The year is 1942. Lieutenant Colonel Leslie
Groves of the United States Army Corps of Engineers sits across from the brilliant
theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, smoke bellowing from Oppenheimer’s
third cigarette in half an hour. Oppenheimer, his face a picture of pained
sincerity, tells Groves, “The Nazis no doubt have their own atomic bomb project, and Werner
Heisenberg, a phenomenal nuclear physicist, will lead it. If we don’t move fast, they’ll have
the bomb before us…We need to act right now.” At that moment, the die was cast. Oppenheimer’s
fate to become the “father of the atomic bomb” was sealed, but just how close were the
Nazis really to building that bomb? Did it really become a neck-and-neck race between
Oppenheimer and Heisenberg? And what were the Soviets and Japanese doing during this race?
Not everything was as it seemed. Today you’ll hear the bigger story, which was much more interesting
and, to be frank, much crazier than the Oppenheimer narrative we’ve heard so much about
lately. Oppenheimer was actually just one piece, albeit a big piece, in the vast jigsaw puzzle that
is the story of the creation of the atomic bomb. To understand the Nazis’ prerogatives, we need
to understand what was going on in the world, so we’ll start our story in London, UK,
where a Jewish Hungarian-German-American physicist named Leo Szilard is walking
down a road known as Southampton Row. He’s just moved to England. The main reason
for that is the extremely antisemitic Adolf Hitler has just become the Chancellor
of Germany. Get out while you can, Szilard has told other scientists.
The year is 1933. It’s September 12. Szilard is 35 years old, and he’s about
to have a moment of disturbing clarity. On this walk, he’s thinking about an article
he’s just read in The Times newspaper. It featured a speech given by Ernest Rutherford,
a pioneering New Zealand-born physicist who would later become known as “the father
of nuclear physics.” Rutherford is also now living in Britain, a country at the
center of the Golden Age of physics. The Times article was headlined, “Rutherford
Cools Atomic Energy Hope,” with the subheading, “Sees Moonshine in The Talk at Present of
Releasing Power in Matter.” By moonshine, he meant poppycock, bullcrap, not true. It was
not possible, he said, that humans could utilize atomic energy, meaning, use it for practical
matters, not yet, anyway. The article talked about scientists “smashing the atom,” where, said
the story, “incredible energy is concentrated.” Szilard keeps walking. He knows all of this,
of course. His mind hasn’t stopped working overtime since he read Albert Einstein’s 1905
paper, “Does The Inertia Of A Body Depend Upon Its Energy-Content?” Einstein proposed you
could turn energy into matter, just as you could turn matter into energy, unbelievable
amounts of energy. In the Times article, Rutherford said with the processes they have
now, you couldn’t get great power from matter. His exact words regarding recent experiments
with protons and a particle accelerator were: “It was a very poor and inefficient way of
producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation
of the atoms was talking moonshine.” Szilard then stops at some traffic lights
at Russell Square. His mind is on fire. Stars explode, cities burn. He imagines
a nuclear reaction producing neutrons. Neutrons had only just been discovered
by the British scientist James Chadwick, a man you’ll hear about again later in the show. Szilard sees the nuclear reaction producing
more neutrons, which then causes more nuclear reactions, and he wonders why this
would stop. It wouldn’t, he thinks. There would be a nuclear chain reaction.
He walks across the street, and halfway, he realizes something terrible. The huge
amount of energy could be turned into a weapon, a bomb like the world has never seen. It
would be an atomic bomb. This was a theory, of course, but he believed it could happen.
It wasn’t moonshine. Szilard patented his idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1936.
