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Chemical Evidence Shows the Nazis Weren't At All Close To Having the Bomb
TheAlexKnapp writes: The Nazis winning World War II by getting the bomb first is a staple of alt-history and it's the reason why James T. Kirk lost the love of his life, Edith Keeler. Einstein also noted possible German efforts to build one in his letter to FDR urging the U.S. develop an atomic weapon. But it turns out there really wasn't a race to build a bomb at all. Materials from Germany's atomic weapons program have been studied by an international team of researchers, who determined that Germany never achieved a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction — something that Fermi and his colleagues had accomplished in 1942 — which was a key step to actually building an atomic weapon. This chemical evidence supports other historical accounts that the German atomic program never achieved this result.
of our Nazi multiverse
The allies might have determined Germany was ready to "receive" an atomic bomb via air mail though.
That news is something like 65 years late - a new /. record!!
Physical evidence has shown that nearly everyone bombed or threatened -- Iran, Iraq, etc. -- weren't all that close. On the other hand, all 'friends', from Israel to Pakistan, got a free ride and material support.
Jáchimov (today's Czech Republic) was determined to be the source of the Uranium ore German scientists were experimenting with, and it's nice that they added a "fun fact" for the town, but the most important fun fact, they omitted. Silver coins minted since 1519 in Jáchimov (called St. Joachimsthal at the time) were so common that the name Joachimsthaler for the coins got shortened to Thaler which eventually lead to the U.S. Dollar.
So no Nazi atom bomb is a big dower for them.
I talked to a producer who knew some History Channel people, and she said they called it the Hitler Channel. No mater what series, if you could tie something to Hitler or the Nazis then it was a big plus. She said that when they had a series on the Spartans they compared them to Germany during WWII, and the management was thrilled.
Why is Snark Required?
So the lying about opponents having WMD, thus have to be bombed/invaded/nuked, has a longer tradition in the US than i originally thought...
The History Channel has a lock on "OMG!!! the Nazis almost won the war, what if their super secret had been built, we would all be speaking GERMAN and eating sauerkraut, OMG!!!". Of course was either only a prototype or was never built at all, but who cares, RATINGS!!!
So no Nazi atom bomb is a big dower for them.
I talked to a producer who knew some History Channel people, and she said they called it the Hitler Channel. No mater what series, if you could tie something to Hitler or the Nazis then it was a big plus. She said that when they had a series on the Spartans they compared them to Germany during WWII, and the management was thrilled.
The Nazis could easily have won the war, if Hitler wasn't insane and had settled for controlling mainland Europe west of Stalin. Only an idiot fights on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots invades Russia during the winter. If Hitler had not betrayed Stalin, he could have held mainland Europe indefinitely. If he had not declared war after Pearl Harbor, but had let Japan fight the United States alone, the war would have dragged for an extra decade. But an extended war against the biggest industrial powers in the world is impossible without technological advantage that cannot be countered.
I call BS! If they weren't close to a nuclear reaction, how did they get to the moon?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Well we already knew that the Nazis were very far from a nuclear weapon. They didn't even have the theories right by the end of the war. So this is just confirming something that wasn't under much question.
Heisenberg himself didn't realise that with compression the mean free path becomes much shorter and hence you can get a supercritical assembly with much less fissile material than you would otherwise need. When told of the Hiroshima explosion he calculated that the Americans had just managed to refine 500kg of U235 in order to make a bomb. An overestimate by about a factor of ten.
The German physicists also discarded plutonium early on as an alternative, and whey they discovered their error it was far too late in the programme to do anything about it.
Also Heisenberg himself seems to not have been too keen on the idea, always downplaying the possibility, and trying to convince Bohr that on-one should work on developing the bomb.
Stefan Axelsson
At least the USA are learning from history: It worked once, it worked again.
I read a biography of Hitler some time ago. According to the biography, Hitler wasn't interested about atomic bomb, because the scientists said that it would take many years to complete the bomb. Hitler was concerned about his health even in 1930s, and he didn't think he would be alive anymore when the bomb would be ready. Because of this, he didn't think it would be useful to use resources for atomic bomb research.
Not the first time the US thought an enemy had WMDs but didn't, huh?
