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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.
"Alsos", by Samuel Goudsmit, (ISBN: 1563964155) describes the top-secret team that followed Allied forces into Europe to find out how close the Germans were to having nuclear weapons.
I strongly recommend the book Heisenberg's War by Thomas Powers. It provides a much deeper background into this meeting (and the entire German nuclear arms program) and is quite readable. Here's a bn.com link to the book if you want to avoid amazon.
heh heh heh.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Otherwise, the world would be facing a unified Europe, ruled by faceless bureaucrats headquartered in a continental European country, and America would be the only country that could go toe to toe with them.
Of course, once they figured out they were in Copenhagen, it was impossible to determine what went on. Doesn't make for a very thrilling movie, either.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I'm quite glad I got the opportunity to see Copenhagen recently at the Wilshire theater in LA, the play kicked ass. At least I thought so. My wife was too busy being distracted by the druggie making weird gestures in the on-stage seating; plus she wasn't big on the whole science aspect and said "well couldn't they have just done that whole play in 5 minutes and be done with it?" Oh well. Definitely not for everyone, but almost definitely for the /. crowd! If you've got a chance to see it, it's cool.
How are they certain Heisenberg was in Copenhagen AND he was there in 1941 at the same time?
Both Proof and Copenhagen were disappointing. It seems the standards for "play of the year" (both won) aren't quite up to the "Long Day's Journey Into Night" days or even "Glengarry Glen Ross".
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!"
The study of history is largely the study of what-ifs. Without them, you have a non-fiction story. With them, you have a learning experience.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
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.
[Sound of original poster pressing the "Independant Thought Alarm" button]
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I managed to get a transcript of the letter from Bohr to Heisenberg, here it is:
Dear Werner,
Ever since your last visit, I haven't seen my cat, Fluffy. You haven't seen her, have you?
Sincerely,
Neils
For my engineering/chemistry professor last year i needed to write a Biographyon this man. My biography is pretty in depth and a worthy read if anyone is interested. It can be found @ http://artlu.net/essays/wernerbio.html Enjoy, AJ
-------
artlu.net
The author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb is Richard Rhodes, not David Rhodes. The book is within view on my bookshelf.
I think the biggest "what if" is what if B.J. Blazkowicz hadn't rescued the Spear of Destiny from the Nazis? Man, we would've been screwed.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Of course. The Americans shouldn't have developed nuclear weapons even though they had the technology to do so, and their rivals had active weapons programs. Then, once available, they shouldn't have used them, even though their use was not outside the norms of war at the time, and even though they brought the war to a prompt end. America should destroy its remaining weapons, and then there will be rainbows and bread and roses, and all of humanity can gather around the campfire to smoke pot and sing folk songs.
War is hell, period. But it's a fact of life. Get over it.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb,
Thomas Powers provides lots of interesting detail, citations, background. From reading various sources, I see Heisenberg as badly misjudged and misrepresented. I think he was basically a good guy in a very bad situation and, integrating all the available material, it feels like he basically did the Right Thing, and played a key role in keeping the German nuclear program working in directions other than building a bomb.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
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...
