"Absence of A-bomb: Were the Nazis duped -- or simply dumb?" So asks the weekly U.S. News & World Report in a piece for its July 24-31 cover story, "Mysteries of History." The question is being revisited now perhaps because of a recent Broadway import from London: Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen."
The play focuses on a murky incident that has been hotly debated since the end of the war: the meeting between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-75) and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) one day in the fall of 1941, in Copenhagen. Why did Heisenberg, victorious Germany's No. 1 scientist, go to see his former mentor and collaborator Bohr, now in an occupied land?
The question is important. Heisenberg and Bohr -- both Nobel Prize-winners, Bohr in 1922, two years before Heisenberg went to study at his Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Heisenberg in 1932 -- together laid the foundations of nuclear physics. And whereas Heisenberg, who worked on nuclear development under Adolf Hitler, did not produce nuclear weapons, Bohr escaped German-occupied Denmark to join forces with the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.