In Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (609 pages. Knopf. $27.50) Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Thomas Powers argues that Heisenberg knew enough to build a bomb, that his scruples were genuine and that he almost perversely understated his own case. Heisenberg, who died in 1976, claimed only that he had been lucky to avoid a moral dilemma. “I was able to say in all honesty that, yes, we could build an atomic bomb,” he recalled in 1968, “but … only … if we had at our disposal the best researchers in Germany and a large part of the industrial resources of our country.” American scientists, Powers points out, were in just the same situation. Unlike them-and unlike Germany’s own rocket scientists-Heisenberg stressed to military authorities only difficulty, not urgency. If Heisenberg had wanted a green light, Powers argues, he would only have had to ask. “But Heisenberg did not simply withhold himself, stand aside, let the project die,” Powers continues. “He killed it.”
At a crucial 1942 meeting, Albert Speer, Hitler’s military procurer, offered to build cyclotrons; Heisenberg said Germans lacked experience using them. Speer offered funds; Heisenberg proposed a discouragingly modest budget. The Nobel laureate even failed to reassure Speer that a runaway chain reaction wouldn’t fry the planet. The German bomb died then and there. Heisenberg didn’t explain basic bomb physics to Walther Gerlach, head of his own program; yet to non-German scientists he was treasonably talkative-“the single most important source of true information about the German bomb program picked up by the Allies, although it was not always believed.” In fact, the Allies considered assassinating Heisenberg. OSS agent Moe Berg, linguist, polymath, ex-Boston Red Sox catcher and all-around eccentric, stalked him at a lecture in Zurich, pistol in pocket. Luckily for Heisenberg, he discussed nothing more sinister than S-matrix theory.
Powers needed sterner editing: he never tells what S-matrix theory is, and his explanations of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s revolutionary and disquieting “uncertainty principle” (we can know a particle’s momentum or location, but not both) are sketchy at best; he repeats stories and quotations. Such annoyances, though, matter less than the case Powers builds-and his anger at his closemouthed hero for not taking better care of his posthumous reputation. But if Heisenberg really did deny Hitler the bomb, why wouldn’t he say so? A story his wife told suggests he suffered from-or gloried in-a stiff-necked sense of pride. When he was 6, a teacher hit his hand with a ruler for some misattributed infraction. The teacher later apologized, but Heisenberg wouldn’t accept his apology and never looked him in the face again.
