Copenhagen (6 page)

Heisenberg
  But, Bohr, where will that lead? What will be the consequences if we manage to fail?

Bohr
  What can I possibly tell you that you can’t tell yourself?

Heisenberg
  There was a report in a Stockholm paper that the Americans are working on an atomic bomb.

Bohr
  Ah. Now it comes, now it comes. Now I understand everything. You think I have contacts with the Americans?

Heisenberg
  You may. It’s just conceivable. If anyone in Occupied Europe does it will be you.

Bohr
  So you
do
want to know about the Allied nuclear programme.

Heisenberg
  I simply want to know if there is one. Some hint. Some clue. I’ve just betrayed my country and risked my life to warn you of the German programme …

Bohr
  And now I’m to return the compliment?

Heisenberg
  Bohr, I have to know! I’m the one who has to decide! If the Allies are building a bomb, what am I choosing for my country? You said it would be easy to imagine that one might have less love for one’s country if it’s small and defenceless. Yes, and it would be another easy mistake to make, to think that one loved one’s country less because it happened to be in the wrong. Germany is where I was born. Germany is where I became what I am. Germany is all the faces of my childhood, all the hands that picked me up when I fell, all the voices that encouraged me and set me on my way, all the hearts that speak to my heart. Germany is my widowed mother and my impossible brother. Germany is my wife. Germany is our children. I have to know what I’m deciding for them! Is it another defeat? Another nightmare like the nightmare I grew up with? Bohr, my childhood in Munich came to an end in anarchy and civil war. Are more children going to starve, as we did? Are they going to have to spend winter nights as I did when I was a schoolboy, crawling on my hands and knees through the enemy lines, creeping out into the country under cover of darkness in the snow to find food for my family? Are they going to sit up all night, as I did at the age of seventeen, guarding some terrified prisoner, talking to him and talking to him through the small hours, because he’s going to be executed in the morning?

Bohr
  But, my dear Heisenberg, there’s nothing I can tell you. I’ve no idea whether there’s an Allied nuclear programme.

Heisenberg
  It’s just getting under way even as you and I are talking. And maybe I’m choosing something worse even than defeat. Because the bomb they’re building is to
be used on us. On the evening of Hiroshima Oppenheimer said it was his one regret. That they hadn’t produced the bomb in time to use on Germany.

Bohr
  He tormented himself afterwards.

Heisenberg
  Afterwards, yes. At least we tormented ourselves a little beforehand. Did a single one of them stop to think, even for one brief moment, about what they were doing? Did Oppenheimer? Did Fermi, or Teller, or Szilard? Did Einstein, when he wrote to Roosevelt in 1939 and urged him to finance research on the bomb? Did you, when you escaped from Copenhagen two years later, and went to Los Alamos?

Bohr
  My dear, good Heisenberg, we weren’t supplying the bomb to Hitler!

Heisenberg
  You weren’t dropping it on Hitler, either. You were dropping it on anyone who was in reach. On old men and women in the street, on mothers and their children. And if you’d produced it in time they would have been my fellow-countrymen. My wife. My children. That was the intention. Yes?

Bohr
  That was the intention.

Heisenberg
  You never had the slightest conception of what happens when bombs are dropped on cities. Even conventional bombs. None of you ever experienced it. Not a single one of you. I walked back from the centre of Berlin to the suburbs one night, after one of the big raids. No transport moving, of course. The whole city on fire. Even the puddles in the streets are burning. They’re puddles of molten phosphorus. It gets on your shoes like some kind of incandescent dog-muck—I have to keep scraping it off—as if the streets have been fouled by the hounds of hell. It would have made you laugh—my shoes keep bursting into flame. All around me, I suppose, there are people trapped, people in various stages of burning to death. And all I can think is, How will I ever get hold of another pair of shoes in times like these?

Bohr
  You know why Allied scientists worked on the bomb.

Heisenberg
  Of course. Fear.

Bohr
  The same fear that was consuming you. Because they were afraid that
you
were working on it.

