Transcript of Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall (1945) [pdf]
germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org
germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org
Heisenberg had made a big miscalculation. He thought it would take 2 tons of enriched uranium to make a bomb. In fact, it's about 52Kg for a dumb bomb, and and maybe 5Kg with a good design. Oops.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=_qVgeP_UGqsC&pg=PA64&lpg=P...
>HAHN: I must honestly say that I would have sabotaged the war if I had been in a position to do so.
>HAHN replied that he too loved his country and that, strange as it might appear, it was for this reason that he had hoped for her defeat.
>HEISENBERG: I don't think so. On the other hand, the days of small countries are over. Suppose HITLER had succeeded in producing his EUROPE and there had been no uranium in EUROPE.
This is now my favourite political quote.
>HARTECK: Who is to blame?
>(?) VOICE: HAHN is to blame.
>WEIZSÄCKER: I think it's dreadful of the Americans to have done it. I think it is madness on their part.
>HEISENBERG: One can't say that. One could equally well say "That's the quickest way of ending the war.”
>HAHN: That's what consoles me.
Sharp.
>HEISENBERG: There is a great difference between discoveries and inventions. With discoveries one can always be skeptical and many surprises can take place. In the case of inventions, surprises can really only occur for people who have not had anything to do with it. It's a bit odd after we have been working on it for five years.
It seems like they're talking about the issues at hand, and he's just sitting there thinking about all of this in an abstract way, like it doesn't matter.
And how does that make him a "perspective-seeker"?
I am no physicist, nor am I well versed in Heisenberg's life, but the quotes in the link suggest to me that he has spent a large amount of time pondering ethics, unseen causality, and attributed intent. That is what I meant by seeking perspective.
Now I see.. I only took a few physics courses and mostly associate his name when using the inequality, i.e what I think of when I read "uncertainty principle" (also, doing time-frequency signal processing/analysis). I was thrown off by the expression "quantum observation" because I thought you were talking about the observer effect, something that didn't really make me think of him.
Maybe we can chalk it up to cultural differences, but we've never called it like that here (it was always "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle").
>the quotes in the link suggest to me that he has spent a large amount of time pondering ethics, unseen causality, and attributed intent. That is what I meant by seeking perspective.
Indeed. I also think this is the case for the others, too. What's impressive was his almost forensic approach. His remarks read more like an autopsy than someone being in the situation he was in.
I admit that the observer effect was the first thing that sprang to mind when I was thinking of how the uncertainty principle was stated. That's probably why I worded it so poorly.
> His remarks read more like an autopsy than someone being in the situation he was in.
Seeing as how all this took place soon after the war, I imagine he may have considered it something of a post-mortem.
That shows at any rate that the Americans are capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would have been impossible in Germany. Each one said that the other was unimportant.
Organization & management were key to winning.
But it took a long time to light a fire under the American authorities, and it wasn't until the absolutely critical replacement of his name is a footnote in history with Groves that things really got rolling, on the industrial scale needed, and the scientists and engineers sufficiently focused on the design and execution of the bombs themselves (which for various reasons didn't end up being the afterthought some expected). And he of course picked Oppenheimer to lead that effort, which was opposed by most, albeit he was one of the few uncommitted physicists capable at that level.
These two men organized more than 100,000 people for the industrial production of the required fissionables (90% of the work per Wikipedia), and Grove's drive got those ready in time to forestall Operation Downfall. Heck, they went from the first real test to putting metal on target in 21 and 24 days....
And the design and fabrication of "the bomb" turned out to be massively harder than they expected due to weapons grade plutonium not being suitable for a gun assembly bomb (which is also grossly wasteful of fissionable, if the Little Boy is any guide, as I recall it had 3x critical mass, and a fair amount if it wasn't as pure U-235 as they'd have wanted). Making the implosion concept work was hard, and they got it right the first time....
