The Heisenberg Uncertainty : HEISENBERG’S WAR: The Secret History of the German Bomb, <i> By Thomas Powers (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 488 pp.)</i>

In 1939, his last year in the majors, Moe Berg, the erudite, multilingual catcher of the Boston Red Sox, had a good season. He batted .273 and got a home run on his final day. Five years later, Berg was in Switzerland on a secret mission for the OSS, carrying a .32-caliber pistol and authority to kill the man he chatted with as they walked at night through the streets of Zurich. Berg’s unsuspecting companion: Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s leading physicist, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who headed the effort to build a nuclear bomb for Adolf Hitler.

The scene in Switzerland is perhaps the most dramatic in this richly detailed, impressively researched and wonderfully exciting study of one of the great unanswered questions of World War II: Why were the Nazis, whose scientists had first discovered atomic fission, unable to build the bomb?

Author Thomas Powers argues that it was because Heisenberg deliberately stalled, unwilling to put such a terrible weapon in the hands of Hitler. Other historians contend that the Nazis never produced a bomb for a much simpler reason--because Heisenberg and his colleagues didn’t know how. But one does not have to accept Powers’ central but arguable conclusion to find the journey rewarding.

For “Heisenberg’s War” is more than the story of German physicists toiling away in their laboratories as Allied bombers reduced the Third Reich to flames and rubble. The equally important counterpoint is the story of America’s development of the atomic bomb, and the deep and constant worry of the political leaders in Washington and the scientists at Los Alamos over what the Germans were doing. Here are familiar figures such as Gen. Leslie Groves, the brusque yet highly effective Army martinet whipping the dreamers and atom-splitters into line; the brilliant, tortured Robert Oppenheimer, and the Jewish scientists like Hans Bethe who had fled Hitler’s Germany and placed their talents in the service of the United States.

What is striking is that neither side knew what the other was doing. The atomic scientists in each country were like blind men groping around in the wrong room, finding nothing. The members of the Alsos mission, organized by American intelligence to seek out and round up German scientists as the Allied armies advanced through Europe, were astonished to discover that Heisenberg and his colleagues had not even succeeded in building a nuclear reactor.

The Germans in turn, captured in 1945, flown to England and their every conversation bugged by British intelligence, were disbelieving at first when they heard on the BBC that the United States had succeeded in building the atom bombs dropped on Japan. Heisenberg, Powers reports, “stated firmly that he didn’t believe a word of it.” And Otto Hahn, who had discovered nuclear fission in 1938 and contemplated suicide because of its potential destructive power, taunted Heisenberg as a “second-rater.”

Many of the scientists, on both sides of the Atlantic, knew each other well. In the prewar world they had attended international scientific conferences together, worked in the same laboratories, exchanged papers. Hans Bethe, working in America, knew and worried about Heisenberg’s brilliance. These men, here and in Germany, had sought to serve science as a pure ideal. As it turned out, science could never be divorced from politics. Now, at war, they were serving other masters, yet never entirely free of the moral dilemma of developing weapons of mass destruction. Each of these men coped with, or ignored, the moral problem in his own way.

When the first bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, in the New Mexico desert, in July of 1945, Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, mourned: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

Heisenberg never reached that moment of despair. In 1932, he won the Nobel prize for his “uncertainty principle, “ a concept that applied equally well to his life. In taking on Heisenberg, Powers has set himself a Sisyphean task. True, Heisenberg was never a member of the Nazi party; he defended Jews such as Einstein and Niels Bohr, the half-Jewish Danish scientist who walks as a memorable figure through these pages. Indeed, Heisenberg himself was accused by the Nazis of being a Jewish sympathizer, and was saved only by the intervention of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler because of the improbable circumstance that their mothers were friends.

Powers points out that Heisenberg, in a visit to Copenhagen early in the war, revealed the German bomb program to Bohr; that he later intervened to save Bohr’s lab from the Nazis; that he tried, cautiously and unsuccessfully, to save the parents of the Dutch-born physicist Samuel Goudsmit from Auschwitz. Most important, Heisenberg told the military and Albert Speer that German scientists could not build a bomb in time to affect the war.

The fact is, however, that Heisenberg chose to remain in Germany and work for the Nazis when he could have come to America, and he remains at best an ambiguous and enigmatic figure. He worked on nuclear fission for Hitler; to non-Germans, at least, he defended the Nazis’ invasion of Poland and France; he claimed not to know that the Nazis were murdering Jews, and he wished in retrospect that Germany had won the war, on the theory that Europe would be better Nazi than red. His wistful longing for a German victory is hard to reconcile with the argument that he dragged his feet on making the bomb. At times, Powers’ repeated efforts to portray Heisenberg as one of the good guys teeters on the edge of parody, as though the German scientists had joined the chorus line of “Springtime for Hitler.”

No matter. In every other respect, Powers’ prodigious research is convincing, his portraits of the human drama compelling. There are vivid, sharply etched scenes--the daring British commando raid to destroy the crucial heavy-water plant in occupied Norway, OSS scientist Stanley Lovell scheming to inject Hitler’s vegetables with female hormones (a precursor of the CIA’s plot to make Fidel Castro’s beard fall out), and Werner Heisenberg, near the war’s end, slipping away from his laboratory in Southern Germany, by now hidden in a cave at the bottom of a cliff, to play Bach fugues in an 18th-Century church at the top.

Moe Berg, who spoke seven languages and read Sanskrit, didn’t shoot Heisenberg in Zurich possibly because, attending the scientist’s lecture, he heard nothing to persuade him that the Nazis were even close to developing a nuclear bomb.

There was a dugout canard about Berg: “He could speak seven languages but he couldn’t hit a curve ball in any of them.” For whatever reason, there was no hit in Zurich. Perhaps because of Berg’s respect for learning, he could not bring himself to gun down a Nobel laureate.

Berg’s target did not realize the danger he was in. As they walked along at night, Heisenberg, who had been allowed out of Germany to deliver the lecture in neutral Switzerland, thought that Berg was a Swiss who sympathized with the Nazis.

In the end, one prominent German scientist even tried to claim moral superiority for the fact that Germany had not produced a bomb, and America had. Samuel Goudsmit, the head of the Alsos mission, felt nothing but “cold fury” for the idea that Heisenberg and his friends might claim moral credit for their failure to build a bomb. The real irony was that Hitler, who insisted on “Aryan science,” kicked out the Jewish physicists who helped to create the bomb for America. As for Heisenberg’s equivocal role, and the claim that he deliberately sabotaged the Nazi war effort, we are left with a Scotch verdict: not proved.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “Heisenberg’s War,” see Opinion, Page 3