Wow. I just got my hands on the Farm Hall Transcripts, annotated by Jeremy Bernstein.

[NNadir]

Just after World War II, all of Germany's nuclear scientists were captured by the Allies. The Americans and the British confined ten of them to a estate in Britain and recorded their conversations. The idea was to find out what they knew, and what they had done during the war in Nazi Germany to give Hitler an atomic bomb.

I personally had no idea that the transcripts of these recordings had been published, but recently learned that indeed they had been, well over 20 years ago.

The cast of characters is amazing, Werner Heisenburg most prominently, Max Von Laue, Otto Hahn, Carl Frederick von Weisacker, six others.


From Bernstein's Preface:

In practical terms, the Germans came nowhere near manufacturing an actual nuclear weapon during World War II. That being the case, why should the circumstances surrounding this non-event still arouse such passionate debate? I think that there are two reasons. On the one hand, many of the people who were involved in the successful development of the Allied nuclear weapons had serious moral misgivings, especially once they saw what the use of the weapon meant in terms of human misery. A sense of how these people felt was expressed by the Harvard nuclear physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, who immediately after the first successful test at Trinity, said to Oppenheimer, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”1 I mention these misgivings to show just how sensitive a subject this is for the people involved in the Allied program, some of whom are still alive and very articulate.

On the other hand—and this is where the debate begins—there is the version of this history promulgated by the German nuclear scientists after the war. Some of these scientists, a few of whom are also still alive, were also very articulate. Their version is built on the proposition that, unlike their American counterparts who actually constructed this “immoral” weapon, they, the Germans, took the moral high ground and “prevented” this weapon from falling into the hands of Hitler. In other words, they deliberately and consciously withheld their knowledge and expertise for the sake of some higher ethical purpose. If this were true, then these scientists, all of whom collaborated with the regime—some were members of the Nazi Party and some were not—could salvage something of their moral stature, which had been irreparably tarnished by their collaboration. They could claim that they functioned morally in an immoral regime,..

...At first sight, when confronted with such a maze of contradictory assertions and emotions, one might naively think that the way through would be to interview all the principals involved to see if one could not come to a consensus. As anyone who has tried to do this sort of thing soon discovers, however, memory often obscures fact instead of revealing it. The German scientists involved have told the same story over and over again for so many years that one wonders if they themselves now know what part of it is literally true and what part is invention. What is needed in situations like this are the contemporary documents—what people really said and wrote at the time—and not some post-facto, often self-serving, reconstruction. Ideal would be a recording, or a transcript of a recording, that would bring such conversations back to life...

...When I first saw these transcripts, soon after their release in February of 1992, I had something of the feeling that Champollion must have felt in August of 1808 when he saw a newly produced copy of the Rosetta stone—the key to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Like Champollion with his knowledge of languages, I felt that if one knew enough about the subject matter, then by reading both the lines in the transcripts and what was between the lines, one could hope to reach into both the Germans’ state of mind and their state of knowledge as it was in 1945. What seemed to be needed here—the equivalent of the Coptic, Greek, and other languages Champollion needed to decipher the hieroglyphics—was a certain familiarity with the physics of nuclear weapons.

Although I was too young to have been at Los Alamos, I did get into physics in the late 1940s, when nuclear weapons loomed very large. When I received my Ph. D., in 1955, jobs in universities were scarce, and I thought seriously of employment at one of the weapons laboratories. To this end, I spent the summer of 1957 as an intern at Los Alamos, where I was exposed to some nuclear weapons technology and witnessed some actual testing in the Nevada desert. For the next two years or so I consulted at the Rand Corporation and at the General Atomic Company on problems that had a nuclear weapons component. Furthermore, most of my teachers, people like Bainbridge, Robert Marshak, Norman Ramsey, Victor Weisskopf and, later, people like Hans Bethe, I. I. Rabi, Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Wilson, Stanislaw Ulam and Robert Serber, had been at Los Alamos. I talked to them extensively about their experiences, and when I went to work at the Brookhaven National Laboratory I talked to Goudsmit on an almost daily basis. Indeed, when I started writing about science for the general public, a substantial part of what I wrote—profiles of people like Albert Einstein, I. I. Rabi, John Wheeler, and Hans Bethe—reflected this experience...