Read Rhode's book, especially the latter half after the nuclear physics discoveries take a back seat (https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/d...) and Grove's autobiography (https://www.amazon.com/Now-Can-Be-Told-Manhattan/dp/03068018...) to learn the organization and management details, they're amazing.
And had much wider effects on the world at large, that we could indeed do such things led to the Apollo program, and of course to too much conceit that "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we [do something very different and a lot more intractable, probably without even a clearly defined goal]?"
HEISENBERG: One can't say that. One could equally well say "That's the quickest way of ending the war.” HAHN: That's what consoles me
WEIZSÄCKER: I believe the reason we didn't do it was because all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded.
HAHN: I don't believe that but I am thankful we didn't succeed.
Hahn sounds fairly authoritative throughout this transcript, so I'm more inclined to believe him.
And later:
BAGGE: I think it is absurd for WEIZSÄCKER to say he did not want the thing to succeed. That may be so in his case, but not for all of us.
I believe this should be "...and if it did end the war, it is still doubtful..."?
No less a figure than Neals Bohr believed it impossible on those grounds, said in 1939 "It can never be done unless you turn the United States into one huge factory", and when "Nicholas Baker" visited America, remarked that was indeed just what we'd done or were doing.
"The Arsenal of Democracy" was not just a slogan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_of_Democracy).
"HAHN: I must honestly say that I would have sabotaged the war if I had been in a position to do so."
"...They then went on to discuss the feelings of the British and American scientists who had perfected the bomb and HEISENBERG said he felt it was a different matter in their case as they considered HITLER a criminal..."
"WEIZSÄCKER: Our strength is now the fact that we are 'un–Nazi'."
Many of the physicists mentioned here expressed doubts about the Nazi regime. Perhaps it could be said that they didn't achieve the bomb because, in many ways, they didn't want their leaders to possess it. So there was a kernel of doubt preventing them from doing so. On the other hand, the Americans did not have that problem since they "considered Hitler a criminal" and viewed it as imperative that they win the war at any cost. Maybe this made the moral question of whether or not to achieve the bomb less of an obstacle for them. That gave a psychological benefit which facilitated the work they were doing.
Heh. There's a little piece of truth to how war crimes are prosecuted.
Both sides were at fault, but to say that the U.S. was objectively right is an oversimplification.
> The firebombing of Tokyo itself did much worse.
Are you considering the aftereffects of radiation on top of the civilian death toll?
I think the U.S. is quite fortunate that they bombed Japan and not another country. Only the Japanese could so quickly recover from the horrors of a large-scale nuclear bombing in such a short period of time. It makes people who blame the U.S. look bad because "oh but they're doing fine now, so it wasn't that big of a deal".
From what I can tell, it is difficult to make an argument against the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on the civilian toll. The pacification of Japan without the bomb would seemingly have led to far more civilian deaths.
Just curious on how you could have arrived at this conclusion?
> Only the Japanese could so quickly recover from the horrors of a large-scale nuclear bombing
Ever heard of the Wirtschaftswunder? US support post-war was crucial for a lot of countries' recovery.
Right? One thread a JS expert, the next thread an authority on WWII. Welcome to HN :P
The atomic bomb was horrific in its effect, but it was no different that the industrial scale bombardment implemented throughout the war.
Even a cursory study of this subject going back to the manipulations in China in the 1930s makes it pretty clear that the US/Allied cause was righteous.
This comic book version of history present in the US is disgusting.
The US could have nuked a 100% military installation. The US could have detonated the nukes in Tokyo harbor to scare the shit out of the population.
No.
The US decided to nuke TWO, not one, TWO cities full of civilian human beings.
It had many interesting revelations, including the single thing which had a higher priority than the Manhattan Project: the building of a super-Mullberry for Operation Coronet, the invasion of the Kanto Plain on main island of Honshu, where Tokyo and much else was located.
And if you study the endgame on the Japanese side, it's really not likely nukes in Tokyo harbor to scare the shit out of the population would have worked, for one thing, they had no say in the running of the country. There also wasn't generally clean separations between military installations and civilian areas, especially since Japan is so crowded.
