Read Copenhagen for Free Online Page B

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