From the transcripts themselves...

Diebner: I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?

Heisenberg: Microphones installed? (laughing) Oh no, they’re not as cute as all that. I don’t think they know the real Gestapo methods; they’re a bit old fashioned in that respect.

As we now live under a completely immoral and clearly criminal government - although not one with the power that the Nazis had day to day over their citizens, this seems like a timely subject to read.

As it happens, a clearly insane criminal in the White House now has access to nuclear weapons on a scale that no one in 1945 could imagine.

It should make for some fascinating reading on the off hours...

[brush]

1. Fascinating indeed. From the last excerpt, do you think Heisenberg was actually underestimating...

the allies with his "no microphones" comment?

[NNadir]

4. Over the years, it has been my...

...privilege to know and work with or for some very highly accomplished and highly intelligent people.

They generally fall into two classes: A set who thinks everybody is as intelligent and as knowledgeable as they are and a set who thinks either no one - or perhaps only a few - are as intelligent and as knowledgeable as they are.

I suspect, with no direct knowledge, that Heisenberg fell into the latter set.

As a person, Heisenberg was fairly right wing, not a Nazi perhaps, but definitely a German nationalist. It was his refusal to leave Germany in the 1930's that terrified the allies; and in many ways, negative ways, he was the inspiration for the Manhattan Project. People feared what he could do.

This said, I side with the people who say he was pretty much incompetent to build a nuclear weapon, or even a reactor.

The quoted conversation took place before the announcement of the existence of nuclear weapons, which clearly demonstrated that physics had gone way beyond anything Heisenberg had ever known.

Another excerpt from the text, with the important part in bold:

It is very unlikely that agreement will ever be reached on all the issues raised by Werner Heisenberg’s war time role. One thing is certain; Heisenberg was a great physicist. He had the first truly quantum-mechanical mind—the ability to take the leap beyond the classical visualizing pictures into the abstract, all-but-impossible-tovisualize world of the subatomic. To a layperson it is very difficult to explain the difference between this kind of ability and the ability to do common-sense engineering physics. Heisenberg was simply not very good at that. Recently Peierls, who had worked with him in the 1920s wrote, “Though a brilliant theoretician he42 was always very casual about numbers. When I was his student in the late 1920s the first assignment he gave me was to check whether a recent observation in a spectroscopic experiment could be explained as an example of his uncertainty principle. A simple back-of-an-envelope estimate would have shown that the effect was 100 or even 1,000 times greater than could be explained by his hypothesis.”43 The one thing that an engineer cannot be is “casual about numbers.” Fermi, in contrast, was a great engineering physicist—the better experimenters usually are—as well as a brilliant theorist. Fermi could estimate the order of magnitude of things within, as one witness put it to me, a “gnat’s whisker.” Heisenberg’s inability to do this sort of thing made him, as far as the German program was concerned, often part of the problem rather than the solution.

It is quite possible that someone would have built a nuclear reactor without the impetus of the Manhattan project, but no one on Earth could have done it as quickly as Enrico Fermi did, because as the text makes clear, Fermi had an intuitive sense of engineering as well as a very profound scientific understanding.

It will probably be a very long time before the likes of Fermi are seen again.

The discovery of practical nuclear engineering of course gave humanity the immediate capability to destroy itself, but it also gave humanity the practical capability to save itself. Fermi saw and knew both sides.

I want to be very clear on something, humanity is destroying itself, and if it wishes to save itself from the smaller destructive tool, the threat of catastrophic nuclear war, it will very much need to do so using nuclear reactors rather than abandoning them, as on the side reduce the threat of the on going greater threat, the threat of climate change.

[brush]

5. In your last graph are you advocating using nuclear energy as a primary energy source instead of...

wind, solar, geothermal and wave—the green energy sources most are familiar with—or nuclear in combination with all of aforementioned ones?

Nuclear mishap scares have certainly entered public consciousness and caused a turning away from it as part of a diverse, future array of energy sources. That perception is out there.

[NNadir]

7. I acknowledge the public perception, but the general public is advocating its own suicide.

It is a common logical fallacy - often used in advertising - to confuse what is popular with what is good, excellent, or for that matter, morally correct. Appeal to Popularity

It is absurd to compare the risk of nuclear energy with the risk of, um, everything else.