Shortly after WWII, Werner Heisenberg was held captive by the British government at Farm Hall along with several other top German scientists. The British secretly taped the conversations at Farm Hall, and these tapes were declassified in 1992. (It took prolonged and strenuous efforts by several historians, and members of the Royal Society to persuade the government.) Heisenberg was at Farm Hall when the US dropped the bombs on Japan in August of 1945. When he heard the news, he was astonished that the US had separated sufficient U235 from U238 to obtain critical mass. He was also surprised that the US also made a plutonium based bomb. (The methods used to extract U238 and Pu were made by a chemist working under Enrico Fermi in Chicago. Without the knowledge provided by that chemist, the US would not have had either bomb for perhaps another year.) Since Heisenberg was surprised, we may assume he simply did not know how to get enough weapons grade uranium. Nor could he make enough and separate enough plutonium for a bomb. He had enough uranium to make a small nuclear reactor. Which he did create in a cave in southern Germany. The US army found the cave and removed the materials. The assessment by US scientists was that the reactor was never put to use. Apparently war efforts hindered Heisenberg's attempt to get all the resources he needed. And, towards the end of the war, the effort was abandoned. It is likely that Heisenberg knew he could not make a bomb and persuaded the Nazi government to allow him to make a reactor instead. Whether he had only technical reasons for the change in policy is unknown. He may have had moral reasons for preventing the Nazis from getting a bomb, but there is no public source of information to support that hypothesis. In 1941, he may have wanted to make a bomb, or knew that the Nazis wanted him to make one. In either case, I think he went to Copenhagen to ask/tell/warn Bohr about the Nazi plans. During that evening, he and Neils Bohr went for a walk. Bohr's wife, Margerethe, reported that they both left the house that evening in a good mood. The walk in the dark was short, only a few minutes. Neils Bohr came back quickly, and in a foul mood. Heisenberg followed him back inside. They did not talk about much later that evening. Later in the war, Bohr's family secretly got into a boat at night and left for England, and then America. Heisenberg stayed in England for some time, as a "guest" of the British government. In 1947, he was allowed to visit Bohr, and his British handler went with him. During that meeting, he and Bohr agreed that "we both came to feel that it would be better to stop disturbing the spirits of the past." (From Heisenberg's memoirs.) Bohr and Heisenberg continued their friendship after 1947, and until Bohr died in 1962. Bohr kept that friendship even though most Allied scientists shunned Heisenberg.
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!"
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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?
He was an OSS operative.
There's nothing that specifically indicates this, of course. But look at the human site of the game. Here was a man who worshipped Einstein, who had many other associations with Jewish scientists, and who himself narrowly escaped academic blacklisting when the Nazis took power. And somehow he ends up as scientific chief of a major German weapons project!
There's actually a well-documented meeting with an OSS agent in Geneva. Official histories state that Heisenberg was there to give a talk, and the agent, Moe Berg, was there to determine the progress of the German bomb effort and (at his own discretion!) terminate Heisenberg. Supposedly Heisenberg told Berg that the project wasn't going well, and Berg took his word for it and let him live. Not, in my opinion, a very plausible story.
OK, no evidence at all for this theory. But it's worth thinking about.
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?)
As for working capital and manpower, the Nazis were simply stealing or forcing much of what they needed.
Having seen Copenhagen and Proof, I feel that the superior drama was most assuredly "Proof." However, from a techno-geek's standpoint, I can see why the submitter might enjoy Copenhagen more.
'hagen was definitely more cerebral & technical, and used physics as a metophor for ethical struggles.
Proof was a much more personal play about a woman's relationship with her father (and indeed, the world around her.) The math is simply part of the plot, not interwoven with the primary thrust. I saw both original casts, and both were phenominal, but the interaction between Mary Louise Parker and the cast was one of the most thrilling dramatic performances I've ever witnessed. She was incredible.
As a coincidence, the young male lead in Proof was played by Ben Shenkman, who was the young rabinical guy in "Pi."
While I loved Copenhagen, and I love Robert Westenburg (one of the male leads) I felt Proof was the far superior play.
besides your valid points, I will also point out that the Japanese Army had few equals when it came to butchering civilians... In just a few weeks in Nanking, they killed more chinese civilians (through beheadings, torture, and rape of children followed by murder) than both the allied atomic blasts killed, and their total toll on civilian populations around the world is much, MUCH higher than any reported allied caused civilian death tolls (depending on how you view russia, and whose "ally" they really were).
In any case, huge numbers of civilians were killed around the world (FAR outstripping battlefield casualties), in very large part due to German and Japanese policy. It was not a very honorable war, on any side, but the stakes became too high to expect much compassion.
IMO, it is a wonder that Japan is not a charred cinder annexation of China, as retribution for WWII. (They should be sending thanks to Taiwan every day, for helping to divert national aggression.)
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
You're making it sound like there was months between these events. Hiroshima was August 6th, the Soviet Union declared war on the 8th, the Nagasaki bombing was on the 9th, and the surrender was on the 14th. That's a total of 8 days from start to finish. I think that's an amazingly fast response time. The Japanese military & leadership had to evalulate the damage, try and work out the responses they could do, all in an enviroment where all normal communications had been cut off.
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
The Sunday Times and The Times have always been separate publications. Nowadays Rupert Murdoch owns them both, and has been combining some of their operations. But that's a recent development.
