Chemical Evidence Shows the Nazis Weren't At All Close To Having the Bomb 295
TheAlexKnapp writes: The Nazis winning World War II by getting the bomb first is a staple of alt-history and it's the reason why James T. Kirk lost the love of his life, Edith Keeler. Einstein also noted possible German efforts to build one in his letter to FDR urging the U.S. develop an atomic weapon. But it turns out there really wasn't a race to build a bomb at all. Materials from Germany's atomic weapons program have been studied by an international team of researchers, who determined that Germany never achieved a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction — something that Fermi and his colleagues had accomplished in 1942 — which was a key step to actually building an atomic weapon. This chemical evidence supports other historical accounts that the German atomic program never achieved this result.
we are in an alt-history (Score:5, Insightful)
Possible air mail delivery of one (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re: Possible air mail delivery of one (Score:2)
But it's a GLOWING ruin now.
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They didn't nuke all Japan, just two cities and neither was a ruin at the time. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were excluded from the conventional bombing raids and kept in relatively good shape to test the effects of the nuclear bomb in a living city.
Captcha: misuse
Bit late (Score:5, Funny)
That news is something like 65 years late - a new /. record!!
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It was a coverup, man.
It's nice to mention Jáchimov in the article. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's nice to mention Jáchimov in the artic (Score:5, Informative)
The English word "slavery" has a completely different root, it came originally from the Greek "sklabos". Slav as in ethnicity comes from the slavic word "slovo", meaning "word" - as in people speaking an understandable language. In fact, even today, after more than a millennium of separation all Slavic languages are still partially mutually intelligible.
How will the History Channel cope? (Score:5, Funny)
So no Nazi atom bomb is a big dower for them.
I talked to a producer who knew some History Channel people, and she said they called it the Hitler Channel. No mater what series, if you could tie something to Hitler or the Nazis then it was a big plus. She said that when they had a series on the Spartans they compared them to Germany during WWII, and the management was thrilled.
The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Insightful)
The History Channel has a lock on "OMG!!! the Nazis almost won the war, what if their super secret had been built, we would all be speaking GERMAN and eating sauerkraut, OMG!!!". Of course was either only a prototype or was never built at all, but who cares, RATINGS!!!
So no Nazi atom bomb is a big dower for them.
I talked to a producer who knew some History Channel people, and she said they called it the Hitler Channel. No mater what series, if you could tie something to Hitler or the Nazis then it was a big plus. She said that when they had a series on the Spartans they compared them to Germany during WWII, and the management was thrilled.
The Nazis could easily have won the war, if Hitler wasn't insane and had settled for controlling mainland Europe west of Stalin. Only an idiot fights on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots invades Russia during the winter. If Hitler had not betrayed Stalin, he could have held mainland Europe indefinitely. If he had not declared war after Pearl Harbor, but had let Japan fight the United States alone, the war would have dragged for an extra decade. But an extended war against the biggest industrial powers in the world is impossible without technological advantage that cannot be countered.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue. Einstein, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, and James Frank all came from Germany and Hungary. Enrico Fermi and Emilo Segre came from Italy. These were many key men of the Manhattan Project and ancillary research.
They already had a rocket delivery system, and they were ahead in jet aircraft. Mix von Braun with those guys, and Germany would have been unstoppable in the late 1940s.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good point. Nazi Germany had many talented engineers. But their basic sciences in many regards had been ideologically purged - not just by driving out the jews and other undesirables, but also those who supported them and didn't support the general principles of Nazism.
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Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Informative)
That's a popular theory... but it's not at all clear there's any truth to it, as the things that beat Germany weren't the things those guys were working on. True, they were key to the Manhattan Project (except for Einstein who took no part in the war and von Neumann who mostly did mathematical consulting work across a broad number of fields including the Manhattan project), but it's not the Manhattan project that beat Germany - it was the difference between Germany's industrial output and that of the US and the rest of the Allies.
WWII was, like most wars, largely a war of attrition - and the Axis lacked the capacity to win that war due to their relative (to the US and the allies) lack of industrial capacity and manpower, as well as the fragile conditions of their supply chain. This page [combinedfleet.com] concentrates mostly on the naval war in the Pacific, but it speaks to the grim disparity that all the Axis powers faced.