Every year, 7 million people die from air pollution.

Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (Lancet 2016; 388: 1659–724).

I discussed these figures at length here: Update on the annual death toll from air pollution.

This means that every decade, more people die from dangerous fossil fuel waste (combined with biomass, particularly "traditional" biomass" ) than died in World War II. It means 19,000 people per day; it means 13 people every minute.

I very much doubt than in more than half a century of nuclear power operations the total deaths associated with it will match the number of people who will die from air pollution before sunrise tomorrow.

The conceit of public opinion, egged on by the same barely literate journalists of the type who brought us Donald Trump, climate denialism, the Iraq war, the Vietnam war, etc, etc, etc... is that nuclear energy and only nuclear energy need be perfect or everything else (and worse) will be allowed to kill in vast numbers.

I'm a scientist. Data, real data, matters to me.

The comparisons are simple.

Another great scientist, for whom I have great respect, the climate scientist Jim Hansen, writing in one of the world's most prominent environmental scientific journals, demonstrated conclusively, and in my view irrefutably, that nuclear energy saves lives:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It's open sourced. Anyone could read it.

I'm a political liberal. I consider myself a well to the left on most issues; and I consider myself an environmentalist, although I hold many other people who consider themselves environmentalists - the entire membership of Greenpeace for example - in clear contempt. My liberalism is very much concerned with something other than imagining that much of our consumer junk can be made "sustainable." My liberalism includes something that's dying in modern liberalism: Concern for the impoverished. I best synthesized my views on energy, the environment, and humanity in a post elsewhere, this one:

Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come (The numbers therein have gotten much worse since I wrote that in 2014.)

I regard anti-nukism as I regard anti-vax stuff, anti-GMO stuff, anti-this, anti-that, so far that it exists on my end of the political spectrum as our creationism. It embarrasses and frankly shames me.

The majority of my efforts here to educate people on our side about how wrong they are about nuclear energy is contained in my journal here: NNadir's Journal

My journal is littered with a lot of scientific topics that are not about nuclear energy, but I'd crudely guess that at least 60% of my posts resulting from readings from the primary scientific literature are about getting people to wake up and recognize that nuclear energy is our last, best hope.

As for so called "renewable energy," it hasn't worked, it isn't working and it won't work. The reason is physics.

In the last ten years the world sunk more than two trillion dollars into solar and wind.

Frankfurt School/UNEP Global Renewable Energy Investment, 2018, Figure 3, page 14

It was a waste of money, a grotesque waste, and the waste from the materials used to build this stuff will be a huge problem for those who have to clean it up, specifically the people who are infants and toddlers today.

As of this morning the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide was 408.49 ppm, up from 385.11 ten years ago

I frequently ridicule the rhetoric that contends that so called "renewable energy" is a reasonable way to address climate change. I mean after all, the reason that humanity abandoned so called "renewable energy" in the 19th century was that most people lived short miserable lives of dire poverty, even more so than today.

A recent example of this ridicule is here: 2018 World Energy Outlook: Solar and Wind Grew by 11.24% in 2017; Gas by "Only" 3.32%!!!!

The title is pure sarcasm derived from profound grief. As I near the end of my life, I am appalled at what my generation, as well as the current generation, is doing to everyone that will live after us.

There is plenty of ignorance to go around on all sides of the political spectrum. None of us are innocent with respect to the climate catastrophe now well underway.

Thank you for your polite and sincere question.

Have a wonderful Sunday.

[brush]

9. You mean nuclear power as part of a combination of energy sources, right, as we...

certainly have to move away from fossil energy?

Being in the field are you confident of improved safety measures in not just the plants but in the disposal of waste. I lived in Nevada so this is of particular concern in my state.

[NNadir]

10. No. I believe in nuclear energy as the sole source of energy.

The issue of so called "nuclear waste" is trivial when compared to the vast amount of death and destruction associated with dangerous fossil fuel waste.

I oppose Yucca Mountain not because it is dangerous, but because I consider all of the fission products and higher actinides to be extremely valuable materials. I've spent more than 30 years thinking about this, reading enormous amounts of material on the subject.