The Sunday Times registration process has an amusing flaw. Tried to tell it I was born in 1830. Not acceptable. 1890? Nope. 1899? Get serious. I meant to try "1900" next, but typed "2000" by mistake. That was acceptable! Apparently 1-year-olds read the Sunday Times, but not centenarians!
Despite the after-the-fact romancing (of a guy who would very probably have delivered the Nazis an atomic weapon if he could have) there's good reason to believe that the only thing preventing Heisenberg from developing the bomb were his own miscalculations. Not the least of which was his determination that the amount of fissionable material required to create a critical mass was much greater than was actually required (there's a fascinating theory vs. engineering story behind that, but you can probably look it up.) This calculation led him to believe that any atomic weapon would be enormous and hard to deliver.
After the war Heisenberg was taken to a detention center in the UK where he was surveilled with listening devices. When the he learned that the US had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, he was stunned, and (IIRC) initially remarked to his co-detainees that we must have found a way to deliver a colossally huge bomb or something of the sort.
Some have theorized that Heisenberg was both extremely clever and extremely loyal to the German people-- so much so that he deliberately foiled the Nazi research effort, then faked disbelief in order to mislead the Allied eavesdroppers. Personally, I think he just blew it.
But you're right. Judge for yourself.
The problem is in Reading vs. Performance.
I have a degree in Math and have done many years of semi-professional acting (i.e. I get paid, but not so much that I don't need my CS job to live)
Copenhagen was a better written play, but I pity and respect the man who tries to perform it. Long difficult monologues where the audience will often want to stand up and say, "Could you repeat that, I only half got it." But when you're reading it and can appreciate the nuance. Copenhagen was by far a superior piece of writing in the history, the math, and especially in the interpersonal relationship between the two men. First as teacher-student, then nearly to father-son, then suddenly to bitter enemies. It is practically shakespere-ian in how dynamic their relationship was and those aspects were very strongly and humanely played out.
To talk about Proof, it would be easy to produce, easy to get an audience, and easy to make people feel smart because they were watching a play that had math in it. The actors have plenty of opportunity to showboat and draw an audience in, but fundamentally, the play is about smart men who are too pig-headed to trust a girl. (*gasp!* it's a GIRL! Not a big shocker any more) As soon as the play uses up its 90 minutes, the boyfriend pulls the stick from his bum and then everything is fine. He shouldn't have mistrusted her in the first place, but then the play would be about 15 minutes long.
To sum up: Proof is fun to watch chickies who do math and physicist who drink heavily. Copenhagen is an excellent play to expand your scope and see a truly powerful piece of writing.
From what I understand USSR entering the Pacific war had more effect on the United States than it did on Japan. The US saw that Japan wouldn't surrender unconditionally and with the USSR in the theatre they'd want Japan split like Germany. Since Japan's demands for the emperor staying in power as a figure head weren't that unreasonable to the US, the US caved and let japan surrender conditionally to the US and the US only before Russia could really get involved. Else we'd have a North Japan and South Japan. Because the war ended when it did we only Korea and Vietnam split and Russia got the Kuril Islands. So it wasn't as bad.
yeah, but I like the part about smoking pot though.
Why don't we all smoke pot and design some nuclear weapons? We can use computers now to do all the hard number crunching. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There is a very nice German made for TV movie called Ende der Unschuld (= end of innocence). It deals with the German attempt of creating a nuclear bomb and the scientists at Farm Hall.
Yeah. Dave Rhodes wrote Make Atomic Bombs Fast!.
Sorry.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
At the time the bomb was dropped there were two amphibious operations planned: OLYMPIC, the invasion of southern Japan in late 1945, and CORONET, the invasion of Kyushu, Spring 1946. Preparatory carrier air strikes were already being done.
Allied casualties (US/UK/Commonwealth) were projected in the tens of thousands. Japanese civilians were being instructed in the use of satchel charges and sharpened bamboo sticks for use in repelling the invaders.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"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.
He worked at Berkeley.
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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
They made two cores. One was used at Trinity, the other at Nagasaki. Those two cores were all the US had available for a couple months. The Pu came from Hanford Washington. The Hiroshima bomb was a gun type Uranium bomb, which was so simple it didn't require testing. Which is why people are more worried about enriched uranium getting to terrorists than they are about Plutonium. U is much easier to make a bomb out of.
