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PARTISAN REVIEW
one in wartime being obliged
to
do his best for his own country." Yet
governments would have
to
come
to
the scientists
to
find out if there
was any hope of producing the weapons in time for them
to
be used in
the war. "We are the ones who will have
to
advise them to go ahead or
not," Heisenberg says.
Both men believed it would be extremely difficult practically to pro–
duce a bomb, therefore it would ha ve been possible for both of them to
tell their governments "the simple discouraging truth." Nine months
later, Heisenberg asked for so little money from Albert Speer to keep the
reactor program going that the Nazi high command did not take the
project seriously. Heisenberg claims that his strategy worked: "And that
is the end of the German atomic bomb."
It
is not, however, the end of questions about the visit in
1941.
Heisenberg'S reactor had almost reached a critical mass, and if he had
more time and more uranium, he tells Bohr proudly in the play, "it
would have been German physics that achieved the world's first self–
sustaining chain reaction." (Bohr points out, however, that it would
have killed Heisenberg'S team because the device had no control rods.)
His boast fits Margrethe's charge that he came to Copenhagen because
he wanted to show that he was important enough to have been given the
chance "to save the honor of German science." If he didn't tell Speer
that the reactor could produce plutonium (and therefore a bomb), it
was, she says, because he was afraid of what might happen
to
him if the
Nazis committed huge resources to a project that he could not bring to
fruition. Moreover, she has an even simpler explanation for his not
building a bomb: "You didn't understand the physics."
Bohr realizes in the play that Heisenberg had spent the war believing
that it would take a ton or more of plutonium to create a critical mass,
when actually it would take only kilograms, as the Allied project
proved. He had not done the essential calculation that would have kept
him from his error, and it bolstered his belief that the bomb could not
be made in time to be used in the war. Bohr speculates that if he had
asked him if he had made the calculation, instead of angrily ending their
talk, Heisenberg might have seen that he needed to make it and then
"suddenly a very different and very terrible new world begins to take
shape." Instead, Bohr reflects ruefully, he went on to Los Alamos "to
play my small but helpful part in the deaths of a hundred thousand peo–
ple." Perhaps, Heisenberg suggests in the play's last lines, the present
world was "preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in
Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined."