If Yucca Mountain were built, however, it would not be as dangerous as air pollution in Nevada. That is a fact.

I recently discussed this in connection with the Sellafield reprocessing plant and its release of technetium:

Technetium in Use and in the Environment: Alloys, Sellafield Lobsters and Deep Eutectic Solvents. (By the way, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas has world leaders in Technetium chemistry.)

The main distinction between so called "nuclear waste" and all other waste forms - including that attached to so called "renewable energy" is that what people call "nuclear waste" has a spectacular record of not killing anyone.

[KelleyKramer]

2. Wow, bookmarking for later

That looks very interesting, thank you for posting!

[Farmer-Rick]

3. Do you have a link?

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Interesting. I once started -- but never finished -- "Heisenberg's War", which appears to argue that

WH's failure to produce a Nazi nuclear weapon was deliberate. Unfortunately, after relocating virtually every year for a decade, I no longer know where my copy of that book is. Reviews appear to be mixed -- no smoking gun, but then this would require a non-smoking gun in any case. The whole issue seems clouded by (wait for it) uncertainty.

I tend to be of the belief that one scientist, however brilliant, with a bunch of "second-stringers" could not have pulled off what was accomplished in this country by a very "deep bench" of scientists, ranging from practical geniuses to masters of abstruse theory. Not to belittle the German nuclear scientists, but Hitler's anit-Semitic excesses pretty well bled the scientific establishments of Germany white, to coin a phrase. Though nuclear fission was discovered in Germany, Hitler's effort to build an atomic bomb were doomed by the lack of top-tier scientists remaining in Germany. As the comedian remarked to his friend who complained that you couldn't buy a decent bagel in Berlin, "well, whose fault is that, really?".

[NNadir]

8. I read it some years ago. I'm not sure if it's in my personal library or if I got it...

...from a public library: There are books all over the place in this house - much to my wife's chagrin - and I no longer have the time to keep them in order or clutter free. (I tend to read in a desultory, non-linear, manner, and usually have books scattered around the house.) In recent years, I'm more of a library kind of guy than a book buying kind of guy.

I think it was too kind to Heisenberg, by far.

Excerpts of the background text of the book evoked in the OP:

In December of 1939 and in February of 1940, Heisenberg produced two reports for German Army Ordnance that set out the theory of a chain-reacting reactor, at least in principle. He concluded that a reactor moderated with heavy water could work with natural uranium. This is what inspired Harteck to begin investigating the possibilities of obtaining enough heavy water. By the summer, the Germans in Berlin began constructing a facility for their reactor experiments, which they called the “Virus House” to throw off suspicious visitors. The first experiments were done, partially under Heisenberg’s direction, with an arrangement of layers of uranium oxide alternating with layers of a paraffin moderator. Heavy water was not available. There was also not enough uranium. The results were inconclusive, but were encouraging enough to suggest that the setup might go critical if heavy water were substituted for paraffin and sufficient uranium used. There was no sense of urgency about any of this work—no special pressure from German Army Ordnance. Indeed, people like Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker also spent time doing pure research and teaching. (By contrast, Harteck did work full time on military applications.) The reason for this relaxed attitude was that the German military was totally convinced that the war was as good as won...

...Many of the figures we have already encountered addressed the group: Schumann, Hahn, Bothe, Harteck and, of course, Heisenberg. Heisenberg’s lecture was a mixture of popular fission science with a tantalizing glimpse of its military applications thrown in. He told his audience, “If one could assemble a lump of uranium-235 large enough for the escape of neutrons from its surface to be small compared with the internal neutron multiplication, then the number of neutrons would multiply enormously in a very short space of time, and the whole uranium fission energy, of 15 million-million calories per ton, would be liberated in a fraction of a second. Pure uranium- 235 is thus seen to be an explosive of quite unimaginable force.”45 He also managed a “commercial” for plutonium. When one has succeeded in constructing an operating reactor, he pointed out, “the question of producing the explosive receives a new twist: through the transmutation of uranium inside the pile, a new element is created, 46 which is in all probability as explosive as pure uranium-235, with the same colossal force.”47

In contemplating this lecture and its audience, one is struck by the question: What did Heisenberg think he was doing? What went through his mind at the sight of Rust and the other Nazis in this audience? Why was Heisenberg dangling before these people an “explosive of quite unimaginable force?” Certainly Heisenberg was not a Nazi. In fact he had been publicly denounced. In 1937, the Nazi Party member and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Johannes Stark inspired and partially wrote an article in the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps attacking physicists like Heisenberg who believed in twentieth-century physics—relativity and the quantum theory— as “white Jews.” Stark and his associates invented something they called Deutsche Physik, consisting mainly of the classical physics they understood. The abstract thinking of the quantum theory and relativity was for them the work of Jews and their sympathizers.