That’s a huge piece of this jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t until 1938 that another very
big breakthrough came. Nuclear fission was discovered. You take the nucleus
of a uranium atom, into which a neutron collides to create two smaller nuclei. This
process creates massive amounts of power, but what’s important is more neutrons are created
in the process, and just as Szilard had theorized, the reactions could become self-sustained
and create a huge amount of energy. Notably, some of these scientists worked
at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science in Germany. Einstein
had worked there in the past. During the war, vile human experimentation on Jewish
people was part of the work there. Germany was at the center of the scientific
world, and under Hitler, that meant danger. You also need to know that when the Nazis
took control of Germany, many scientists hit the road. Some were blacklisted, such
as Fritz Strassmann, who was one of the four people who developed nuclear fission. He once
said he’d rather die than know his work had helped Hitler make an atomic bomb. Not every
German scientist was of that kind of opinion. Two of the other scientists
were Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. Hahn, sometimes called the “father of nuclear
fission,” didn’t jump ship out of Germany like many others. In fact, in 1933, long before the
full extent of Hitler’s violence was understood, Hahn told a Canadian newspaper, “In any case,
for the youth, for the nation of the future, Hitler is a hero.” So, the father of nuclear
fission was a Hitler fan. Don’t forget that. Lise Meitner, who was a Jewish Austrian-Swedish
woman, got out of Austria when Hitler annexed the country. She ended up in Denmark, much in
part thanks to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, another important person where the
development of the atomic bomb is concerned. He told the Allies in 1941
that his former student, Heisenberg, was helping the Nazis to make the bomb. Bohr had
to flee Denmark when the Nazis occupied it. He was stuffed on a British bomber named the Mosquito
in the middle of the night and taken to England. There was also trouble for
the Austrian-born physicist Otto Robert Frisch, the last of the four
that developed nuclear fission and a man who later figured out how to detonate the atomic
bomb while working on the Manhattan Project. A Jew, Frisch moved to England and later
secured himself British citizenship. As you can already see, this was a strange time in human
history. Scientists did a lot of moving about, sometimes not by choice. Many went to Britain,
where Robert Oppenheimer would be for a few years. But today’s show is not all about Oppie;
it’s about a lot of brilliant scientists, including a French trio who proved once and
for all that you could create great power from a nuclear chain reaction in their paper
in Nature on April 7, 1939. Every reaction, they said, would generate three, possibly four
neutrons, which would create more fissions. BOOM! They filed three patents, including patent No.
445686, “Perfectionnement aux charges explosives,” which was the first patent in history
for an atomic bomb. That same year, Szilard had written to the Italian-American
physicist Enrico Fermi and told him about the possibility of the atomic bomb,
to which Fermi replied, “Nuts!” Fermi became known as the “architect of
the nuclear age.” In 1942, he created the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. So, there were all these great scientists and
lots and lots of theories, and now there was the very realistic possibility of making a bomb
with power that could potentially end worlds. But the bomb was still a long way off from becoming
a physical thing you could drop on a city and incinerate a good chunk of the population.
It’s one thing writing about a theoretically possible time machine, it’s another thing sending
volunteers back in time to fight a tyrannosaurus rex. Still, now they knew the bomb was possible.
That year Heisenberg secured funding from the Nazis for the development of a nuclear reactor.
Heisenberg, who you’ll hear about a lot today, was never going to leave Germany. That fact
alone caused the world outside Germany to panic, not just the scientific world, either.
On May 5, 1940, a journalist named William Lawrence wrote in the New York Times that the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics had pretty much been turned into a uranium research center.
Lawrence said “five or ten pounds” of uranium would be able to create “vast power” enough to
“drive an ocean liner.” He explained the Nazis had an atom smasher (particle accelerator),
the greatest discovery in modern science, and that the Nazis could somehow use this great
power in the war. He said one pound of uranium-235 (“$25,000 a gram”) could create the
explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT, leaving a “300-foot crater” in its wake.
Much to the consternation of readers, he added that “every German scientist” had
been ordered to drop all other research and “devote themselves to this work alone.” It
sounded like the Nazis might become the first country to create a power source to end all wars.
Was that true? It can’t be ignored in this show today. It played a big part in why the Americans
soon got very busy with their own atomic bomb. But it must be said that Lawrence was not the
first or the last mainstream journalist in the US who was a government-sponsored propagandist.
A few years after he wrote that first atomic piece for the Times, he told the world via
the same newspaper that the horrific and torturous radiation sickness in Japan from
those atomic bombs wasn’t actually real; he knew it was, and he was being paid to say
that by the War Department. This is important. Lawrence parroted what the U.S. Army, through the
Manhattan Project’s Leslie Groves, told Congress, that dying from radiation was actually “a
very pleasant way to die.” They said just a few hundred had died, not mentioning they were
almost all civilians. The truth got out, but the American military said it was Japanese propaganda.
