Today in History - May 3: US sends top baseball player to kill nuclear scientist
That someone was top spy Moe Berg, who joined the Office of Strategic Services after years as a professional baseball catcher.
Berg was told if he believed Heisenberg was close to finishing a bomb, he was to kill him.
But Berg determined the Germans were still far off, and held off his assassination.
In US custody, Heisenberg and other top physicists were put in bugged rooms so their conversations could be covertly monitored.
When told of the Hiroshima bombing, the physicists were astonished. As it turns out, the Germans were not planning on building an atomic bomb.
Heisenberg gave a very banal justification for never pursuing a nuclear weapon.
"We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up," he said.
President of Liberia Charles D.B. King was re-elected on May 3, 1927, in what has been described as the "most rigged election ever".
King received 229,527 votes, or 97 per cent of the vote.
But there were just 19,000 registered voters in the country.
King's term in office was a debacle, and he resigned in the face of impeachment several years later.
Champion thoroughbred racehorse Tim Tam won the Kentucky Derby on May 3, 1958.
In the crowd that day was Australian biscuit magnate Ross Arnott.
Arnott considered the horse's name had a pleasant ring to it, and decided to name the brand's new biscuit after it.
Tim Tams are now perhaps Australia's most popular biscuit.
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