Slashdot Mirror
Regarding the WWII Meeting of Bohr & Heisenberg
HarlanC writes: "The NY Times has an article (registration required) discussing the famous meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941. The conclusion is that Heisenberg revealed to Bohr the existance of a Nazi atomic program in an attempt to obtain assistance from Bohr. The Times of London article is here (long registration process required)" The play "Copenhagen" was based on a fictionalization of this meeting, it was much better than "Proof", I assure you.
"Alsos", by Samuel Goudsmit, (ISBN: 1563964155) describes the top-secret team that followed Allied forces into Europe to find out how close the Germans were to having nuclear weapons.
I strongly recommend the book Heisenberg's War by Thomas Powers. It provides a much deeper background into this meeting (and the entire German nuclear arms program) and is quite readable. Here's a bn.com link to the book if you want to avoid amazon.
heh heh heh.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Otherwise, the world would be facing a unified Europe, ruled by faceless bureaucrats headquartered in a continental European country, and America would be the only country that could go toe to toe with them.
Of course, once they figured out they were in Copenhagen, it was impossible to determine what went on. Doesn't make for a very thrilling movie, either.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
How are they certain Heisenberg was in Copenhagen AND he was there in 1941 at the same time?
Leave it at that.
That's a horrible idea. It's just as important to learn from the almost-mistakes and close calls of history as it is from the mistakes and successes.
What are the odds it wasn't a druggie, but a SIGN LANGUAGE INTERPRETER?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
It doesn't matter what happened and if someone decided to sabotage the bomb in German or not.
The Reich would not have been able to build an atomic bomb because they couldn't have set up the infrastructure without it being bombed to support the atomic bomb creation.
In Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" he goes into alot of detail about how much industrial infrastructure was needed to make the Uranium and Plutonium for the 3 American atomic bombs.
And don't forget the amount of money and metals it took to make the equipment. The United States built 2 cities of 50,000 people each, one at Oak Ridge and the other at Hanford.
Germany didn't have the manpower, materials or bomb-proof infrastructure during the war to produce an atomic bomb.
I managed to get a transcript of the letter from Bohr to Heisenberg, here it is:
Dear Werner,
Ever since your last visit, I haven't seen my cat, Fluffy. You haven't seen her, have you?
Sincerely,
Neils
For my engineering/chemistry professor last year i needed to write a Biographyon this man. My biography is pretty in depth and a worthy read if anyone is interested. It can be found @ http://artlu.net/essays/wernerbio.html Enjoy, AJ
-------
artlu.net
Of course. The Americans shouldn't have developed nuclear weapons even though they had the technology to do so, and their rivals had active weapons programs. Then, once available, they shouldn't have used them, even though their use was not outside the norms of war at the time, and even though they brought the war to a prompt end. America should destroy its remaining weapons, and then there will be rainbows and bread and roses, and all of humanity can gather around the campfire to smoke pot and sing folk songs.