So, when Lawrence told Americans years before that the Nazis were flying in their atomic bomb
research, was he exaggerating? According to some, he was a military mouthpiece, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning master of misinformation working for one of the US’s most well-respected papers. Was
he lying so the US Army would receive more funding for atomic research? Or was he telling the truth?
A Soviet professor at Yale University read the article, and word got back to the Soviet Union.
Stalin, who’d murdered a good chunk of his best scientists in his paranoid purges, took notice.
The Soviets needed that explosive power, and they, too, had some of the best scientists in the world,
despite the recent diminishment of their numbers. The race was on. Pity Stalin had murdered good
scientists, but the Nazis weren’t much better. In the 1930s, when Hitler spread his noxious
wings over Germany, the Nazis were applying their unique take on affirmative action in
the German workplace. Politics got in the way of work. It wasn’t always the best people who
landed the best jobs, it was the Aryan people. Hitler certainly didn’t back Jewish scientists,
even though they were often the best scientists. Back then, an SS Journal said Heisenberg was
a “White Jew” and called him the “Ossietzky of physics.” Carl von Ossietzky, who would win
the 1935 Nobel Prize for Peace, was charged with treason for writing about Germany’s secret
rearmament plan. He was imprisoned and later sent to a concentration camp. You couldn’t
get much worse than him in the Nazis’ eyes, so the brilliant Heisenberg, Germany’s best
bet for an atomic bomb, was not a popular man. SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered an
investigation of his political beliefs, which went on for an entire year. At the SS headquarters,
Heisenberg wasn’t beaten up, but when he saw a sign on the wall of his interrogation room that
read “breath calmly and deeply,” he knew the room had seen some horrors. This would affect his whole
outlook on the Nazis, but he still turned down the opportunity to work at Columbia in the US when
he had the chance before the war. Heisenberg could breathe a sigh of relief when a directive
from Himmler stated, “We cannot afford to lose or kill this man.” He was too important to science.
Szilard was by then totally convinced that with enough fissile material, the bomb could be made.
He saw that explosion he’d imagined back in London as a reality. He’d also been shuck up by the fact
that the German nuclear physicist Siegfried Flügge had just published two articles on exploiting
nuclear energy. Flügge would soon be part of what he and other German physicists called the “Uranium
Club,” where they would discuss the Uranmaschine (uranium machine, aka, a nuclear reactor). The
Germans, it seemed to Szilard, were on the ball, maybe even ahead. Szilard talked this over with
some other physicists and came to the conclusion that he absolutely had to warn the US President.
That’s the reason Szilard went to the Noble Prize winner Albert Einstein, who was then working at
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He asked Einstein, who was about as big a name
as you could get in this Golden Age of physics, to write to President Franklin Roosevelt a message
dictated by him. Einstein agreed. The missive he put his name to has gone down in history. It’s
now referred to as the Einstein-Szilard Letter. On August 2, 1939, he wrote to “F.D. Roosevelt,
President of the United States, White House” from “Albert Einstein, Old Grove Rd., Nassau Point,
Peconic, Long Island.” The President of the USA, of course, doesn’t open fan mail when he
gets up in the morning. The scientists had enlisted the help of the economist
Alexander Sachs, who had access to FDR. In the opening paragraph, he told FDR
that “the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of
energy in the immediate future.” Einstein (Szilard) said “quick action” was
necessary after what the French team had just done in France and what Szilard and Fermi had
done in the US, which was cause a nuclear chain reaction “in a large mass of uranium by which
vast amounts of power” could be generated. He then used the kind of language that might cause
a frisson of fission-related fear in a President: “This phenomenon would also lead to
the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that
extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this
type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together
with some of the surrounding territory.” He did admit, though, that such a device might
be too heavy for a plane to carry. Oh, how quickly they’d change their minds on that part.
He advised the President to bolster the budgets of scientists in this area because Germany was
repeating the work the Americans were doing in their labs at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute.
Einstein said large amounts of uranium was needed, and the kicker, he explained, was that
large amounts could be found in the Belgian Congo - now accessible by Hitler.
