"It is known that Germany worked desperately to solve the problem of controlling atomic energy."

Throughout the war, and yet looking toward the peace which would inevitably follow it, Heisenberg's group worked on developing a reactor to generate electrical power. One of the critical tasks in such a project is developing controls for the chain reaction.

To anyone who knows this, the last sentence in the Times' report is a tipoff that Germany was not working on a bomb. But, if you don't know it, which meant virtually everyone reading that sentence in August 1945, it meant that Germany was desperately trying to develop a bomb.

Is this journalistic pseudo-objectivity? Or a result of that peculiar urge which leads some criminals to leave a clue at the scene of their crime? Or is it an attempt to get a truth past a censor?

We'll never know, because Sidney Shalett is dead.