The explosion of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
Physicists and spies: like Fréderick Joliot, who secretly collaborated with the French resistance, or like the Dutchman Samuel Goudsmit, who did it big by joining the main American espionage organization. Physicists saboteurs, physicists engaged in warfare, physicists who escape and are captured, physicists put to work on remote islands in the Baltic Sea, physicists in love with the wrong Mata Hari, physicists who communicate with other physicists by anagrams, and make gross mistakes. And, together with physicists, soldiers, polyglot former baseball players, Nobel Prize winners, intrepid aviators and skiers, sons of ambassadors determined to win dad’s heart with reckless undertakings up to suicide. This is the true and dramatic story of the race for the atomic bomb and how the United States became convinced that Germany, a huge scientific and industrial power, could have built it before them. That is, it is the story of the American “brigade of bastards” told by science writer Sam Kean in his latest book, where “brigade of bastards” was the nickname that was actually given to the spy group in action because it could act in total autonomy from the groups military and was entitled to everything.
The story begins in 1938 with a hastily published paper demonstrating the possibility of uranium fission. It is signed by the German Otto Hahn (destined for the Nobel Prize) and his collaborator (Jewish and female, therefore destined for nothing) Lise Meitner. War follows. At one point, to prevent the Germans from building the bomb, the Americans set up a spy group. And since then, so much has happened that the precise and pressing story of the actions aimed at blocking the research of German physicists fills the almost 500 pages of the book without leaving a breath.
At the center of the story, the attempt to stop, silence, perhaps even kill Werner Heisenberg who had designed the reactors of the German atomic program. Everyone respected him as a physicist, but some colleagues (understandably) came to hate him. So here he is hunted down to Switzerland: they’ll put a ruthless headhunter with a long experience in the Burmese jungle on his tail, but things in Zurich will go more slowly and Heisenberg won’t notice anything. Indeed, he will continue to wonder why so much disapproval from colleagues.
The American espionage group was called Alsos, from the Greek “grove”, a name that some wits chose because it was wanted by General Leslie Groves (in English, “grove”), who was in charge of the bomb construction project, and was directed by a daredevil Boris Pash. On the other hand, his rival in espionage operations although at war on the same side, an enigmatic Moe Berg, much more subtle, so much so that he was able to convince a scientist like Antonio Ferri, one of the world’s leading experts in aerodynamics, to follow him to the United States , on whose head the Germans had placed a large bounty.
But this is just a detail. For example, now that the secret documents of the intelligence services have been declassified, with evidently painstaking work, Kean has reconstructed how the desperate attempts to sabotage the Norwegian hydroelectric plant where the Germans produced heavy water for the nuclear program went. And that of the many wrong leads followed by the Americans to identify Nazi uranium deposits, such as when they found themselves following radioactive toothpaste. So many holes in the water made without even knowing how far the Germans were in the development of the atomic bomb, cost bombings and victims in half of Europe.
And where were the Germans of the Uranium Club? Back, way back.
But we can say this today, as today we know the ending of the story. The bomb was built by the Americans and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Heisenberg didn’t really believe it at the time. And then he resented his colleagues not so much for having been associated with the Nazis (well, he had worked for them) but because it was said that he did not understand the physics necessary for the construction of the atomic weapon. Finally, above all he changed physics: it became important, rich, considered, feared. No surprise, seeing her today. After all, as Kean says in conclusion, physics “by breaking the atom had broken the world”.
