Bernstein PP 2003

243
Phys. perspect. 5 (2003) 243261

14226944/03/03024319
DOI 10.1007/s00016-003-0177-8
The Drawing or Why History Is Not Mathematics*
Jeremy Bernstein**
The mystery of whether or not Werner Heisenberg gave Niels Bohr a drawing that Bohr came to
believe was that of a German nuclear weapon, is discussed and resolved.
Key words: Hans Bethe; Aage Bohr; Niels Bohr; James Chadwick; Leslie Groves; Wer-
ner Heisenberg; J. Hans D. Jensen; J. Robert Oppenheimer; Abraham Pais; Rudolf
Peierls; Robert Serber; Edward Teller; Victor Weisskopf; Copenhagen; German Bomb
Project; Los Alamos; Manhattan Project; chain reaction; nuclear fission; nuclear reac-
tor; moderator; plutonium; uranium.
The Drawing
Beginning in 1977, I did a series of interviews with the physicist Hans Bethe which
resulted in a three-part New Yorker profile that was published in December of 1979.
1
Our interviews proceeded chronologically from Bethes birth in Strasbourg in 1906, his
childhood and early student days in Germany. Then we discussed the Hitler years.
Bethe, who is half-Jewish, was forced to emigrate in 1933, finally coming to the United
States in 1935, where he became a professor at Cornell University, which he never left.
We then discussed the war years. Since Bethe did not obtain his American citizenship
until March of 1941, he was not allowed to work on classified military projects until
December of that year. He then worked on radar for a year with a summer the sum-
mer of 1942 spent in Berkeley with a study group assembled by Robert Oppenheimer
to examine the prospects for a nuclear weapon. Los Alamos did not get underway until
the spring of 1943. Bethe was one of the early recruits. He later became the head of the
theoretical division. When I conducted these interviews I knew something not a great
deal about the German attempts to make a bomb and I was curious as to what Bethe,
and the other scientists at Los Alamos many of whom were refugees from Hitlers
Europe knew about the German work at the time they were doing their own. In
response to this question Bethe told me the following anecdote, many of the elements
of which were new to me then.
During the war, he said, Werner Heisenberg had visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen
(figure 1). Bethe did not give me a date and in my New Yorker article I said it was in
* I have discussed some aspects of this story earlier in my article,What Did Heisenberg Tell Bohr
about the Bomb? Scientific American 272 (May 1995), 7277.
** Jeremy Bernstein is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology and
a former staff writer for the New Yorker.
02_Bernstein 8.8.2003 10:28 Uhr Seite 243
244
October of 1941. This, as it happens, is slightly wrong. It was mid-September. Bethe
then told me that Heisenberg and Bohr had a conversation or conversations in
some back alleys in Copenhagen. Heisenberg later recalled that the one important
conversation took place in the Faelled Park behind Bohrs institute, but in his recently
released letters Bohr distinctly recalls that it took place in his office at the physics insti-
tute. However, a new letter from Heisenberg to his wife Elisabeth written at the time
of the visit describes three visits that Heisenberg made to Bohrs home.* One conjec-
tures that the essential conversation took place at the time of the second visit. Bethe
then told me that during this conversation Heisenberg gave Bohr a drawing which,
later, Bohr transmitted to the people at Los Alamos. He went on to say, It was clear-
ly a drawing of a reactor, but when we saw it our conclusion was that these Germans
were totally crazy did they want to throw a reactor down on London?
2
I pointed out in my article that the Germans were not crazy at all. Since 1940, they
had known that one of the uses of a reactor was to manufacture what we would later
call plutonium. They knew that this element was at least as fissionable as uranium and
offered great advantages in its chemical treatment. As it happened, the Germans were
never able to make a functioning reactor during the war so they never learned how dif-
ficult it was to actually use plutonium in a bomb. But if the people at Los Alamos had
Jeremy Bernstein Phys. perspect.
Fig. 1. Werner Heisenberg (19011976) and Niels Bohr (18851962) in happier times in Copenhagen
in 1934.
* This letter has not been published. I am grateful to Michael Frayn for disclosing its contents.
realized which they didnt that the Germans knew about plutonium their concern
about the German program which was always considerable might well have
approached the panic level.
When I listen to the tape I made with Bethe on which he describes this incident I
am always struck by what I failed to ask him. I didnt ask, for example, what he meant
by later. As I subsequently found out, the Heisenberg visit was in the fall of 1941,
while Los Alamos did not begin until the spring of 1943. Why did it take something like
two years for Bohrs transmission to take place and, indeed, just how did Bohr trans-
mit this drawing? If I had asked these questions I would have saved myself, as it turned
out, a good deal of grief. In any event, I described this incident in the New Yorker and
forgot about it. I dont recall anyone showing any interest for nearly fifteen years. The
scene shifts to the early 1990s. By this time I was an adjunct professor at the Rocke-
feller University where the late Abraham Pais was a professor. Pais had recently pub-
lished his biography of Bohr which discusses the visit but not the drawing.
3
This had
inspired the journalist Thomas Powers, who was working on his book Heisenbergs
War,
4
to call Pais to see if he knew something about the drawing. Powers had his rea-
sons. His book presents a revisionist view of Heisenbergs wartime activities which
claims that Heisenberg had a deep knowledge of nuclear weapons which he concealed
from his colleagues, thus helping to prevent the bomb from falling into the hands of
Hitler. Heisenberg never claimed anything like this himself and few, if any, historians
of the period accept it, but that is not what concerns me here. What concerns me is the
drawing. Powers had taken my version or, more exactly, Bethes version of this story
but had added his own twist. To have given Bohr this drawing, he argued, was for
Heisenberg a traitorous act an act of betrayal and sabotage. He ends his chapter on
this with the dramatic denouement, Bohr was convinced that Heisenbergs crude
sketch illustrated the working principle of the bomb he was trying to build for Ger-
many. With this simple piece of paper Heisenberg had put his life in jeopardy.
