Remora

Tom Powers made the case, years ago, that Heisenberg intentionally monkey-wrenched the Nazi Atom Bomb program. He could make this case because of the curious fact that the German atom bomb team had the resources to make much more progress towards the development of the bomb than they actually did. Richard Rhodes book on the hydrogen bomb, Dark Sun, shows that even the Soviet team was closing in on the bomb in the last years of the war. The Soviets, of course, had the advantages accrued from an espionage system that was delivering primo content about the Americans, yet the Soviet physicists got pretty far along on their own, too.

When Powers' book, Heisenberg's War, was published, it re-opened a debate about Heisenberg's role in the war. Powers thesis has been disputed for a while due to the release of transcripts showing what German physicists, interned in Farm Hall in England, said to each other when they heard the news about Hiroshima. Heisenberg said, "One can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942, after our meeting with Rust [the education minister] when we convinced him that we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done." There is also this interesting conversation between Heisenberg and Weisaecker:

"HEISENBERG: The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we were not 100% anxious to do it, on the other hand we were so little trusted by the state that even if we had wanted to do it, it would not have been easy to get it through.

DIEBNER: Because the officials were only interested in immediate results. They didn't want to work on a long-term policy as America did.

WEIZSAECKER: Even if we had gotten everything that we wanted, it is by no means certain whether we would have gotten as far as the Americans and English have now. There is no question that we were very nearly as far as they were, but it is a fact that we were all convinced that the thing could not have been completed during the war.

HEISENBERG: Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb. I must admit that.

What is at the bottom of a man's heart is seen by the Lord alone, as we know here at Limited Inc. And we also know there is no Lord, so it is seen by no-one -- an eminently Heisenbergian problem.

In any case, Heisenberg's enthusiasm has now been decisively clarified with the publication of a letter (subject to this report in the NYT) that Neils Bohr drafted (but never sent) to Heisenberg about a 1942 meeting between the two of them.

"Bohr, who died 40 years ago, said that under his beloved prot�g�, "everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons."

In particular, the documents describe a meeting that Heisenberg initiated between the two men in occupied Denmark in September 1941.

After the war, Heisenberg said he traveled to Copenhagen to share his qualms about nuclear weapons. But the papers, released by the Bohr family and posted on the Niels Bohr Web site, www.nba.nbi.dk, which is maintained by the Niels Bohr Archive, tell a different story."

Powers still claims that Bohr and Heisenberg were talking past each other. But the Farm Hall recording (made without the physicists being aware of it) seems to accord pretty well with Bohr's memory. Of course, Heisenberg wasn't a Nazi. He knew that the Nazi attack on "Jewish science" was utter nonsense. But he was a patriotic German. His stance was shared by much of the German high command, external and damning obedience while sustaining, in the inner exile at the bottom of the heart, his dissent.

Sounds like the way Limited Inc is living through the Bush era.