Pergamon Amt Nucl. Energy Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. Ill-IV, 1996

Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain

PRESS RELEASE FROM AlP PRESS

NEW DETAILS OF NAZI BOMB PROJECT REVEALED IN HITLER'S URANIUM CLUB

Captured and detained by the Allies, 10 German atomic scientists joined the rest of the world in astonishment as they learned that a U.S. Air Force bomber had just dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima, Japan. Many of these men had worked on a Nazi nuclear reactor project, but they were now being held at Farm Hall, an English country manor used by British intelligence. Eavesdropping on these men and recording their conversations, the Allies learned how close the Nazis came in their failed attempt to build an atomic bomb and how much the Germans knew about the Allies' research efforts.

Kept under wraps until 1992, records of these top-secret conversations are fully explored for the first time in Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, a new book from AlP Press by noted science historian Jeremy Bernstein. Providing the first expertly annotated transcripts of the Farm Hall conversations, Hitler's Uranium Club brings fresh insights into the progress of the German bomb project during World War II, the thoughts of German scientists during that time, and their attempts to grapple with the postwar era.

The 10 German scientists, two of them Nobel Prize winners, were captured days before the Nazi regime surrendered and then were sent to Farm Hall for a 6-month period starting in July 1945. Some of these men were members of the so- called "Uranium Club": the group of scientists who were summoned to Berlin in September 1939 to plan and carry out wartime research. Some had been detained by the Allies in the hope (unbeknownst to them) that their ideas could influence the development of postwar German science.

Among the detainees were Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg, the most prestigious and influential member of the German bomb project; Kurt Diebner, a top figure in the German army's nuclear program and a rival of Heisenberg's; Otto Hahn, co-discoverer of nuclear fission but not a significant player in the wartime fission project; Max Von Lane, another Nobel Laureate who bravely opposed the Nazi regime and war-related research. The transcripts also include insights into the roles played by German scientists who were not held at Farm Hall, such as the creative Manfred von Ardenne, the man who conducted a secret nuclear reactor design project at the Reich Post Office!

How close was Heisenberg to building the bomb? Science historian David Cassidy, author of the critically acclaimed Uncertainty: The Life and Times o f Werner Heisenberg, writes in the introduction to Hitler's Uranium Club that Heisenberg made several errors in his first attempts to understand what happens when a nuclear reactor goes critical or when an explosive reaction occurs. "As these early errors indicate," Cassidy writes, "Heisenberg had completely misunderstood the more subtle aspects of reactor and bomb physics. There is no clear indication in his research reports that he substantially revised [his] preliminary notions about reactor behavior." Only at Farm Hall did he begin to realise his errors.

British intelligence recorded hours of Heisenberg's and the other scientists' conversations on shellacked metal disks. Approximately 10% of the conversations was translated and transcribed, and the metal disks were reused after the transcriptions. The very existence of the Farm Hall documents, an important key to understanding what Germans knew of Allied efforts during the war, was not publicly revealed until 1962, when U.S. Major General Leslie Groves published Now It Can Be Told, his memoirs of the U.S. atom bomb project. British and American authorities finally declassified the reports in 1992 after years of pressure from scientists and historians.

Although the Germans saw themselves as trailblazers in nuclear research, in fact they were far behind the Allies in their efforts. The Germans never collected enough uranium-235 to make a nuclear reactor, let alone a bomb. And they were completely unaware that the Allies had built a working nuclear reactor years before the war had ended.

Bernstein analyzes the revelations at Farm Hall in the main part of the book. In addition to the Farm Hall transcripts, many other documents are excerpted in the book, including the extensive diary kept at Farm Hall by German isotope expert Erich Bagge and a letter from the anti-Nazi Max Von Laue to his son at Princeton University written during the Farm Hall captivity.

As David Cassidy notes in his introduction, "There are few, if any, other instances in recorded history where we have the conversations of leading figures as they complete one era, come to terms with it, and prepare their strategy for the next." These conversations, analyzed for the first time in Hitler's Uranium Club, will surely shape our views of Germany's failed effort to build the bomb.

Jeremy Bernstein worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker for more than 30 years and has been a professor of physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology since 1967. His awards include the John Case Award, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Britannica Award, and the Gemant Award. Bernstein is the author of several books, including Einstein, Kinetic Theory in the Expanding Universe, Three Degrees Above Zero: Bell Labs in the Information Age, and Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos. His most recent book is An Introduction to Cosmology.

AlP Press is the book publishing division of the American Institute of Physics, a non-profit organisation dedicated to furthering the science of physics and its application to human welfare.

Further information: Michele Matozzo, American Institute of Physics [Tel.: (516) 576 2483].

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IV Press Release

HITLER'S URANIUM CLUB: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall By Jeremy Bemstein; Introduction by David Cassidy

407 pp,, cloth; Price: $34.95

Publication Date: October 1995; ISBN: 1-56396-258-6

Comment by the Editor--It should be noted that a publication on the Farm Hall Transcripts has been available for some time and is published by The Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom (1993). The publication has the title 'OperationEpsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts'. It has a detailed introduction by Sir Charles Frank who was one of the British scientists to visit Farm Hall while the German scientists were being detained there. Operation Epsilon runs to 313 pp. and has English and German versions of events.