Authors: Michael Frayn
Bohr
So you don’t want me to say yes and you don’t want me to say no.
Heisenberg
What I want is for you to listen carefully to what I’m going on to say next, instead of running off down the street like a madman.
Bohr
Very well. Here I am, walking very slowly and popishly. And I listen most carefully as you tell me …
Heisenberg
That nuclear weapons will require an enormous technical effort.
Bohr
True.
Heisenberg
That they will suck up huge resources.
Bohr
Huge resources. Certainly.
Heisenberg
That sooner or later governments will have to turn to scientists and ask whether it’s worth committing those resources—whether there’s any hope of producing the weapons in time for them to be used.
Bohr
Of course, but …
Heisenberg
Wait. So they will have to come to you and me. We are the ones who will have to advise them whether to go ahead or not. In the end the decision will be in our
hands, whether we like it or not.
Bohr
And that’s what you want to tell me?
Heisenberg
That’s what I want to tell you.
Bohr
That’s why you have come all this way, with so much difficulty? That’s why you have thrown away nearly twenty years of friendship? Simply to tell me that?
Heisenberg
Simply to tell you that.
Bohr
But, Heisenberg, this is more mysterious than ever! What are you telling it me
for?
What am I supposed to do about it? The government of occupied Denmark isn’t going to come to me and ask me whether we should produce nuclear weapons!
Heisenberg
No, but sooner or later, if I manage to remain in control of our programme, the German government is going to come to
me!
They will ask
me
whether to continue or not! I will have to decide what to tell them!
Bohr
Then you have an easy way out of your difficulties. You tell them the simple truth that you’ve just told me. You tell them how difficult it will be. And perhaps they’ll be discouraged. Perhaps they’ll lose interest.
Heisenberg
But, Bohr, where will that lead? What will be the consequences if we manage to fail?
Bohr
What can I possibly tell you that you can’t tell yourself?
Heisenberg
There was a report in a Stockholm paper that the Americans are working on an atomic bomb.
Bohr
Ah. Now it comes, now it comes. Now I understand everything. You think I have contacts with the Americans?
Heisenberg
You may. It’s just conceivable. If anyone in Occupied Europe does it will be you.
Bohr
So you
do
want to know about the Allied nuclear programme.
Heisenberg
I simply want to know if there is one. Some hint. Some clue. I’ve just betrayed my country and risked my life to warn you of the German programme …
Bohr
And now I’m to return the compliment?
Heisenberg
Bohr, I have to know! I’m the one who has to decide! If the Allies are building a bomb, what am I choosing for my country? You said it would be easy to imagine that one might have less love for one’s country if it’s small and defenceless. Yes, and it would be another easy mistake to make, to think that one loved one’s country less because it happened to be in the wrong. Germany is where I was born. Germany is where I became what I am. Germany is all the faces of my childhood, all the hands that picked me up when I fell, all the voices that encouraged me and set me on my way, all the hearts that speak to my heart. Germany is my widowed mother and my impossible brother. Germany is my wife. Germany is our children. I have to know what I’m deciding for them! Is it another defeat? Another nightmare like the nightmare I grew up with? Bohr, my childhood in Munich came to an end in anarchy and civil war. Are more children going to starve, as we did? Are they going to have to spend winter nights as I did when I was a schoolboy, crawling on my hands and knees through the enemy lines, creeping out into the country under cover of darkness in the snow to find food for my family? Are they going to sit up all night, as I did at the age of seventeen, guarding some terrified prisoner, talking to him and talking to him through the small hours, because he’s going to be executed in the morning?
Bohr
But, my dear Heisenberg, there’s nothing I can tell you. I’ve no idea whether there’s an Allied nuclear programme.
Heisenberg
It’s just getting under way even as you and I are talking. And maybe I’m choosing something worse even than defeat. Because the bomb they’re building is to
be used on us. On the evening of Hiroshima Oppenheimer said it was his one regret. That they hadn’t produced the bomb in time to use on Germany.
Bohr
He tormented himself afterwards.
Heisenberg
Afterwards, yes. At least we tormented ourselves a little beforehand. Did a single one of them stop to think, even for one brief moment, about what they were doing? Did Oppenheimer? Did Fermi, or Teller, or Szilard? Did Einstein, when he wrote to Roosevelt in 1939 and urged him to finance research on the bomb? Did you, when you escaped from Copenhagen two years later, and went to Los Alamos?
Bohr
My dear, good Heisenberg, we weren’t supplying the bomb to Hitler!
Heisenberg
You weren’t dropping it on Hitler, either. You were dropping it on anyone who was in reach. On old men and women in the street, on mothers and their children. And if you’d produced it in time they would have been my fellow-countrymen. My wife. My children. That was the intention. Yes?
Bohr
That was the intention.
Heisenberg
You never had the slightest conception of what happens when bombs are dropped on cities. Even conventional bombs. None of you ever experienced it. Not a single one of you. I walked back from the centre of Berlin to the suburbs one night, after one of the big raids. No transport moving, of course. The whole city on fire. Even the puddles in the streets are burning. They’re puddles of molten phosphorus. It gets on your shoes like some kind of incandescent dog-muck—I have to keep scraping it off—as if the streets have been fouled by the hounds of hell. It would have made you laugh—my shoes keep bursting into flame. All around me, I suppose, there are people trapped, people in various stages of burning to death. And all I can think is, How will I ever get hold of another pair of shoes in times like these?
Bohr
You know why Allied scientists worked on the bomb.
Heisenberg
Of course. Fear.
Bohr
The same fear that was consuming you. Because they were afraid that
you
were working on it.
