March 28, 2000

Revisiting German Physicist's Failure
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    By JAMES GLANZ

    The ghost of Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize winner who led the Nazi atomic bomb program, walked again yesterday as historians and scientists met to determine whether his failure to build a bomb during World War II was deliberate or a simple product of his own incompetence.

    The meeting, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was stimulated by a play, "Copenhagen," that explores the same lingering question and is soon to open on Broadway. And like the characters in the play, the experts at the meeting came to a seemingly unbridgeable disagreement on Heisenberg's intentions as he led a program that could have given an atomic bomb to Hitler.
    A debate about motives on the Nazi bomb project.

    Historians at the meeting suggested that there was little evidence that Heisenberg ever expressed moral scruples about building the bomb until the German Reich was smashed and he attempted to patch up his relations with the Allies. But scientists -- some of whom knew Heisenberg and worked on the Allied bomb effort -- suggested that even under intense pressure from the Nazis, he never tried very hard even to understand how an atomic bomb would work.

    Dr. David Cassidy, a historian at Hofstra University who has written a biography of Heisenberg, said there was no evidence "that moral issues regarding nuclear fission research were of particular concern for Heisenberg." He said the central question of the play, involving the reasons for a mysterious wartime voyage that Heisenberg made to meet his former mentor, the Danish physicist and Nobel laureate Neils Bohr, probably did not have a comfortable answer for Heisenberg supporters.

    The record suggests that he did not seek out Bohr to confer on the moral issues raised by atomic bomb research, as Heisenberg later contended. Rather, Dr. Cassidy said, the historical setting and the weight of evidence "strongly suggest that he wanted first to convince Bohr that the seemingly inevitable German victory would not be so bad for Europe after all."

    Heisenberg might have also hoped that Bohr would use his influence with Allied scientists to prevent them from building their own bomb, Dr. Cassidy said.

    But Dr. Hans Bethe, 93, a Cornell physicist and Nobel Prize winner who worked on the Manhattan Project, said he was certain that Heisenberg, whom Dr. Bethe knew, never had any intention of building a bomb for Hitler. Dr. Bethe's evidence came largely from secret recordings made of Heisenberg and his colleagues after Germany collapsed in 1945.

    Those recordings, which registered the scientists' shock when they learned that the Allies had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, largely demonstrate how ignorant Heisenberg was of how such a bomb would have to work.

    "This is a beautiful justification of Heisenberg when he said he never worked on a bomb," Dr. Bethe said. "He never did."

    Dr. John Wheeler, a professor emeritus at Princeton University who also worked on the Manhattan Project, largely agreed that Heisenberg should not be remembered as a malevolent genius who was stopped by his own miscalculations. But Dr. Wheeler did recall the difficulties that Heisenberg faced in regaining the friendship of other physicists after the war.

    "I was struck by how some people would not see him at all," Dr. Wheeler said. "And only a few people would treat him as a normal human being."

    After an emotional presentation at the meeting, which was sponsored by the Ensemble Studio Theater and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Dr. Wheeler summed up his thoughts on both Heisenberg and Bohr, both of whom he knew, in this way: "Happy memories of two great men."

    The audience at a preview of the play at the Royale Theater on Sunday was also sprinkled with physicists and Manhattan Project veterans. And they, like those who debated yesterday, had their own opinions about Heisenberg's role. Standing in the balcony at intermission, Dr. Benjamin Bederson, a physicist at New York University, noted that the play was inspired by a book, "Heisenberg's War," by Thomas Powers, whose thesis was that Heisenberg deliberately killed the German bomb project.

    "His conclusion, I thought, was wrong," said Dr.

    Bederson, speaking of Mr. Powers. Dr. Bederson worked on the Manhattan Project as a G.I. in Los Alamos, and remembers hearing Bohr being paged over the public address system by his code name, Nicholas Baker.

    But beyond his view of the play's historical underpinnings, Dr. Bederson had quite a different reaction to the unaccustomed spectacle of seeing physics performed on Broadway. "The play is wonderful," he said, during intermission. "I'm amazed how many people are here, and how physics has really gotten into the culture. Physics has made it."


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