Germany never quite mastered the riddle…
This
phrase, which has extremely interesting implications, was probably the first use
of a propaganda theme which persists to this day. The need for this theme arose
out of the inevitable collision of the war-time theme that America was in a race
with Hitler Germany to develop the bomb with the reality that the latter was not
even close to developing such a weapon. This collision was aggravated to the
level of a crisis when the US actually used the new terror weapon, not against
Germany, but against Japan when there was no military need for its use. To
summarize, the propaganda problem exists on two levels:
- The US developed the bomb, Germany did not.
- The US used the bomb when there was no military necessity for it.
The propaganda responses to the second level are well known:
- It saved American soldier's lives.
- It shortened the war.
They are widely accepted by Americans. What
seems less widely appreciated is the implication that the killing of a child or
other non-combatant in a state which is an enemy of the United States is
acceptable if it enhances the chances of survival of an American soldier. The
danger that the reversal of this implication poses for ordinary Americans is
even less appreciated.
Werner Heisenberg |
The
propaganda response to the first level is less important than the second, but
certainly no less interesting. It pits American physicists against German
physicists.
What elevated this to a major issue was that around 1947, Werner Heisenberg
(1901 - 1976, Nobel prize: 1932), the leader of German wartime nuclear research, said that his group made a
conscious decision, on moral grounds, not to develop the bomb. This
introduction of morality into the issue of the bomb after it had been
painstakingly papered over, and by a physicist from former Hitler Germany no
less, immediately ignited massive counterattacks against Heisenberg in essays,
books, and even a broadway play (Copenhagen by Michael Frayn).
Since this is a matter of state interest, one might expect that some of these
attacks against Heisenberg are officially inspired.
The conclusion of Thomas Powers, the leading expert on Heisenberg's wartime
activies (Heisenberg's War), is that Heisenberg's assertion is correct.