
Nuclear Forensics Shows Nazis Were Nowhere Near Making Atomic Bomb - fraqed
http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i39/Nuclear-Forensics-Shows-Nazis-Nowhere.html
======
ufmace
There was a really good post somewhere on Reddit a while back that I can't
seem to find now that had a lot more details on the idea of a Nazi atom bomb,
mostly political. I think the gist was that one of the key steps in a nuclear
program at the WWII stage is the realization that an artificial nuclear
explosion is practical, if difficult, and makes a very effective weapon of
war. That also means that they understand the core physics concepts and have
some idea of what building a bomb would involve.

As I understand it, the Nazi regime never got to the point of even realizing
that a bomb was a serious possibility. So naturally, they never devoted real
resources to figuring out the details and how to go about actually building
one.

There's also the economic aspect - the initial development work was massively
expensive, and even the other major WWII combatants who had an idea that a
bomb was possible didn't think they would be able to devote enough resources
to it to actually build one for that war. They may well have been right - even
with the massive resources the US poured into the project, the war was still
pretty close to being over before they had a bomb ready to drop.

~~~
osullivj
Yes - the Frisch Peierls memo was key...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memorandum)

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tragomaskhalos
Richard Rhodes' "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb" is a pretty thorough account
of the whole enterprise, and concludes that the Germans were nowhere near, so
I don't think this is a particularly controversial revelation.

~~~
jewbacca
My favourite account of the German nuclear programs (note: using the plural
here is deliberate, and significant) is "Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret
Recordings at Farm Hall" ([http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Uranium-Club-Secret-
Recordings...](http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Uranium-Club-Secret-
Recordings/dp/0387950893)), by physicist Jeremy Bernstein.

The centrepiece is a curated set of transcripts from secret recordings of the
candid conversations of a group of German scientists detained together for
months after the war (specifically for the purpose of surveilling such
conversations).

Some vaguely YC-ish lessons on how their failure to produce could be
attributed in many ways to seemingly mundane organizational structures that
were debatably inherent to Nazi German society and internal politics.

Also some borderline pornographic payoff when they find out about Hiroshima.
At the time, they were convinced they were 10 years ahead of anyone else, and
were being detained as a prelude to being showered with honours and put in
place to bring American and British science into the modern age. Then they set
about convincing themselves they failed on purpose for moral reasons.

~~~
hga
Some related terrible bad luck (well, for the Third Reich) in organization:
the scientists' saving throw to get serious resources devoted to the project
was ruined when a secretary preparing the invitations for a seminar
accidentally substituted the agenda for a highly technical one happening
around the same time, and the major figures who would have otherwise shown up
declined.

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Theodores
The U.S. had the best in uranium before the war started in a warehouse in New
York:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkolobwe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkolobwe)

Nobody else had the raw materials in such a useful form. I say this is the
quirk of history that gets overlooked when it comes to the race to get the
bomb.

~~~
brudgers
For the US, it was than raw materials and talent. It was infrastructure. The
US had the juice to run all the centrifuges. A decade of rural electrification
created the Tennessee Valley Authority. Germany didn't have that sort of
abundant electric generation, let alone protected from bombing.

I remember reading somewhere that the abundance of electricity in the US led
its planners to ignore the fragility of Axis power infrastructure when
selecting targets for strategic bombing. Allied dam busting was tactical and
carried out by medium bombers at low level not the heavies from altitude used
on targets deemed important.

~~~
Theodores
It was class warfare as well as the war told by the movies.

This was on both sides, so you had things like how none of the German bombs
ever managed to hit a 'royal' palace, e.g. the one that German lady lives in
with postcode SW1A 1AA.

Meanwhile, the train tracks that led to the concentration camps were
miraculously spared from the Allied bombing campaigns.

From the perspective of the arms companies, why bomb something like a power
plant when you could expend far more ordnance wiping out working class
populations?

Churchill was first and foremost an oil man, despite the war time heroics he
had his eye on the pie, carving up the oil wealth of the Middle East between
BP and the Americans. WW2 was just a chapter in mechanised warfare that
started in 1914 and goes on to this day, the war never stopped, certainly not
in 1945. Things were only getting started then. Laos is a case in point - a
secret war when more ordnance was dropped on the country than everything
dropped in WW2.

We try to rationalise the behaviour of psychopaths, as if they were thinking
in any type of common sense way.

I don't believe the dambusters thing was a shoe-string operation, although not
quite Manhattan Project in cost, it certainly was not cheap. It was also
'standard' Lancaster bombers - the de-facto 'heavy bomber' of the time, albeit
'a small plane made of things like wood' in comparison to whatever we have
today.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
You seem to be imagining that the bombers in WW2 had modern bombing
technology. At the time, they didn't have the technology to accurately target
a single building (especially at night when the raids on London were
conducted). They certainly didn't have the accuracy to target something as
narrow as a train track. Bombing tactics at the time consisted of dropping a
huge number of bombs and hoping that a few of them got lucky and hit something
valuable.

~~~
hga
_Bombing tactics at the time consisted of dropping a huge number of bombs and
hoping that a few of them got lucky and hit something valuable._

Ideally setting fire to the buildings housing machine tools (need to warp
them, not shove them around and scour their paint with splinters).

But I can think of no more exquisitely vulnerable target than a refinery, and
we were infamously ineffective at taking them out, starting with:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave)
and overall see:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_Campaign_of_World_War_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_Campaign_of_World_War_II)
especially the final paragraph.

I also note that it doesn't take long to repair railroads, and repairing them
quickly after enemy damage has been a focus of engineers starting with our
Civil War.

