Werner says:"I don't beleef dat."
"Powers argues that this was to underestimate Heisenberg: that Heisenberg withstood the government to the point of undermining the German bomb programme. Every step of the way, Heisenberg stressed the risks and difficulties of the project; asked point blank to set a timescale, Heisenberg denied that a bomb could be built in time to assist the war effort. Heisenberg even visited Bohr in occupied Denmark in 1941, knowing that Bohr had contacts with the Allies, and spoke openly about his work on the bomb programme before suggesting a worldwide physicists' agreement not to work on nuclear weaponry. Far from being "the most dangerous possible German", Heisenberg was the Allies' biggest asset; if anything, Heisenberg's opposition to nuclear weapons research makes him contrast favourably with the physicists of the Manhattan Project.
There are three main propositions here. Firstly, Heisenberg was an anti-fascist, unafraid to give away classified information to the Allies. Secondly, although Heisenberg accepted official positions under the Nazis, he obstructed atomic weapons research as effectively as if he had offered the regime open resistance, if not more so. Lastly, Heisenberg's resistance was crucial in preventing a serious German bomb programme, which otherwise could have parallelled the Manhattan Project and won the war for Hitler. A book could be written demolishing this argument; unfortunately Powers' book is dedicated to stating and re-stating it, often in the teeth of the facts it documents. I believe it is wrong on all counts: Heisenberg's politics, his supposed stand against the bomb programme, the significance of that stand and the feasibility of a German bomb programme under the Nazis."
He sounds like a strange breed of Nazi attack dog at any rate.
Every German who helped the war effort of that country to any degree gets painted with the same colours as the worst case of Naziism. It is hard to be rational in such an emotional area, but it is dangerous to make broad assumptions. |