Or, as I like to say - the atomic bomb didn't win the war, it ended the war. The war was already won, and the only remaining question was how large the butcher's bill was going to be.
They didn't have a rocket delivery system until late 1944 - by which time they were already in deep trouble, barely able to sustain their existing forces and starting to be pinched by lack of petroleum and access to raw materials. (Germany's industrial output peaked in Q3 of 1944.) The same holds true of jet aircraft. While they were technologically ahead... their production capacity was starting to lag. And by the time they started figuring out how to use it effectively, the Allies had figured out how to partially counter it in flight and how to attack it at it's most vulnerable points in flight. (On top of the fuel and raw material problems.) They never could have survived to the late 1940's to become unstoppable.
Or, to put it another way, real history is very different than the urban legend version endlessly touted in a variety of poorly researched TV programs and books. The poor research incidentally is deliberate - breathless accounts of how close the Germans came and how they might have won sell by the truck load.
On a side note, I'm actually quite pleased with TFA - it and researchers acknowledge the truth, this is just a shovelful added to the already existing mountain of evidence that the Germans weren't anywhere close to the bomb... and that it's not clear they were even trying. The common consensus among those who have studied (as opposed to watching TV and reading urban legends and deliberate misinformation) the issue is that they were not.
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Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue.
Well, yes, it usually all comes down to that the Nazis could have won if they weren't Nazis, or hadn't had Hitler as their leader.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Interesting)
The Americans had two Bombs ready to go. There was a third Bomb that needed another week or so of development. After that, with the current Tech, they could roll out one single "Atomic" Bomb every month or so.
That was the Plan. This is something simply not understood these days. The Manhattan Project wasn't simply about making a couple of Bombs to drop on Germany or later, Japan, and then the War would be over, and everybody could go Home.
One Bomb a month, and maybe a second Bomb a month... forever. It was an Industry, with thousands of determined workers.
(This is all second hand of course- but I have Primary Sources, now all dead.)
Germany quickly folded, and an isolated Imperial Japan would starve itself to death. Forget all that Invasion nonsense, it was just folderol for public consumption. Isolation was the ultimate goal, and the Bombs were then convenient.
Dropping the Bombs just gave the Saner Japanese an excuse to easily and quickly Surrender. Don't forget the Japanese Coup that led to this Surrender, and how the Emperor was then forced to grovel to keep his head. Others lost theirs.
So what happened to those other early Bombs? They became Science Projects, with a twinge of Security Theater added. My Best Source used to fly through those Mushroom Clouds, grabbing bits of them on Filter paper, to see what actually happens in the few seconds following a Nuclear Fission. Realize that Nuclear _Fusion_ is quite common, and it surrounds us every time we go outside. Nuclear Fission in Nature is rarer; Stars usually have to Explode for this to naturally occur at any great scale. This is Basic Nucleosynthesis.
My Best Source lived to be 94. He was so fucking Radioactive, (Mainly long lived Americium and Curium isotopes.), that he refused at some point to be studied any longer. But he had some great and very funny stories to tell, and his mind was sharp right up the very end. Thanks for everything, Al.
Another Source was the thoroughly Evil and Corrupt Edward Teller. We took an immediate dislike to each other, but that didn't stop his boasting. He actually was a Monster. A family member of his later divulged to me certain details...
Edward Teller was pretty much the worst Monster that a little kid can imagine. That he is now so fondly regarded by Republicans is no wonder.
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Most of the third nuke (fourth, if you count the Trinity test) had been delivered to Tinian. FDR was holding back on airlifting the core (the radioactive part). There's no reason the third bomb couldn't have been dropped soon. After that, more bombs would be arriving, but they weren't ready at that time.
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There was also an attempted military coup to prevent surrender.
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Had Japan delayed the surrender, the inability of the US to launch a third nuclear attack would have resulted in the reveal of the bluff.
Had US delayed the launch of the nuclear bombs then it is likely that the surrender had came anyway.
Actually they did surrender, just not with the term unconditionally which the US president had promised the US people. And yes it would have upgraded anyway, it was just semantics.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at Europe today - who's the most dominant nation in the European Union, economically and politically? Germany - and that's after they were bombed all to hell, split in half for 50 years by the USA/USSR, not to mention stripped of various bits of land in the east that were given to Poland and Russia. While Germany wouldn't be the strongest power in the world, certainly, they'd have done a lot better for themselves had they not started an aggressive war.