No, one of the clear factors was their leadership realizing we'd advanced to the point where a single plane could destroy a city, instead of requiring near Maximum Efforts with hundreds of them.
And of course, the bottom line is that these bombings worked. All else is speculation.
The imminent USSR invasion from the north played a significant part in the calculus of Japan's surrender. Too often the use of nuclear weapons alone gets credit, but there was a more complex political/diplomatic context surrounding _why_ they worked in the case.
Links for anyone interested in reading more on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/... http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08... http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...
Well, it added to things falling apart at an accelerating rate in just about every way. I'm of the opinion that the USSR's actions didn't hurt in the least, but we have absolutely no way of knowing if they were critical, and if so, how much. Probably the biggest thing was making the Army look even more incompetent, when they needed to be squelched ... well, that had been needed for decades....
Because the real action was in far off Manchuria, which we were ever more effectively cutting off from the home islands. And it wasn't like the USSR had the ability to project serious power into the latter without our help (and even then there main effort was of course focused on Eastern Europe), there was no serious "imminent USSR invasion from the north" in the offing.
At best, they could have taken a port on northern Hokkaido, which would have been utterly obnoxious after the surrender, but wouldn't change in the least the calculus of the Japanese plans to resist on the southern home islands where we were the critical threat. And where they had a real chance of "winning" as they perceived it (see Hell To Pay for lots more details) ... although that might not have turned out well given our chemical weapons capabilities, which those who didn't know about the Manhattan Project were ramping up.
In fact, after the Navy busted those railway ferries than ran from it to Honshu (some had steam turbines and could do 17 knots!), causing a severe immediate transportation problem due to the lost coal supply, I seriously doubt Hokkaido's contributions to the war effort going forward could even be significant, especially since we were hardly finished in cutting the link between the two islands.
Everything I've read indicates that it was the second bomb, which indeed happened on the same day as the declaration of war, that really got the attention of the rulers of Japan, and got them serious about surrendering.
the US is the only country on earth that ever dropped nuclear weapons on civilians. US generals decided to kill civilians, in retaliation, to achieve pure terror.
the US lost 3.5k civilians on 9/11 and started 2 wars for it.
but all this mil-porn floats around, civilian armchair heroes debate death and destruction with zero empathy or connection to reality.
just utterly inhuman.
Anyways, all sides in WWII that were able to bombed the crap out of civilian centers when they were given the chance to do so. That's what total war means.
If any other nation had had nukes, you can bet your ass they would've used them--because in such a war you have no choice other than full mobilization of your warmaking abilities or surrender.
Except, of course, Hiroshima was an entirely legitimate military target as well, it was among other things the Second General Army headquarters, e.g. over 3,000 of them were on a parade ground 900 yards from ground zero doing physical training. And it was adjacent to the naval center of Kure.
In Nagasaki, 90% of the population worked for 4 big arms or precursor companies (per Wikipedia), and in general the designated target cities were important industrial centers, or at least still were because by then we'd fire bombed all of the rest of them, excepting the 4 targets/alternates, Kyoto for the obvious reasons (it's the Emperor's city), and Tokyo was also left off the target list, for not only did we need people of authority still alive to surrender, there wasn't any left of it worth bombing. You do know that the early March firebombing of it everything went "right" and we destroyed 16 square miles and killed on the order of 100,000 people? A worst outcome than either of the atomic bombings.
You're saying, quite explicitly, since you don't deny my above facts, that it would have been better to let 400,000 completely innocent civilians per month in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere to continue to be killed, and to kill millions, probably tens of millions of Japanese in Operations Starvation and the like, and in Downfall, the invasion of the home islands, which would have also killed western allied troops by the 100,000s of thousands.
You'd truly prefer to have made East Asia that much more of an abattoir, further embittering all concerned, well, the survivors, that is?
the US lost 3.5k civilians on 9/11 and started 2 wars for it.
