Copenhagen - Michael Frayn [40]
The idea that Heisenberg was inviting Bohr to work on the German bomb is on the face of it the least plausible out of all the possible interpretations that have been offered. It is completely at odds with what Weisskopf recalls Bohr as saying in 1948, and with what Bohr is on record as telling Chadwick at the time. In any case, the suggestion that Heisenberg thought he might be able to import someone half-Jewish into the most secret research programme in Nazi Germany is frankly preposterous.
So what is Sereny’s evidence for her account of the meeting? At this point the sense of vertigo returns, and one begins to have the feeling that one is in an Escher drawing, where the stairs up to the floor above somehow lead back to the floor one is already on, because the only reference she gives is … Powers, Heisenberg’s great champion, in Heisenberg’s War.
And it’s true—Powers does quote an opinion to this effect (and it’s the only possible source for it anywhere, so far as I know). He says he was told by Weizsäcker that some person or persons unnamed in Copenhagen, 44 years after the event, had told him that this is what Bohr had said he had believed Heisenberg’s intention to be. One might think that this is rather faint evidence. In any case, even if it really is what Bohr believed, it is of course not what Weizsäcker believed, or Powers either. They are reporting Bohr’s alleged belief as a possible misapprehension on his part which might have explained his anger. Indeed, Powers’s own reading of the situation is precisely the one that Sereny claims to be discredited by Speer’s remark.
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Goudsmit gradually modified his opinion, and his final judgment on Heisenberg, when he died in 1976, was a generous one which goes some way to expunging the dismissive tone of his book: ‘Heisenberg was a very great physicist, a deep thinker, a fine human being, and also a courageous person. He was one of the greatest physicists of our time, but he suffered severely under the unwarranted attacks by fanatical colleagues. In my opinion he must be considered to have been in some respects a victim of the Nazi regime.’
Robert Jungk, one of the few authors who have ever attempted to defend Heisenberg, modified his opinion in the opposite direction. In Brighter than a Thousand Suns, originally published in 1956, he suggested that the German physicists had managed to avoid building nuclear weapons for conscientious reasons, and quoted Heisenberg as saying that, ‘under a dictatorship active resistance can only be practised by those who pretend to collaborate with the regime. Anyone speaking out openly against the system thereby indubitably deprives himself of any chance of active resistance.’ But Jungk later changed his mind, and described the notion of passive resistance on the part of the German physicists as a ‘myth’. He had contributed to spreading it, he said, out of an ‘esteem for those impressive personalities which I have since realized to be out of place.’
For a really spirited and sustained defence Heisenberg had to wait until Powers published his book in 1993. It is a remarkable piece of work, journalistic in tone, but generous in its understanding and huge in its scope. A little too huge, perhaps, because Powers is unable to resist being sidetracked from the main narrative by the amazing byways that he perpetually finds opening off it. I recommend it particularly to other dramatists and screenwriters; there is material here for several more plays and films yet.
His central argument is that the Allied bomb programme succeeded because of the uninhibited eagerness of the scientists to do it, particularly of those exiles who had known Nazism at first hand, and who were desperate to pre-empt Hitler; while the German programme failed because of the underlying reluctance of scientists in Germany to arm Hitler with the bomb, however strong their patriotism, and however much they wanted to profit from the possibilities for research. ‘Zeal was needed,’ he says; ‘its absence was lethal, like a poison that leaves no trace.