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It'd be interesting if some historians wrote some alternate-timeline novels about how things would be today if things had gone differently back then, perhaps with Hitler being deposed and replaced with someone smarter and more realistic, or a chancellor being elected who didn't start a war.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Interesting)
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941. The problem, which you note, is that Hitler was military dolt. He split his forces and decided to go south to capture oil fields. Things went great at first, but Hitler didn't understand that a map doesn't portray just how big the Soviet Union was or that Stalin was prepared to sacrifice untold numbers of Russian troops. Because Hitler didn't prepare for a long campaign, his troops were left unprepared for the winter of '41.
Great generals do not make the mistake of thinking the enemy thinks like they do. They are able to put themselves in their enemies' heads and think like the enemy. Hitler was more or less a pompous ass. The Soviet generals were not all that great either, Stalin had already purged the good ones. Their hero, Zhukov, was more or less a bulldozer driver. He'd have never risen in rank in pre-war Germany. Of course the Americans had their pompous asses, e.g., MacArthur. Admiral Nimitz was once asked why he kept a picture of MacArthur in his office given that they never got along together. His reply was something along the lines of, I want to remind myself what a real ass looks like.
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Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941. The problem, which you note, is that Hitler was military dolt. He split his forces and decided to go south to capture oil fields. Things went great at first, but Hitler didn't understand that a map doesn't portray just how big the Soviet Union was or that Stalin was prepared to sacrifice untold numbers of Russian troops. Because Hitler didn't prepare for a long campaign, his troops were left unprepared for the winter of '41.
What compounded this problem was that historically, even when Moscow was captured Russia was able to keep fighting. What Hitler didn't realize was that Moscow was much more important to the Stalin regime than it had been in previous wars. To Hitler, Moscow wasn't the prize that state capitals usually are. Had he not pulled those divisions and sent them to help Army Group South (which didn't really need the help anyway) Moscow would likely have fallen, and the Soviet Union along with it.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a much more easy method than that.
Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants. Who they started slaughtering.
If they had treated the peasants decently, they would have conquered russia easily.
But it just wasn't in their nature.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Insightful)
Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants. Who they started slaughtering.
If they had treated the peasants decently, they would have conquered russia easily.
But it just wasn't in their nature.
That problem can again be attributed to Hitler and those he placed in power. Certainly many of the professional officers on the ground realized that decent treatment of civilians would cut down on issues, but they were ordered to be harsh with civilians and cooperate with Einsatzgruppen in their area. As atrocities and mistreatment mounted partisan activity could only increase; especially with the Red Army tactic of leaving behind trained soldiers to organize, coordinate, and lead partisan groups in bypassed or occupied areas. Barring Hitler's other many blunders in matters of military strategy the Germans could have still won even with the mistreatment of civilians. But there is a difference between conquering a country and pacifying it. Even if they had won, they would have been tied down for years clearing out the large swathes of Russia they passed over, with literally divisions worth of troops in pockets all over the country fighting a guerrilla warfare led by Commissars and hardline officers. But in any case it was a good case study of what kind of policies not to put in place when you are trying to occupy an area.
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Nazi's were greeted as liberators by russian peasants. Who they started slaughtering.
I believe it was the polish peasants who were greeting their liberators and were slaughtered.
Later, polish people sabotaged german trains.
What a surprise !
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You are probably right.
My mother was a polish peasant, and she was deported to Germany, as a peasant.
At the end of WWII, her mother and sister were deported from Poland to Ukraine, since most peasants were killed there.
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While Hitler threw away a lot of goodwill in the Ukraine and some other places, it's not obvious that they would have won by treating the occupied population legally. While it would have reduced the partisan problem, it would have increased the logistic burden on the German Army.
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He split his forces and decided to go south to capture oil fields.
