Copenhagen by Michael Frayn Read Free Book Online Page A

quarter of your ability!
    Heisenberg   Not a tenth of it. But he has ten times the eagerness to do it. It might be a very different story if it’s Diebner who puts the case at our meeting with Albert Speer, instead of me.
    Margrethe   The famous meeting with Speer.
    Heisenberg   But this is when it counts. This is the real moment of decision. It’s June 1942. Nine months after my trip to Copenhagen. All research cancelled by Hitler unless it produces immediate results—and Speer is the sole arbiter of what will qualify. Now, we’ve just got the first sign that our reactor’s going to work. Our first increase in neutrons. Not much—thirteen per cent—but it’s a start.
    Bohr   June 1942? You’re slightly ahead of Fermi in Chicago.
    Heisenberg   Only we don’t know that. But the RAF have begun terror-bombing. They’ve obliterated half of Lübeck, and the whole centre of Rostock and Cologne. We’re desperate for new weapons to strike back with. If ever there’s a moment to make our case, this is it.
    Margrethe   You don’t ask him for the funding to continue?
    Heisenberg   To continue with the reactor? Of course I do. But I ask for so little that he doesn’t take the programme seriously.
    Margrethe   Do you tell him the reactor will produce plutonium?
    Heisenberg   I don’t tell him the reactor will produce plutonium. Not Speer, no. I don’t tell him the reactor will produce plutonium.
    Bohr   A striking omission, I have to admit.
    Heisenberg   And what happens? It works! He gives us barely enough money to keep the reactor programme ticking over. And that is the end of the German atomic bomb. That is the end of it.
    Margrethe   You go on with the reactor, though.
    Heisenberg   We go on with the reactor. Of course. Because now there’s no risk of getting it running in time to produce enough plutonium for a bomb. No, we go on with the reactor all right. We work like madmen on the reactor. We have to drag it all the way across Germany, from east to west, from Berlin to Swabia, to get it away from the bombing, to keep it out of the hands of the Russians. Diebner tries to hijack it on the way. We get it away from him, and we set it up in a little village in the Swabian Jura.
    Bohr   This is Haigerloch?
    Heisenberg   There’s a natural shelter there—the village inn has a wine-cellar cut into the base of a cliff. We dig a hole in the floor for the reactor, and I keep that programme going, I keep it under my control, until the bitter end.
    Bohr   But, Heisenberg, with respect now, with the greatest respect, you couldn’t even keep the reactor under your control. That reactor was going to kill you.
    Heisenberg   It wasn’t put to the test. It never went critical.
    Bohr   Thank God. Hambro and Perrin examined it after the Allied troops took over. They said it had no cadmium control rods. There was nothing to absorb any excess of neutrons, to slow the reaction down when it overheated.
    Heisenberg   No rods, no.
    Bohr   You believed the reaction would be self-limiting.
    Heisenberg   That’s what I originally believed.
    Bohr   Heisenberg, the reaction would not have been self-limiting.
    Heisenberg   By 1945 I understood that.
    Bohr   So if you ever had got it to go critical, it would have melted down, and vanished into the centre of the earth!
    Heisenberg   Not at all. We had a lump of cadmium to hand.
    Bohr   A lump of cadmium? What were you proposing to do with a lump of cadmium?
    Heisenberg   Throw it into the water.
    Bohr   What water?
    Heisenberg   The heavy water. The moderator that the uranium was immersed in.
    Bohr   My dear good Heisenberg, not to criticise, but you’d all gone mad!
    Heisenberg   We were almost there! We had this fantastic neutron growth! We had 670 per cent growth!
    Bohr   You’d lost all contact with reality down in that hole!
    Heisenberg   Another week. Another fortnight. That’s all we needed!
    Bohr   It was only the