5
Before he published his book Powers had contacted Aage Bohr, Bohrs son, a physi-
cist and also a Nobel Prize winner, who had been Bohrs confidant during the war (fig-
ure 2). Powers wanted to learn more about Heisenbergs Copenhagen visit and, in par-
ticular, to find out what Aage Bohr knew about the drawing. In due course he had
heard from Aage and what Aage had had to say had put Powers in something of a
quandary. Aage said in no uncertain terms that the notion that Heisenberg gave Bohr
a drawing during his visit in 1941 was pure fiction. As he put it in a letter to Powers
dated November 16, 1989, Heisenberg certainly drew no sketch of a reactor during his
visit in 1941. The operation of a reactor was not discussed at all.
6
Powers had contact-
ed Pais thinking that, as Bohrs biographer, he might know something about the draw-
ing which he had not put into his book. Pais, as it happened, did not know anything
beyond what he had read in my article so he asked me on one of my visits to Rocke-
feller if I knew anything beyond what I had written. I had to admit that I did not but I
said I would try to look into it. I then went home and said to myself, Now what?
The two obvious people to contact were Aage Bohr and Bethe to see if there was
some way to reconcile their accounts. Pais was returning to Copenhagen where he
spent much of the year and he offered to speak with Aage and indeed to bring him a
copy of the tape I had made with Bethe to see if this would help. In due course I got a
245 The Drawing or Why History Is Not Mathematics Vol. 5 (2003)
246
letter from Pais saying that he had discussed the matter with Aage and played the tape,
None of which has changed Aages calm and firm opinion that there never was a
drawing Heisenberg gave to Bohr.
7
This is something that Aage has now repeated to
me through intermediaries a number of times over the years.* One of the things he has
said is that if there had been a drawing which, in 1941, his father had thought repre-
sented a plan for a German atomic bomb he would certainly have used his contacts in
the underground to promptly transmit this to the Allies. As we will see, Bohr did com-
municate with the British by underground courier. Meanwhile Bethe wrote to say that
there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that he had seen a drawing at Los Alamos.
He added, Whether the drawing was actually due to Heisenberg, or was made by Bohr
from memory, I cannot tell.
8
Since this was getting me nowhere I tried to think of other people I knew who had
been at Los Alamos at that time. Two came to mind. There was Victor Weisskopf, a
good friend of Oppenheimers who was, knowing Viki, bound to have been at the cen-
ter of any interesting action. Weisskopf replied that he had no recollection at all of a
Fig. 2 Aage Bohr (b. 1922) and Niels Bohr (18851962) inspecting a camera outdoors in 1953.
Credit: Niels Bohr Archive; courtesy of American Institute of Physics Emilio Segr Visual Archives.
* The principle intermediary has been Finn Aaserud, Director of the Niels Bohr Archive, Copen-
hagen. I am grateful to him for his help and for permission from the Niels Bohr Archive to quote
the Bohr correspondence with James Chadwick.
drawing but that I should ask Bethe again a blank wall. I also wrote to Rudolf Peierls
Sir Rudolf Peierls who with Otto Frisch, both refugees from Germany in England,
had in 1940 made the first correct calculation of the so-called critical mass the min-
imum mass of uranium-235 needed to make a bomb. It was this calculation that real-
ly started the Allies effort to build a bomb. Both Frisch and Peierls had come to Los
Alamos as part of the British delegation. In due course I heard from Peierls who
offered an ingenious solution that he thought might reconcile the accounts of Bethe
and Aage Bohr. Peierls conjectured that there was a drawing he had never seen it at
Los Alamos which in fact Heisenberg had given to Bohr in his 1941 visit. But, he sug-
gested, Bohr had kept this secret from his family, and Aage in particular, to protect
them from knowing about something that could gravely endanger them if discovered.
As ingenious as this is, I soon came to the conclusion that it was extremely implausible.
In the first place Bohr shared many confidences with his son during the war including
his impressions of Heisenbergs visit. This went on after the war when there was no
longer any danger of the information falling into the wrong hands. Moreover, the Bohr
Archive in Copenhagen has no record of such a drawing nor of any discussion about it.
Once again I had hit a blank wall. But then I got an idea, something that I should have
thought of in the first place. I would call Robert Serber.
Serber, who died in 1997, was at the time of his death a professor emeritus of physics
at Columbia University. I had known him for many years. Among other things he had
helped me with the technical aspects of the German program which are discussed in
my book, Hitlers Uranium Club.
9
This is an annotated version of the transcripts made
of conversations among German nuclear physicists captured at the end of the war and
interred in a large mansion Farm Hall in England. Serber and I had studied Heisen-
bergs remarks on the physics of nuclear weapons to see how much he understood;
rather little as it turned out. No one was more qualified than Serber (figure 3). In the
mid-1930s he had become a postdoctoral fellow with Oppenheimer. The two became
close friends. Oppenheimer developed a great respect for Serbers unassuming bril-
liance, so it was no surprise when he was invited to join the 1942 study group in which
Bethe was also a participant. Serber, like Bethe, was one of the early recruits to Los
Alamos. Serber produced The Los Alamos Primer.
10
These are the transcripts of a
series of introductory lectures he gave to new arrivals at Los Alamos to explain the
physics of nuclear weapons. They were declassified in 1965 and are still, for anyone with
the technical background, the best introduction to this subject. I called Serber and it
became clear at once that I had struck a gold mine.