Heisenberg
But, Bohr, you could have told them!
Bohr
Told them what?
Heisenberg
What I told you in 1941! That the choice is in our hands! In mine—in Oppenheimer’s! That if I can tell them the simple truth when they ask me, the simple discouraging truth, so can he!
Bohr
This is what you want from me? Not to tell you what the Americans are doing but to stop them?
Heisenberg
To tell them that we can stop it together.
Bohr
I had no contact with the Americans!
Heisenberg
You did with the British.
Bohr
Only later.
Heisenberg
The Gestapo intercepted the message you sent them about our meeting.
Margrethe
And passed it to you?
Heisenberg
Why not? They’d begun to trust me. This is what gave me the possibility of remaining in control of events.
Bohr
Not to criticise, Heisenberg, but if this is your plan in coming to Copenhagen, it’s … what can I say? It’s most interesting.
Heisenberg
It’s not a plan. It’s a hope. Not even a hope. A microscopically fine thread of possibility. A wild improbability. Worth trying, though, Bohr! Worth trying, surely! But already you’re too angry to understand what I’m saying.
Margrethe
No—why he’s angry is because he is beginning to understand! The Germans drive out most of their best physicists because they’re Jews. America and Britain give them sanctuary. Now it turns out that this might offer the Allies a hope of salvation. And at once you come howling to Niels begging him to persuade them to give it up.
Bohr
Margrethe, my love, perhaps we should try to express ourselves a little more temperately.
Margrethe
But the gall of it! The sheer, breathtaking gall of it!
Bohr
Bold skiing, I have to say.
Heisenberg
But, Bohr, we’re not skiing now! We’re not playing table-tennis! We’re not juggling with cap-pistols and non-existent cards! I refused to believe it, when I first heard the news of Hiroshima. I thought that it was just one of the strange dreams we were living in at the time. They’d got stranger and stranger, God knows, as Germany fell into ruins in those last months of the war. But by then we were living in the strangest of them all. The ruins had suddenly vanished—just the way things do in dreams—and all at once we’re in a stately home in the middle of the English countryside. We’ve been rounded up by the British—the whole team, everyone who worked on atomic research—and we’ve been spirited away. To Farm Hall, in Huntingdonshire, in the water-meadows of the River Ouse. Our families in Germany are starving, and there are we sitting down each evening to an excellent formal dinner with our charming host, the British officer in charge of us. It’s like a pre-war house-party—one of those house-parties in a play, that’s cut off from any contact with the outside world, where you know the guests have all been invited for some secret sinister purpose. No one knows we’re there—no one in England, no one in Germany, not even our families. But the war’s over. What’s happening? Perhaps, as in a play, we’re going to be quietly murdered, one by one. In the meanwhile it’s all delightfully civilised. I entertain the
party with Beethoven piano sonatas. Major Rittner, our hospitable gaoler, reads Dickens to us, to improve our English .… Did these things really happen to me …? We wait for the point of it all to be revealed to us. Then one evening it is. And it’s even more grotesque than the one we were fearing. It’s on the radio: you have actually done the deed that we were tormenting ourselves about. That’s why we’re there, dining with our gracious host, listening to our Dickens. We’ve been kept locked up to stop us discussing the subject with anyone until it’s too late. When Major Rittner tells us I simply refuse to believe it until I hear it with my own ears on the nine o’clock news. We’d no idea how far ahead you’d got. I can’t describe the effect it has on us. You play happily with your toy cap-pistol. Then someone else picks it up and pulls the trigger … and all at once there’s blood everywhere and people screaming, because it wasn’t a toy at all .… We sit up half the night, talking about it, trying to take it in. We’re all literally in shock.
Margrethe
Because it had been done? Or because it wasn’t you who’d done it?
Heisenberg
Both. Both. Otto Hahn wants to kill himself, because it was he who discovered fission, and he can see the blood on his hands. Gerlach, our old Nazi co-ordinator, also wants to die, because his hands are so shamefully clean. You’ve done it, though. You’ve built the bomb.
Bohr
Yes.
Heisenberg
And you’ve used it on a living target.
Bohr
On a living target.
Margrethe
You’re not suggesting that Niels did anything wrong in working at Los Alamos?
Heisenberg
Of course not. Bohr has never done anything wrong.
Margrethe
The decision had been taken long before Niels arrived. The bomb would have been built whether
Niels had gone or not.
Bohr
In any case, my part was very small.
Heisenberg
Oppenheimer described you as the team’s father-confessor.
Bohr
It seems to be my role in life.
Heisenberg
He said you made a great contribution.
Bohr
Spiritual, possibly. Not practical.
Heisenberg
Fermi says it was you who worked out how to trigger the Nagasaki bomb.
Bohr
I put forward an idea.
Margrethe
You’re not implying that there’s anything that
Niels
needs to explain or defend?
Heisenberg
No one has ever expected him to explain or defend anything. He’s a profoundly good man.
Bohr
It’s not a question of goodness. I was spared the decision.
Heisenberg
Yes, and I was not. So explaining and defending myself was how I spent the last thirty years of my life. When I went to America in 1949 a lot of physicists wouldn’t even shake my hand. Hands that had actually built the bomb wouldn’t touch mine.
Margrethe
And let me tell you, if you think you’re making it any clearer to me now, you’re not.
Bohr
Margrethe, I understand his feelings …
Margrethe
I don’t. I’m as angry as you were before! It’s so easy to make you feel conscience-stricken. Why should he transfer his burden to you? Because what does he do after his great consultation with you? He goes back to Berlin and tells the Nazis that he can produce atomic bombs!