A Tale of Two Bombs

By Bruce W. Nelan

TITLE: HEISENBERG'S WAR

AUTHOR: THOMAS POWERS

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 609 PAGES; $27.50

THE BOTTOM LINE: This is a fascinating if argumentative account of why Hitler never developed nuclear weapons.

The Manhattan Project, America's prodigious World War II program to build an atom bomb, was set in motion by the fear that Hitler's Germany would produce the weapon first. Experts in the U.S. thought German science could have a lead in the race because a German chemist, Otto Hahn, had discovered nuclear fission in 1938. His countryman Werner Heisenberg was considered by many to be the world's leading physicist and was certain to be at the center of any Nazi A-bomb effort.

But when U.S. scientific intelligence teams dashed into Germany in the final days of the war in Europe, they found only small experimental reactors incapable of even a self-sustaining chain reaction. Heisenberg had been working on them all right, but with little money or organization and on a part-time basis. Compared with the Manhattan Project, there was no German bomb program.

In his superbly researched and well-written book, Thomas Powers proposes an explanation for the German failure. That his case is not entirely persuasive does not dull the book's fascination. It is a kind of police procedural, an examination of international intelligence gathering -- the sort of material Powers handled so smoothly in his splendid 1979 look at Richard Helms and the CIA, The Man Who Kept the Secrets.

The Nazi leaders seem to have had no idea what they should have been doing in the nuclear field and paid scant attention to what others were working on. The U.S. actually had the facts about the desultory German effort but were worried that they were a smoke screen. Heisenberg, a Nobel laureate already famous for his work in quantum mechanics, was drafted for the weapons program in September 1939. But serious work halted in June 1942 when Heisenberg told Albert Speer, Hitler's war-production czar, that an atom bomb could not be produced fast enough to affect the outcome of the war. From then on, Heisenberg apparently wanted his old scientific friends in Scandinavia, Switzerland and the U.S. to know that Germany was working on power reactors, not bombs.

Though he said he was "not 100% anxious" to provide Hitler with a bomb, Heisenberg never claimed he blocked the program out of moral compunctions. This book asserts he did: "He killed it," Powers writes. It is a line of argument that has always upset Manhattan Project scientists because it suggests that Germans who worked for the Nazis struck a superior moral stance. Readers need not agree with Powers. He provides plenty of evidence and argument on all sides of the issue.

Heisenberg, who headed the Max Planck Institute after the war and remained active until his death in 1976, may have given his own answer on the day he learned of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In a remark picked up by a hidden British microphone, he said he and his team had not had the "moral courage" to ask for the thousands of workers and huge resources that would have been necessary. The price of failure would have been high for all of them.

Powers tracks the elaborate and unceasing efforts of the American project directors to find out what was going on in Heisenberg's laboratories in Berlin and Leipzig. The great strength of his book is his ability to present precisely what the German team was doing and contrast it with the baseless but understandable American fears.