The Los Alamos Meeting
To understand what I learned we have to back up a little. When we left Bohr it was
1941, and he was still in Copenhagen. He remained there until September of 1943,
when he was warned that the Gestapo was going to arrest him. Denmark had been
occupied by the Germans since 1940. Bohr escaped to Sweden with his family and on
October 5 he was flown alone to Scotland. The same day he traveled to London and
began a series of briefings and debriefings about the German and Allied programs. I
248
will return to what little we know about the contents of these later. On November 29
Bohr sailed to New York with Aage on the Aquitania, where he arrived a week later.
He then went to Washington where he was introduced to a number of people connect-
ed with the American program including General Leslie Groves who was in charge of
it. On December twenty-seventh he and Aage took the train to Chicago where they
were met by Groves who accompanied them on a two-day train trip to New Mexico.
During this trip Bohr and Groves talked incessantly. It was more likely Bohr talking
and Groves trying to keep up. Bohr was never easy to understand in conversation. It
appears that during these conversations Bohr showed Groves the drawing. One does
not know if this was a drawing Bohr had with him or if it was something he sketched
for the occasion. I have not been able to learn exactly what Bohr told Groves about the
provenance of the drawing except that it certainly had something to do with Heisen-
berg. By the time they reached Los Alamos on December 30th Groves was alarmed.
He thought that Bohr was describing plans for a German nuclear weapon. By the end
of 1943, the British knew a great deal about the German program.
11
They were fairly
Fig. 3 Robert Serber (19091997) at the blackboard in Berkeley. From Peace and War, by Robert Ser-
ber with Robert P. Crease 1998 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the pub-
lisher.
sure not certain that the Germans did not have an industrial-size program like our
Manhattan Project. They were also reasonably sure not certain that the Germans
did not have a plan to use radioactive materials as weapons. But until this was absolute-
ly nailed down by having people on the ground one had to investigate all leads and
here was Bohr with the drawing of what he thought was a German nuclear weapon.
Little wonder that Groves reacted decisively.
He persuaded ordered is probably a better description Oppenheimer to convene
a group to listen to what Bohr had to say about the German program. This happened
the very next day December 31 and Serber was part of the group. He told me that
he came a little late to the meeting and when he arrived Oppenheimer showed him the
drawing asking him what he thought it represented, indicating that it had something to
do with Heisenberg. Serber realized at once that it was the drawing of a reactor and he
told me that he thought that it looked a little silly. I did not, unfortunately, ask him
whether he thought it was a somewhat silly looking drawing of a reactor or a silly look-
ing drawing of a nuclear weapon. As I will explain in due course, both are true. In any
event, Serber had some documents pertaining to this occasion of which he generously
offered to send me copies. When they arrived they turned out to be a two-page report
by Bethe and Edward Teller analyzing what must have been the drawing. Alas, no
drawing was submitted as part of the report and the original drawing seems to have
disappeared. Then there was a letter written by Oppenheimer to Groves dated Janu-
ary 1, 1944, summarizing the meeting of the previous day and Bethe and Tellers
report. It is a brief letter which is easier to present than summarize. Oppenheimer
writes:
Dear General Groves:
I am enclosing a memorandum written by Bethe and Teller after the conference yes-
terday. Present at the conference were the Bakers [the code name for Niels and
Aage Bohr], Bethe, Teller, [Richard] Tolman, Weisskopf, Serber, [Robert] Bacher,
and, for a small part of the time, as you know, Oppenheimer. The calculations
referred to and described in the accompanying memorandum were carried out by
Bethe and Teller, but the fundamental physics was quite fully discussed and the
results and methods have been understood and agreed to by Baker.
I believe that it would be appropriate to emphasize that the completely negative
findings represented in the accompanying memorandum apply to the arrangement
of materials suggested by Baker and take into account all the physical elements
which appeared important to him. No complete assurance can be given that with a
new idea or a new arrangement, something along these lines might not work. It is,
however, true that many of us have given thought to the matter in the past, and that
neither then nor now has any possibility suggested itself, which had the least prom-
ise. The purpose of the enclosed memorandum is to give you a formal assurance,
together with the reasons therefore, that the arrangement suggested to you by Baker
would be a quite useless military weapon.
Very sincerely yours,
J.R. Oppenheimer
12
250
In short, such a reactor cannot explode like a nuclear weapon. It might, of course, be a
nasty source of radiation. This letter made it clear what Bethe had meant by later and
transmitted in the interview I had with him. Later was this meeting and transmit-
ted was the arrival of Bohr at Los Alamos at the end of 1943. It also gives the list of
people who were there. I had already contacted several of them. Oppenheimer and
Bohr were dead as was Tolman who had died in 1948. This left Bacher and Teller. I
managed to reach Bacher, who had headed the experimental division at Los Alamos,
on the phone and he told me that while he remembered the meeting he did not remem-
ber the drawing. I was amused by his reference to Groves in the present tense. You
know how he is when he gets riled up. An assistant to Teller responded much later.
She said, Dr. Teller suffered a mild stroke last year and has difficulty in recalling cer-
tain periods of time. He read your letter with interest; however he does not recall any
information with regard to your question concerning Bohr and Heisenberg.
13
None of
this resolved the riddle of where the drawing came from. But I am now going to
describe what I think is the solution. I am not going to try to reproduce the chronolo-
gy of the discoveries that have led me down this path some quite recent but rather
to outline the argument. My basic premise is that Aage Bohr is right. No drawing was
given to his father by Heisenberg in September of 1941, something that everyone who
knew Heisenberg said was so uncharacteristic of his cautious nature as to defy belief.
