Heisenberg's War. - book reviews

National Review, May 24, 1993 by Russell Seitz

HIROSHIMA has become the apex of the mountain of images that form the world's vision of the nuclear age. But at the inception of the Manhattan Project, few imagined that Japan would be part of the picture. The race for The Bomb began with Hitler's rise rather than the ascendancy of militarism in Japan--the uranium atom was first split in Berlin.

The scientists who counseled FDR to pursue The Bomb's development belonged to a generation of physicists whose lingua franca was German. The founders of the new disciplines of quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and general relativity hailed mostly from the capitals and ancient university towns of the Wilhelmine and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Few were more gifted than a professor's son, Werner Heisenberg, or his protege, a scion of Junker diplomats, named Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, the younger brother of the current president of Germany. Von Weizsacker's main achievement, explaining how the sun works, has been eclipsed by Heisenberg's justly famous uncertainty principle. tured by the Allies shortly after the invasion of Normandy and sent to America for enrichment. So it came to pass that some of the U-235 in the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima was diverted from Hitler's hands.

Few of Heisenberg's colleagues in Britain or America, and fewer still of those who fled Europe after the Nazis' rise, ever forgave him fully. I remember the glacial reception afforded him when he visited Cambridge, Mass., twenty years ago. I think I was introduced to Heisenberg then, but, naturally, I'm not absolutely certain. But of this much I am sure: by 1974, many veterans of the Manhattan Project and some of their German opposite numbers had become leading lights in the international campaign against nuclear weapons, von Weizsacker being a prominent advocate of unilateral disarmament. And when, in the interest of solidarity, the shotgun reconciliation of these former foes came to pass, some few of those present who knew of Moe Berg must have silently felt the sardonic depth of the underlying black comedy of manners.

Back in the 1920s and '30s, the glory days of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg was lionized as one of the few real "magicians" of twentieth-century science--the few, such as the late Richard Feynman, whose leaps of intellect staggered even their most astute colleagues. In Heisenberg's case, that athleticism was not merely intellectual.

If electrical wizard Nikola Tesla prefigured Dr. Zarkov, Heisenberg occasionally acted like Flash Gordon's understudy: in 1934, another biographer recounts, visiting Kyoto on a round-the-world lecture tour with physicist P. A. M. Dirac, young Werner, feeling in need of exercise, climbed freehand up the outside of a ten-story pagoda and perched on its finial like a hood ornament. From that literal high point, he descended into the abyss with the rest of his countrymen--but not without some resistance. He defended Einstein's physics with enough vigor to arouse the wrath of the Nazis. He escaped condemnation only by the intervention of a childhood friend of his mother's, Frau Himmler--whose son Heinrich needs no introduction.

Much of the new information in Powers's book has come to light with the declassification of the transcripts of what some German atomic scientists said during their enforced stay at a bugged British manor house in 1945. (Their less fortunate colleagues fell into Stalin's hands and lived out their days in the nuclear Gulag.) Powers's new facts usefully augment those of David Cassidy's 1991 biography of Heisenberg, Uncertainty. Both afford insight into how one of the century's brightest minds strove to deal with the conflict of its darkest hours.

We should be thankful that just as Saddam Hussein's providential impatience spared us a nuclear confrontation in the Persian Gulf, the Wehrmacht's lack of time and engineering resources kept the ultimate Vergeltungswaffe out of the Axis's hands. For what the Third Reich did accomplish--the V-2 missile--has already proliferated farther afield than nuclear weapons have. Taken together with the growing ubiquity of nerve gas, the proliferation of that antique, but all too viable, missile technology should serve to remind us that the moral imbecility that flared earlier in this century is not a burnt-out case. So the demise of two evil empires should not console us. If we let a third arise, it will be far better armed than its predecessors, and doubtless in possession of some men of science as imperfect in their wisdom as Werner Heisenberg. For both biographies suggest that his career can be read as an inverse Bildungsroman--a trajectory descending from the twilight of German romanticism into a slingshot orbit around Hitler's dark star.