Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [50]
The progress and regress of the war also shaped the German nuclear program. From 1939 until sometime in 1942, most in Germany were confident of victory. The Germans won virtually all the battles, in Europe and Africa, on land and sea. They had invaded the Soviet Union (where the gradual turning of the tide was either not yet fully perceptible or hotly denied) and attacked Great Britain with war planes. Much of the German population celebrated the Third Reich’s triumphs; Heisenberg was at worst resigned to them and more likely content, and he especially hoped for the destruction of communism in the East. If what the German military was doing seemed to be working, there was no need to pursue such chimerae as atomic bombs. More ordinary weapons would finish the job. Once the war seemed to turn against the Germans—with the Allied victory at El Alamein in October and November 1942, or more clearly the German surrender at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943—the argument concerning nuclear weapons, oddly, remained much the same: while other new weapons, such as V-i and V-2 rockets, might be within reach and increasingly necessary as the German military situation grew dire, atomic bombs were beyond German imaginings or budgets.
The deterioration of Germany’s military position was brought about in part by the increased ability of Allied bombers and commando teams to strike in German-held territory or inside Germany. High on British and American target lists were weapons research and manufacturing facilities, and prominent among these were sites of nuclear investigation. The British, Norwegians, and Americans attacked the mammoth heavy-water plant at Vemork, Norway, destroying a ton of heavy water through sabotage in February 1943, hitting it with bombers the following November, and finally sending a last shipment of heavy water destined for Germany to the bottom of a deep Norwegian lake on 20 February 1944. RAF attacks on Hamburg and Kiel during July 1943 forced the removal to Freiburg of an ultracentrifuge that was (slowly) enriching fissionable Uranium 235, and raids that November on Frankfurt destroyed the factory responsible for producing uranium metal. In February 1944 the RAF hit Berlin, not for the first time. The Americans had encouraged the attack, unabashedly seeking to kill Heisenberg and Hahn, who were known to work at the KWI. While the raid only broke the windows of the Physics Institute, it burned out the Institute of Chemistry, in which Hahn had been working on fission. The scientists present stayed safe in a bunker built for them by Speer, but the attack was so devastating that one scientist suspected it had been conducted using nuclear weapons and authorized the examination of bomb craters and debris with Geiger counters. Soon the labs were disassembled and moved south.28
The relocation, to Hechingen, Tailfingen, and Haigerloch in the southwest not far from Freiburg, offered only temporary respite from Allied harassment. Heisenberg set to work on a new reactor in a Haigerloch cave previously used for storing wine, but supplies of the uranium cubes needed for the machine were very limited; the pile fell well short of criticality. Meanwhile, the Americans, who remained fearful that German science would yet produce a nuclear weapon, took steps to locate and dismember the German program. General Leslie Groves, the man in charge of the American Manhattan Project, working with the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence