The Race for the Atom Bomb

Text copyright © 2018 by Michael Joseloff All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Published by Amazon Publishing, Seattle www.apub.com Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com , Inc., or its affiliates. eISBN: 9781503935556 Cover design by RBDA Studio To Joanne, Matthew and Karen CONTENTS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE A SMALL GLOBAL COMMUNITY CHAPTER TWO ROME CHAPTER THREE SPLIT ATOMS CHAPTER FOUR HEISENBERG IN MICHIGAN CHAPTER FIVE WAR CHAPTER SIX HEAVY WATER CHAPTER SEVEN 1941 CHAPTER EIGHT THE MANHATTAN PROJECT CHAPTER NINE HEAVY WATER II CHAPTER TEN CHICAGO CHAPTER ELEVEN CONSTRUCTION CHAPTER TWELVE HEAVY WATER III CHAPTER THIRTEEN LOS ALAMOS CHAPTER FOURTEEN HUNTING HEISENBERG CHAPTER FIFTEEN HEAVY WATER IV CHAPTER SIXTEEN KIDNAP CHAPTER SEVENTEEN DARK DAYS CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ALSOS CHAPTER NINETEEN RESTRICTED AREA CHAPTER TWENTY BATTLE OF THE BULGE CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE HUNTING HEISENBERG II CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CAPTURE CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE THE HUNT IS OVER CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR PLUTONIUM CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE JAPAN CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX FARM HALL CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN HIROSHIMA CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT PEACE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY END NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR INTRODUCTION I FOUND THE PHOTO while browsing the internet: five men dressed in jackets and ties, smiling and posing for the camera somewhere on the campus of the University of Michigan. The picture was taken at an annual physics conference in Ann Arbor during the summer of 1939. I recognized two of the men: one, Werner Heisenberg, would go on to spearhead Adolf Hitler’s atomic bomb program, the other, Enrico Fermi, would become a top Manhattan Project scientist working on the Allied atom bomb. A third, whom I didn’t recognize, Samuel Goudsmit, would become a top Allied intelligence officer tasked with gathering information on the German atom bomb and, in the final months of the war, capturing Hitler’s atomic scientists before the Soviets could nab them. I later learned, to my surprise, that the three were longtime friends and that Heisenberg also knew Robert Oppenheimer, the future scientific director of The Manhattan Project. That photo, taken just a month before the start of World War II, provided the inspiration for “Chasing Heisenberg: The Race for the Bomb.” My interest in the rivalry between Allied and German scientists dates back to 1993 when I produced a report on J. Robert Oppenheimer for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS. I’ve been reading about that history off and on for years, looking for a compelling narrative that would breathe new life into what was arguably one of the greatest scientific and engineering feats of the twentieth century. That 1939 photo alerting me to Heisenberg’s friendship with Fermi, Oppenheimer and Goudsmit showed me the way. I thought I knew the bomb’s history fairly well before I began digging into the lives of those four men, but I was wrong. My research uncovered twists and turns and fascinating details I had not known before, and along with them, the makings of a great story. CHAPTER ONE A SMALL GLOBAL COMMUNITY 3-13-38 CBS RADIO WORLD NEWS ROUNDUP AUSTRIAN INVASION Tonight the world trembles . Right at this moment Austria is no longer a nation, but is now officially a part of the German empire . The Nazis are driving with all their might to bring Austria under complete Nazi domination . Jews, Catholic leaders and former Austrian officials are being jailed. Hitler . is preparing . a roundabout triumphal tour of the land of his birth . In Berlin, Field Marshal Herman Goering has served notice that Germany intends to go after the Germans in Czechoslovakia already ringed on several sides by German troops. BY THE SUMMER OF 1939, a little over a year after that radio broadcast, Adolf Hitler had all but shredded the Versailles Treaty, the peace agreement ending World War I. While Germany’s erstwhile enemies sat idly by, he’d rebuilt his nation’s military, sent German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, annexed Austria, bullied the Czechs into surrendering the Sudetenland, occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and stripped German Jews of their civil rights, forcing many to flee the country. After years of grabbing territory through political chicanery, Adolf Hitler was ready to go to war; his plan, to create a Third Reich, a racially pure Germanic Empire in Europe. As the date for the opening attack, an invasion of Poland, neared, scientists attached to the German War Office began research on a revolutionary weapon, a bomb that would draw its destructive power not from conventional man-made explosives like TNT, but from a primordial energy locked