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By Root 170 0

middle of the English countryside. We’ve been rounded up by the British—the whole team, everyone who worked on atomic research—and we’ve been spirited away. To Farm Hall, in Huntingdonshire, in the water-meadows of the River Ouse. Our families in Germany are starving, and there are we sitting down each evening to an excellent formal dinner with our charming host, the British officer in charge of us. It’s like a pre-war house-party—one of those house-parties in a play, that’s cut off from any contact with the outside world, where you know the guests have all been invited for some secret sinister purpose. No one knows we’re there—no one in England, no one in Germany, not even our families. But the war’s over. What’s happening? Perhaps, as in a play, we’re going to be quietly murdered, one by one. In the meanwhile it’s all delightfully civilised. I entertain the party with Beethoven piano sonatas. Major Rittner, our hospitable gaoler, reads Dickens to us, to improve our English .… Did these things really happen to me …? We wait for the point of it all to be revealed to us. Then one evening it is. And it’s even more grotesque than the one we were fearing. It’s on the radio: you have actually done the deed that we were tormenting ourselves about. That’s why we’re there, dining with our gracious host, listening to our Dickens. We’ve been kept locked up to stop us discussing the subject with anyone until it’s too late. When Major Rittner tells us I simply refuse to believe it until I hear it with my own ears on the nine o’clock news. We’d no idea how far ahead you’d got. I can’t describe the effect it has on us. You play happily with your toy cap-pistol. Then someone else picks it up and pulls the trigger … and all at once there’s blood everywhere and people screaming, because it wasn’t a toy at all .… We sit up half the night, talking about it, trying to take it in. We’re all literally in shock.

Margrethe Because it had been done? Or because it wasn’t you who’d done it?

Heisenberg Both. Both. Otto Hahn wants to kill himself, because it was he who discovered fission, and he can see the blood on his hands. Gerlach, our old Nazi co-ordinator, also wants to die, because his hands are so shamefully clean. You’ve done it, though. You’ve built the bomb.

Bohr Yes.

Heisenberg And you’ve used it on a living target.

Bohr On a living target.

Margrethe You’re not suggesting that Niels did anything wrong in working at Los Alamos?

Heisenberg Of course not. Bohr has never done anything wrong.

Margrethe The decision had been taken long before Niels arrived. The bomb would have been built whether Niels had gone or not.

Bohr In any case, my part was very small.

Heisenberg Oppenheimer described you as the team’s father-confessor.

Bohr It seems to be my role in life.

Heisenberg He said you made a great contribution.

Bohr Spiritual, possibly. Not practical.

Heisenberg Fermi says it was you who worked out how to trigger the Nagasaki bomb.

Bohr I put forward an idea.

Margrethe You’re not implying that there’s anything that Niels needs to explain or defend?

Heisenberg No one has ever expected him to explain or defend anything. He’s a profoundly good man.

Bohr It’s not a question of goodness. I was spared the decision.

Heisenberg Yes, and I was not. So explaining and defending myself was how I spent the last thirty years of my life. When I went to America in 1949 a lot of physicists wouldn’t even shake my hand. Hands that had actually built the bomb wouldn’t touch mine.

Margrethe And let me tell you, if you think you’re making it any clearer to me now, you’re not.

Bohr Margrethe, I understand his feelings …

Margrethe I don’t. I’m as angry as you were before! It’s so easy to make you feel conscience-stricken. Why should he transfer his burden to you? Because what does he do after his great consultation with you? He goes back to Berlin and tells the Nazis that he can produce atomic bombs!

Heisenberg But what I stress is the difficulty of separating 235.

Margrethe You tell them about plutonium.

Heisenberg I tell some of the minor