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

The Nazis Could Have Won

[Etherwalk]

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.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue. Einstein, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, and James Frank all came from Germany and Hungary. Enrico Fermi and Emilo Segre came from Italy. These were many key men of the Manhattan Project and ancillary research.

They already had a rocket delivery system, and they were ahead in jet aircraft. Mix von Braun with those guys, and Germany would have been unstoppable in the late 1940s.

Re:The Nazis Could Have Won

[Fire_Wraith]

The bigger point was that they didn't need to start a war, at all, period.

Look at Europe today - who's the most dominant nation in the European Union, economically and politically? Germany - and that's after they were bombed all to hell, split in half for 50 years by the USA/USSR, not to mention stripped of various bits of land in the east that were given to Poland and Russia. While Germany wouldn't be the strongest power in the world, certainly, they'd have done a lot better for themselves had they not started an aggressive war.