We should add that this had also come as a shock to Einstein. Earlier in July,
Szilard and the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, Eugene Wigner, had
driven Wigner’s car out to Long Island. Wigner, who’d also once worked at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, was Jewish, although he hadn’t gone to America because
of the Nazis. He was there before their rise to power when he’d landed a cushy job at
Princeton. He knew now that he’d not be going back to Germany, and he also knew
that the Nazis had at their disposal some excellent scientists who were probably
working on some kind of atomic bomb. The story goes that when they told Einstein
about how such a bomb could be made, he looked at them startled and said, “Daran
habe ich gar nicht gedacht" (“I did not even think about that.”) Of course, they all
spoke German. In fact, their original draft of the letter was full of spelling mistakes.
Before he got the letter, the President had been told about the possibility of a massive bomb
with the power to take out large parts of cities, but his scientific experts had assured
him that it was unlikely it could be made. It wasn’t until October that
FDR replied to Einstein. To say he was a busy man would be a massive
understatement. The Nazis had invaded Poland in September. The world was about to change. FDR told
Einstein in the reply that he would form a board and investigate the matter of this super-powerful
bomb. Einstein would years later call signing that letter the "one great mistake of my life."
Then the British added to the urgency when a team in England working under the Australian
physicist Mark Oliphant at the University of Birmingham wrote a paper outlining the
first calculations regarding the size of the critical mass of fissile material needed to
make the atomic bomb. Poop just got more real. This became known as the Frisch–Peierls
memorandum, named after the scientists that had come up with the calculations, Otto
Frisch and Rudolf Peierls. As you know, Frisch was a Jew and elected to become British. Peierls,
who’d once worked under Heisenberg, did the same. Like FDR’s American advisors, British
scientists hadn’t initially thought the bomb was possible anytime soon, but that changed
after Frisch and Peierls did some calculations and came to the conclusion that, actually,
you could make a “super bomb” that could produce “a temperature comparable to that
in the interior of the sun” and, with it, “destroy life in a wide area.” And the worst
part, the bomb would not have to be huge. It could weigh as little as a few kilos, so
dropping it from a plane could certainly happen. 1 to 10 kilograms (2.2 to 22.0
lb), they said, and you could have the power of thousands of tons of dynamite.
Damn. Did the Germans already know this? That information was the reason for the secret
British MAUD Committee, which researched further, and eventually became the Tube Alloys nuclear
research and development program. The British kept this program top-secret, even from the USA
and many people in the country’s government. Tube Alloys was actually infiltrated by Soviet spies,
as was the Manhattan Project. We’ll come to that soon, but just tell you for now that one of the
men we’ve mentioned already was an atomic spy. Prior to this, when Frisch and Peierls had figured
out that extremely important part of the puzzle, Oliphant went over to the US to help the
Americans with work on microwave radars. Without giving secrets away, he convinced American
scientists there that they really had to speed up their nuclear research. This apparently got back
to FDR. Szilard wrote many years later these foreigners should have been awarded “a special
medal… for distinguished services” and that Dr. Oliphant would be the first to receive one.
The Frisch–Peierls memorandum played a huge part in getting that bomb made as fast as it
did. The British were ahead at this point, and it seems didn’t want to share all their
knowledge with the Americans. Vannever Bush, who was FDR’s Scientific Advisor, was behind
Roosevelt writing to Churchill in August 1941 to suggest collaboration on the bomb. Churchill was
weary of collaboration at this point, especially as the US hadn’t even joined the war yet.
This all changed in 1942 when the UK sent a scientific mission to the U.S. led by
Wallace Akers, the director of Tube Alloys, to visit the US’s S-1 committee – the precursor
to the Manhattan Project. The Americans, it was now pretty obvious, were flying
ahead, spending millions on R&D, whereas Britain was spending comparatively peanuts.
Not long later, Michael Perrin, who was the secretary-general of Tube Alloys, admitted
that the US will soon “completely outstrip us in ideas, research and application of nuclear
energy.” He said if Britain wasn’t careful, the US would snub the UK, which is exactly
what Vannever Bush and the chemist James Conant advised FDR to do when Churchill proposed
the collaboration. Churchill had earlier admitted, “We must face the fact that ... [our]
pioneering work ... is a dwindling asset and that, unless we capitalize it quickly,
we shall be outstripped. We now have a real contribution to make to a 'merger.'