deep inside the uranium atom. No one had ever tried to harness that energy. No one knew if the weapon would work. But if it did, one “atomic” bomb would be able to destroy an entire city. Loaded into a long- range strategic bomber or onto a guided rocket, it might spread Nazism across the globe. With the world on the brink of war, Werner Heisenberg, a 37-year-old physics professor at the University of Leipzig, a Nobel Prize-winner and future architect of Hitler’s nascent atom bomb program, boarded an ocean liner and set sail for New York City. Heisenberg was one of the most brilliant physicists of his time. His work in the field of Matrix Mechanics was considered every bit as revolutionary as that of Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity. 1 A loyal son of the fatherland and a corporal in the reserve force that supported Germany’s regular army, Heisenberg sympathized with the Nazi goal of restoring Germany to a position of prominence in Europe. 2 But he condemned what he called “the excesses” of Nazism, especially the anti- Semitic policies that drove Jewish scientists, some of the nation’s best, to flee the country. 3 At the time, there were only about a hundred scientists in the world doing research in Heisenberg’s field of theoretical physics. 4 The rise of Nazism had estranged him from that small global community, and he looked forward to seeing old friends. Some he had known since the 1920s when he was a teaching assistant and they, postdoctoral fellows in Göttingen, Germany. Among them: a 34-year-old Jewish physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer. 5 Göttingen was the world capital for theoretical physics. Oppenheimer had come there to study in 1927. He had read and admired Heisenberg’s work and looked forward to meeting him. Heisenberg was teaching elsewhere at the time, but when he came to the campus for a short visit Oppenheimer sought him out and introduced himself. Both men had brilliant and original minds. Drawn together by their shared interest, the future rivals developed what may not have been a friendship, but was certainly a relationship built on mutual respect. 6 During his trip Heisenberg reconnected with another former Göttingen student, Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist. Fermi’s seven months at Germany’s elite university had been difficult. He felt uncomfortable and insecure. Göttingen attracted the world’s brightest physicists, future Nobel Laureates like Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli. Fermi worried that he would not measure up. Nevertheless, he and Heisenberg became close friends. 7 Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli (Photograph by Franco Rasetti, Courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection) The two reunited at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where they attended an annual meeting of theoretical physicists. A photo taken at the time captures the moment. It shows them with three Michigan faculty members: Samuel Goudsmit, Clarence Yokum and Edward Kraus. Goudsmit, another Göttingen graduate, was a close friend of Heisenberg. Samuel Goudsmit, Clarence Yokum, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi and Edward H. Kraus at the University of Michigan, summer 1939 (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Crane-Randall Collection, Goudsmit Collection) Heisenberg’s last trip to the annual summer meeting was in 1939. Two years later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor thrust him and his three American friends into the front lines of World War II where they squared off against each other in a race to build the atom bomb. This is the story of that race told through the lives of four scientists: Werner Heisenberg, the scientific head of Germany’s nuclear program, and Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Samuel Goudsmit, principal players in the Allied effort. It begins in Rome, Italy, in 1934 with Enrico Fermi’s pioneering experiment probing the atom’s nucleus. It had been almost three decades since Albert Einstein revolutionized atomic physics with his theory that an atom’s mass is really energy in a different form. In the following years, his famous equation E=mc 2 had become part of popular culture. Publishers lured readers with sensational headlines highlighting the potential dangers of atomic energy: “Tinkering With Angry Atoms May Blow Up the Earth” and “Nature’s Greatest Secret, the Might of the Atom Stirs Scientists.” 8 In 1914, in his novel The World Set Free , H.G. Wells looked into his crystal ball and conjured the horror of 1959, the year the world’s nations became engulfed in an atomic war. “From nearly 200 centres . roared the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs,” he wrote, “the flimsy fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganized and every city, every thickly populated area was starving or trembled on the verge of starvation.” When Wells wrote his apocalyptic novel, atomic energy was a mysterious, almost mythical force of nature.

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