War is hell, period. But it's a fact of life. Get over it.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb,
Thomas Powers provides lots of interesting detail, citations, background. From reading various sources, I see Heisenberg as badly misjudged and misrepresented. I think he was basically a good guy in a very bad situation and, integrating all the available material, it feels like he basically did the Right Thing, and played a key role in keeping the German nuclear program working in directions other than building a bomb.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Shortly after WWII, Werner Heisenberg was held captive by the British government at Farm Hall along with several other top German scientists. The British secretly taped the conversations at Farm Hall, and these tapes were declassified in 1992. (It took prolonged and strenuous efforts by several historians, and members of the Royal Society to persuade the government.) Heisenberg was at Farm Hall when the US dropped the bombs on Japan in August of 1945. When he heard the news, he was astonished that the US had separated sufficient U235 from U238 to obtain critical mass. He was also surprised that the US also made a plutonium based bomb. (The methods used to extract U238 and Pu were made by a chemist working under Enrico Fermi in Chicago. Without the knowledge provided by that chemist, the US would not have had either bomb for perhaps another year.) Since Heisenberg was surprised, we may assume he simply did not know how to get enough weapons grade uranium. Nor could he make enough and separate enough plutonium for a bomb. He had enough uranium to make a small nuclear reactor. Which he did create in a cave in southern Germany. The US army found the cave and removed the materials. The assessment by US scientists was that the reactor was never put to use. Apparently war efforts hindered Heisenberg's attempt to get all the resources he needed. And, towards the end of the war, the effort was abandoned. It is likely that Heisenberg knew he could not make a bomb and persuaded the Nazi government to allow him to make a reactor instead. Whether he had only technical reasons for the change in policy is unknown. He may have had moral reasons for preventing the Nazis from getting a bomb, but there is no public source of information to support that hypothesis. In 1941, he may have wanted to make a bomb, or knew that the Nazis wanted him to make one. In either case, I think he went to Copenhagen to ask/tell/warn Bohr about the Nazi plans. During that evening, he and Neils Bohr went for a walk. Bohr's wife, Margerethe, reported that they both left the house that evening in a good mood. The walk in the dark was short, only a few minutes. Neils Bohr came back quickly, and in a foul mood. Heisenberg followed him back inside. They did not talk about much later that evening. Later in the war, Bohr's family secretly got into a boat at night and left for England, and then America. Heisenberg stayed in England for some time, as a "guest" of the British government. In 1947, he was allowed to visit Bohr, and his British handler went with him. During that meeting, he and Bohr agreed that "we both came to feel that it would be better to stop disturbing the spirits of the past." (From Heisenberg's memoirs.) Bohr and Heisenberg continued their friendship after 1947, and until Bohr died in 1962. Bohr kept that friendship even though most Allied scientists shunned Heisenberg.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Many people feel that saving approximately 1 million American lives was more important at that time than a percentage of the populations (both military and civilian) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You should also consider how many Japanese would have been killed without the surrender (nuclear weapons are not needed for massive destruction...see Dresden for instance).
Do you seriously think the Japanese would have hesitated to kill any number of American civilians if they had the means? It was a vicious war, and both sides were concerned about victory (and survival) above all else.
Perhaps he should have been frightened, period. Perhaps the whole lot of them should have been clockmakers, like Albert said.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps we should praise the brilliant inventors of nuclear weapons, since those weapons have apparently halted the practice of "world war". Peace is a good thing, right?
Regardless, not pursuing the a-bomb wasn't an option...someone would have. Most would agree that the US has been a model citizen as a nuclear superpower. At least we have tremendous safeguards surrounding the use of such devices.
Of course, that part goes unmentioned in the NYT article, because that might call into question just who really *did* use those horrible weapons, and it might have to be stated that it wasn't everyone's favorite boogeyman of the 20th century. We can't have people thinking about the realities of the past; no, interesting what-ifs make for much better propaganda.
Sounds to me like you've absorbed quite a bit of propaganda yourself... ;-)
Personally, I'm worried that nuclear stockpiles will be cut to the point where world war becomes 'thinkable' again.
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
He was an OSS operative.
There's nothing that specifically indicates this, of course. But look at the human site of the game. Here was a man who worshipped Einstein, who had many other associations with Jewish scientists, and who himself narrowly escaped academic blacklisting when the Nazis took power. And somehow he ends up as scientific chief of a major German weapons project!
There's actually a well-documented meeting with an OSS agent in Geneva. Official histories state that Heisenberg was there to give a talk, and the agent, Moe Berg, was there to determine the progress of the German bomb effort and (at his own discretion!) terminate Heisenberg. Supposedly Heisenberg told Berg that the project wasn't going well, and Berg took his word for it and let him live. Not, in my opinion, a very plausible story.
OK, no evidence at all for this theory. But it's worth thinking about.
Additionally, at the time they had most of the resources of continental Europe at their disposal if they wished.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Having seen Copenhagen and Proof, I feel that the superior drama was most assuredly "Proof." However, from a techno-geek's standpoint, I can see why the submitter might enjoy Copenhagen more.
'hagen was definitely more cerebral & technical, and used physics as a metophor for ethical struggles.
