Inside the Centre by Ray Monk

Author:Ray Monk [Monk, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Vintage Digital
Published: 2012-11-15T08:00:00+00:00

When Bohr read this account, he was appalled at how little it accorded with his own memory of that meeting, and so he wrote, but did not send, a letter to Heisenberg, repudiating it. ‘Personally,’ he wrote, ‘I remember every word of our conversations, which took place on a background of extreme sorrow and tension for us here in Denmark.’ What made a particularly strong impression on him, he told Heisenberg, was ‘that you and [Heisenberg’s colleague, Carl von] Weizsäcker expressed your definite conviction that Germany would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a different outcome of the war’. He also remembered Heisenberg giving him the ‘firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons’:

I listened to this without speaking since [a] great matter for mankind was at issue in which, despite our personal friendship, we had to be regarded as representatives of two sides engaged in mortal combat. That my silence and gravity, as you write in the letter, could be taken as an expression of shock at your reports that it was possible to make an atomic bomb is a quite peculiar misunderstanding, which must be due to the great tension in your own mind. From the day three years earlier when I realized that slow neutrons could only cause fission in Uranium 235 and not 238, it was of course obvious to me that a bomb with certain effect could be produced by separating the uraniums. In June 1939 I had even given a public lecture in Birmingham about uranium fission, where I talked about the effects of such a bomb but of course added that the technical preparations would be so large that one did not know how soon they could be overcome. If anything in my behaviour could be interpreted as shock, it did not derive from such reports but rather from the news, as I had to understand it, that Germany was participating vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic weapons.

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