Lost Nazi Uranium Found In a Dutch Scrapyard 205
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.
Doesn't address the most interesting issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't address the most interesting issue (Score:3, Interesting)
The longer it takes for the joke to sink in, the funnier it is.
Re:Doesn't address the most interesting issue (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess we'll never really know. Maybe it was both.
We do really know. There is no plausible answer to Michael Frayn's argument in his play "Cophenhagen". Ergo, the matter is incontrovertibly settled: there is simply no way that Heisenberg could have got his initial estimate of the mass of a uranium bomb so badly wrong (several tonnes) at Farm Hall if he had been working on such a project for the NAZIs.
This is one of those controversies that has been going on for so long that there's a little industry built up around it, but like buggy-whip makers the product they are pushing is no longer much needed.
Re:Doesn't address the most interesting issue (Score:1, Interesting)
If you are interested in Copenhagen, I STRONGLY suggest purchasing this book:
http://ohst.berkeley.edu/publications/copenhagen/
I presents several different arguments that do a very good job of exploring many things which Frayn couldn't include in the play for theatrical reasons or was otherwise unaware of. Also, make sure to look at both Frayn's postscript and his post-postscript, which you should be able to find online with a bit of searching.
The play is good, but it definitely falls short in some areas. For example, Heisenberg definitely did the calculation, he just used what was essentially a shortcut based on a false assumption. But it wasn't that he assumed something or the other was right, he just messed it up. Nevertheless, after reading the essays in the book I linked to, I've decided that essentially the Nazis just decided the bomb program wasn't worth pursuing. But hopefully some people will pick up the book and be able to draw their own conclusion.
Also, to the person suggesting Paul Rose's account: Rose is a giant asshat. He hates Heisenberg unconditionally, going as far as to accuse him of spitting at Max Born, his close friend and mentor, because he was a Jew, despite the fact that no other historian has agreed with this account, there is no evidence of it, and their correspondence has the same tone before and after the supposed event occurred. Don't listen to Rose.
Re:Politics (Score:3, Interesting)
It is very interesting to look into the "Uranium Verein", the nazi nuclear program. Considering all the very good scientists they had, and the good infrastructure that existed at this time, they should have succeed way before US. But they had Bohr leave, they had Pauli leave, they had Einstein leave. More than Einstein, they put Heisenberg as a leading person, despite him being a poor experimenter (but a very good theorician) the good experimenter at the time was too suspicious because he kept having jewish assistant and protesting about their disappearance. It also didn't help that many of the scientific team had to serve some time on the front (and one or two died). The whole program is an example of bright people hindered by poor management, it is fascinationg to read.
Interesting That This Was Not Congo Uranium (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact this can be traced to production batches at Joachimstal during the war is interesting for the following reason: it was a mine incapable of supporting a nuclear weapon program.
Joachimstal (Jachymov today) is an ancient and famous mining district (others have noted here that Thaler == Dollar originated from its name) and due to radon gas in its mine is also the earliest recorded incidences of death from occupational radiation exposure - - - lung cancer was a common cause of death of underground miners from the 16th century onward. It was also a prominent source of material for the discovery of radiation and radioactive elements.
But it could only produce a few tens of tons of uranium annually! Something like a 1000 tons of uranium was needed to support an effective nuclear weapons program.
Germany had however a couple of thousand tons of already mined and processed ore from the Belgian Congo, captured at the outset of the war. This material was perfect for a nuclear weapons program - if it had one. This material was captured by the U.S. at the end of the war unused. A couple of thousand tons of ore from this same mine and shipped to the U.S. before the war in fact powered the Manhattan Project through most of its wartime operations.
That Germany was still relying on old pre-war supply arrangements through Joamchimstal to obtain research uranium is very interesting. It is another manifestation of the failure to create a real weapons program.
Re:Politics (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I'd put it this way. The Nazis, intellectually speaking, weren't anything.
Tyrannies of that type use ideology, but aren't about ideology. Trying to take their "ideologies" seriously as ideologies only leads to confusion, because they weren't interested in consistency, much less truth. They used language purely for its utility.
Take their idea of "Jewish science". You can't take that notion seriously, because it's all a fantasy they cooked up to target people they were afraid of. So they just lump them in together. It's telling that Himmler wanted to label Heisenberg as a "White Jew". "Jew" doesn't mean "person of historically Jewish descent" or "person who adheres to the Jewish law". It's just the verbal equivalent of a punch in the face.
The same goes for Hitler's views about atheists. Atheists tend to be free thinkers, and therefore likely to oppose the regime. So you take two despised groups and you manufacture a bigger "threat" by glomming them together.
Scapegoating is so critical to tyranny that where there aren't ready made hatreds, the tyrant invents groups to be hated. Stalin invented the "kulik", or rich peasant, as the scapegoat for his failed agricultural policies. They kuliks weren't rich by any means, but if your family were starving and your neighbor's had food, that gave you a satisfying, concrete target for your rage right within reach.
As far as the "Christianity" is concerned, it's about as meaningful as their notion of "Jew". If they'd been living in a predominantly Buddhist society, they'd be filling their propaganda with Buddhist trappings. If they'd been living in a Jewish society, then they'd avail themselves of Jewish symbols and scapegoat Christians and Muslims.
