The meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg sparks a lot of debate. This is mostly because this historical event lacks in primary information, giving rise to many speculations about why Heisenberg went to visit Bohr in Copenhagen, 1941. According to historian Mark Walker there are two opposing views, the Polemic and apologetic. Polemics argue that Heisenberg wanted to create the atomic bomb, but that he was not capable of building one, he was incompetent to American scientists. Apologetic say that Heisenberg was very much able to build a bomb but he did not create it because he was aware of the harm the bomb can cause. In the play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn recognizes the dilemma of the opposing views and also shows us the difficulty in understanding a historical event that has a level of uncertainty.
There is no clear answer to why Heisenberg decided to visit Bohr in 1941, while being on opposite sides of the war. Bohr and Heisenberg went for a walk to prevent their conversation from being monitored, so there is no record of what they specifically talked about. Many historians like Mark Walker investigate the polemic and apologetic views. "As in his articles, in Alonso Goldsmith asserted that the German nuclear power project had tried very hard to create and supply the National Socialist government with nuclear weapons, but had failed because of gross scientific errors"" (Walker 187). Goldsmith's polemic view shows that they believed Heisenberg wanted to build the atomic bomb but his scientific calculations were wrong. The Apologetics on the other hand came up with their defense "according to the article Die Naturwissenschaften, after 1942 the German scientists worked only on the "peaceful uranium machine"" (Walker 185), by stating that they did not want to build the bomb although they had all the information and material to do so. They were only focused on creating a power machine and not a destructive bomb.
