Word: heisenberg
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...when U.S. scientific intelligence teams dashed into Germany in the final days of the war in Europe, they found only small experimental reactors incapable of even a self-sustaining chain reaction. Heisenberg had been working on them all right, but with little money or organization and on a part-time basis. Compared with the Manhattan Project, there was no German bomb program...
...Nazi leaders seem to have had no idea what they should have been doing in the nuclear field and paid scant attention to what others were working on. The U.S. actually had the facts about the desultory German effort but were worried that they were a smoke screen. Heisenberg, a Nobel laureate already famous for his work in quantum mechanics, was drafted for the weapons program in September 1939. But serious work halted in June 1942 when Heisenberg told Albert Speer, Hitler's war-production czar, that an atom bomb could not be produced fast enough to affect the outcome...
Though he said he was "not 100% anxious" to provide Hitler with a bomb, Heisenberg never claimed he blocked the program out of moral compunctions. This book asserts he did: "He killed it," Powers writes. It is a line of argument that has always upset Manhattan Project scientists because it suggests that Germans who worked for the Nazis struck a superior moral stance. Readers need not agree with Powers. He provides plenty of evidence and argument on all sides of the issue...
...Heisenberg, who headed the Max Planck Institute after the war and remained active until his death in 1976, may have given his own answer on the day he learned of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In a remark picked up by a hidden British microphone, he said he and his team had not had the "moral courage" to ask for the thousands of workers and huge resources that would have been necessary. The price of failure would have been high for all of them...
Powers tracks the elaborate and unceasing efforts of the American project directors to find out what was going on in Heisenberg's laboratories in Berlin and Leipzig. The great strength of his book is his ability to present precisely what the German team was doing and contrast it with the baseless but understandable American fears...