8 ms·
Nuclear Forensics Shows Nazis Were Nowhere Near Making Atomic Bomb
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoAnd even further, having no effective means of delivery.
- duaneb 11y agoHow do you mean? They had effective bombing fleets and even their V2s, which had their problems, but still offered unmanned, long-range delivery.
- bpodgursky 11y agoI'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 11y agoThey were heavy then. They aren't now. After the war a decade of research cut the weight by two orders of magnitude.
- expertentipp 11y agoThere was just a little bit of space in the tip for a warhead. Sometimes the tip was filled only with concrete from a shortage of explosives. Not without a reason the scientists in Peenemünde were calling V2 a "flying laboratory". Its actual military effectiveness as a missile was quite poor. For a scale: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Aggregat4-Schnitt-engl.jpg/800px-Aggregat4-Schnitt-engl.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Ag...
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoThey had no effective long range bombers that could carry such a bomb, nor air superiority in the latter half of the war (in which it'd be used).
- brudgers 11y agoAgainst advancing armies, the target can deliver itself.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoSo, the Germans would use early atomic weapons as battlefield tactical weapons? There's a million ways that could go wrong, and wouldn't impact the end of the war in the slightest, other than Germany getting first dibs on being nuked before Japan (and probably an all out Allied air assault on Germany with chemical weapons).
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago>So, the Germans would use early atomic weapons as battlefield tactical weapons? Pre-Trinity, pre-Hiroshima most people had no idea what a nuclear weapon could do. You can tell a general twenty kilotons of TNT, but he isn't going to believe it until he sees it. See also: the Davy Crockett tactial nuke. >There's a million ways that could go wrong, Another thing that everyone knows, now. Remember, we used to do atmospheric testing of the things mere tens of miles from populated areas. https://imgur.com/gallery/8j0VRkn https://imgur.com/gallery/8j0VRkn
- digi_owl 11y agoYep. Once enough zeros are tacked to a number, the human mind blanks out on the scale of things.
- brudgers 11y agoMy apologies for not being more clear. My point was that the way the US delivered nuclear weapons to Japan and the delivery mechanisms upon which Cold War and contemporary nuclear arsenals are optimized, is not the sole way in which nuclear weapons can be used for effect. Continuing our conversation, the fact that using nuclear weapons carries a risk of retaliation has defined geopolitics for seventy years and is what has given us the term Mutually Assured Destruction. I am not certain that the US and UK would have been tremendously invested in retribution in 1945 had the Nazi's had used atomics against the Soviets in the East. This feeling is based on the shape of post war real-politik toward many former Nazi's despite the atrocities that were actually committed. Finally, the implication that Allied fire bombing was somehow less ruthless than chemical weapons does not resonate with me. My take is that white phosphorous is simply easier to turn into a reliable stockpilable weapon than poison gas [particularly given changes in air pressure and temperature that bombs in a bomber undergoe]. It is my opinion that the Allies actual use of atomics speaks to the no holds barred nature of their bombing campaign.
- Theodores 11y agoThe 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.
- duaneb 11y agoDefinitely. It's hard to say how things would have been affected had the US not had the store, though.
- brudgers 11y agoFor 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.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoIndeed, electric power was a real issue for the Nazis. They did use the Norwegian heavy-water plant at Rjukan quite extensively, so it was sabotaged on several occasions.
- vibrolax 11y agoCentrifuges? IIRC, that was not used for uranium separation until the 1960's. At Oak Ridge TN were the Y-12 electromagnetic separation (calutron) and K-25 gaseous diffusion separation plants.
- arethuza 11y agoThe most famous "dam busting" raid of WW2 was heavy bombers (Lancasters) at 60ft (yes sixty feet) at 240 mph.
- Bluestrike2 11y agoIt 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 11y agoIt 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 11y agoSome, 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.
- afarrell 11y agoI think a better interpretation is that they were able to convince themselves that bringing nuclear weaponry into the world was the lesser of two evils.