If I accept this then I am obliged to explain how Bohr got this information. From
whom, and when? That is what I am now going to set out to do.
Reactor Physics and the German Project
The first clue I want to present is found in the report of Bethe and Teller.
14
It is in the
first sentence of the second paragraph which reads, The proposed pile [this was the
term the Americans then used for reactor] consists of uranium sheets immersed into
heavy water. Let us deconstruct this. In the rough sketches that Bethe has made in an
attempt to reproduce what he saw in 1943, he always draws what looks like a cross-sec-
tion of a cylindrical container. In short, the heavy water and the sheets of uranium were
apparently placed in a cylindrical container. But what about the heavy water itself?
What is it, and what purpose does it serve? What it is, is easy to describe. A molecule
of ordinary water consists of two atoms of hydrogen bound to one atom of oxygen,
H
2
O. But there is an isotope of hydrogen in which the nucleus consists of one positively
charged proton like ordinary hydrogen and one electrically neutral particle the
neutron. This nucleus is called the deuteron, D, and heavy water consists of two
deuterons bound to one oxygen, D
2
O. It occurs at a frequency of about one part in 5000
in ordinary water. But why is it important for reactors?
To answer this we must discuss briefly a few aspects of nuclear fission in uranium.
In 1938, when Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann observed what Lise Meitner and her
nephew Otto Frisch later identified as the fissioning of uranium, they had bombarded
natural uranium the kind you would get out of the ground with slow neutrons.
These are neutrons that move with speeds of a few kilometers a second. But natural
uranium is predominantly a mixture of two isotopes, U
238
which is most of it, and U
235
whose nucleus has three fewer neutrons and constitutes less than one percent, 0.7% to
be more accurate, of the content of natural uranium. In 1939, Bohr had the brilliant
insight that it was only the U
235
that was fissionable by slow neutrons. The vast number
of U
238
nuclei acted essentially as spectators. There is an energy threshold for neutrons
above which the U
238
nuclei are fissionable, whereas the U
235
nuclei are fissionable at
all energies. Indeed, because of an oddity of quantum mechanics, the probability of fis-
sioning a U
235
nucleus is vastly enhanced the slower are the neutrons that bombard it.
But when a U
235
nucleus is split it emits a small number of neutrons a little over two
on average in addition to the fission fragments. But these neutrons are fast. They
move about ten thousand times faster than the slow neutrons which move at a few
kilometers a second. In a reactor using natural uranium, as opposed to a uranium bomb
which uses basically only the U
235
isotope, the fast neutrons must be slowed down to
where they become thermal that is, move at speeds of a few kilometers a second.
The fast neutrons have a low probability of fissioning a U
238
nucleus because not
enough of them have energies above the fission threshold for U
238
. This is where the
heavy water comes in.
To moderate the speeds of the neutrons a moderator consisting of light nuclei is
introduced. One wants the nuclei to be light because when the neutrons bounce off of
them one wants them to give up as much energy as possible to the target nucleus. If
they hit a brick wall so to speak all they would do is to bounce off in a new direc-
tion with undiminished energy. The proton the nucleus of hydrogen, the lightest ele-
ment would be ideal. But the problem is that the proton can capture the neutron to
form a deuteron and thus be lost to the fission chain reaction. Light-water reactors are
possible if one uses uranium that has been enriched with U
235
.
The deuteron, which does not capture many neutrons,* is next best as a moderator,
hence the heavy water. But heavy water must be painfully extracted from ordinary
water. The saga of the German attempts to do this and the Allied attempts to disrupt
them has been the stuff of films.
15
Suffice it to say here, that because of the difficulties,
the Germans never had available more than a few tons of the stuff. We never ran into
this problem because our reactors used a highly purified form of graphite in which the
neutrons bounce off the relatively light carbon nuclei. Early in the war, the Germans
decided that graphite would be too expensive to purify so they opted for heavy water.
Thus the sentence in the Bethe-Teller memorandum tells us as if we did not know it
already that the reactor being considered was German. Now we come to the urani-
um sheets. Here we have a major clue which will lead us to another question.
To exploit this we must say something about the German nuclear program.
16
In the
fall of 1939, German Army Ordnance drafted a group of scientists to come to Berlin to
work on nuclear energy with the idea of creating a weapon. The members of the group,
which included Heisenberg and Hahn, referred to themselves as the Uranverein the
Uranium Club. The group realized that there were two important things it had to do;
design a reactor and find a way to separate U
235
from U
238
. The reason for the first was
* I am grateful to Richard Garwin for pointing out that at a slow rate the deuteron can capture
a neutron to become the nucleus of superheavy hydrogen, the triton.
252
to see how to design a controlled nuclear chain reaction. After 1940, when what we
later called plutonium was introduced as another possibility for fission, there was an
additional reason for the reactor; to make plutonium. The reason for the second ura-
nium separation was that a bomb whose explosive force must be released very rap-
idly would work on the fast unmoderated neutrons that will fission U
235
. Thus one
wanted uranium that was enriched to the point where U
238
would be almost entirely
weeded out. In the end, the Germans did not succeed in either of these objectives
although they made considerable progress.
Our concern is with the reactor. In 1941, the time of Heisenbergs visit to Bohr, there
were two groups working on reactors. There was a group in Berlin and Heisenbergs
people in Leipzig. They employed different designs, but neither used metallic uranium.