Soon we shall have little or none.” After what had happened, FDR was very much within
his rights to rebuff Churchill, but he didn’t. He had earlier ordered that Britain should not be
provided with as much information as before, and Britain had responded with a £50,000,000
plan to build its own god damned atomic bomb, but in the interests of the world, the two
nations agreed cooperation was better. The Nazis had to be beaten at all costs.
On August 19, 1943, the two nations signed the historic Quebec Agreement, adopting
most of a five-point plan that Churchill had written up, which asked for the free exchange of
information, to not use the bombs on each other, and to agree only to use them on another country
if they both agreed. Churchill also told FDR that the US would “have full use of British commercial
and industrial capacities under this agreement.” Many of the best British scientists went
over to the US to work on what had already become the Manhattan Project led by Robert
Oppenheimer. A team of 19 scientists who’d worked on Tube Alloys went to Los Alamos.
Some of them were just what the US needed, including Chadwick (head of the British team),
Peierls, Fuchs, and William Penney – the latter was a mathematician who tried to figure out
the damage of the blast wave from the bomb. Niels Bohr went along later, as did some
other Brits, some of them only returning home when the US signed the Atomic Energy
Act of 1946, which restricted the UK and Canada’s access to US nuclear technology.
General Groves was not a happy man. He was very much against the collaboration, so
at first, he put the British scientists in limited roles so they wouldn’t have access
to the complete information. In the end, they had access to every department except plutonium
chemistry and metallurgy. Spies were everywhere, he reckoned, and he was right. Klaus Fuchs
of the British team was a spy, and he had access to top-level material, but he wasn’t
spying for the Germans, but for the Russians. Before the Brits took Fuchs in, he’d been a
Communist, but so had many scientists back then. The Germans were actually quite a big thorn
in the side of the Soviet Union where atomic research was concerned. On June 22, 1941,
the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Pravda, announced
the construction of the “first powerful cyclotron (particle accelerator) laboratory in the
Soviet Union for splitting the atomic nucleus.” The Germans invaded the Soviet Union that same
day. The scientists at the lab were all shipped out, and their work was abandoned. There were
bigger things to think about. Yakov Zeldovich and Yulii Khariton, who before had been working
on uranium chain reactions, ended up being told to drop that work and concentrate on chemical
explosives. Many great physicists in the Soviet Union were told to stop messing around with chain
reactions and start doing what the army wanted them to do. Still, at that point, they didn’t
know how much the British and Americans had progressed, or the Nazis, for that matter.
Georgii Nikolayevich Flyorov, one of the best Soviet physicists who discovered
something called spontaneous fission, noticed something weird when he did what he often
did and read physics journals in English. No one was talking about fission anymore. He wasn’t
stupid or naive. Nuclear fission was the topic of the day. He guessed it had just been made
classified by the military. Flyorov already had an idea in his head about an atomic bomb. Now
he was sure one was being developed over the sea. It’s believed it was Flyorov who told Stalin to
start a Soviet atomic bomb project. The Soviets soon knew they were years behind and didn’t have
the uranium they needed to make the bomb. Still, they soon had knowledge, lots
of knowledge, thanks to Fuchs. Fuchs was offered money to spy, but he told the
Soviets to keep their cash. He would spy for free, but only because he knew that the Nazis would
possibly win the war, especially if they got their atomic bomb before everyone else. Fuchs,
like many scientists at the Manhattan Project, believed both the Soviet Union and the Germans
would both be capable of building the bomb sooner or later and as the Soviets were allies,
more power to them, thought Fuchs. Hitler was the enemy, for now, at least. Some say he
was just a “commie,” but others say he didn’t want a world in which one country had all the
power and could then blackmail other nations. Fuchs also knew that the Germans had large stocks
of uranium needed for nuclear reactors. In fact, when the Red Army marched over the German
border just before they occupied Germany, they took forty scientists to steal what ended
up being nearly 350 kg of metallic uranium. They also took all the paperwork related to
atomic research. When they entered Berlin, they went straight over to the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute of Physics and got what the British and Americans had wanted for years.