I thought this is clear since 1945. Germany never came close to obtaining a critical mass of fissible material.
How do we know exactly at what step they were at?
How do you know that others were not contributing to other steps?
The fact is that there was steps which does indicate a race for the bomb.
The other fact is that we grabbed as many scientists as we could from them.
We just thought they were close to having the bomb because someone found a prototype of a digital clock in the wreckage of the Reichstag.
I take it you just copied this text without being able to read German.
Otherwise you would have known how to transliterate umlauts to plain ASCII.
So exactly what everyone has been saying without variation since the Alsos teams arrived in Paris in 1944 turns out to be correct?
Slow news day.
p.s. Had a nice chat with one of the Alsos guys once. Described showing up in one of the labs and everyone there being shocked to see just who was walking through the door. All their former colleges were in fatigues, which they kinda thought was weird. But then when they explained why they were there, and what they were trying to stop, all of the Germans immediately went "What?!? No, we were never doing that!" but then understood why they were in uniform and armed.
I knew it! Those evil American imperialists! It just shows their fake evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq wasn't the first time... they've been doing it since WWII! They should apologize to the Germans for having the audacity to wage war on them; it's clear now they were just helpless migrants trying to find a new life in Poland, France, etc. We should set up a Google campaign to try and give them reparations. Think of all of those years they had to live with the shame of being falsely accused and living under the financial burden of the war... it's reprehensible.
(am I laying it on too thick, Dice and Slashdot?)
But now we are in a worse situation. Whereas the Nazis could not develop it the Muslims do have it.
Mint Nazi Propaganda on Slashdot, modded +2?
Well, that's a first.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
so they were already using the wmd excuse back in the 40s?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
http://thegreateststorynevertold.tv/the-hitler-test/
"If you believe what the government says, you’re part of the problem. If you believe what big media tells you, well, then you’re just an idiot, incapable of discernment and a total failure at critical thinking."
Like most of the people on Slashdot...
Yeah, we probably could have done without them... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sarcasm? Me? Never!
Both "english" and "german" in your sig should be capitalized.
Better not mention the word 'clock' at airports anymore.
CAPTCHA: generals
Allied bombings and sabotage by resistance fighters contributed as well. It's possible the German physicists could have made more progress if they had secure places to do their work like Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford. And of course the Nazis sabotaged themselves by chasing off the best scientists in Europe.
Heisenberg himself ... calculated that the Americans had just managed to refine 500kg of U235 in order to make a bomb. An overestimate by about a factor of ten.
As it turned out, the Americans also overestimated the amount of material needed by another factor of ten. They had enough material for over twenty. but they used it all on three bombs.
The problem the German Nazi's had was they had great rocket engineers but terrible bomb people. Actually a scary similarity to the Nazi's is happening today in Iran. Only difference is that Iran could actually buy the technology needed for bomb making and rocket technology too. This is why the treaty the US wants to sign with Iran is so questionable. The fact Iran already has all they need knowledge wise to build a bomb. Means the treaty is virtually worthless to prevent from actually doing so in secret. Obviously the German's had strength in numbers to wage war. So they were very successful on the ground and somewhat in the air.
But today if Iran was to wage war it would be through nuclear attack not ground or air. Israel will most likely be correct. The only way to stop this is by attacking the infrastructure of Iran's nuclear program. Even so, we (US) have probably wasted too much time negotiating with these terrorists.
Because the War to Japan was not won by the Bomb. Japanese already lost people by thousands every day. What mattered was the arrival of the soviets on the Japan north coast, threatening them of ending up under Stalin's hand. They preferred the gentler US domination and capitulated for that.
Also see the Nuclear Graphite History section for some details.
I'm sorry but this is not correct. The Nazi's were collecting large amounts of Uranium. Clearly they were working on an atomic weapon.
I built an atomic bomb for my grade six Science Fair exhibit.
Those people have given contributions in the digital age, but the world would still get by just fine without them.
I don't understand why people get so upset about regular Jews. It's not like they are Zionists or practitioners of the Talmud. They are just people, like Muslims or anyone else.
These kindly old men were looking for the WRONG bomb! You look for what you know. Everything else is NOISE.
