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.

Comments

Their own scientists weren't even close

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

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.