From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 06:19:11 MDT
There are several interesting links about the Bohr-Heisenberg
relationship and the German bomb project.
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-7/p28.html
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-7/p34.html
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-7/p38.html
http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-4/p14.html
http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-4/p92.html
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p11.htm
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/SRC/copenhagen.html
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/6/2/5
"The Oakridge Institute for Continuing Learning at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
presented Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, which re-enacts Werner Heisenberg's
visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. It also raises the issue of whether
Heisenberg made a moral decision to steer the German nuclear project away from
bombs, or used the technical difficulties he encountered as justification to
abandon the bomb, and therefore avoid the necessity of addressing the moral
decision.
Wolf Häfele, a leading figure in German nuclear energy, visited me in Oak Ridge
shortly after Copenhagen was presented here. I suggested that, having been a
student of Carl von Weizsäcker, he might ask his former adviser about the visit.
Weizsäcker had accompanied Heisenberg on his 1941 lecture tour of Denmark, but
was not present at the Heisenberg-Bohr meeting. Here is an excerpt from Häfele's
reply:
I read the play and studied other available documents. Then I contacted Carl
Friedrich von Weizsäcker. This is my description of the 1941 Copenhagen meeting
as I understand it: Heisenberg did not want to build the bomb. You must realize
the difficulties and dangers imposed by the ever-present Gestapo. A way of
deflecting suspicion was to point to the extreme difficulties of the uranium-235
separation. Heisenberg was also plagued by the thought that the Americans and
the British could develop the bomb. He strongly believed in the ethics of the
brotherhood of physicists across borders and races. Von Weizsäcker threw in the
idea of contacting Niels Bohr, and managed to organize a scientific event in
Copenhagen with the help of the German Foreign Office . . . Heisenberg wanted to
convey [to Bohr] the message that the German scientists would not develop the
bomb, and that the others should not develop it either . . . Heisenberg and Bohr
met. Afterward, Heisenberg came to von Weizsäcker in despair: Bohr had only
heard and understood the hint that Heisenberg knew in principle how to build the
bomb. The real point of Heisenberg's message did not come through at all."
Alvin M. Weinberg
Oak Ridge Associated Universities
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
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