The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [74]
Emmy lived with her daughter, Birgit, who had mousy-coloured hair like her mother but was taller and more buxom. Tommy recalled: ‘Birgit looked good, she was pretty enough, but she was bigger in stature than her mother, and she wasn’t so self-assured. Even though she was two inches taller than me, Birgit was the sort of girl all men want to look after. Her mother was the confident one. Emmy was smaller, more fascinating and charming, and she had all the delicacies of a woman.’
But Tommy had the feeling that Birgit liked him every bit as much as Emmy did. This, he reflected, was a situation which called for careful management if he was going to benefit in the way he thought possible without offending either hostess.
Tommy was still finding his feet and assessing the qualities of his neighbors when a meeting took place in Copenhagen that was later regarded as one of the most dramatic events of the scientific war. In many ways it came too soon for Sneum, although even if he had already been at full intelligence-gathering capacity, it is doubtful that he would have got wind of it.
Professor Niels Bohr, who became known as the father of theoretical nuclear physics and would go on to win a Nobel Prize, had once regarded a young German doctor called Werner Heisenberg as a soulmate. Heisenberg had become Bohr’s protégé, and the older man, a Danish Jew, had taught his favorite Aryan student everything he knew. And that was the problem. For what both physicists knew in the autumn of 1941 was enough to threaten the very survival of mankind. Each man realized that science was dangerously close, in theory at least, to constructing a weapon so lethal that its first owner would rule the world. Thanks to uranium and the destructive curiosity of the world’s most brilliant minds, the spectre of the atom-bomb already loomed. Bohr, fifty-five and stubbornly anti-Nazi, knew that if Hitler ever laid his hands on such a bomb the free world would become a memory. Heisenberg, at the age of thirty-nine, was a patriotic German troubled by ethics. He was therefore torn between nationalistic duty and his sense of what was right for the world.
Anxious to discuss the moral and scientific complexities of his research, the younger man attended a scientific conference in Copenhagen in the third week of September 1941. Bohr remained conspicuously absent from the series of theoretical lectures and discussions in order to ensure that he remained above any possible accusations of collaboration. But the two men met discreetly one evening, and walked through the brewery district of Copenhagen, choosing a route around the famous Carlsberg House of Honour. As they nervously paced the lanes, looking behind them at regular intervals, both physicists suspected the Abwehr might be tailing them.
There was no time to waste so Heisenberg decided to voice what had been troubling him: ‘Do you think it is right to work on the uranium problem at the moment, Niels? There could be grave consequences for the technique of war.’
The older man demurred and Heisenberg thought his professor might be hiding something about the progress made by the Allies in that area. But in fact the terrified Dane was wondering whether his closest friend and protégé had agreed to help Hitler try to win that race. By way of reply, Bohr eventually asked the allimportant question: ‘Werner, do you really think such a bomb is possible?’
‘It would take a terrific technical effort,’ answered Heisenberg.
This was hardly the answer to put Bohr’s exceptional mind to rest. Heisenberg seemed to be telling him that the bomb was now a very real, if difficult, possibility. For all Bohr knew, the Germans might even be trying to make it already, though he considered success unlikely. A strange psychological stand-off developed between the two men. The meeting had already gone too far for Bohr’s liking,