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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/Shi

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.

duaneb 11y ago
Definitely. It's hard to say how things would have been affected had the US not had the store, though.
brudgers 11y ago
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.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Indeed, 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 ago
  Centrifuges? 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 ago
  The most famous "dam busting" raid of WW2 was heavy bombers (Lancasters) at 60ft (yes sixty feet) at 240 mph.
- Theodores 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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-biography-shawcross-luftwaffe http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/sep/13/queen-mother-biogr... while the King and Queen were there.
foobarian 11y ago
Some of those ore samples are quite beautiful.

duaneb 11y ago

Definitely. It's hard to say how things would have been affected had the US not had the store, though.

brudgers 11y ago

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.

semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Indeed, 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 ago
Centrifuges? 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 ago
The most famous "dam busting" raid of WW2 was heavy bombers (Lancasters) at 60ft (yes sixty feet) at 240 mph.
Theodores 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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-biography-shawcross-luftwaffe http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/sep/13/queen-mother-biogr... while the King and Queen were there.

foobarian 11y ago

Some of those ore samples are quite beautiful.