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The invasion planners estimated a far, far lower number, 50,000 or so.
If we'd agreed to let them keep their Emperor a few weeks earlier, the Japanese would've surrendered. We held out for unconditional surrender but, after dropping the two bombs, relented and accepted their surrender and allowed the emperor to remain on the throne..
Eisenhower and Marshall both opposed use of the bomb. In 1962 Eisenhower reiterated his belief that it wasn't necessary and that neither was invasion , that Japan was done and would've surrendered within weeks without either action taking place.
This is all documented (in Richard Rhodes's book, among many other places).
Has someone been playing too much wolfenstein or do you really think the nazis made tesla-shooting 'Lopers'?
-
"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?"
We only have relative peace. Here are some wars (just off the top of my head) conducted after 1946:
Korea.
Vietnam.
6 day war (Israel vs Egypt[or arabic countries])
The Gulf War.
The Balkans.
Pakistan vs India.
Tchechnia.
Tens of civil wars in Africa.
IRA vs Great Britain
Afghanistan.
Or did you mean wars that took place in the US?
Just because they aren't fighting in your backyard, doesn't mean they aren't fighting.
Peace is a good thing, but don't think for a moment, that we have a global peace.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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
My Grandfather was on a troopship bound for Japan when the A-Bomb was dropped. He remembers the speeches they were given about high projected casualties. Intelligence had determined that the Japanese were hoping to draw out the Soviet negotiations while focusing their forces eastward. The Soviets likely wouldn't have complained, because they did NOT want to enter the Pacific theater. In fact, the allies were angry at them for their refusal to do so. The opposition would have been fierce and largely perpetrated in a sort of urban guerilla warfare (weapons and instructions were distributed to civilians in preparation). Anyway, my original point was that my Grandfather is convinced that he would not have survived had the US not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That impression was reinforced when he saw the villages in China and the Phillipenes that the Japanese had burnt and slaughtered. Additionally, the Nanjing Massacre was a horror story for American GIs to hear about. Knowing that a power capable of such a massacre had struck your homeland was a powerful motivator, and a terrifying challenge. I would likely not be here today but for the bomb.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
"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."
I would have gotten into that, but I got distracted away from the computer by stuff. Part of the problem is that each side more or less viewed the other as uncivlized barbarians. At the very least, I don't think the Allies would have accepted the somewhat-less-than-unconditional surrender they got until after they saw first-hand how strong Japanese convictions were on the matter.
On the other side of the lines, I don't think the Japanese could trust the gaijins to keep their word on those conditions to surrender until after they saw the Allied willingness not to destroy them outright with impunity. After all, they surrender so easily, how much honor could they have?
"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."
If the Japanese military listened to their own experts, they would have seen that Pearl Harbor was a Bad Idea (tm), and that the Americans wouldn't be so soft as to be willing to roll over and surrender the Pacific after an initial, crippling blow.
(Aside: Kinda makes me wonder if bin Laden had similar such people voicing concerns like these, or if he just had yes-men like in recently-released videoes.)
It seems like there was a general lack of respect on both sides of the conflict that only a climatic battle for the islands could solve. It could have been some big meat-grinder of a campaign, churning out some unknown number of military and civillian casualties until (or if) one both sides lost the stomach to carry on, or it could have involved the unveiling of some new super-weapon that has enough destructive potential to give both sides a reason to take a step back and look at what's happening. In our history, the latter happened.
... and it still took a month for the formal signing of the surrender...
A general mistrust and misunderstanding of both sides leading to some pretty ugly conflicts. It happened to the US and the USSR in the 1920's, it happened here in WWII, it seems to have happened between the US and the Muslim world, and it may even be happening between the US and the PRC.
1: Germany DIDN'T get the bomb. We defeated Germany without the use of atomic weapons. The bomb was totally irrelevant, in the end, to the course of the Eurpoean war.
2: Japan was in negotiation to surrender when we dropped the bomb. We were holding out for the removal of the Emperor. In the end, we decided to let them keep the Emperor, so they would surrender to us and not the USSR.
3: The projected casualties number for a land invasion of Japan was created after the fact. See previous posts. We dropped the bomb to get a one-up over the USSR, not to defeat Japan.