I like how hindsight is used to attempt to control virtually everything on this site.
You fight wars with what you believe at the time based on the evidence you have available, it's all you can ever do. All these people talking about how Hitler was a pompous ass and that's how he lost the war, well guess what - if we would have believed that Germany was too backwards to have been developing the kind of technology we were working on, and quit working on it ourselves because reasons, then that would have made the US and their allies the pompous asses.
And running around talking about how people were "wrong" and "liars" because the evidence that they had wasn't as reliable as they thought at the time, and trying to punish them for their actions because of it - well, that's damning them if they do, and damning them if they don't. If you see smoke in your building you run out and call the FD. You don't sit there and think "oh must be the commies fucking with us again". If it turns out later to happen to be some kid playing with a smoke device they stole from some groupies the night before, that doesn't make you stupid.
It's APK. He went off his Meds, and is a Prisoner in a Hosts Loop of his own device.
He can check out any time he likes, but he can never leave.
Love this Captcha- descends
It was all Bush's fault
I swear the captcha's are provided on-demand by comedy-inclined NSA agents who read the preceding post and try to come up with something witty. Every single time.
Yes, a Fun Fact. That is, until the Spanish flooded Europe with Cheap American Gold and Silver. That led to the downfall of the Spanish Empire. Oh, they tried Slavery for a while, but Slavery, (From the root word "Slav".), was falling out of favor in Europe by then.
Read Pirenne on the follies of basing Currencies on precious metals that turned out to be rather common.
This was something Charlemagne understood- wean the People from Gold onto Silver, and then onto Baser Metals.
It's all just Metal after all; it can't be eaten, and a good Daughter had value beyond Silver- she could be sold for three goats and a cow.
On invading hostile countries with weapons of mass destruction, but only criticized for 50% of it.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
I never understood why she had to die. They should have just taken her with them. The effect would likely be the same. If it mattered so much they probably could have used their advanced medical knowlege to fake her death. The only change to history would be the disappearance of her body. How bad could that be?
Hasn't this been known for years, well the government has known since the end of the war when they found the remains of an underfunded, under equipped nuclear energy project. However I think they chose not to tell everyone else for quite a while. Heck, most of their heavy water supply, produced in Norway I believe, was just thrown into some rail cars and sent unguarded to a commercial ferry where the resistance sabotaged the ship and destroyed most of it.
That is a goatse link, just to warn others.
Interestingly, it seems there are a lot of misconceptions about that what was going on over there. One might draw parallels to what's going on over there today in Syria, but it seems that we're not in the business of fucking assholes so much anymore. No one has the energy to fuck those assholes anymore.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
they were not close. These are the same guys who said there wasn't any bomb in Iraq....oh.
No frost for you!
By about 4 minutes.
In Nazi Germany, the Cow pees on you! MOOO!
The English word "slavery" has a completely different root, it came originally from the Greek "sklabos". Slav as in ethnicity comes from the slavic word "slovo", meaning "word" - as in people speaking an understandable language. In fact, even today, after more than a millennium of separation all Slavic languages are still partially mutually intelligible.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Szilard actually wrote the letter (Einstein only signed it). Regardless, it only stated that Germany had ceased selling uranium from Czechoslovakian mines. It does not mention that Germany is actually working on an uranium bomb. The letter urges further research on chain reactions. The letter does not urge that the US develop an uranium bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That's interesting, thanks.
The quote according to Eddie Layton was, "To remind myself not to be a horse's ass." It's unfortunate that Nimitz isn't as well known as some of the other WW2 principals, as he did a very good job as CinCPAC.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
That's nice and all, but the slave does have its roots from Slav.
From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
slave (n.)
late 13c., "person who is the chattel or property of another," from Old French esclave (13c.), from Medieval Latin Sclavus "slave" (source also of Italian schiavo, French esclave, Spanish esclavo), originally "Slav" (see Slav); so used in this secondary sense because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples.
This sense development arose in the consequence of the wars waged by Otto the Great and his successors against the Slavs, a great number of whom they took captive and sold into slavery. [Klein]
http://www.powells.com/biblio/...