Making metallic uranium was the sole province of the Auer Gessellschaft and they
were not able to supply metallic uranium plates until the spring of 1943. Furthermore,
none of Heisenbergs reactor designs until 1943 resembled the design that Bethe and
Teller analyzed. His typical design was a sphere inside of which were concentric spher-
ical shells of powdered uranium embedded in various media such as heavy water or
paraffin. In a report that Heisenberg published in the fall of 1941 the same period he
had visited Copenhagen there is a drawing showing a test reactor of this spherical
design. The Berlin people did propose plates of uranium embedded in heavy water, but
while Heisenberg was aware of this project he seems to have consulted for it this
was not what he was working on. The Berlin people did not have any metallic uranium
plates either in 1941. The obvious question is why would Heisenberg have given Bohr
a design for a reactor in 1941, which he did not work on seriously until 1943? The more
logical question to ask is did something happen in 1943 that was relevant to Bohrs
understanding of the German program? Here, I think that the answer is definitely yes.
Bohr and the Bomb
As I have mentioned, during the war Bohr had contacts with people outside of Den-
mark. I want to focus on the communications he had with James Chadwick in 1943.
Chadwick (figure 4) was the British physicist who had discovered the neutron. By 1943,
he was deeply involved with the British program that was trying the develop nuclear
weapons. He was able to communicate with Bohr by underground courier. In one
instance the message, which had been reduced to microdots, was smuggled in the hol-
lowed-out interior of a key. In another, a dentist made a cavity in a couriers tooth
which he then put a filling over. The first message is from Chadwick to Bohr. It is dated
the 25th of January, 1943. It more or less speaks for itself. He writes:
I have heard in a roundabout way, that you have considered coming to this country
if the opportunity should offer. I need not tell you how delighted I myself should be
to see you again, and I can say [to] you, there is no scientist in the world, who would
be more acceptable both to our university people and to the general public. I think
you would be very pleased by the warmth of the welcome you would receive. A fac-
tor which may influence you in your decision is that you would work freely in sci-
entific matters. Indeed I have in my mind a particular problem in which your assis-
tance would be of the greatest help. Darwin and Appleton are also interested in this
problem and I know they too would be very glad to have your help and advice. [Sir
Charles Darwin, the grandson of the Charles Darwin, was a distinguished physicist
who was then working in the British nuclear weapons program. Sir Edward Apple-
ton was its leader.] You will, I hope, appreciate that I cannot be specific in my ref-
erence to this work, but I am sure it will interest you. I trust you will not misunder-
stand my purpose in writing this letter. I have no desire to influence your decision,
for you alone can weigh all the different circumstances, and I have implicit faith in
your judgment, whatever it should be. All I want to do, is to assure you that, if you
decide to come, you will have a very warm welcome and an opportunity of service
in the common cause. With my best wishes for the future and my deepest regards to
Mrs. Bohr.
Yours sincerely,
J. Chadwick
17
Bohr understood the meaning of Chadwicks somewhat cryptic invitation to which he
responded, perhaps with a little less discretion than Chadwick might have wanted. This
Fig. 4 James Chadwick (18911974). Credit: American Institute of Physics Emilio Segr Visual
Archives.
254
letter is undated but one would imagine that it was sent in February at the latest. He
writes:
I can hardly express how deeply I appreciate your kind letter for which I thank you
most heartily. As you know, I am with my whole heart in the struggle for freedom
and humanity and it is a great encouragement to feel, that my friends have not for-
gotten me and are endeavouring to support my ardent wish to participate in the
great common cause. However tempting it would be to me to follow your invitation,
I find it after much deliberation to my great regret impossible for the present to
leave this country. Not only I feel it to be my duty in our desperate situation to help
to resist the threat against the freedom of our institutions and to assist in the pro-
tection of the exiled scientists, who have sought refuge here. Still neither such duties
nor even the dangers of retaliation to my collaborators and relatives might perhaps
not carry sufficient weight to detain me here, if I felt, that I could be of real help in
other ways, but I do not think that this is probable. Above all I have to the best of
my judgment convinced myself, that in spite of all future prospects any immediate
use of the latest marvellous discoveries of atomic physics is impracticable. However
there may, and perhaps in near future, come a moment where things look different
and where I, if not in other ways, might be able modestly to assist in the restoration,
which is bound to come of international collaboration on human progress. At that
moment, whether it will come before or after the cessation of hostilities, I shall make
an effort to join my friends and I shall be most thankful for any support they might
be able to give me for this purpose. I need not add, that I leave it to you to judge to
whom you may convey the content of this letter. With my heartiest greetings and
most cordial wishes.
18
In this communication Bohr expressed a view that he had been expressing since his dis-
covery that only the rare isotope of uranium, U
235
, was fissionable at all energies. He
immediately realized that it would be a monumental job to separate the isotopes of
uranium. They have identical chemical properties and their masses are so close that the
effects due to the mass difference are tiny. Bohr once remarked that, in his view, it
would take the resources of an entire nation to carry out this technology. In a sense he
was right. The most costly element of the most costly scientific project which had ever
been done the making of the atomic bomb was isotope separation. By 1945 there
were 75,000 people working on this at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Curiously, Bohr never
thought of the plutonium alternative. Given his deep knowledge of fission he certainly
could have. One wonders whether his total aversion to the idea of nuclear weapons
prevented his thinking about them deeply enough.
Nonetheless, Bohr made an abrupt about face less than six months after he had writ-
ten to Chadwick. He expressed this in a second communication to Chadwick. Unfor-
tunately, it also is not dated. But we know its approximate date. We know this because
Chadwick referred to it in a meeting on September 10, 1943. He said that he had heard
from Bohr within within a month or so.* Bohr begins this communication with the
* I would like to thank David Cassidy for supplying this document.
remarkable sentence, In view of the rumours going around the world, that large scale
preparations are being made for the production of metallic Uranium and heavy water
to be used in atomic bombs, I wish to modify my statement as regards the impractica-
bility of an immediate use of the discoveries in nuclear physics.