I just finished reading "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer. Speer was Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments and War Production. Thus any program to develop an atomic bomb was under Speer's ministry. He said that they were working on one, but due to Hitler's poor leadership and executive decisions, it never got the priority it should have. Speer claimed that Nazi Germany could have produced an atomic bomb by 1947. That of course, he said, was inconsequential because the United States produced theirs by August of 1945.
American Scientist had a really good article on this back in 1996.
Heisenberg had estimated that a ton of U-235 was needed to reach critical mass, which was, of course, a huge overestimate. This is the reasoning he gave in a conversation with Otto Hahn immediately after being surprised by the news of Hiroshima (the conversation was secretly taped by the Allies):
"If I have pure 235 each neutron will immediately beget two children and then there must be a chain reaction which goes very quickly. Then you can reckon as follows. One neutron always makes two others in pure 235. That is to say that in order to make 10^24 neutrons I need 80 reactions one after the other. Therefore I need 80 collisions and the mean free path is about 6 centimetres. In order to make 80 collisions, I must have a lump of a radius of about 54 centimetres and that would be about a ton."
Can you see the mistake in his logic?
The Germans never *had* a bomb program.
They were doing some studies on nuclear materials with a view towards military applications, but had no specific usage in mind. The 'bomb program' was created by lazy journalists and editors who (in 1945) conflated 'nuclear' with 'bomb' in that same way they do with 'computer' and 'Wintel' today. The myth of the 'bomb program' has persisted despite the utter lack of evidence that Germany was pursuing a bomb. (Almost every study of the 'bomb program' has started with the assumption that it existed, which is poor logic and poorer scholarship. Very few have started from zero and seen what conclusions come from examining the evidence without bias.)
The myth of the 'ethical scientists' is largely the same face saving nonsense that came postwar from almost every German who had any affiliation with the Party or the Military.
But doing business with quarrelling states (in and outside of Europea) has for a long time been an important factor in the US economy. The question is, what is more important to the US, its security or its economy.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
> 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.
The odd thing is that Hitler had both biological and chemical weapons, yet did not use them.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"If you want to talk about history, explore the economic situations that the US manufactured in the 30s that gave rise to the expansionist elements of the Japanese imperialists. Look honestly at US policies regarding hard goods such as steel and the like and you'll find that, like China today, the US's aggressive postures created a situation where the extremists could thrive, and the Divine Wind could drive a normally xenophobic people into world-conquering frenzy."
Yes, we were cutting back on steel and oil into Japan in the 1930's. Now, was that because we're generally not nice people, or do you think that maybe, just maybe this has something to do with the way they were an aggressor forcefully expanding their empire into mainland Asia since 1932?
"their imperialist "protection" of "Manchukuo" (now echoed in Afganistan?)"
Hrm... dissidents in Manchuria disrupting a rail line going through Manchuria, causing the Japanese to decide to deploy troops, and state-sponsored dissidents in Afghanistan launching an attack on US soil and killing thousands of civillians? Yeah, I can see all the similarities there... WTF?
I don't believe in 6am. I mean, _I_ certainly have never seen it.
The odd thing is that Hitler had both biological and chemical weapons, yet did not use them.
Not really. WWI was a chemical war. After the way the powers that be decided that chemical war was aweful, and both sides had something. So they both decided to not attack with them first lest the evil other (both sides consider the other evil) use them back.
Because it worked in WWII with chemical weapons a lot of the cold war depended on having weapons you would not use next.
There's some confusion here about gun-type designs vs. spherical implosion systems. Trinity was the first test of spherical implosion, using plutonium. Hiroshima was a gun bomb, with two subcritical pieces of U-238 forced together with a gun-like arrangement.
Incidentally, those aren't the only possible geometries, just the simplest ones. Linear implosion was developed in the 1950s. Other geometries have been developed, but are still classified. As greater compute power has become available, it's become possible to simulate, and thus design, more complex implosion geometries.
This is a major argument for export restrictions of "supercomputers". Still, all the major developments in nuclear weapons were made in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Every desktop machine today has orders of magnitude more power than the supercomputers of the nuclear establishment in 1970. It's not clear why we still have "supercomputer" export restrictions at all.