Proof was a much more personal play about a woman's relationship with her father (and indeed, the world around her.) The math is simply part of the plot, not interwoven with the primary thrust. I saw both original casts, and both were phenominal, but the interaction between Mary Louise Parker and the cast was one of the most thrilling dramatic performances I've ever witnessed. She was incredible.
As a coincidence, the young male lead in Proof was played by Ben Shenkman, who was the young rabinical guy in "Pi."
While I loved Copenhagen, and I love Robert Westenburg (one of the male leads) I felt Proof was the far superior play.
besides your valid points, I will also point out that the Japanese Army had few equals when it came to butchering civilians... In just a few weeks in Nanking, they killed more chinese civilians (through beheadings, torture, and rape of children followed by murder) than both the allied atomic blasts killed, and their total toll on civilian populations around the world is much, MUCH higher than any reported allied caused civilian death tolls (depending on how you view russia, and whose "ally" they really were).
In any case, huge numbers of civilians were killed around the world (FAR outstripping battlefield casualties), in very large part due to German and Japanese policy. It was not a very honorable war, on any side, but the stakes became too high to expect much compassion.
IMO, it is a wonder that Japan is not a charred cinder annexation of China, as retribution for WWII. (They should be sending thanks to Taiwan every day, for helping to divert national aggression.)
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
You're making it sound like there was months between these events. Hiroshima was August 6th, the Soviet Union declared war on the 8th, the Nagasaki bombing was on the 9th, and the surrender was on the 14th. That's a total of 8 days from start to finish. I think that's an amazingly fast response time. The Japanese military & leadership had to evalulate the damage, try and work out the responses they could do, all in an enviroment where all normal communications had been cut off.
Um, NYT doesn't charge. The fact that Salon does isn't really relevant in this context. I have never seen someone post the content of a Salon article here.
/. explicitely declaims responsibility for what individuals post.
Also note that
this is getting old and so are you
blog
The Sunday Times and The Times have always been separate publications. Nowadays Rupert Murdoch owns them both, and has been combining some of their operations. But that's a recent development.
The Sunday Times registration process has an amusing flaw. Tried to tell it I was born in 1830. Not acceptable. 1890? Nope. 1899? Get serious. I meant to try "1900" next, but typed "2000" by mistake. That was acceptable! Apparently 1-year-olds read the Sunday Times, but not centenarians!
no, this was not sign language, and that man was seriously on some type of stimulant/drugs.
As for the on stage seating....it's part of the props for the play....there is audience seating behind the actors. So he was most certainly not on stage for any type of sign language reason.
Also, the person he was with got pretty pissed at him cuz he was acting like such an idiot, that they left before the end of the play.
So enjoy your ill-gotten pc-thug karma! (politically correct, that is)....
Despite the after-the-fact romancing (of a guy who would very probably have delivered the Nazis an atomic weapon if he could have) there's good reason to believe that the only thing preventing Heisenberg from developing the bomb were his own miscalculations. Not the least of which was his determination that the amount of fissionable material required to create a critical mass was much greater than was actually required (there's a fascinating theory vs. engineering story behind that, but you can probably look it up.) This calculation led him to believe that any atomic weapon would be enormous and hard to deliver.
After the war Heisenberg was taken to a detention center in the UK where he was surveilled with listening devices. When the he learned that the US had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, he was stunned, and (IIRC) initially remarked to his co-detainees that we must have found a way to deliver a colossally huge bomb or something of the sort.
Some have theorized that Heisenberg was both extremely clever and extremely loyal to the German people-- so much so that he deliberately foiled the Nazi research effort, then faked disbelief in order to mislead the Allied eavesdroppers. Personally, I think he just blew it.
But you're right. Judge for yourself.
The problem is in Reading vs. Performance.
I have a degree in Math and have done many years of semi-professional acting (i.e. I get paid, but not so much that I don't need my CS job to live)
Copenhagen was a better written play, but I pity and respect the man who tries to perform it. Long difficult monologues where the audience will often want to stand up and say, "Could you repeat that, I only half got it." But when you're reading it and can appreciate the nuance. Copenhagen was by far a superior piece of writing in the history, the math, and especially in the interpersonal relationship between the two men. First as teacher-student, then nearly to father-son, then suddenly to bitter enemies. It is practically shakespere-ian in how dynamic their relationship was and those aspects were very strongly and humanely played out.