Blackett's War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare
by Stephen Budiansky
ISBN13: 9780307743633
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The nazis, Germany being the eternal juggernaut of chemical engineering, had poison gases, including the first nerve gas agent, which were actually more effective or "useful" than early nukes: by killing people and animals, those left the infrastructure intact for "Aaryan Lebensraum" expansion. Almost like a neutron bomb, which didn't arrive until the beginning of 1970s.
Except that Adolf Hutter himself suffered a poison gas attack while serving as trench infantry in WWI and thus forbade gas use "against humans and animals" including enemy soldiers. Gas murder was applied against those deemed "sub-human" according to nazi racial ideology, like the jews, gipsy, gays, the handicapped, etc. in the concentration camps.
Had the nazis made unfettered use of posion gas in a full scale "Gotterdammerung", the whole of Europe, from Scotland to Greece would be ruled by cockroaches even today. Not to mention germ-warfare, since Germany was also the leader in microbiology in the first half of 20th century. Furthermore, remember that they had unstoppable Mach5 hypersonic V2 missiles to deliver 1ton warheads, while the american B-29s weren't allowed to fly against the Reich because their computing gunsights weren't fast enough to track the Me-262 jetfighters at 870km/h.
Had the japanese paid any attention, those B-29 would have never reached Hiroshima and Nagasaki too, since they had some fine piston engined interceptor fighters for homeland defence. I personally think the japanese leadership was actually happy to see those two particular cities, the most christian japanese cities, one protestant and one catholic, razed to the ground by atom, thus completely eliminating the risk Jesus posed to shinto and buddhism.
Christianity was a small, but not very small yet disproportionately influential minority in pre-WW2 Japan, which commanded much respect from the general population, being associated with all the benefits of western modernity, transportation, industry, schools, sport, medicine, etc. Christianity is now less than 1.7 thousandth (!) of Japan and their lack of influence / intermediation means Japan doesn't understand the world and the world doesn't understand Japan, thus the island nation's full economic and cultural potential can never be realized. However, who cares as long as the Emperor remains and can be secretly admired as deity and child sexual perversion can continue... (wink, wink). Good riddance Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bansai!
Those non-christians who have governed the USA since 1911 and who developed the A-bomb were very cunning to craft and calculate such a chain of events in advance for a completely foreign land, from the A-bombings to the Two Lost Decades. They are the most clever, but also the most evil of all races.
By the way, I almost forgot: there is some allegation the nazi germans had tiny atomic bombs, which shunned compression-fission for a mixture of sub-critical fission and the "dirty bomb" method combined with urranium pyrophorics. Small, tactical artillery-launched devices that were meant to incinerate app. 1500m2. A least one test firing was performed in Ohrdruf, Thuringien and they were probably 9 months from having something field usable, which is pretty long time under war pressure. But since the Reich never believed in amassed strategic bombing, they saw no need for kiloton-class nukes as their aim was to conquer intact lands and buildings, for a quick teutonic lebensraum expansion. America had plenty of land stolen from the redskins, so they were only interested in causing destruction on an Old Testamental scale.
Yes there was a race, I saw it on Hogan's Heros! For me, that's definitive.
It seemed to me that I already read an analysis of the purity of the graphite used in a buffer wasn't high enough and thus was more of a blocker than a buffer. The result was that the failed experiment then diverted the Nazis from an efficient path down a far harder path. That the Manhattan project was effectively based on the same experiment but done at ever higher purities of graphite until it worked and confirmed what they thought about neutrons.
You make a good point that it wasn't Germany's strategic aim to inherit a nuclear wasteland of Europe. But perhaps they might not have minded turning the US into nuclear wasteland to stop them.
I'm sorry... ; (
The spelling is JÃchymov.
We'll give some land to the chinks and the niggers, but we DON'T want the Irish.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How can we blame this on George Bush?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
From all the text in the original item and Forbes blog, there definitely was a race. Several races, in fact. Aryans, Jews, Italians, Mixed-ethnicity Americans, etc, as well as the race for the bomb. Thank God, the Germans did not win, or come close enough to create lots of radioactive material with which to blitz England with dirty bombs and V2's. They might have been set to explode at 150 .. 1000 meters to pollute and require effort to clean up.