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Regarding the WWII Meeting of Bohr & Heisenberg
HarlanC writes: "The NY Times has an article (registration required) discussing the famous meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941. The conclusion is that Heisenberg revealed to Bohr the existance of a Nazi atomic program in an attempt to obtain assistance from Bohr. The Times of London article is here (long registration process required)" The play "Copenhagen" was based on a fictionalization of this meeting, it was much better than "Proof", I assure you.
Leave it at that.
That's a horrible idea. It's just as important to learn from the almost-mistakes and close calls of history as it is from the mistakes and successes.
But then, that would be silly. Although perhaps a reality exists where it isn't silly. ;-)
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
What are the odds it wasn't a druggie, but a SIGN LANGUAGE INTERPRETER?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
It doesn't matter what happened and if someone decided to sabotage the bomb in German or not.
The Reich would not have been able to build an atomic bomb because they couldn't have set up the infrastructure without it being bombed to support the atomic bomb creation.
In Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" he goes into alot of detail about how much industrial infrastructure was needed to make the Uranium and Plutonium for the 3 American atomic bombs.
And don't forget the amount of money and metals it took to make the equipment. The United States built 2 cities of 50,000 people each, one at Oak Ridge and the other at Hanford.
Germany didn't have the manpower, materials or bomb-proof infrastructure during the war to produce an atomic bomb.
The book making of the Atomic bomb is also quite interesting as it goes into a great deal of detail about the Bohr-Heisnberg relationship. NY times misread the book , I believe, when they said that heisenberg simply failed. In actuality the book paints a picture of Heisenberg not wanting to develop the bomb at all - and turning the german research team away from a number of key discoveries. Now the book doesn't say that this was intentional - perhaps heisenberg was simply mistaken. Judge for yourself.
The most interesting fact I learned from that book was this:
To seperate,process, and manufacture the uranium nad plutonium neccassary for the a-bombs it required 32% of the United States Electrical output, 23% of the US's Silver output (144,000 Troy Ounces was the figure I believe), and 14% of the US's aluminum output to construct the plants (at Oak Ridge, Tennesse and Hartford, Washington). Remember this is 1944 people - height of america's industrial might. Now ask yourself if germany could've done the same...
I would argue that the what-ifs are more important than the actual events. We know what *did* occur, and therefore we can always repeat the pattern of the past... but if we want to break new ground and not repeat the past mistakes we need to look at what *other* things we could have done at the time, and what the probable effects of these different scenarios would have been. And maybe if we analyze the what-ifs enough, we could come up with a probabilistic science to determine what action to take in current and/or future events to create the best possible outcome. Although the complexity due to the massive forces interacting would probably render anything like this impossible, considering we can't even predict the weather too far in advance...
The "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was written by
Richard (not David) Rhodes, for which he won a
Pulitzer Prize. Doesn't exactly inspire great
confidence in the NYT's QA program...
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Many people feel that saving approximately 1 million American lives was more important at that time than a percentage of the populations (both military and civilian) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You should also consider how many Japanese would have been killed without the surrender (nuclear weapons are not needed for massive destruction...see Dresden for instance).
Do you seriously think the Japanese would have hesitated to kill any number of American civilians if they had the means? It was a vicious war, and both sides were concerned about victory (and survival) above all else.
Perhaps he should have been frightened, period. Perhaps the whole lot of them should have been clockmakers, like Albert said.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps we should praise the brilliant inventors of nuclear weapons, since those weapons have apparently halted the practice of "world war". Peace is a good thing, right?
Regardless, not pursuing the a-bomb wasn't an option...someone would have. Most would agree that the US has been a model citizen as a nuclear superpower. At least we have tremendous safeguards surrounding the use of such devices.
Of course, that part goes unmentioned in the NYT article, because that might call into question just who really *did* use those horrible weapons, and it might have to be stated that it wasn't everyone's favorite boogeyman of the 20th century. We can't have people thinking about the realities of the past; no, interesting what-ifs make for much better propaganda.
Sounds to me like you've absorbed quite a bit of propaganda yourself... ;-)
Personally, I'm worried that nuclear stockpiles will be cut to the point where world war becomes 'thinkable' again.
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I just saw Frayn's play "Copenhagen" last night in SF and really must urge all of you to see it if you can. Regardless of what truly motivated Heisenberg the issues raised are far more reaching. I walked away with the following: -we sometimes lack the perspective to understand our own motivations -mechanistic thinking is flawed, we should move to a a more systemic approach (the aspect of Heisenberg's Uncertainty theory applied similarly as in Fritof Capra's work "Turning Point") my 2cents. thoughts?
Additionally, at the time they had most of the resources of continental Europe at their disposal if they wished.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The atom bomb developed during WWII and deployed against the Japanese was not, compared to conventional air weaponry, and effective weapon. The US had to preserve certain Japanese cities from regular bombing attacks so that there would be something left to bomb when the A bombs were ready.
On the other side of the war (lets use the two-sided model here) there was the Rocket. It, much like its spiritual predecessor the Paris Gun, was also an inneffective use of resources. More people were killed constructing the Rockets than were killed by them in combat. Development of the Rocket took away from Germany's air power and perhaps helped their loss in that arena, or at least hastened it.
Both sides had overestimated the other sides progress in the areas in which they themselves were most advanced.
