Lost Nazi Uranium Found In a Dutch Scrapyard 205
Posted
by
kdawson
from the sturm-und-drang dept.
from the sturm-und-drang dept.
colin_faber writes "Lewis Page of the Register is reporting that forensic nuclear scientists at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre traced the two pieces of metal found in a Dutch scrapyard — described as a cube and a plate — back to their exact origins and dates. Apparently both came from ores extracted at the 'Joachimsthal' mine in what is now the Czech Republic from the former Nazi nuclear-weapons programme of the 1940s." The article runs through the roadblocks that, unknown to the Allies, the Nazi regime erected against their possible success in any nuclear bomb development during the war.
Fun trivia (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:3, Informative)
Stupid British slang. Of course, its hardly a real news source, hence the slang in the first place.
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:5, Informative)
The article is about Germany trying to build an atomic bomb during WWII. Jewish scientists who fled Germany around that time include Einstein (E=mc^2, the basis for atomic bombs), Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb), Bloch (worked with neutrons, worked on the Manhattan project), Wigner (told Roosevelt about Nazi bomb plans, worked on the Manhattan project), Szilard (same as Bloch, one of the people who first conceived the a-bomb) and Frisch (same as Szilard).
Do you suppose some of those guys might have been kind of useful to a German atomic weapons program?
Re:Doesn't address the most interesting issue (Score:3, Informative)
Everybody should read "Copenhagen" at some point, it's really the first and last word on this issue. There's very little in the historical record to guide us to the 'right' answer to the question of what Bohr or Heisenberg were trying to accomplsh, the best we can do is consider the different possibilities.
Whatever happened, thank G-d Bohr didn't ask Heisenberg if he'd double checked his reaction cross-section radius...
Re:Politics (Score:5, Informative)
Atheist? Perhaps non-Jewish, but I've never heard of the Nazi's having an inclination to promote a person *because* they were atheist, as opposed to Protestant or Catholic.
The Nazi's were at least superficially Christian and opposed atheism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_religious_views#Hitler.27s_reaction_to_atheism [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany [wikipedia.org]
Or perhaps you mistyped and mean Aryan.
Re:First Godwin Article? (Score:1, Informative)
No [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], no [slashdot.org], and (oh yes) no [slashdot.org].
Re:Politics (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Politics (Score:3, Informative)
Judging by the wiki articles, perhaps not the best sources but they're readily available, both Himmler and Rosenberg believed in some kind of Aryan religion which was an aspect of the Nazi movement. Neither appear to have publicly declared themselves to be atheists.
Boffin (Score:5, Informative)
"In the slang of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, boffins are scientists, medical doctors, engineers, and other people engaged in technical or scientific research.
The word 'boffin' (or 'boff'—often as an insult[1]) can also be used to refer to any particularly clever person. The closest American equivalent is "egghead"."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boffin [wikipedia.org]
They all went to the moon anyway (Score:2, Informative)
I thought we were all clear on that.
http://www.ironsky.net/site/index.php#teaser [ironsky.net]
Re:Politics (Score:4, Informative)
Ah hem: a WW2 Wehrmacht belt.
http://snyderstreasures.com/pages/buckles.htm [snyderstreasures.com]
Please go peddle your propaganda somewhere else.
Re:Fun trivia (Score:1, Informative)
It's true, but you're omitting how the word got into the American language. It's not through "romance languages like French" (don't you mean roman?), but through the german (as in language group) language Dutch. The German (as in, spoken in Germany) word 'thaler' became our word 'daalder', and was used by Dutch merchants as currency [lakdiva.org].
Re:Fun trivia (Score:5, Informative)
You'll find that Romance languages [slashdot.org] is the accepted English term for the language group including French, Italian and Spanish. The name for the group including English, Dutch and German is Germanic languages [wikipedia.org]. (Not the capitalisation, too.)
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:3, Informative)
Einstein had nothing to do with the atomic bomb, other than supporting it politically. Not to say that he wasn't a brilliant physicist, but he really had nothing to do with it.
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:5, Informative)
Einstein did many things, and yes his formula was instrumental in predicting the power that a nuclear explosion would have (and yes - he miscalculated the first time, everyone did). However his contribution to the atomic bomb was limited to the suggestion that "matter should be convertible into energy". Not much more than that sentence. Of course, that sentence was the reason a lot of scientists re-examined the properties of known radioactive materials, leading to :
The direct basis for atomic bombs, for a quick neutron-cascade reaction in enriched uranium, laid by these scientists :
Otto Hahn (German, Nazi)
Fritz Strassman (German, most likely also a Nazi)
Lise Meitner, Jewish, who initially received a "special exception" from the Nazi regime for her work, and protection from a thoroughly Nazi university in Austria, but then was forced to flee anyway
But this was only fission itself, and the suggestions that if somehow large amounts of U-235 were used with cadmium-enriched water between them that a "large amount" of energy would be released. This release of energy was not yet a bomb, it is what we call today a "meltdown". Dangerous, very hot, and poisonous, but nowhere near an atomic explosion. Niels Bohr calculated exactly how much energy a meltdown would produce : 200 million electron-volts PER split atom. The principle that guides bomb development was still missing 2 concepts : enrichment and the discovery of "critical mass".