19
The phrase rumours
going around the world was apparently suggested to Bohr by Aage, probably to con-
ceal specific sources. In any event, somehow in the summer of 1943, Bohr learned
enough about the German program so that he became seriously alarmed. But how?
Enter the figure of J. Hans D. Jensen.
Jensen and the German Project
Jensen (figure 5), who died in 1973, was born in Hamburg in 1907. He was the son of a
gardener. He studied physics, mathematics, chemistry, and philosophy at the Universi-
ties of Hamburg and Freiburg and got his Ph.D. in physics from the former institution
in 1932. In 1941, he was Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Technische Hochschule
Fig. 5 Hans D. Jensen (19071973). Credit: American Institute of Physics Emilio Segr Visual
Archives, W.F. Meggars Gallery of Nobel Laureates.
256
in Hannover. After the war he became a professor at the University of Heidelberg
from which he retired in 1969. Six years earlier he had been awarded the Nobel Prize
in Physics for his theoretical work on the structure of nuclei. Jensen never wrote about
his wartime experiences. He rarely spoke of them, although I will give one notable
exception shortly. While he knew well many of the members of the Uranverein, he was
never in the club. For example, while Heisenberg did tell Jensen about his work on
reactors, he never told him that one of its purposes would be to make plutonium.
Jensen had a reputation for very left-wing political opinions which may be why he was
never part of the inner circle of the German program although he did work connected
with it. Nonetheless, after Heisenberg returned from Copenhagen he encouraged
Jensen to make a visit possibly to repair the damage that Heisenberg thought he had
done with Bohr. In 1948, he wrote that in encouraging this visit he hoped that Jensen
would give Bohr a correct view ein richtiges Bild of their enterprise of building a
reactor.* With Heisenberg one is never quite sure of the agenda. Certainly ein richtiges
Bild would have included a discussion of plutonium. In any event, in the summer of
1942 Jensen visited Copenhagen. The people there were not quite sure what to make
of him, or of his visit. There was some feeling that he might be a Nazi plant which he
certainly wasnt although he had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1937. He
joined, he said, to preserve his academic career. His left-wing attitudes were well-
known and it was even rumored that he was a Communist. But that he was able to
make two visits to occupied Denmark aroused suspicion. Bohr made it clear that his
negative feelings about Heisenberg had not changed. Jensen described what he knew
of Heisenbergs work, but remember that in 1942, they were still using the spherical
design with a paraffin moderator and uranium metal powder. This was not the reactor
whose drawing Bohr brought to Los Alamos. But a year later Jensen was back in
Copenhagen and he had new information.
One is not entirely sure where he got this information but there is a suggestive hint.
On May 5, 1943, Heisenberg gave a lecture on atomic energy for the Aviation Acade-
my. This was something that had been created by Hermann Gring for people such as
engineers or military officers who had a special interest in aviation. Heisenbergs lec-
ture was one of a small series given by members of the Uranverein. By this time, and
this is somewhat ironic in view of Bohrs communication with Chadwick, the Germans
had made it clear to everyone who might be of importance to the program, that atom-
ic energy would not play any military role in the near future. In his lecture Heisenberg
barely mentions it except to say that it is another order of magnitude of difficulty com-
pared to the applications he does discuss; namely, the reactor. Needless to say, he does
not discuss plutonium. What he does discuss in some detail is the reactor he proposes
to build the following summer. He is very specific about this. There is even a diagram.
This is a reactor in a cylindrical container with a heavy-water moderator and metallic
uranium plates. He says it will consist of one and a half metric tons 3,300 pounds of
heavy water and three metric tons 6,600 pounds of metallic uranium. The uranium
* I am grateful to Cathryn Carson for showing me this communication and for discussions on the
general subject of the German program.
is to be immersed in the heavy water in metallic plates. In the actual reactor which was
constructed later that year there were less than three thousand pounds of uranium in
thirty-eight metallic plates. It gave promising results but did not go critical; that is, pro-
duce a self-sustaining chain reaction. There is no reason to think that Jensen was at this
lecture, but there is every reason to believe that he knew about this reactor. Jensen was
working on the extraction of heavy water and he was clearly in contact with Heisen-
berg. Moreover, while this lecture was not open to the general public it was not regard-
ed as supersecret. There are also clear reasons to be quite sure that on his second visit
to Copenhagen in the summer of 1943, he told Bohr about it.
One reason to think so is because he said he did. Recently my colleague Mal Rud-
erman, who is now a professor at Columbia University, told me that while he was on
the faculty at Berkeley Jensen came to dinner at his house.* During dinner Jensen told
the assembled group that he was the one who had informed Bohr about the German
program. Bohr says as much in the recently released letters that he wrote but did not
send to Heisenberg in 1957. In one of them Bohr writes:
As regards Jensens visit to Copenhagen in 1943, the war had already at that time
taken a course quite different from what you and [C.F. von] Weizscker expressed
as your conviction in 1941 [that the Germans would rapidly win the war]. Jensen
described the efforts to increase the production of heavy water in Norway and men-
tioned in this connection that, for him and other German physicists, it was only a
matter of an industrial application of atomic energy. At that time, however, I had to
be very cautious and sceptical, partly on the basis of rumours of new German
weapons, partly because of my own difficult position due to the constant surveil-
lance of the German police.