A few years back, I was wandering around the stacks in the Firestone library at Princeton University and I came across a small book, in German of course, written by Stark in the 1930's on the topic of "Physics under Hitler."

My German has deteriorated over the years, but I got a real sense, even with my limited reading ability, of how awful a human being Stark was. We all live with applications of the "Stark Effect," but it is wrong to assume that an award of the Nobel Prize means that the recipient is a noble human being. Stark was a pure Nazi, and like most fascists, his view on everything, including physics, was driven by ignorance. Physics had passed him by, and he could no longer comprehend it; in the 20th century physics moved incredibly fast.

There is a video version of Michael Frayn's wonderful play Copenhagen, which is a re-enactment of Heisenberg's meeting with Bohr in 1941. It was also sympathetic to Heisenberg, almost straight out of Powers. It's a wonderful film, but a few years back, Aage Bohr released some of his father's letters, including an unsent letter to Heisenberg. It appears that Heisenberg had sent a letter to Bohr trying to get him to buy into the German construct of "We could have built a nuclear weapon, but it would have been immoral to do so..."

Bohr, one of the clearest thinkers in history, apparently wrote down his thoughts in letters frequently to clarify them, but often did not end up sending them. This was a win for history, since Heisenberg may have well destroyed the correspondence.

Upon release of the letter, by Aage Bohr, Frayn conceded that his play should have been written differently.

The text of this book evoked in the OP also make it clear that Bohr's wife Margrethe never liked Heisenberg personally.

[caraher]

11. The Farm Hall transcripts are indeed fascinating

Though neither primary nor secondary literature, a relatively recent book that I thought was a worthwhile even-handed treatment of top physicists in Nazi Germany was Philip Ball's "Serving the Reich," which focuses on Planck, Debye and Heisenberg. It's light on technical detail but does a good job exploring the ramifications of viewing science as pure, as above the fray of politics, can play out in a time when everyone is choosing a side, wittingly or not.

[NNadir]

12. That actually looks like an interesting read. If I find time, I'll pick it up. I know Planck's...

...papers were destroyed in a bombing, a great loss for the history of science.

He was 87 in 1945, of course, and played no real role in the Second World War.

His son was executed in opposition to the Nazis, but I actually know very little of his life under the Nazis, so non-technical or not, it's probably an interesting read.

Another interesting German who remained in Germany in the Nazi era is David Hilbert, who died in 1943, his funeral barely attended. What he is most famous for in this era was his sarcasm directed at Bernard Rust, which is mentioned in the explanatory text of the book evoked in the OP. In reference to the 1942 meeting at which Heisenberg outlined the possibility of nuclear weapons to high level Nazis, the following exchange apparently took place:

...The popular lecture series took place on February 26, 1942. Bormann, Göring, Himmler and Speer, as well as other very important Party figures, had been invited, but declined. Among the actual listeners was Bernhard Rust, the Minister of Education, and one of the most primitive of the Nazi racists. He took special pride in the fact that under his auspices the Jews had been forced out of the universities in 1933. Not long after he had succeeded in this, Rust found himself at a banquet in Göttingen seated next to David Hilbert, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century and a marvelous man. Rust asked, “And how is mathematics in Göttingen, now that it has been freed of Jewish influence?”44

“Mathematics in Göttingen?” Hilbert replied. “There is really none anymore.” This was the sort of man—Rust—who was about to take over the direction of the nuclear program...

Another great German scientist who remained behind because he was an old man was Arnold Sommerfeld. He was, according to Wikipedia, one of the 10 people who attended Hilbert's funeral.

Thanks for pointing the book you mentioned out. I hope to pick it up some day.