After the war, the two technologies came together as the ICBM, a dangerous weapon which dramatically changed the nature of the global arena. The cold war was born and much human labor was lost in the making of tools which we hope will never be used.
--
Vivez sans temps mort
So it's one people, one nation, one (group of) leader(s)?
We aren't one people, we are many peoples. But we all happen to live in this little part of world together, and we might just try to make the best out of it. It's the opposite of going to war.
Sorry if this seems flamish, but as an American I'm nervous about anything that could bring together all of Europe under one flag.
I think you have it backwards. European cooperation leads to less wars and conflicts, not more.
Besides, why shouldn't I be just as nervous about the US under one flag?
How many of them?
Not enough to win the war.
Besides, for every Nazi "Super-Weapon" something else had to be paused.
Books on the U-Boat war argue that if the V-2s and Me-262 hadn't been built, there would have been the manpower for the advanced U-Boats to be built.
Through-out 1944 and 1945, the German war production was a series of starts and stops when someone wanted a new "super-weapon". The huge rail-guns used to shell targets on the Russian Front used as much steel as it took to built hundreds of armored vehicles, yet the Germans lacked armor and had artillery to spare. Instead of building battle-field rockets like the Americans and Russians, the Germans built V-1s and V-2s that didn't have a marked impact on the war.
The Germans didn't have the manpower or capital to do these things.
Um, NYT doesn't charge. The fact that Salon does isn't really relevant in this context. I have never seen someone post the content of a Salon article here.
/. explicitely declaims responsibility for what individuals post.
Also note that
this is getting old and so are you
blog
"Isn't it interesting that Bohr was frightened that the Nazis would have such a weapon only to see it used to butcher Japanese civilians five years later by "the good guys"?"
What's more horrible, the US building and using an atomic bomb, or school children being trained to defend Tojo's Japan with bamboo spears? Doesn't the fact that it required not one but TWO nuclear attacks before the Japanese decided to surrender give you pause about possible justifications?
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
1.) The US submarine force had what was essentially a total blockade of resource-poor Japan since May. They face destruction by slow starvation. No surrender.
2.) The first bomb in early August (after three months of the previously-mentioned blockade). Three days go by with no surrender.
3.) The second bomb. Still no surrender.
4.) The Soviet Union delcares war on Japan and starts a big land-grab in Asia. They now face a potential invation from two fronts (one of which all too willing to feed an army into the meat-grinder that the Japanese are trying to turn their islands into)
So what's the next step? For the Japanese army, the next step was a coup, an effort to depose Hirohito's government and prevent him from airing a surrender announcement. After all, how many more bombs could the US drop? Can't be more than one or two...
There is a misconception about Japan that still persists to this day (as can be seen in your opinion) that they have Western ideals and a Western way of thinking. This is not true today and it sure as hell wasn't true in the 1940's. Just because defeat is inevitible isn't necesarily reason for them to surrender.
Most would agree that the US has been a model citizen as a nuclear superpower. At least we have tremendous safeguards surrounding the use of such devices
... From wet, wet Copenhagen.
Are you joking?? AFAIR US is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons against another country during war. (The justice of this is of course negotiable, and I somewhat agree with you that it probably was the best solution.)
Furthermore the US is most probably the country with the largest amount of nuclear tests in the world... Also in fairly recent times! That doesn't really count as a "model citizen" in my book.
- Henrik
There is a misconception indeed, and you persist in it. Japan was not unwilling to surrender because insufficient force had been
displayed, but rather because the demands were
not made in a way that made it reasonable for
Hirohito to accept them. At the same time, the
social structure of Japan was such that while
the Emperor had not declared the war effort
over, the country would fight a useless
impossible battle to defend their country.
If the US had listened to the advice of its
own anthrolopologists employed at the time to
study japanese culture (see, for example The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), surrender
could have been obtained with no further bloodshed at all. Unfortunately, the leaders
of their time chose to disbelieve this information and fit the behavior of the Japanese into their own model of thinking, which said that
they were impossibly, irraitionally resolute, and would only surrender if impossible force and
arms were displayed. This worked, but other workable courses were yet available which were not tried.
-josh
> But if you're Germany, smaller and under constant attack but with superior scientific traditions, what is to say that a more analytical approach might not have produced the same results?
Germany's superior scientific traditions were lost when all the best minds went to the other side of the ocean just at the Nazis were taking over. Many of the people who made the bomb fled Germany and Italy.
Also, German scientists were mostly theoreticians, not experimenters or engineers. Remember, these were the theoreticians who came up with quantum physics *theories*. They had hardly any "analytical approach" at all. When it came to making the bomb, among the hundreds of thousands of people working on the Manhattan project, the Americans employed hundreds of engineers for every theoretical scientist. Of the several hundered people employed by the Nazis to make the bomb, the people were mostly scientists and technicians. Most of the German engineers were working on the V2 and non-atomic bombs.
> On the Luftwaffe 1946 web site there are some very speculative but very interesting possibilities of how the Germans could have (a) been designing a totally different type of bomb (b) come up with a way of producing plutonium that did not require the full-blown nuclear reactors at Hanford.
The Nazis never made one atom of plutonium. They did not know how. Even if they did know, they did not have the resources. After the war, German scientists were astonished to discover how much the Americans knew about plutonium, how much the Americans made, and that one could make a bomb out of it.