20
Bohrs Understanding of Reactor Design
This discussion with Jensen was what inspired Bohr to write his second communication
to Chadwick. I will not quote in detail from the rest of it since it is rather technical. It
does show that at that time Bohr really did not understand what a nuclear weapon was.
He also did not seem to understand this reactor very well.** Bohr considered the case
in which this reactor began to explode. In other words the chain reaction started to run
away. He asked the question what would stop it. He proposed the following answer. He
said that when the temperature of the reactor, which goes up because the chain reac-
tion is producing energy, reaches a critical value it will blow off heavy water. When this
happens there will no longer be a moderator and the chain reaction will stop. By esti-
mating this temperature Bohr concluded that the most power such an explosion could
generate is about a hundred times what a comparable TNT explosion would produce.
* I am grateful to Paula and Mal Ruderman for telling me about this incident.
** I am very grateful to Freeman Dyson for several discussions of these technical questions. He
pointed out to me the flaw in Bohrs analysis.
258
He concludes:
Even if this is very great compared with that obtainable with ordinary chemical
explosives, it would in view of the large scale bombing already achieved hardly be
responsible to rely on the effect of a single bomb of this type procurable only with
an enormous effort. The situation, however, is of course quite different, if it is true
that enough heavy water can be made to manufacture a large number of eventual
atomic-bombs, and although I am convinced that the arguments here outlined are
familiar to experts, I hasten therefore to modify my statement [that atomic weapons
were not relevant to the present war].
21
One can only wonder what Chadwick made of this communication. He surely knew
that heavy water has nothing to do with atomic bombs except that it can be used in
reactors that make plutonium. There is no heavy water in a fission bomb and Bohr did
not know about plutonium. Furthermore, upon his arrival in Britain Bohr seemed to be
sending mixed messages. Chadwick got the impression that what Bohr was saying was
that Heisenberg was not working on atomic weapons at this juncture. This was true, but
Bohr was nonetheless presenting his information as if it concerned the design of such
a weapon. This persisted until he got to Los Alamos where, as we have seen, he incited
Groves to call an emergency meeting. Bethe once told me that it was clear to him that
Bohr, when he arrived at Los Alamos, was quite ignorant about nuclear weapons. In
fact, Oppenheimer assigned Richard Feynman to Bohr to get him up to speed. He also
did not understand the physics of this reactor very well. This is what Bethe and Teller
sorted out. First let me explain briefly why Serber thought that, as a reactor design,
what he saw in the drawing was silly. This will illuminate one of the problems with
the German program.
Remember that the drawing showed uranium plates embedded in heavy water.
This is not an efficient design. The reason has to do with the uranium. Recall that the
moderator the heavy water is slowing the neutrons down so they can cause fission.
An ideal situation would be to have this slowing down take place without the neu-
trons spending any time in the uranium. This is not possible. They diffuse in and out
of the uranium during this process. But here is the problem. Uranium can capture
neutrons. That is how plutonium is made. The probability of this capture depends on
the energy of the neutrons. At certain energies resonance energies the proba-
bility becomes huge. Neutrons get eaten and are no longer available for fission. So
one wants a design that minimizes the time neutrons have to spend in the uranium
while they are slowing down. Plates are very bad. A fast neutron created in the inte-
rior can travel a long way before getting out. During this time it is neither moderated
nor can it cause fission, but it can get captured. Much better are chunks of uranium
spheres or cylinders or rods which have the moderator all around them. This was
clearly understood by Enrico Fermi. His reactor that went critical on December 2,
1942, had uranium lumps embedded in purified graphite. But this principle was also
understood by the Germans at least some of them. As early as 1942, a young theo-
retical physicist named Karl-Heinz Hcker, who was attached to the program, showed
that this lump design was vastly superior to the layers. Heisenberg was well aware of
this analysis but chose to ignore it since the layer design was simpler to calculate with.
(There was a rival group in Berlin that used Hckers design which may have con-
tributed to Heisenbergs reluctance.) It was only his last reactor, which was captured
in 1945, that used metal cubes embedded in heavy water. This reactor was close to
going critical. But Bethe and Teller were not in the business of reactor design. They
were analyzing the reactor design that Bohr had brought to them. Actually they
seemed to have improved on it.
For a long time I was completely baffled by the dimensions of the reactor Bethe and
Teller analyzed. They assumed that it had forty tons of heavy water. This is a huge
amount an order of magnitude larger than any corresponding number in the German
program in which they struggled to get a few tons. Where did this number come from?
Finally I asked Bethe (figure 6).* His answer really surprised me. Partly from the
Canadians, he said. Starting in the early 1940s the Canadians had had a project to
build a heavy-water reactor. There was a British-Canadian collaboration and some of
Fig. 6 Hans A. Bethe (b. 1906) at a meeting of the American Physical Society in 1957. Credit: Photo-
graph by Bob Davis; courtesy of American Institute of Physics Emilio Segr Visual Archives, Physics
Today Collection.
* This conversation for which I am grateful took place on January 15, 2002.
260
these people found their way to Los Alamos. The Canadians had made a theoretical
analysis of how much heavy water was needed to make such a reactor work and had
come up with something like forty to fifty tons if the reactor was to produce any sub-
stantial amount of power.* Bethe and Teller knew about the Canadian reactor
although they were not sure of its dimensions. They guessed. The model reactor that
they analyzed had a radius of 2 meters which would hold forty tons of heavy water;
their version of the Canadian reactor. Actually the first heavy-water reactor to go crit-
ical was not Canadian but a small test reactor built at Argonne, Illinois. It went critical
on May 15, 1944, and used 6.5 tons of heavy water in a cylindrical aluminum tank. This
is to be compared with the approximately 3,300 pounds that Heisenberg used in his last
reactor, which he was desperately trying to complete in the spring of 1945, before the
Allies captured it. The total production of heavy water available to the Germans dur-
ing the war was something like three tons.** Bethe and Teller wanted to know what
their model reactor would do if the chain reaction ran away. They realized that Bohrs
mechanism in which the heavy water is blown off is irrelevant.
