The Physicists by C. P. Snow

Author:C. P. Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Physicists
ISBN: 9780755120178
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

8: Nuclear Fusion

WHEN the news of Hiroshima was first broadcast, a select assembly of German nuclear scientists (Heisenberg and Hahn amongst them) were in gentlemanly captivity in a Cambridgeshire country house. Their conversation was bugged. To begin with, they didn’t believe the BBC report. This wasn’t a fission bomb. It was some kind of bluff, designed to frighten the Japanese into making peace. After all, they, the Germans, hadn’t found a way of making such a bomb. How could the Anglo-Americans have done so?

The mystery was the exact opposite. Why hadn’t the Germans come nearer? The answer seems to be that, until late in the war, the German authorities, with whom decisions usually went much too high, often to Hitler himself, weren’t prepared to devote resources to projects which wouldn’t guarantee results within a couple of years. They wanted weapons for use next year, not in the dim future. Their engineering was still excellent, in many fields much better than that of the Anglo-Americans. They were producing the jet fighter, Me 262, by far the best fighter in the war, which didn’t come into service until too late. Similarly with their final type of submarine. But they didn’t expend any of that engineering skill on a nuclear bomb. That was too remote, and might as well be left to the scientists.

The scientists appear not to have had much access to high authority, or not much influence. Further, good as they were, as good as their counterparts in America, they didn’t show themselves as flexible and adaptable. Apparently, though it seems inexplicable, they had no equivalent of the Peierls-Frisch calculations about the practicality of the bomb (the Germans were thinking in terms much more gigantesque). The German scientists didn’t transform themselves into wartime engineers. They had no Fermi. If they had acquired him, it could have made a difference.

There gradually emerged a sweet romantic story, much to the credit of human nature, that the German scientists had deliberately held back. They wouldn’t accept the moral responsibility of giving such bombs to a monstrous regime. It would be an intolerable crime. Better to pretend that the bomb wasn’t feasible.

Well, it is a sweet story, but it happens to be utterly untrue. These were decent men: they were also dutiful men and, some of them, nationalistic Germans. Heisenberg had visited Bohr in occupied Copenhagen in 1941, and Bohr was certain that it was an attempt, not to inquire if Allied scientists had conscientious scruples, but whether they were setting about the job. From 1943 onwards, men as intelligent as Heisenberg knew that their country was fighting a desperate defensive war. If they lost, that was the end of Germany. Even under Nazi rule, Germany was Germany. In comparable circumstances, American, English, Russian scientists would have felt that the evils of the regime counted for nothing against the evils of absolute defeat. They would have gone to the limit to make the bomb.

Nothing is known in the West of whether the Soviets had started their own nuclear project before the end of the war.

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