My understanding is this is the main reason for the war expanding to two fronts. Hitler being a dolt not withstanding, if Germany had stayed out of Russia they might have had serious trouble holding Europe without good sources of oil.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:4, Interesting)
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The question about supplying more troops to Rommel is how to transport and supply them. Even if Rommel had been able to win at El Alamein, he wouldn't have been able to push into the Middle East. Auchinleck had a plan to withdraw to the south, where the Germans couldn't pursue, and hanging on Rommel's flank if he drove into the Middle East. Further, there was no way the Germans would be able to exploit the Middle East oilfields, given British commerce raiding in the Mediterranean, the lack of Axis oiler
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He split his forces and decided to go south to capture oil fields.
My understanding is this is the main reason for the war expanding to two fronts. Hitler being a dolt not withstanding, if Germany had stayed out of Russia they might have had serious trouble holding Europe without good sources of oil.
From what I had always understood, Hitler's thinking (insofar as his syphilis-infect, drug-addled brain could think) was that a large-scale assault could take Russia out quickly due to the state of the Red Army (purges, training and equipment deficiencies, etc). His concern was that if he focused only on England that would allow the Soviets to recover, build up their army, and remove any possibility of defeating them. If he could knock them out quickly he could then focus on England. And for the first 2
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Admiral Nimitz was once asked why he kept a picture of MacArthur in his office given that they never got along together
Somewhat besides the point, but writer Henrik Ibsen also had a portrait of his arch enemy, August Strindberg in his working room, to "show him [Strindberg] how well he was writing".
Nimitz on MacArthur (Score:3)
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The big problem with the invasion was that neither Hitler nor the General Staff ran it, and so the focus shifted over time. Hitler wasn't a great general, but he wasn't that bad on strategy, and having the invasion go according to this vision would have been better than changing vision during the campaign.
The reasons German forces were sent south in greater force were (a) the Red Army had fought the Germans to a standstill near Smolensk, and (b) there were very large Soviet forces there. The move south
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Maybe he was a pompous ass, but the entirety of that pompous ass's campaign in the southwest Pacific from 1942 to 1945 had less US casualties than just the one landing at Anzio.
Or the Battle of the Bulge, for that matter.
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The invasion of the Soviet Union was not going to get off to a good start much earlier than June 22, 1941. It was very difficult to campaign in Spring because of the state of Soviet communications, and the "rasputitsa" (season without roads, roughly) lasted longer than usual in 1941.
Re:The Nazis Could Have Won (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall though, Hitler became grossly overconfident as a result of the 'easy' victory in France. Like most average people at the time, he was expecting a war that would be akin to World War I - ugly, slow, and brutal. The "Lightning War" in France was a huge shock to everyone (except perhaps the Panzer generals that came up with it) in the equivalent of the worldwide pundit class at the time, Hitler included. He didn't think he'd need to do anything particularly different against Russia, and expected the campaign would be quick and easy. "One swift kick, and the entire rotten structure will collapse."
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No they couldn't. Not even close. They made a miserable failure out of trying to defeat a tiny force of Spitfires with their vaunted Luftwaffe in 1940 after the fall of France, when Britain stood alone. They didn't have a clue how to fully mobilize their economy on a war footing. They were ideologically opposed to harnessing the 50% of the potential economy that females represented
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> They didn't have a clue how to fully mobilize their economy on a war footing.
It was both a blessing and a curse. Germany industry was never operated at full capacity for the war effort. As such the industrial bombing against Germany was of limited value since there was so much surplus capacity lying unused towards the war, both in factory and manpower.
> No way in hell. Britain plus the USSR would have finished it without us.
Britain was in such a crap position. Axis domination of the Mediterranean ba
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By the time Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the US was pretty much supporting the Brits with pretty much all aid short of war, casually disregarding the international law on rights and duties of neutrals. In September 1941, the USN went to war in the Atlantic. During Operation Barbarossa, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the US wasn't going to let Britain be defeated.
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No way in hell. Britain plus the USSR would have finished it without us. Maybe one extra year at the utmost. And the US would have devastated Japan much faster without our own second front (which actually had priority). Then we would have swarmed into Europe in full undiverted force by 1944 or 1945.
I totally agree with you, except that the war was already coming to an end.
USSR was already winning the war (the best german generals were sacrificed in Russia), and I believe that De Gaulle and Churchill asked the US to intervene before Stalin could invade the whole Europa.
I believe that the progression of the US soldiers from France to Berlin was easy, while USSR's progression from Russia to Berlin was slow because nobody liked the russian soldiers.