After the Allies invaded Italy in September 1943, under the ALSOS Mission, attempts were made to
get hold of German atomic research information, not only because it might be useful but also
because they didn’t want the Soviets to get it. The Brits and Americans were also worried
about Japan since Japan was certainly no slouch when it came to physics. The Manhattan Project
Intelligence Group came to the conclusion that Japan’s physicists were as good as anyone
else’s. Japan did actually have cyclotrons, two of them at the Riken Institute. Bunsaku
Arakatsu, who’d worked under Einstein and Ernest Rutherford, started the F-Go
project into nuclear technology in 1943. Japan was on the ball, too, but the trouble
was finding high-quality uranium. It looked for it in China, Burma (now Myanmar), and Korea,
but in the end, Japan was just too slow. It was nowhere near making the bomb. Japan also never
thought the Allies would be able to make it in time for it to change the outcome of the
war… That couldn’t have been more wrong. So, under the AlSOS Mission, the Allies sought
to find out as much as possible about Germany and Japan, but it was Germany that was the
biggest threat. It had the best scientists; it could get uranium, or so the Allies thought,
and it had Hitler, who’d boasted occasionally about Nazi super weapons. They were also concerned
about chemical and biological weapons, which the Allies themselves were working hard to create.
As you know, the Germans had their reactor, what they called their uranium machine. What
they didn’t have was all their best scientists, men who were now working on the Manhattan Project,
thanks to the Nazis' hatred of Jews. Hitler went a step further by actually conscripting some
major scientists to fight with the army when they could have been working on research.
It was the physicist Kurt Diebner who was charged with investigating the military
applications of nuclear fission. Heisenberg was not the only main man, but he had indeed
before that calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions could very well be possible.
According to Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, another major component of Germany’s atomic
research, there were close to 200 scientists in Germany in the early 1940s who understood
the potential of an atomic bomb. In fact, it was only discovered in the 1990s that in the
summer of 1942, Weizsäcker had filed a patent on a “process to generate energy and neutrons by an
explosion.” Weizsäcker’s name was also mentioned in one of Einstein’s letters to FDR.
Even so, Germany failed to coordinate its scientists in the war effort. There
were many bright men working in separate labs all over Germany, but unlike the Allies, there was
no sustained push to make the bomb. As you know, there was the uranium club, but that was
certainly no Manhattan Project; it was nothing even like it. But were they still close?
At a uranium club meeting at the start of the war, Heisenberg spoke about a possible atomic bomb,
but something which would take at least five years to make. Later in life, he said, “I didn't
report it to the Führer until two weeks later and very casually because I did not want the
Führer to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic
bomb.” Heisenberg felt that Germany’s efforts should be focused on winning, not on theoretical
science...If he was telling the truth, that is. Despite what the Allies feared, the Nazi project
to make an atomic bomb barely got off the ground. In terms of theory, sure, they knew what they
were talking about, but all those scientists working in different parts of the country had no
fixed agenda. They had no plan, and anyway, Hitler didn’t see this imagined bomb winning the war for
him. Just like in the Soviet Union, when push came to shove, Hitler ordered his best scientists to
work on more pressing matters, mostly involving conventional weapons. Those that did take part
in the research were often set back by rivalries and a battle to secure funding. This separated
state of being made it extremely unlikely that they would ever have made a bomb during wartime.
It might not even have been part of their vision. In 1939, Heisenberg wrote to the German
War Office and explained that the fission process “can on present evidence be used for
large-scale energy production.” He added that the best way of “building a reactor capable
of this will be to enrich the uranium 235 isotope.” He was sure about power production
but not about bomb-making. He later wrote: “'We were happily able to give the
authorities an absolutely honest account of the latest development, and yet
feel certain that no serious attempt to construct atom bombs would be made in Germany.”
Even so, in October 1941, Heisenberg went to Copenhagen to talk with his former teacher
Niels Bohr. Heisenberg later wrote, “We were convinced that the manufacture of atomic bombs was
possible only with enormous technical resources.” Bohr asked him, “Do you really think that uranium
fission could be utilized for the construction of weapons?” Heisenberg said yes, probably, but only
with great technical effort and a huge amount of resources. He later said that he thinks
Bohr misunderstood him and took that to mean Germany was well on the way to making the bomb.
