Michael Frayn - Copenhagen

Margrethe Though I thought absolution was granted for sins past and repented, not for sins intended and yet to be committed.

Heisenberg Exactly! That’s why I was so shocked!

Bohr You were shocked?

Heisenberg Because you did give me absolution! That’s exactly what you did! As we were hurrying back to the house. You muttered something about everyone in wartime being obliged to do his best for his own country. Yes?

Bohr Heaven knows what I said. But now here I am, profoundly calm and conscious, weighing my words. You don’t want absolution. I understand. You want me to tell you not to do it? All right. I put my hand on your arm. I look you in the eye in my most papal way. Go back to Germany, Heisenberg. Gather your colleagues together in the laboratory. Get up on a table and tell them: ‘Niels Bohr says that in his considered judgment supplying a homicidal maniac with an improved instrument of mass murder is …’ What shall I say? ‘ … an interesting idea.’ No, not even an interesting idea. ‘ … a really rather seriously uninteresting idea.’ What happens? You all fling down your Geiger counters?

Heisenberg Obviously not.

Bohr Because they’ll arrest you.

Heisenberg Whether they arrest us or not it won’t make any difference. In fact it will make things worse. I’m running my programme for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. But there’s a rival one at Army Ordnance, run by Kurt Diebner, and he’s a party member. If I go they’ll simply get Diebner to take over my programme as well. He should be running it anyway. Wirtz and the rest of them only smuggled me in to keep Diebner and the Nazis out of it. My one hope is to remain in control.

Bohr So you don’t want me to say yes and you don’t want me to say no.

Heisenberg What I want is for you to listen carefully to what I’m going on to say next, instead of running off down the street like a madman.

Bohr Very well. Here I am, walking very slowly and popishly. And I listen most carefully as you tell me …

Heisenberg That nuclear weapons will require an enormous technical effort.

Bohr True.

Heisenberg That they will suck up huge resources.

Bohr Huge resources. Certainly.

Heisenberg That sooner or later governments will have to turn to scientists and ask whether it’s worth committing those resources — whether there’s any hope of producing the weapons in time for them to be used.

Bohr Of course, but …

Heisenberg Wait. So they will have to come to you and me. We are the ones who will have to advise them whether to go ahead or not. In the end the decision will be in our hands, whether we like it or not.

Bohr And that’s what you want to tell me?

Heisenberg That’s what I want to tell you.

Bohr That’s why you have come all this way, with so much difficulty? That’s why you have thrown away nearly twenty years of friendship? Simply to tell me that?

Heisenberg Simply to tell you that.

Bohr But, Heisenberg, this is more mysterious than ever! What are you telling it me for? What am I supposed to do about it? The government of occupied Denmark isn’t going to come to me and ask me whether we should produce nuclear weapons!

Heisenberg No, but sooner or later, if I manage to remain in control of our programme, the German government is going to come to me! They will ask me whether to continue or not! I will have to decide what to tell them!

Bohr Then you have an easy way out of your difficulties. You tell them the simple truth that you’ve just told me. You tell them how difficult it will be. And perhaps they’ll be discouraged. Perhaps they’ll lose interest.

Heisenberg But, Bohr, where will that lead? What will be the consequences if we manage to fail?

Bohr What can I possibly tell you that you can’t tell yourself?

Heisenberg There was a report in a Stockholm paper that the Americans are working on an atomic bomb.

Bohr Ah. Now it comes, now it comes. Now I understand everything. You think I have contacts with the Americans?

Heisenberg You may. It’s just conceivable. If anyone in Occupied Europe does it will be you.

Bohr So you do want to know about the Allied nuclear programme.

Heisenberg I simply want to know if there is one. Some hint. Some clue. I’ve just betrayed my country and risked my life to warn you of the German programme …

Bohr And now I’m to return the compliment?

Heisenberg Bohr, I have to know! I’m the one who has to decide! If the Allies are building a bomb, what am I choosing for my country? You said it would be easy to imagine that one might have less love for one’s country if it’s small and defenceless. Yes, and it would be another easy mistake to make, to think that one loved one’s country less because it happened to be in the wrong. Germany is where I was born. Germany is where I became what I am. Germany is all the faces of my childhood, all the hands that picked me up when I fell, all the voices that encouraged me and set me on my way, all the hearts that speak to my heart. Germany is my widowed mother and my impossible brother. Germany is my wife. Germany is our children. I have to know what I’m deciding for them! Is it another defeat? Another nightmare like the nightmare I grew up with? Bohr, my childhood in Munich came to an end in anarchy and civil war. Are more children going to starve, as we did? Are they going to have to spend winter nights as I did when I was a schoolboy, crawling on my hands and knees through the enemy lines, creeping out into the country under cover of darkness in the snow to find food for my family? Are they going to sit up all night, as I did at the age of seventeen, guarding some terrified prisoner, talking to him and talking to him through the small hours, because he’s going to be executed in the morning?

Bohr But, my dear Heisenberg, there’s nothing I can tell you. I’ve no idea whether there’s an Allied nuclear programme.

Heisenberg It’s just getting under way even as you and I are talking. And maybe I’m choosing something worse even than defeat. Because the bomb they’re building is to be used on us. On the evening of Hiroshima Oppenheimer said it was his one regret. That they hadn’t produced the bomb in time to use on Germany.

Bohr He tormented himself afterwards.

Heisenberg Afterwards, yes. At least we tormented ourselves a little beforehand. Did a single one of them stop to think, even for one brief moment, about what they were doing? Did Oppenheimer? Did Fermi, or Teller, or Szilard? Did Einstein, when he wrote to Roosevelt in 1939 and urged him to finance research on the bomb? Did you, when you escaped from Copenhagen two years later, and went to Los Alamos?

Bohr My dear, good Heisenberg, we weren’t supplying the bomb to Hitler!

Heisenberg You weren’t dropping it on Hitler, either. You were dropping it on anyone who was in reach. On old men and women in the street, on mothers and their children. And if you’d produced it in time they would have been my fellow-countrymen. My wife. My children. That was the intention. Yes?