I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine. but I never thought that we would make a bomb. and at the bottom of my heart. I was really glad that it was to be an engine.
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"We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up."
"The meaning of 'understanding' has changed in the course of the development of physics."
"There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality."
"The human mind cannot be content with a description of phenomena; it wants to understand them."
"The concept of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the fog of some new, unclear, or not yet understood reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a…"
His personal feelings about the German nuclear program, distinguishing between a reactor ('engine') and a weapon ('bomb').
Date: August 1945 (Farm Hall transcripts)
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Heisenberg says he fully believed Germany could build a working nuclear reactor, which he calls a uranium engine, for power generation. He denies ever expecting they would build an actual atomic bomb. He admits privately feeling relieved that the project aimed at energy rather than weapons. He is drawing a sharp moral line between peaceful nuclear technology and destructive military use, and placing his own work on the safer side.
Heisenberg led Nazi Germany's wartime uranium program, the Uranverein, and his exact intentions remain fiercely debated. Some historians argue he deliberately slowed bomb progress; others say German physics simply lacked the resources and key calculations. This quote reflects his postwar self-portrayal, consistent with his 1941 Copenhagen meeting with Niels Bohr and his recorded Farm Hall reactions in 1945, when interned scientists learned of Hiroshima and expressed shock at American success.
World War II triggered parallel atomic programs in Germany, Britain, and the United States. The Manhattan Project succeeded in 1945, producing bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while Germany never built a working reactor or weapon. After the war, captured German physicists were detained at Farm Hall in England, where their conversations were secretly recorded. The moral weight of nuclear weapons and each scientist's wartime role became defining questions of the early atomic age.
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