As you know, Bohr later told the British that Germany was indeed progressing, which probably
wasn’t true. Bohr also thought in that meeting, Heisenberg was trying to get information out
of him, but Heisenberg later denied this. He said that he was trying to tell Bohr about
the bomb but how German scientists, indeed all scientists, should be against it. It’s still
debated what these two men said at that meeting. Still, the fear during the war that the Nazis were
very close to having weapons of mass destruction was a fantasy, a paranoia, but the Allies weren’t
to know that in a world of secrecy. They had no idea that when they were spending $2 billion
(over $24 billion today) on the Manhattan Project, not to mention all that had been spent on the
earlier American and British projects, the Germans were spending a paltry US$2 million (over
US$24 million today) on their atomic projects. Albert Speer would have known how far the Nazis
had gotten during the war. He was Germany’s Minister of Armaments and War Production and was
handed 20 years at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Once he got out of prison, he said that in
all of his 2,200 entries in the protocols of his meetings with Hitler, they talked about
nuclear fission once. Yes, one time. Speer said, “I was familiar with Hitler's tendency to push
fantastic projects by making senseless demands.” Speer evidently didn’t want to get Hitler
started regarding world-ending bombs. Anyway, atomic talk was way above Hitler’s pay grade,
according to Speer. Hitler was uniquely brutal, but he was quite conventional where
the battlefield was concerned. Heisenberg also later remembered having a meeting
with Speer, who told him he’d get only a little bit of funding. Speer later said, “I had been
given the impression that the atom bomb could no longer have any bearing on the course of the war.”
Then there were the famous Farm Hall transcripts, which tell us more about how
much the Nazis had known. As you know, when the war ended, the Soviets and
the Allies went after the Nazi scientists. The Allies still believed the Nazis were progressing
with atomic bomb research and research into other weapons. They wanted them for their knowledge and
expertise, but how much knowledge did they have? A group of leading German scientists
after the war was whisked off to England under Anglo-American Operation Epsilon,
while in Germany, under Operation Big, equipment and materials were smashed, and
research work was plundered - what the Soviets hadn’t already taken, anyway. Under
the US’s highly secret Operation Paperclip, they even took Nazi war criminals if they
were valuable in some way. About 1,600 German scientists went to work for America, just as many
had gone to the Soviet Union for the same reason. Back to Operation Epsilon, what happened at
Farm Hall farm in England was quite unique. It was meant to be the smoking gun in terms
of finding out about German weapons of mass destruction, but it fell flat on its face.
The Brits detained a number of those prominent Germans they believed had been working on
the Nazi atomic bomb project. They stuck them in a farmhouse for around six months
and bugged the place. Everything they said was listened to from July 3, 1945, to January
3, 1946. Surely, the Nazis were hiding some kind of Los Alamos somewhere…or so they thought.
So, they listened, and listened, and listened…Top scientists we’ve talked about today, such as
Kurt Diebner, Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, chatted to their hearts
were content. The transcripts of the conversations were only made public in 1992. Only about 10
percent of the conversations were transcribed, adding up to 24 reports, over 250 pages,
that were all sent to General Groves in 1946. Quite amusingly, one conversation went:
Diebner: I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?
Heisenberg: Microphones installed? (laughing) Oh no, they're not as cute as all that. I don't think
they know the real Gestapo methods; they're a bit old-fashioned in that respect.”
Haha indeed, Heisenburg! A revelation came when the Germans
found out about the bombing of Japan, and they all seemed shocked. Some tried to
figure out how the Americans had done it. The American physicist Jonathan Logan heard
what they said and later explained that it was obvious the Germans in the Uranium Club had
not known much about how to complete the bomb. When Heisenberg heard the news, he tried to
understand how the bomb might have worked. He even attempted the calculation of critical mass
– the smallest amount of fissile material needed to cause a chain reaction in an atomic bomb.
Two of the best nuclear weapon physicists in the world at the time, head of the Theoretical
Division at the secret Los Alamos, Hans Bethe, and the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” Edward
Teller, said Heisenbug made the same mistakes they had when they’d first tried to get
to the bottom of the atomic bomb puzzle. The ensuing conversations about how the Allies did
it, or if they did really do it and it wasn’t a lie they’d been told, showed that these men had
not even been close to making the bomb. Some of the Germans said they were grateful they hadn’t
even tried, knowing what Hitler might have done. Others regretted Germany had failed. Hahn, who
remember was a Hitler-loving chemist in 1933, said to the physicists, “If the Americans have
a uranium bomb, then you're all second-raters.” He also called the bomb an “inhumane weapon,”
although he initially didn’t believe it was true. He then told the other men that he’d once
said to himself that all the uranium in the world would be better off at the bottom of the ocean.