Heisenberg
  But, Bohr, you could have told them!

Bohr
  Told them what?

Heisenberg
  What I told you in 1941! That the choice is in our hands! In mine—in Oppenheimer’s! That if I can tell them the simple truth when they ask me, the simple discouraging truth, so can he!

Bohr
  This is what you want from me? Not to tell you what the Americans are doing but to stop them?

Heisenberg
  To tell them that we can stop it together.

Bohr
  I had no contact with the Americans!

Heisenberg
  You did with the British.

Bohr
  Only later.

Heisenberg
  The Gestapo intercepted the message you sent them about our meeting.

Margrethe
  And passed it to you?

Heisenberg
  Why not? They’d begun to trust me. This is what gave me the possibility of remaining in control of events.

Bohr
  Not to criticise, Heisenberg, but if this is your plan in coming to Copenhagen, it’s … what can I say? It’s most interesting.

Heisenberg
  It’s not a plan. It’s a hope. Not even a hope. A microscopically fine thread of possibility. A wild improbability. Worth trying, though, Bohr! Worth trying, surely! But already you’re too angry to understand what I’m saying.

Margrethe
  No—why he’s angry is because he is beginning to understand! The Germans drive out most of their best physicists because they’re Jews. America and Britain give them sanctuary. Now it turns out that this might offer the Allies a hope of salvation. And at once you come howling to Niels begging him to persuade them to give it up.

Bohr
  Margrethe, my love, perhaps we should try to express ourselves a little more temperately.

Margrethe
  But the gall of it! The sheer, breathtaking gall of it!

Bohr
  Bold skiing, I have to say.

Heisenberg
  But, Bohr, we’re not skiing now! We’re not playing table-tennis! We’re not juggling with cap-pistols and non-existent cards! I refused to believe it, when I first heard the news of Hiroshima. I thought that it was just one of the strange dreams we were living in at the time. They’d got stranger and stranger, God knows, as Germany fell into ruins in those last months of the war. But by then we were living in the strangest of them all. The ruins had suddenly vanished—just the way things do in dreams—and all at once we’re in a stately home in the 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 officials. I have to keep people’s hopes alive!

Margrethe
  Otherwise they’ll send for the other one.

Heisenberg
  Diebner. Very possibly.

Margrethe
  There’s always a Diebner at hand ready to take over our crimes.

Heisenberg
  Diebner might manage to get a little further than me.

Bohr
  Diebner?

Heisenberg
  Might. Just possibly might.

Bohr
  He hasn’t a quarter of your ability!

Heisenberg
  Not a tenth of it. But he has ten times the eagerness to do it. It might be a very different story if it’s Diebner who puts the case at our meeting with Albert Speer, instead of me.

Margrethe
  The famous meeting with Speer.

Heisenberg
  But this is when it counts. This is the real moment of decision. It’s June 1942. Nine months after my trip to Copenhagen. All research cancelled by Hitler unless it produces immediate results—and Speer is the sole arbiter of what will qualify. Now, we’ve just got the first sign that our reactor’s going to work. Our first increase in neutrons. Not much—thirteen per cent—but it’s a start.

Bohr
  June 1942? You’re slightly ahead of Fermi in Chicago.

Heisenberg
  Only we don’t know that. But the RAF have begun terror-bombing. They’ve obliterated half of Lübeck, and the whole centre of Rostock and Cologne. We’re desperate for new weapons to strike back with. If ever there’s a moment to make our case, this is it.

Margrethe
  You don’t ask him for the funding to continue?

Heisenberg
  To continue with the reactor? Of course I do. But I ask for so little that he doesn’t take the programme seriously.

Margrethe
  Do you tell him the reactor will produce plutonium?

Heisenberg
  I don’t tell him the reactor will produce plutonium. Not Speer, no. I don’t tell him the reactor will produce plutonium.

Bohr
  A striking omission, I have to admit.

Heisenberg
  And what happens? It works! He gives us barely enough money to keep the reactor programme ticking over. And that is the end of the German atomic bomb. That is the end of it.