Nazis and the bomb: nuclear archaeology finds Werner Heisenberg mistook how close he was

H ans Bethe. Felix Bloch. Niels Bohr . Albert Einstein. Enrico Fermi. James Franck. Otto Frisch. Samuel Goudsmit. Lilli Hornig. Rolf Landshoff. Maria Goeppert Mayer . Rudolf Peierls. George Placzek. Eugene Rabinowitch. Joseph Rotblat. Leo Szilard. Edward Teller . Stanislaw Ulam. John von Neumann. Victor Weisskopf. Eugene Wigner. These are just some of the scientists who had emigrated from Europe, many of whom later made critical contributions to the Manhattan Project — the American effort to build the world’s first nuclear weapon.

Many of these scientists had seen firsthand the horrors Nazi Germany was perpetrating in Europe; many were Jews who were escaping persecution themselves. They showed their contempt for Adolf Hitler and his armies by bringing a sense of urgency to their research on the bomb, and were often motivated by what they believed the stake was: the fate of the world itself.