{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.024557602022390754, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010834236186348862, 'mean_word_length': 5.183035714285714, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture

Hitler’s unbuilt atomic bomb remains among the most famous technologies of World War II. Nazi atomic bombs litter the postwar American imagination, whether one reads Philip K. Dick’s classic counterfactual tale The Man in the High Castle or catches aStar Trekrerun of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock discussing possible futures if the Nazis fuse their ballistic missile, the V-2, with their atomic bomb. 1 Undergraduates, novelists, playwrights, students of science policy, and historians remain fasci nated by what never was—the Nazi atomic bomb. For Paul Lawrence Rose, Werner Heisenberg’s technical incompetence, in particular his inability to calculate the cor rect critical mass of uranium 235, doomed the Nazi effort. Rose also argues against Heisenberg’s various postwar presentations of his wartime nuclear research and the uses of those presentation by historians. 2 Despite the volume’s many strengths, Rose’s work is marred by a profoundly simplistic and misleading understanding of wartime research in both Germany and the United States. Focusing on an individual, no matter how important, does not answer the question Rose seeks to answer. In turn, Rose opens up the possibility for even more work on the war’s greatest mythical enterprise. The existence of a German atomic bomb was among the main reasons given for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. nuclear weapons program. With the discovery of fission in uranium in 1938, researchers in both Europe and the United States quickly realized that fission might produce a chain reaction and the possibility of new and incredibly powerful munitions. American and British researchers assumed that anything they might do or conceptualize had also been considered by their German counterparts, especially Werner Heisenberg, who remained in Germany rather than emigrate. Allied authorities considered Heisenberg, a Nobel Prize winner as well as the author of quantum mechanics’ uncertainty principle, to be the central figure in any German bomb project. So great was the belief in Heisenberg’s importance that the United States considered assassinating him while he visited Switzerland in December 1944. The unlikely assassin, Morris “Moe” Berg—a professional baseball player for the Boston Red Sox (until 1942), Princeton graduate, and Office of Strategic Services special agent—decided not to shoot Heisenberg; had he done so, we might have been spared much of the literature surrounding the nonexistent German atomic bomb (Cassidy 1992; Dawidoff 1994; Powers 1993). Ironies abound in the race for an atomic bomb, one of the great stories of the twen tieth century. The war in Europe ended before the United States had completed work