Heisenberg’s War (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Thomas Powers
- First Published: 1993
- Type of Work: History, biography, and science
- Time of Work: 1939-1945
- Setting: Germany, Switzerland, and the United States
- Principal Characters: Werner Heisenberg, Adolf Hitler, Morris “Moe” Berg, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr
- Genres: Nonfiction, History, Science and technology
- Subjects: Science or scientists, World War II, Nazism or Nazis, Germany or German people, Atomic bomb, Nuclear warfare or weapons, Arms or weapons, Physics or physicists
- Locales: United States, Germany, Switzerland
There are many kinds of hero. Werner Heisenberg was a man of heroic thought: a physicist of the first water, inventor of quantum mechanics and of the Uncertainty Principle that bears his name, 1932 Nobel laureate—and the one man in Hitler’s Germany who could conceivably have put together a project to build a German atomic bomb.
Hitler himself, in his utterly perverse way, was another kind of hero to those who adored him: an intensely charismatic leader with an uncanny knack for saying and doing whatever would feed on the deepest hatreds and unspeakable fears of the German...
[The entire page is 2170 words long]
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