What happens is this. Because of the characteristics of the reactor it takes a long
time compared to the sorts of times that are involved in say a bomb for the neutron
population to increase. It takes about a millisecond for it to double. In a bomb this is
something like a hundredth of a microsecond. A bomb that is made of U
235
uses fast
unmoderated neutrons.
During this millisecond the reactor expands since the fission fragments heat it up.
But as it expands the uranium becomes less dense. A neutron has to go farther and far-
ther to find a uranium nucleus to fission. Bethe and Teller estimated that if the reactor
doubled its size this would decrease the density to the point where the chain reaction
stops. They calculated how much energy would be released and pointed out that this
would be less than an equivalent amount of TNT two orders of magnitude smaller
than Bohrs estimate. They also considered the effects of the radiation which is, as we
now know only too well, what really matters when a reactor blows up. This is what they
communicated to Groves in their two-page report which put an end to any concern
about Heisenbergs reactor as a nuclear weapon.
This then is the story of the drawing, at least as I see it. What are we to make of it?
I readily admit that I have not given a mathematical proof that Heisenberg did not give
Bohr a drawing in Copenhagen. If you insist, you can still believe that happened. His-
tory is not mathematics. My appeal, however, is to plausibility, economy, and common
sense.
* Freeman Dyson has pointed out to me that a reactor that produces a megawatt of power will
heat up ten tons of water in an hour to the boiling point. Forty tons is not an excessive amount
if the water is used as both a moderator and a coolant.
** The largest producer of heavy water in the world is Canada.To give some idea, a Canadian exper-
iment to detect neutrinos produced in supernova explosions uses as a detector a tank that con-
tains 1,000 tons of heavy water on loan from the Canadian Atomic Energy Commission.
References
1 I published these as a book, Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
2 Quoted in ibid., p. 77.
3 Abraham Pais, Niels Bohrs Times, In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991).
4 Thomas Powers, Heisenbergs War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1993).
5 Ibid., p.128.
6 Aage Bohr to Powers, November 16, 1989, quoted in ibid., p. 511, n. 31.
7 Pais to the author, undated.
8 Bethe to the author, undated.
9 Jeremy Bernstein, Hitlers Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, New
York: American Institute of Physics Press, 1996).
10 Robert Serber, The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How To Build An Atomic Bomb
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
11 F.H. Hinsley, et al., ed., British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 3, Part 2 (London: HMSO
Publications Center, 1988); see especially Appendix 29 which was written in November 1944. It is
astonishing what the British were able to find out by 1943 about this top secret German program.
12 Oppenheimer to Groves, January 1, 1944, from the files of Robert Serber.
13 Joanne Smith to the author, April 3, 1997.
14 Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, Explosion of an Inhomogeneous Uranium-Heavy Water Pile,
January 1, 1944, from the files of Robert Serber.
15 For a particularly nice account, see Per F. Dahl, Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear
Energy (Bristol and Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1999).
16 I am very grateful to Mark Walker for several communications. I have also profited from his book,
German National Socialism and the quest for nuclear power 19391949 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989). I have also found useful David Irvings The German Atomic Bomb: The
History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany, 2nd edition (New York: Da Capo, 1983). David Cas-
sidy supplied me with a schematic showing all of Heisenbergs reactor designs. A primary source
is Werner Heisenberg, Collected Works. Series A/ Part II. Original Scientific Papers, ed. W. Blum,
H.-P. Drr, and H. Rechenberg (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1989).
17 Chadwick to Bohr, January 25, 1943, Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen; quoted in part in Margaret
Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 19391945 (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martins
Press, 1964), p. 246. I am grateful to Finn Aaserud, Director of the Niels Bohr Archive, for supply-
ing this letter to me.
18 Bohr to Chadwick, undated, probably February 1943, Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen; quoted in
part in Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy (ref. 17), pp. 246247. I am grateful to Finn Aaserud,
Director of the Niels Bohr Archive, for supplying this letter to me and to the Niels Bohr Archive
for permission to quote it.
19 Bohr to Chadwick, undated, Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen; paraphrased in part in Gowing,
Britain and Atomic Energy (ref. 17), p. 247. I am grateful to Finn Aaserud, Director of the Niels Bohr
Archive, for supplying this letter to me and to the Niels Bohr Archive for permission to quote it..
20 Bohr to Heisenberg, undated [1957], Document 9, in Niels Bohr-Werner Heisenberg, Naturens
Verden, No. 89 (2001), pp. xxxxxxi. I am grateful to Finn Aaserud, Director of the Niels Bohr
Archive, and to the Niels Bohr Archive for permission to quote this letter.
21 Bohr to Chadwick, undated (ref. 19).
22 In contemplating what elements would be needed to believe now that a drawing was given to Bohr
in 1941 I kept thinking of Ionescos play The Bald Soprano. I commend the following: In spite of
the extraordinary coincidences which seem to be definite proofs, Donald and Elizabeth not being
parents of the same child are not Donald and Elizabeth. See Eugne Ionesco, The Bald Soprano
and other Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 19.
2 Fifth Avenue, 18-L
New York, NY 10011, USA
e-mail: jbernste@earthlink.net

Bernstein PP 2003

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Bernstein PP 2003

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

243

Phys. perspect. 5 (2003) 243261

You might also like