Although I'm not sure why we're bothering to reply to this message, seeing as
how the very first point is infamously wrong, postal code SW1A 1AA
([https://www.google.com/search?q=SW1A+1AA](https://www.google.com/search?q=SW1A+1AA))
most assuredly did get bombed:
[http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/sep/13/queen-mother-
biogr...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/sep/13/queen-mother-biography-
shawcross-luftwaffe) while the King and Queen were there.

~~~
Theodores
Read up on this chap:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Lindemann,_1st_Visco...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Lindemann,_1st_Viscount_Cherwell)

A lot of WW2 happened before Americans joined the party. At the start and up
until the Blitz, both sides wished to avoid civilian casualties (incredible
idea). Even the Nazis wanted to just take out the RAF, docks and munitions
factories. But then some bombs landing in Berlin gave Hitler the idea to start
terrorising British cities, so London's docks became a target in expectation
that a lot of ordnance would miss and terrorise Londoners. Whitehall was also
targeted - a 'decapitation strike' in modern parlance.

Coventry was removed from the map in summer 1940, to a certain extent
Churchill had been waiting for this to happen (Bletchley Park had thee
intercepts) so that reprisals could begin. And so it began. Bomber command
kind of gave up on 'precision' and it then became eugenics - kill off the
working class people! Bomb their houses! Factories, docks, railways were no
longer the targets, it really was working class housing to be terrorised.

I have not heard about Churchill's advisor - Lindemann - on any History
Channel documentaries, but not everything is as it gets told. I am not seeking
a contrary view, just, the more you study a subject doing one's own research
the more it differs from our own rosy propaganda. I also think that what the
germans did in Namibia before the war is also quite fascinating, the depths of
inhumanity that we learned of after the concentration camps were discovered
were plain to see a generation earlier. It is as if the germans missed out on
colonies and sought to make colonies in eastern Europe to make up for missing
out on the land grab that the British (Portuguese, French and Spanish) empires
had managed.

As for the Buckingham Palace incident, that was a stray bomb, not one of many
aimed at the palace that happened to get through.

~~~
samstave
What did they do in Namibia?

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Bluestrike2
It turns out, driving out all of your physicists and mathematicians because
they were Jewish and gutting your academic system wasn't quite the smartest
idea in the world.

~~~
expertentipp
It almost looks like the nuclear and hydrogen bombs were a "Jewish revenge"
(Teller, Ulam, Szilard, Rabi, von Neumann, ...). Even Fermi was kicked out of
Italy because of remote Jewish connotation of his wife. Entire Europe, not
only Germany, shoot itself in the foot at this point.

~~~
sandworm101
Some, but certainly nowhere near all of the scientists involved were jewish.
What did happen was that rising antisemitism (in many many countries) caused
jewish academics to suddenly become more mobile, more willing to move about
the planet or country and take positions on strange projects. I think it less
revenge and more market forces that resulted in a relatively large number of
jewish experts working on the bomb.

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weinzierl
I have visited the Atomkeller Museum, in Haigerloch. As far as I can remember
what you can see on the picture [1] from the article is almost everything
there is to see. At the entrance is a glass box with a slowly ticking Geiger
counter but that's it. Basically it's a small rock cavern with a hole in the
ground.

[1] [http://cen.acs.org/content/cen/articles/93/i39/Nuclear-
Foren...](http://cen.acs.org/content/cen/articles/93/i39/Nuclear-Forensics-
Shows-Nazis-
Nowhere/_jcr_content/articlebody/subpar/articlemedia_0.img.jpg/1443211062695.jpg)

------
_ak
There's a book about Germany working on the atomic bomb from about 10 years
ago. One thing that I always stuck in my mind was that the Nazis had several
different programmes, run by different organizations. I remember at least
three, Wehrmacht, SS, and Post Ministry (I know, this is kind of WTF). All of
these organizations actively competed against each other over a very limited
amount of resources, in particular heavy water and fissible material. Of
course that won't produce meaningful results if you're being sabotaged by
other organizations in your country.

------
brudgers
Related to Axis bomb programs, an interesting article on Japan's:
[https://sites.google.com/site/naziabomb/home/japan-s-a-
bomb-...](https://sites.google.com/site/naziabomb/home/japan-s-a-bomb-project)

------
bane
An interesting quirk of history, it was the reconstituted German rocket
program in the U.S. which finally gave global delivery capability to American
nukes.

~~~
tosseraccount
Peacemaker:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-36_Peacemaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-36_Peacemaker)

BUFF:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress)

Forrestal :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Forrestal_%28CV-59%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Forrestal_%28CV-59%29)

------
redwood
I was under the impression that Heisenberg made a fundamental mistake on a
back of envelope calculation of the amount of an important input required that
led him to believe it was not a tenable option and therefore the project was
eventually killed. that doesn't mean that we didn't just get very lucky and
that he might have on the flipside gotten very close to building something

------
wnevets
Of course they weren't. They realized early on if the war was still going on
by the time the bomb was finished they would still lose the war.

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ZanyProgrammer
And even further, having no effective means of delivery.

~~~
duaneb
How do you mean? They had effective bombing fleets and even their V2s, which
had their problems, but still offered unmanned, long-range delivery.

~~~
bpodgursky
I'm not an expert, but nuclear bombs are heavy. I'm seeing the warhead
capacity of a V2 rocket as 2,200lbs. Little Boy was 9,700lbs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy)

~~~
CapitalistCartr
They were heavy then. They aren't now. After the war a decade of research cut
the weight by two orders of magnitude.

