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> We had a much larger economy and resource potential than germany and japan. Yes, I once thought that it should have been surprising that Germany didn't get t
by ufmace 8y ago
> We had a much larger economy and resource potential than germany and japan.
Yes, I once thought that it should have been surprising that Germany didn't get the bomb first. Upon more reading, the effort that the US threw at the project was simply staggering - nobody knew which was the best technique for how to do a bunch of different things, so the Americans tried all of them at the same time. No other participant in the war could have duplicated that level of effort. And despite all of that effort, the bomb was only ready to be dropped after Germany had already been defeated by conventional arms.
I have also read that the German scientists' point of view is that a nuclear bomb as a practical military weapon was an interesting idea, but that nobody would be able to build one in time for the current war. And they were right - for themselves.
- iguy 8y agoThe effort was indeed huge, but it's not so obvious that the Germans could not have done it. IIRC the V2 missile program may actually have been more expensive? Different technology but also hard... hard enough that in 1969 the same guys were still leading the world.
- kaybe 8y agoIt did not help that some new aspects found in physics were considered 'ungerman' ('Jewish physics') and discarded, especially Einstein's work and many aspects of quantum mechanics. This alone would probably have proved crippling to any efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
- rfinney 8y ago[edited to remove mis-information ] apologies!
- msla 8y agoThink Un-German, as an English word.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- atemerev 8y agoNot necessarily. Ironically, nuclear explosion physics doesn’t use anything from quantum mechanics, nor from relativity. Intellectually, Germans were well-positioned to complete the project; thankfully, they didn’t have the necessary financial and engineering support.
- zby 8y agoCare to elaborate on that? Sounds rather surprising. In wikipedia on nuclear fission "quantum" is used 3 times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission - but I suspect that all of the nuclear physics is based on quantum mechanics isn't it?
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoI think atemerev's point is that you can find out enough to build a bomb without knowing either relativity or quantum. Yes, E=mc^2 is why the energy is released, but all you need to know is how much energy is released when an atom splits. Yes, quantum mechanics may explain the neutron absorption cross section, but you don't need to know that. You just need to be able to measure the cross section.
- ufmace 8y agoYes, it probably wasn't terribly helpful either that the rejection of Jewish physicists, many of whom helped get the American bomb project off the ground, and rejection of physicists studying "Jewish Physics" left them with probably too few qualified physicists to move a bomb project along as rapidly as the Americans did, even if they had the budget for a project of that size (they didn't), and were willing to spend it early enough (no indication of that). Considering also that they would have had to move rather faster than the Americans, since they didn't finish before the defeat of Germany. Fortunately for the world, there are plenty of reasons why is was essentially impossible for them.
- int_19h 8y ago> No other participant in the war could have duplicated that level of effort. Effort aside, there's also luck. Americans couldn't assume that Germans haven't tried despite the lack of resources, and scored on first attempt by sheer chance. This is one of those races where even if you're very confident that you're faster than everybody else, you still give it everything you have, because the consequences of not winning are too grave for anything else.
- mannykannot 8y agoIt was not by sheer chance that Groves et.al. showed up at Alamogordo with plutonium, in a sphere of exactly the right size, containing a carefully-constructed initiator, and surrounded by explosive blocks of exactly the right shape, with their detonators connected to timing circuitry specifically developed to have the necessary accuracy, and all components thoroughly tested. If it had not detonated, that would have been on account of a chance event.
- int_19h 8y agoAnd long before that could have been done, they had to do a lot of research and engineering, much of which was dead ends. US could afford to fund all that, including the dead ends. OPs argument above is that Germany couldn't compete, because they didn't have such resources, and had to pick one direction and stick to it. My point is that it's true in general, but there was a chance that Germans would have picked the right one from the get go, and managed to get similar results with a lot less effort.
- mannykannot 8y agoAh, I see what you mean. I think it is clear, however, from what they did do, that they were heading in the wrong direction and had some serious misconceptions that would have prevented them being lucky in that sense. There is the question of whether they even did a correct calculation of critical masses prior to hearing about the Hiroshima bomb (while being held at Farm Hall), and they apparently did not understand the relevance of prompt neutrons. I believe one of the Alsos team members said that the German scientists were lucky they did not kill themselves with their primitive experiments.