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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.
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
Not the first time the US thought an enemy had WMDs but didn't, huh?
Hitler certainly had WMDs, just not nuclear
They didn't nuke all Japan, just two cities and neither was a ruin at the time. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were excluded from the conventional bombing raids and kept in relatively good shape to test the effects of the nuclear bomb in a living city.
Captcha: misuse
Also see the Nuclear Graphite History section for some details.
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
That's a popular theory... but it's not at all clear there's any truth to it, as the things that beat Germany weren't the things those guys were working on. True, they were key to the Manhattan Project (except for Einstein who took no part in the war and von Neumann who mostly did mathematical consulting work across a broad number of fields including the Manhattan project), but it's not the Manhattan project that beat Germany - it was the difference between Germany's industrial output and that of the US and the rest of the Allies.
WWII was, like most wars, largely a war of attrition - and the Axis lacked the capacity to win that war due to their relative (to the US and the allies) lack of industrial capacity and manpower, as well as the fragile conditions of their supply chain. This page concentrates mostly on the naval war in the Pacific, but it speaks to the grim disparity that all the Axis powers faced.
Or, as I like to say - the atomic bomb didn't win the war, it ended the war. The war was already won, and the only remaining question was how large the butcher's bill was going to be.
They didn't have a rocket delivery system until late 1944 - by which time they were already in deep trouble, barely able to sustain their existing forces and starting to be pinched by lack of petroleum and access to raw materials. (Germany's industrial output peaked in Q3 of 1944.) The same holds true of jet aircraft. While they were technologically ahead... their production capacity was starting to lag. And by the time they started figuring out how to use it effectively, the Allies had figured out how to partially counter it in flight and how to attack it at it's most vulnerable points in flight. (On top of the fuel and raw material problems.) They never could have survived to the late 1940's to become unstoppable.
Or, to put it another way, real history is very different than the urban legend version endlessly touted in a variety of poorly researched TV programs and books. The poor research incidentally is deliberate - breathless accounts of how close the Germans came and how they might have won sell by the truck load.
On a side note, I'm actually quite pleased with TFA - it and researchers acknowledge the truth, this is just a shovelful added to the already existing mountain of evidence that the Germans weren't anywhere close to the bomb... and that it's not clear they were even trying. The common consensus among those who have studied (as opposed to watching TV and reading urban legends and deliberate misinformation) the issue is that they were not.