Heisenberg's war: the secret history of the German bomb

Originally published: London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. One of the Most important - and controversial - aspects of the history of the Second World War is the failure of the Germans to build an atomic bomb. Germany was the birthplace of modern physics; it possessed the raw materials and the industrial base, and although many leading scientists fled from Hitler, it still commanded key intellectual resources. Yet at the end of the war the Germans had no bomb, and their nuclear research program was found to be negligible. What happened? Until now the conventional view has been that the Germans doubted that the bomb could be built, and were thus unwilling to try. In Heisenberg's War, Thomas Powers offers a radically new and convincing explanation - and in doing so reveals for the first time the entire complex fascinating story of the interplay between science and espionage, morality aid military necessity, paranoia and cool logic, that marked the German bomb program and the Allied response to it