The Farm Hall transcripts were made during and after the second world war in Britain over the possibility of Germany producing an atomic bomb during the war. Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ... The mushroom cloud of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, 1945, rose some 18 km (11 mi) above the epicenter. ...

Almost at the end of the second world war, Werner Heisenberg was captured at his family in Bavaria in Germany and transferred to the UK together with other German scientists involved in the German nuclear energy project: Erich Bagge, Kurt Diebner, Paul Harteck, Horst Korsching, Karl Wirtz , Walther Gerlach, Otto Hahn, and Carl von Weizsacker. Max von Laue who vas a vocal anti-Nazi and did not participate in the German nuclear effort was also detained with the group. They were housed in a farm near Cambridge that was equipped with small microphones placed by the British to find out what exactly Heisenberg and his team knew about constructing an atomic bomb. They did not speak a lot about it, so the British obtained little useful information. This changed on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was bombed. Heisenberg and his team wondered how the Americans succeeded in building an atomic bomb. Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg (December 5, 1901 – February 1, 1976) was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. ... The Free State of Bavaria  (German: Freistaat Bayern), with an area of 70,553 km² (27,241 square miles) and 12. ... The German experimental nuclear pile at Haigerloch The German nuclear energy project was an endeavor by scientists during World War II in Nazi Germany to develop nuclear energy and an atomic bomb for practical use. ... Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 - 10 August 1979) was a German physicist. ... Otto Hahn (March 8, 1879 – July 28, 1968) was a German chemist. ... Max von Laue (October 9, 1879 - April 24, 1960) was a German physicist, who studied under Max Planck. ... Main keep of Hiroshima Castle The city of Hiroshima ) is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chugoku region of western Honshu, the largest of Japans islands. ...

From these conversations it became clear that Heisenberg and his team were far from being able to construct an atomic bomb (or even a working reactor). They made several critical mistakes, including gross overestimation of the required critical mass.

Soon after this Heisenberg was released, as he was no longer considered a risk.

(For reference see Thomas Powers' book Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, published in 1993, and Paul Lawrence Rose's Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, 1939-1945: A Study in German Culture, Berkeley 1998.)

External link

• Annotated bibliography for Farm Hall from the Alsos Digital Library