Not exactly, we were still in a de facto if not de jure state of war with Iraq, remember the no-fly zone et. al. left over from Saddam's invasion of Kuwait? His attempt to assassinate G. H. W. Bush? The decision to finish him off was sound, the attempted nation building afterwards was the true insanity.
Invade Afghanistan and take down the regime that provided aid, comfort and shelter to al Qaeda and Osama ben Laden? You bet, you f-ck with us, past the point we get seriously angry, and we will destroy you, and if needed, through two very different administrations, hunt you down to the ends of the earth and kill you.
civilian armchair heroes debate death and destruction with zero empathy or connection to reality
I'd suggest that you speak for yourself, instead of imputing the worst possible motives on your debating opponents.
just utterly inhuman
Any serious student of history, especially the 20th Century would deny that, it's peace that's "utterly inhuman", war and violence of other types is the natural human condition.
We don't have to like it, but it's silly to deny it.
They were bombed 3 days apart.
Nagasaki was unfortunate. It was suppose to be Kokura. But the weather was shit, so they picked 2nd best from the list - Nagasaki.
(November 1st, although as it turns out a typhoon that hit Okinawa would have required delaying it, which in turn would have totally screwed the timetable of Operation Coronet, the invasion of the Honshuu Kantou plain where Tokyo etc. were, due to weather.)
At "best" they would have been able to take a port in northern Hokkaido, which would have been terribly obnoxious after the war, but not by itself strategically significant after they'd taken so many of the islands to the north. Details about this, and the massive resources that would have been required by us to take just Sapporo, can be found in the highly recommended Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 (https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-1945-1947...) I recommend elsewhere in this subthread.
To imagine this was a major factor in the decision, when e.g. Truman's ship to the Potsdam Conference crossed the path of 4 US divisions being shuttled from the ETO to the Pacific is ludicrous. E.g. we're still issuing Purple Hearts from the initial lot MacArthur ordered, which was estimated to be 1/4 of what would be needed for Operation Downfall. This was also not long after the survivors of the Bataan Death March had been rescued, we were very much in a mood of revenge, see Grove's autobiography for a direct citation of this in reference to the bombing of Hiroshima.
It was the most politically expedient option. The US had the atomic bomb, but couldn't use it on Germany. Not using it on Japan would have been unthinkable, and impossible to justify to US soldiers and their families, in the face of the potential lives lost invading Japan.
However, I'm certain the US would have used the atomic bombs regardless of what atrocities Japan committed, or whether Japan started the war, or how Okinawa turned out. In the case of the US invading Japan, they would have used nukes to soften Japan up for the invasion, and still invaded.
I can't accept the moral justifications made for using the atomic bombs because I'm not convinced there was any scenario in which the US would have had them and not used them.
I kid you not. There has always been some denial on that end about the role of starting that war, and even more denial about their behavior in China and elsewhere.
They probably "give a pass", because to do more on the international stage would draw attention to their many, many, inexcusable war crimes. Dropping plague fleas on China for instance, or the general activities of Unit 731, which would be bound to come up again and again... and they weren't trying to end a war.
That said, I think even in the US there's a lot of debate over the fact that Nagasaki probably didn't need to happen, but hindsight is 20/20.
Of course, not everybody thinks that way.
US submarines were already very nearly doing to Japan what Germany's U-boats attempted to do to Britain by the late stages of the war.
But imho the bombs are still overplayed as war-enders. I think the prospect of invasion and occupation by Russian forces had at least as much of an impact on the decision.
Hard to get angry that someone isn't playing fair when you would have done the same.
Of course, those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki might feel differently, but when do we ever ask for people's feelings?
I found a Quora thread[0] with several answers from apparent Japanese natives that appears to address this.
Some Japanese don't give the US a pass, and Japan's pacificm and anti-nuclear stance can be seen in light of that (see the answer by "Hide Izumi",) as Japan's express policy of not wanting to repeat the evil done to them by the Americans.
