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Eavesdropping on Hitler’s Reich
not very easy for the politicians to allow German uranium specialists
to be at large.
On the first Saturday in September 1945 Professor P. M. S. Blakkett
came for dinner with Heisenberg; both men were Nobel Prize
winners; Blackett was a communist who had contributed brilliantly
to the problems of operational research in the anti U-Boat
tactics, convoy warfare, and strategic bombing campaigns. They
agreed that international scientists should campaign for absolute
openness about the atomic bomb, whatever the objections of the
politicians. Blackett told him the Americans were about to publish
a very detailed technical report on the Manhattan Project.
Heisenberg, driven by injured pride, bluffed shamelessly to the
British professor:
From the things I have seen in the papers [said Heisenberg] and
in the White Paper which [Sir Charles] Darwin gave us [on August
13], I think that I can imagine all the details of what they have done.
The physics of it is, as a matter of fact, very simple; it is an industrial
problem. It would never have been possible for Germany at all to do
anything on that scale. In some way, I am glad that it has not been
possible because it would have been terrible for us all. We started on
a very small scale. We were in a kind of Maschine, but not a bomb,
the idea being first of all that we knew that there was no chance to
do anything on that scale and we knew that, in order to separate the
isotopes, we would have to do it on that scale. Then we thought we
could, with much smaller industrial effort, actually build a small
Maschine which gives us energy.
BLACKETT: Which is a sensible thing. That is what we want to
do. . .
HEISENBERG: Actually, I think, we have almost succeeded in doing
it. However all the plants producing Heavy Water were destroyed by
the R.A.F. and that was why it was not completed. Even so, from the
scientific side, one knows all the things. The Russians certainly also
know it – Kapitza and Landau.
BLACKETT: Frankly, there aren’t any secrets, there are some tricks
of the trade. You know the recipe for making an omelette, but you can’t
necessarily cook a nice one. . . Tell me about yourself.
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