From: Hubert Mania (humania@t-online.de)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 04:03:27 MDT
scerir wrote:
> Berlin was, of course, the target.
>
> Bohr was greatly troubled by the possibility of German atomic
> weapons (Heisenberg was, after all, his best "pupil").
On October 1, 1941 Heisenberg visited Bohr in Kopenhagen, which at that time was
occupied by German forces. Heisenbergs research teams in Leipzig and
Berlin weres the top nuclear fission teams in the world and their insights in nuclear
processes had progressed to a point where they knew that a nuclear bomb was technically
feasible. But Heisenberg shrinked from the gigantic expediture of such a plan.
His moral objections to build an atomic bomb for Hitler remained somewhat gloomy and
were never settled by historians in a satisfactory way. After the war Heisenberg himself
claimed he wanted to warn Bohr in October 1941 that he probably couldn`t reject a Nazi
atomic bomb project without taking the risk of being accused of high treason and
sentenced to death. At that time the German war machinery was at the peak of its power.
There are other interpretations that Heisenberg wanted to persuade Bohr that a Nazi
dominated world was the lesser evil compared to a world dicator Stalin. They say Bohr
got hysterical when Heisenberg carefully mentioned the possibility of a German atomic
bomb. Since this meeting in October 41 the friendship between them was disturbed.
In the post war era Heisenberg claimed that after his return to Germany he deliberately
delayed his nuclear fission research because he did not want to become guilty. But
anyway, between october 1941 and spring of 1942 the supreme army command
decided to rather focus on bomber planes and rockets instead of relying on the
"jewish physics" of Einstein's E=mc^2. So the time window of building an atomic bomb
closed itself with a ridiculously small bang. And in the summer of 42 Robert
Oppenheimer initiated the Manhattan Project.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:29 MST