To talk about Proof, it would be easy to produce, easy to get an audience, and easy to make people feel smart because they were watching a play that had math in it. The actors have plenty of opportunity to showboat and draw an audience in, but fundamentally, the play is about smart men who are too pig-headed to trust a girl. (*gasp!* it's a GIRL! Not a big shocker any more) As soon as the play uses up its 90 minutes, the boyfriend pulls the stick from his bum and then everything is fine. He shouldn't have mistrusted her in the first place, but then the play would be about 15 minutes long.
To sum up: Proof is fun to watch chickies who do math and physicist who drink heavily. Copenhagen is an excellent play to expand your scope and see a truly powerful piece of writing.
From what I understand USSR entering the Pacific war had more effect on the United States than it did on Japan. The US saw that Japan wouldn't surrender unconditionally and with the USSR in the theatre they'd want Japan split like Germany. Since Japan's demands for the emperor staying in power as a figure head weren't that unreasonable to the US, the US caved and let japan surrender conditionally to the US and the US only before Russia could really get involved. Else we'd have a North Japan and South Japan. Because the war ended when it did we only Korea and Vietnam split and Russia got the Kuril Islands. So it wasn't as bad.
Yeah. Dave Rhodes wrote Make Atomic Bombs Fast!.
Sorry.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
At the time the bomb was dropped there were two amphibious operations planned: OLYMPIC, the invasion of southern Japan in late 1945, and CORONET, the invasion of Kyushu, Spring 1946. Preparatory carrier air strikes were already being done.
Allied casualties (US/UK/Commonwealth) were projected in the tens of thousands. Japanese civilians were being instructed in the use of satchel charges and sharpened bamboo sticks for use in repelling the invaders.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"Isn't it interesting that Bohr was frightened that the Nazis would have such a weapon only to see it used to butcher Japanese civilians five years later by "the good guys"?"
What's more horrible, the US building and using an atomic bomb, or school children being trained to defend Tojo's Japan with bamboo spears? Doesn't the fact that it required not one but TWO nuclear attacks before the Japanese decided to surrender give you pause about possible justifications?
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
1.) The US submarine force had what was essentially a total blockade of resource-poor Japan since May. They face destruction by slow starvation. No surrender.
2.) The first bomb in early August (after three months of the previously-mentioned blockade). Three days go by with no surrender.
3.) The second bomb. Still no surrender.
4.) The Soviet Union delcares war on Japan and starts a big land-grab in Asia. They now face a potential invation from two fronts (one of which all too willing to feed an army into the meat-grinder that the Japanese are trying to turn their islands into)
So what's the next step? For the Japanese army, the next step was a coup, an effort to depose Hirohito's government and prevent him from airing a surrender announcement. After all, how many more bombs could the US drop? Can't be more than one or two...
There is a misconception about Japan that still persists to this day (as can be seen in your opinion) that they have Western ideals and a Western way of thinking. This is not true today and it sure as hell wasn't true in the 1940's. Just because defeat is inevitible isn't necesarily reason for them to surrender.
American Scientist had a really good article on this back in 1996.
Heisenberg had estimated that a ton of U-235 was needed to reach critical mass, which was, of course, a huge overestimate. This is the reasoning he gave in a conversation with Otto Hahn immediately after being surprised by the news of Hiroshima (the conversation was secretly taped by the Allies):
"If I have pure 235 each neutron will immediately beget two children and then there must be a chain reaction which goes very quickly. Then you can reckon as follows. One neutron always makes two others in pure 235. That is to say that in order to make 10^24 neutrons I need 80 reactions one after the other. Therefore I need 80 collisions and the mean free path is about 6 centimetres. In order to make 80 collisions, I must have a lump of a radius of about 54 centimetres and that would be about a ton."
Can you see the mistake in his logic?