The physicist Horst Korsching acknowledged, “That shows at any rate that the Americans are
capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would have been impossible in Germany.”
There was more talk about how they failed, and Weizsaecker said: “I believe the reason we
didn't do it was because all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had wanted
Germany to win the war, we would have succeeded!” Hahn replied: I don't believe that,
but I am thankful we didn't succeed.” Weizsaecker said at one point, "I think it's
dreadful of the Americans to have done it. I think it is madness on their part", to which
Heisenberg replied, “One could equally well say 'That's the quickest way of ending the war'"
The nuclear physicist Karl Wirtz said if they had made the bomb, "We would have obliterated London
but would still not have conquered the world, and then they would have dropped them on us."
That would make Wirtz one of the first Germans in history to talk about M.A.D.
- mutually assured destruction. Samuel Goudsmit, the scientific head of the ALSOS
mission, later said that the German effort at making the atomic bomb was “ludicrously small
scale,” with the central group of labs looking like “a few rooms in an old brewery.” He added,
“To be sure, the laboratories were well equipped, but compared to what we were doing in the United
States, it was still small-time stuff. Sometimes we wondered if our government had not spent
more money on our intelligence mission than the Germans had spent on their whole project.”
For sure, input from captured and borrowed German scientists later helped the Soviets
make their bomb so quickly (first test, August 1949), but as Heisenberg later said,
under the conditions they were working, there is no way they could have gotten past the
theory stage. They barely even tried to produce an actual bomb. They were just so far behind.
Hitler didn’t know the first thing about atomic weapons. He had no master plan involving an
atomic bomb. His brutality was simpleminded. If there was a race to make a bomb, it was only
competed by one side until the Soviets got wind of what was happening out in the American desert.
That’s not to blame Roosevelt for throwing tons of money at essentially a product that could kill
everything he loved. He made his decision based on what looked like sound intel, and anyway, someone
would have made the bomb had the Americans and their hodgepodge of multinational scientists
not done it. In the real world, Eve always takes the forbidden fruit from the tree, and
Pandora always opens that damned box; curiosity is behind all our triumphs and tragedies,
but we’d be dumb if we weren’t so curious. Still, did the US have to drop those
bombs? That’s been debated for decades, with some people saying there was evidence
Japan would have surrendered and that it was the invasion of Manchuria that pushed Japan to
do what it did. In 1976, the US public learned that before ther US let those bombs go, American
and British Combined Chiefs of Staff had written: "The increasing effects of sea blockade
and cumulative devastation wrought by strategic bombing…has already rendered
millions homeless and has destroyed from 25 percent to 50 percent of the built-up area
of Japan's most important cities…A conditional surrender…might be offered by them at any time…"
Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal's wrote in his diary that there was "real evidence of
a Japanese desire to get out of the war.” Then in 1978, it was reported that in Harry Truman’s
diary, he’d written that the US had intercepted a message, talking about a “telegram
from Japanese emperor asking for peace.” Even Dwight Eisenhower, who later became
President, said “it wasn't necessary" to hit the Japanese “with that awful thing.”
There is still plenty of evidence that the Japanese generals were not going to give
up, although Leo Szilard later said after he spoke with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes
-Truman's chief adviser - he was convinced that dropping the bombs was all about showing the
Soviets what great power the Americans had. When Szilard had that nightmarish vision at those
traffic lights in London, the light turned green above him, and like a frenzied herd of grown-up
children, humanity started thundering toward the horizon of world destruction. The light’s been
at amber since. Let’s hope it stays that way, and indeed we don’t let the tragedy of scientific
development outweigh the many great triumphs. Now you need to watch a show about Nazi medical
scientists, “The Sea Water Torture - Nazi Camp Experiments.” Or, look at this lighter show,
“Why Hitler's Nephew Was His Worst Enemy.”
