goudsmit. He went into Germany with a team to round up the theoretical physicists that had been involved in Germany’s project. They were all arrested and brought to England and interned in a place called Farm Hall in Cambridgeshire. They were treated very well—they had food and access to music but no access to news. The whole house was wired—it was bugged—so that the MI6 could listen in to the physicists’ conversations. The one piece of news they were allowed to listen to was reports of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the Allies in August 1945. They had already dismissed the idea that a bomb was possible in the timescale of World War II . They had failed to build a nuclear reactor. It turns out that, in the Manhattan Project, it was necessary to build a nuclear reactor in order to make plutonium that was an ingredient of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. These were just fascinating events. You look around at some of the physicists today, can you imagine them going through experiences like that? I just find it extraordinary. After the war, eventually they got back to Germany and they got on with their academic careers. They couldn’t believe it. And then there was a scramble to try and understand how the Allies had done it. What had they missed? Where had they gone wrong? How had they failed? And, what’s really interesting is that out of those conversations was born what is known, in this particular instance, as the ‘Lesart’. Effectively, it’s the argument that, ‘actually, we were smart enough, we could have done this, but we didn’t want to.’ I don’t believe so."