Incidentally, Otto Hahn was part of the nazi nuclear weapon development program (in fact he was the one that suggested the Nazi's start one). Enrichment was eventually mostly perfected by Otto Hahn, in parallel with the enrichment accomplishments in the Manhattan program.
Critical mass, the actual direct cause for an explosion (nazi weaponization of nuclear power at that point was mostly focused on e.g. launching bombs with it, or producing oil with it, that sort of stuff), was discovered by Francis Perrin.
Then, in 1939, all elements to produce a working atomic bomb were in place. Eventually, while Otto Hahn has in fact drawn up plans that would have worked before the Americans had a working plan, the Americans were the first to get a working atomic bomb in July 1945, a month after the fall of the third reich.
Re:Die judischen (Score:3, Informative)
GP is not a German. His text was clearly machine-translated, so is yours, leading to very funny statements.
Yours basically means: Hey, a mute bottom, you have lost the war - another thing that you siphon.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Informative)
Your post misses the mark: Nazis were not opposed to Christian scientists. They were against Jewish scientists. Against as in, first they marginalized them, made it difficult for them to work, then to find a job and finally (if the scientists and their family were stil residing in Germany or a Nazi-occupied country) deported to a concentration camp and gassed.
Germany COULD have had a nuclear weapon before the allies, if only they didn't engage in their futile/counterproductive policy of extermination, genocde and racial discrimination against Jews. Scientists like Szilard (father of nuclear fission) would have stayed in Germany instead of moving to the USA where they then worked on the Manhattan project.
And a note at the end: had the Nazis had a nuclear weapon, it would have changed the course of history. They didn't necessarily need more than one, either: just blow up one major USSR city (say, Moscow) and watch the Eastern front fold up and a truce being signed.
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:5, Informative)
Excellent book about Nazi uranium project (Score:4, Informative)
There is a truly excellent book, "Hitler's Uranium Club" which documents what the Germans themselves said about their efforts. It is edited by Jeremy Bernstein. It is a collection of transcriptions of conversations among the leading German scientists (Heisenberg, Laue, etc., not all of whom were actually doing nuclear physics), who were captured lat in the war and transferred to Farm Hall in England. They were recorded secretly, so what is said is very candid.
Anyone interested in this history should definitely read the book. The conversations run the gamut from very technical, to various fights over social issues.
The Nazi Holocaust was a Christian pogrom (Score:4, Informative)
The Nazi's were at least superficially Christian and opposed atheism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_religious_views#Hitler.27s_reaction_to_atheism [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany [wikipedia.org]
The Nazis were more than just superficially Christian, most of them were very Christian, and had the overt support of the leadership of both the two main Christinan churches in Germany at the time (Catholic and Lutheren), for both the party in general and the policy of exterminating the Jews in particular.
The reason so many people believe the Nazis were athiests is because of a couple of quotes taken out of context, and because the Catholic church has spared no expense (or Jesuit historian) rewriting history and glossing over their own involvement in both the policies and the atrocities. Indeed, they've even managed to gloss over the fact that Hitler was quite devoutly Catholic (and not particularly out of character in his behaviour--just look at how Columbus treated the natives of the West Indies, or Cortez the Mayans and Aztecs, or...the list goes on, ad nauseum, all with the blessing, both tacit and overt, of the Catholic Christian authorities).
This actually becomes more obviuos when you look at the longer history of Catholic pogroms and inquisitions against the Jews that litter the history of Europe. The Nazi holocaust is merely the latest and most notorious. What a coup, to help organise and support such a massive Christian pogrom against a people, then send out your cadres of revisionist "historians" to recharacterise those responsible not as fellow Christians, but as Athiests...about the only group who wouldn't be inclined to support, much less lead, a pogrom against a population simply because their ancesters are rumourted to have cricified one of their deities two thousand years earlier.
Indeed, as you note, the Nazis came after Athiests with much the same ferver as todays Teabaggers, Truthers, and other right-wing zealots. Some things never change.
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't say ANY of them were FROM Germany.
Teller left Hungary when he was 18 and completed his undergraduate and graduate training in Germany. Wigner was also educated in Germany and worked there until he moved to the US, around the same time the Nazis were gaining power. Szilard also did much of his training in Germany and worked there for some time before fleeing the Nazis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Wigner [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le [wikipedia.org]ó_Szilárd
Re:Doesn't address the most interesting issue (Score:3, Informative)
I guess we'll never really know. Maybe it was both.
We do really know..
That sound you just heard? Yep, you got it. Whoosh
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:3, Informative)
Technically, Einstein didn't draft the letter. Leó Szilárd wrote the letter and convinced Einstein to sign it, mostly for credibility purposes.
Wikipedia linky. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Many boffins died ... (Score:2, Informative)
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
where hydrogen is built into helium
at a temperature of millions of degrees
http://www.mudslide.net/TMBG/Albums/tmbg-ws.html [mudslide.net]