Others accept the common rationale that the bombs would have saved more lives in the end than an invasion, and that the Japanese government at the time had betrayed its own people, committed atrocities and had to be stopped.
Others, still, don't really care because it was 70 years ago.
It probably helps a great deal that the US invested money and effort into rebuilding Japan after the war. We didn't want them to turn out like Germany after WW1 and wind up fighting them again in a few years.
[0]https://www.quora.com/How-could-Japan-forgive-the-atom-bombs...
The latter two have killed far, far more than nuclear weapons ever have.
Unit 731: "Instead of being tried for war crimes, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation."
Nazis: "After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses perpetrated led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics."
'I Aim For The Stars'..."(But Sometimes I Hit London)"
If there were any fairness, we'd have hanged the Japanese emperor, and quite a few more of his subjects responsible for crimes against humanity. But the political-military situation didn't allow it.
The US was put in a shitty position by the opportunistic Soviet intervention. So we ended up with a curbed emperor, an American who fancied himself an emperor, and whitewash.
Remember that the Republic of China was still a thing, and the political implications of taking a relative soft approach to Japanese atrocities in China would have pretty severe blowback.
Just as the western Allies figured why not let the Soviets take the hit, Stalin had nothing to lose by letting UK+ANZUS wear themselves out in the Pacific.
But once it was clear how the wind was blowing, why not jump in?
> But once it was clear how the wind was blowing, why not jump in?
The moral effect of running through the Imperial Japanese Army in Manchuria "like crap through a goose" might have been decisive in allowing the surrender to proceed, in suppressing the IJA leadership. Heck, their predictions about how they'd stop or even bleed us in Kyushuu, where they had a massive superiority in numbers and stopping was very much in the cards, looked very different in the light of the 2nd bombing, which showed the first wasn't a one off, and how they were being owned by the Red Army (not that that should have been a surprise after 1939).
> but in physical terms utterly irrelevant to actually ending the war
It was also mentioned, by the way, and now in response to what you said, that Russia acted according to agreements they had with the USA. So seeing some of the arguments here, no matter what they would have done, somebody would always paint their actions negatively. I'm only talking about this entry into the war in the Far East.
The other way, of course, would be the Japanese scheme to make us tire of cost in blood, and their Air Force and Navy had a truly unpleasant surprise in store for the US Navy with vastly more kamikazes ready than we thought, which would have been much more effective than in Okinawa due to the vastly shorter distances and navigational skills required. That was, BTW, the bloodiest US Navy battle in history.
So underestimated that half our carrier air assets were assigned to the north of the relevant area, and the planned CAPs were way to thin to have stopped all that many of them. Although we could have at least somewhat corrected those in a few days after the magnitude of the kamikaze threat materialized, but there's no guarantee of success on our part, and if the Japanese had managed, as they planned, to take out troop transports....
On the other hand, we were really angry by then, and fighting to win. Is there any indication that they thought the outcome in the Pacific was in doubt? (Serious question, I don't know.)
US was not put in shitty position by soviets. US wanted soviets open war on east, and the soviets agreed that they will, within 3 months, once war with Germany is over. Looking at the timelines it appears to me soviets only kept their word they gave to americans at the Yalta conference
I don't think that means what you think it means. Unless you are comparing the defeat of Germany (as in Debellatio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debellatio) and that of Imperial Japan which was a conditional surrender - maybe a typo on your part though, in which case, sorry.
All due to one foresighted Belgium who had learned would be a very bad idea to let the Nazis get their hands on it, and arranged shipment of a lot of it to America. Where it sat in a warehouse until Grove's men showed up and were actually serious about buying the stuff, after e.g. the State Department and everyone else he'd contacted had blown him off, this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Sengier but the greater story can be found in Rhodes' and Groves' books.
By comparison, in the link I included is the statement that "To illustrate the uniqueness of Sengier’s stockpile, after the war the MED and the AEC considered ore containing three-tenths of 1 percent as a good find.", which comports with my memory.