You can connect what the tyrant wants to what he says in this way: The tyrant wants power. To obtain and hold onto it, he needs a compliant people. To make the people compliant, he arouses fear, anger and hatred in them. To arouse those emotions he uses words, not to tell people anything, but to goad them.
Hatred and fear are for the politician like the nose ring a farmer puts on a bull. It allows him to safely lead a big, dumb dangerous animal where he wants it to go. This works for both right wing tyrants and left wing tyrants like Stalin. Remember that next time you are tempted to latch on to some popular political hatred.
Re:Doesn't address the most interesting issue (Score:3, Interesting)
You assume that research invariably produces an incontrovertible and utterly final answer - when nothing could be further from the truth.
Take for example, from the Manhattan Project, the discovery of Plutonium's sensitivity to predetonation. When the fission properties of Plutonium were first explored, it was discovered and 'proven' that Plutonium would work in a gun type bomb. Later, when the properties were being studied more intensely (to refine the bombs design), and completely unexpectedly, Plutonium showed an apparent change in it's fission properties - tending to explode early, well before the [gun type] bomb could reach anything approaching it's theoretical performance. (In other words it would fizzle.) Worse yet, different samples showed different performances, and when the same samples were shipped to Berkley they showed performance not only different from their original research there, but also different from Los Alamos.
In the end it turned out that the difference in location of testing was one of the two keys - Los Alamos, being at higher altitude than Berkley, was subjected to a higher flux of cosmic rays. Those cosmic rays were fissioning P-240 that was present in the samples. The effect had not been previously discovered because the original (accelerator bred) had a far lower level of P-240 contamination than the (reactor bred) samples later used at Los Alamos. (And that the P-240 contamination level depended on the irradiation schedule and level during production.) The scientists had known about the P-240 contamination, but had originally dismissed it.
The entire Plutonium bomb project had to be redirected to discover a method of assembling a supercritical mass of Plutonium orders of magnitude faster than was possible in a gun - resulting ultimately in the implosion bomb. The production schedule at Hanford had to be modified to control the breeding of P-240.
Hell, speaking of Hanford, the reactors there (built according the best research of the time), failed to work initially because of a previously unsuspected decay chain and daughter product poisoning the reactions within the reactor.
This belief only exists among those who aren't actually conversant with the history of the development of nuclear arms. (And those who wish to find a 'hero' who stood up not only against the Nazi's but against nuclear arms.)
Re:Politics (Score:4, Interesting)
Germany simply didn't have the spare industrial capacity to build installations of this magnitude without serious reprecussions on their war effort. As well the design of these facilities are pretty obvious (and large) making them perfect targets for the 8th Airforce
These exact same arguments can be made about the V-2 project, that consumed 2 billion Reichsmarks (1.2 billion US $ at the time, about 70% of the budget of the Manhattan Project during the war) late in the war for negligible real contribution to the war effort.
The Mittlewerk V-2 plant was bombed many times, but being built underground of reinformed concrete, it was never put out of operation.
These same resources could have provided a robust nuclear weapons program (but no bomb by the end of the war).
Most surprising is Germany's failure to have a vigorous R&D effort early in the war on uranium. The cost of such a project would have been small (compared to the huge costs of industrial production) a few tens of million of RM over 2-3 years. They had two strong motivations to do this, even if they thought no atomic bomb was possible during the war.
1. If Germany had "won the war" (defeat of the USSR, undisputed control over continental Europe, and the Anglo-American world suing for peace) they still would face a hostile Britain and U.S. even after an armistice. Given the precedent of WWI and WWII another round 10-20 years down the road seemed likely. Staying ahead of the Anglo-Americans in atomic technology would have been essential even in a victorious scenario.
2. Using uranium as a source of power seemed much easier, and the French were actively pursuing this in 1940 before defeat. The US Navy started its own independent uranium program to build reactors to power submarines around this time. To Germany - outclassed in Naval power and needing to sever the sea supply line of the UK and USSR - the possibility of a uranium powered U-boat should have given the German Navy and Hitler thrills of a well-nigh sexual nature. Yet no serious effort was devoted to exploring this.
Re:The Nazi Holocaust was a Christian pogrom (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the usual way with "debunkers" who seek to tear down a mass movement in order to supplant it with another. Hitler desperately needed a Jewish devil, so he accused the Jews of rewriting their history. Actually, it was Hitler who invented a new history in which the Jew became a sub-human perpetrator of evil. In the same way, as you have demonstrated, the anti-Christian demands a Christian devil and will commonly accuse Christians of rewriting their own history (the same accusation is frequently leveled against any of the numerous denominations: Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, etc). Typically this is accompanied by a certain "guilt by association" argument. In your case, not only is Christianity associated with Nazism according to your own flavor of revisionist history, but it becomes the driving force behind it. Christian zealots are now to be blamed for every major ill the world has ever seen, including the holocaust. Christians are sub-human genocidal maniacs. Where do we go from there?
Make no mistake: the Nazi movement was not a Christian movement, nor were it's principal roots found in Christianity. While plenty of Christians were sucked into the movement itself (mass movements are interchangeable, as Eric Hoffer pointed out; it is the quality of the belief rather than the thing believed in that is important to the True Believer), Hitler viewed all religion as competition to his own power. Hitler had no god but power. Nazism was merely one possible reification of Nietzsche's philosophy combined with any other power doctrines that could be extracted from social Darwinism, paganism, Christianity, and so forth.