- weinzierl 11y agoAnd the physicists and mathematicians that stayed where either unable or had no interest in building an atomic bomb. Here is an excerpt from what Hans Bethe wrote about Heisenberg[1]: The best proof of his lack of interest came at the end of the war. Heisenberg and about ten other German nuclear scientists were interned at Farm Hall, a country estate in England. All of their conversations were secretly taped. When the news of the Hiroshima atomic bomb was broadcast, these scientists could not believe it. When they recognized that it was real, they asked Heisenberg how it could have been done. His first attempt at explanation was totally wrong! He hypothesized something like a nuclear reactor, with the neutrons slowed by many collisions with a moderator. [1] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/Bethe.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/Bethe....
- weinzierl 11y agoI 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-Forensics-Shows-Nazis-Nowhere/_jcr_content/articlebody/subpar/articlemedia_0.img.jpg/1443211062695.jpg http://cen.acs.org/content/cen/articles/93/i39/Nuclear-Foren...
- ufmace 11y agoThere 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 11y agoYes - the Frisch Peierls memo was key... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memorandum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran...
- _ak 11y agoThere'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 11y agoRelated to Axis bomb programs, an interesting article on Japan's: https://sites.google.com/site/naziabomb/home/japan-s-a-bomb-project https://sites.google.com/site/naziabomb/home/japan-s-a-bomb-...
- tragomaskhalos 11y agoRichard 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.
- sandworm101 11y agoIt is controversial for those people who hang their hat on the concept that America was in some sort of race to build and use the bomb before the enemy used it against America. No serious historian thinks that was ever a factor once the logistics were apparent, but the History channel still pumps out constant "documentaries" about Nazi superweapons about be deployed had the war lasted another week or two.
- hga 11y agoPer e.g. the facts that Rhodes lays out, if the Germans had not screwed up organizationally, had not incorrectly dismissed graphite as a moderator for natural uranium reactors, they might have succeeded with the plutonium path. The fear was legitimate, and per Groves in Now It Can Be Told (he was in charge of counterintelligence), it took us a long time and quite some distance into Western Europe to be fairly confident they weren't doing it. So, no, not the last week, not even 1945, but indeed for a long time.
- sandworm101 11y agoThey might have nailed down the science, but not the efforts necessary to gather the fissile material. And then, even if they did have the resources, actually doing all that so close to the action and with the risk of bombing by air or spies, would be inconceivable. The american, actually the canadian-american project as that's where the uranium came from, had the advantage of vast open spaces well outside the range of any enemy aircraft.
- hga 11y agothe efforts necessary to gather the fissile material That's what the plutonium path is all about. It doesn't require a lot, and between the uranium ore from Africa they got when the captured Belgium, and the not as rich ore from Czechoslovakia, it was judged it might be enough. You say it's "inconceivable", but it was indeed "conceived", considered to be possible, if perhaps unlikely, by lots of scientists and engineers working on the Manhattan Project. Who as it progressed had a better and better idea of exactly what was required. And who knew how long we dicked around with the concept before committing to it, and then putting Groves in charge. There's also the danger of 20/20 hindsight. For example, the critical March 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memorandum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran...) laid out the scientific path to success (fast fission) and estimated about 1 kg (2.2 lb) of U-235 was required. Later it was learned it was 52 kg, and plutonium-239 a much more modest 10 kg. Suppose the universe instead allowed 1 pound of Pu-239? Is that still "inconceivable"? Was the V-2 effort "inconceivable"? It required a similar order of magnitude of effort, we knew more about the project because they had to test fly it, the threat was obvious and it did cause a lot of harm, and yet the "risk by air" was not enough to take it out prior to that harm. The final detail is that even if low priority (you're not going to convince many it was truly impossible), the consequences of their getting it before it was too late for the Third Reich were ... well, it would have been existential for them.
- bane 11y agoAn 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 11y agoPeacemaker: 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
- wnevets 11y agoOf 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.
- redwood 11y agoI 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