Science, War and the Devil’s Pact

John Cornwell’s own subtitle seems the most apt title of this review. Since 1990 he has been directing the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge and he is an affiliated research scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in the University. This massive and brilliantly written book is in eight parts: Hitler’s Scientific Inheritance, The New Physics 1918-1933, Nazi Enthusiasm, Compliance and Oppression 1933-1939, The Science of Destruction and Defence 1933-1943, The Nazi Atomic Bomb 1941-1945, Science in Hell 1942-1945, In Hitler’s Shadow and Science from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. Although there is a huge amount of detail, the reader is carried along by the author’s engagement with the human personalities as well as the technical issues. It is his astute understanding of humans, science and the interface of both with politics and ethics that makes such interesting reading. Already in the introduction, Cornwell makes it clear that his ultimate concern lies with the nature of moral responsibility and personal integrity, whether in Nazi Germany or contemporary Western democracies.

It is easy to forget the centrality and influence of German science in the early part of the last century. The chemist Fritz Haber is vividly drawn in the context of the birth of the (later infamous) chemical giant IG Farben and the ominous development of poison gas during the First World War. The roots of ‘racial hygiene’ and eugenics are also to be found in that period. The development of the New Physics is described in a separate section, highlighting the contribution of eminent Germans. Then, in 1933, the curtain begins to come down and scientists are faced with awkward moral and political choices. Some emigrate, others try to get by, and a few are more active in the Nazi cause. Even Max Planck reluctantly lifts his hand in a Nazi salute on a public occasion, even though he also vainly tried to persuade Hitler that some Jews were different in representing the best of German culture. Jews were dismissed from their academic posts and a pall of fear descended on the country. Eventually Haber, as a Jew, was forced to emigrate and died soon afterwards. In all, as Cornwell records, some 25% of the pre-1933 physics community left Germany.

The development of a Nazi slant on science is described in a number of fields. Here it is surprising to learn that the link between smoking and lung cancer was first discovered during this period and that the Nazis launched a vigorous anti-smoking campaign. Indeed, public health campaigns in general were supported by fascism where more liberal regimes might consider this unwarranted interference. Himmler attacked the food industry for destroying the natural German diet, commenting that city dwellers were already at their mercy as a result of tinned food, ‘but now they attack the countryside with their refined flour, sugar and white bread.’

The next section discusses the development of the science of destruction and defence (including rockets, radar and code-breaking), before Cornwell moves on to the Nazi atomic bomb. Here the key milestones in the theoretical development of nuclear fission are discussed, with the growing realisation that an atomic bomb is a practical possibility. The central figure in the German side of this story is Werner Heisenberg. Cornwell leaves no stone unturned in trying to understand Heisenberg as a man and as a scientist, given the unique situation in which he found himself. We are already alerted to an initial conundrum: to what extent is it possible to separate science from the scientist (this also applied to Einstein), science from values, science from moral responsibility? Heisenberg not only struggled with these issues, but also seems to have revised his understanding of himself after the war.

Many readers will have seen Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, which evokes the 1941 encounter between Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. There are many accounts of this meeting, and Cornwell picks his way carefully through them, even citing different drafts from a series of letters written by Bohr. These show how anxious he was to justify himself in case his misunderstanding of Heisenberg might make him more directly responsible for the development of nuclear weapons. The underlying issue is that scientists then had the power to say whether or not the construction of an atomic bomb should even be attempted.

The case of Heisenberg himself is even more complex. The German policy in 1942 was to pursue research with nuclear energy rather arms, but the Allies did not know for sure that the German project had failed until December 1944, at which point the physicist and Nobel peace prize laureate Sir Joseph Rotblat resigned from Los Alamos. This highlights the view that the justification of working on the bomb rested on the conviction that the Germans might be ahead; and once it was known that they were not, the moral landscape shifts dramatically. Rotblat thus emerges as a man of real integrity – he went on to be one of the founders of Pugwash, along with Einstein and Russell. Heisenberg, along with other German scientist, found himself just outside Cambridge in the summer of 1945 where they discussed the implications of the bomb, especially after Hiroshima. Cornwell’s final view is that he was a great physicist, that he supported Hitler’s war aims (partly on the grounds that a German empire would be more benign than a Russian one…..), and ‘that the worst that can be said of Heisenberg….is that he was morally and politically obtuse’ – a fair judgement given the evidence.

The larger questions arising from this book are revisited in the final section after Cornwell’s section on ‘Science in Hell’, where he describes the grim activities of extermination experts and those who experimented on human subjects in order to ‘advance knowledge’ on human endurance of exposure to infectious disease, poisons and freezing conditions. Lisa Meitner’s 1945 letter sets out the collective responsibility for allowing certain things to happen, which echoes Norbert Wiener’s concern that ‘the scientist ends by putting unlimited powers in the hands of the people he is least inclined to trust with their use.’ He adds (‘chillingly relevant today’, as Cornwell observes) that ‘the practical use of guided missiles can only be to kill foreign civilians indiscriminately, and to furnish no protection whatsoever to civilians in this country.’

Cornwell reflects on the qualities of a ‘good scientist’ (in both senses of the term) and highlights the need in a world where they are ever more dependent on their paymasters for people ‘who are not only highly skilled practitioners in their disciplines but who possess a highly developed grasp of politics and ethics, who are prepared to question, probe, expose and criticise the trends of military-dominated science.’ Cornwell does this himself through the fascinating and deeply troubling analysis in this book.