Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb by Thomas Powers, Jonathan Cape, pp 608, £20
The most formidable physicist in Germany, Werner Heisenberg did not reveal until after the Second World War that 'It was from September 1941 that we saw an open road ahead of us, leading to the atomic bomb'. He had remained under the Nazi regime, refusing to leave in spite of many opportunities to escape before the outbreak of the war in 1939. But the end of that open road was never reached. Germany never developed an atomic bomb.
Yet the discovery of fission, just before the war started, had convinced physicists internationally that an atomic bomb could be perfected. Heisenberg, a Nobel prizewinner, was the obvious candidate to head German work on it and Germany was in a good position to lead the race, possessing the scientific and industrial resources and the raw ...
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