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The bomb would have changed that.
Holding mainland Europe (even without the bomb falling on your key strategic supplies) for a decade would have been a miserable siege exercise for all involved, but ultimately futile for the ones holding the tiny, war torn continent.
For Hitler to conquer, anything really, he would have had to win "hearts and minds" and convert lots of people to his cause... or at least not piss off the rest of the world enough to try to stop him. Doesn't seem likely that would have happened
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That was one of his key errors in the first invasion of Russia. The people in the western part of Russia were glad for a change, glad to have a way to get relieved of the soviets. However, for Hitler and his cronies they were all Slavs, and those same people decided after a couple of months that it was better to take their bets at the side of Stalin.
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If Hitler had not betrayed Stalin, Stalin would've betrayed Hitler. The non-agression pact was, for Hitler, supposed to be a chance to take care of the West first before invadi
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Only an idiot fights on two fronts.
Like FDR?
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The Nazis could easily have won the war, if Hitler wasn't insane
No they couldn't. If Hilter wasn't insane there wouldn't have been a war to win.
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The Nazis couldn't have done so well early in the war without Hitler. Hitler pushed German rearmament at a breakneck pace that the top German generals wouldn't have allowed, if they'd had their way. He got WWII started at about the right time, when German rearmament was pretty much at its peak compared to the Western Allies.
Hitler's plan was to attack the Soviet Union and get a quick victory while he was not engaged heavily on any other front. If you'd told him how many prisoners the Germans would hav
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Hmmm. I've seen GW Bush do the same Nazi salute when visiting the troops in Iraq.
That was the Roman salute.
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The Nazi Bell & UFOs.
That is all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.history.com/shows/a... [history.com]
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Actually, by the time of the Valkyrie plot, the Allies didn't want Hitler assassinated. If he had been, he might have been replaced by someone competent who might have prolonged the war.
Re:How will the History Channel cope? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Britain's ability to avoid being starved would have been significantly hindered had she lost the Persian and Middle East oil fields. Her navy couldn't protect her convoys from submarines if her navy doesn't have fuel.
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I suspect that US oil would have supplied the RN if Britain somehow lost the Middle East oil fields. The distance across the Atlantic is less than that from the Middle East to Britain, remembering that the oil had to go all the way around Africa.
As far as a German invasion of Britain goes, the British Army wargames that campaign periodically, and the Brits win. Assuming the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force were neutralized, the German attack forces would have hit the beach thoroughly seasick and worn out
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Following the German invasion of France the BEF had to abandon most of its equipment at Dunkirk. While they brought back men the loss of equipment was painful and would be a source of strain for awhile. Following the evacuations of British soldiers from France Britain had the equivalent of 11 infantry and 1 armored divisions. They also had around 1/6th of the artillery that the divisions would have normally been equipped with. They were plagued with tank shortages which would have made counterattacking the
How did they go to the moon then? (Score:3, Funny)
I call BS! If they weren't close to a nuclear reaction, how did they get to the moon?
Their own scientists weren't even close (Score:5, Informative)
Well we already knew that the Nazis were very far from a nuclear weapon. They didn't even have the theories right by the end of the war. So this is just confirming something that wasn't under much question.
Heisenberg himself [wikipedia.org] didn't realise that with compression the mean free path becomes much shorter and hence you can get a supercritical assembly with much less fissile material than you would otherwise need. When told of the Hiroshima explosion he calculated that the Americans had just managed to refine 500kg of U235 in order to make a bomb. An overestimate by about a factor of ten.
The German physicists also discarded plutonium early on as an alternative, and whey they discovered their error it was far too late in the programme to do anything about it.
Also Heisenberg himself seems to not have been too keen on the idea, always downplaying the possibility, and trying to convince Bohr that on-one should work on developing the bomb.
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Well, its a good thing overall that they were stopped. It's just that their advancement of nuclear weapons wasn't a particular reason to. They would have fallen for many other reasons long before that became a problem.
What's more interesting in that regard is that the Nazis did have largish quantities of nerve gas stored, and the capacity to make more. Hitler didn't press the issue though since he was, wrongly, told that the allies must have the same capability (they didn't) and since he himself had been in
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Yes, there's that. However, as deplorable as that was, it didn't really help their war effort. It could be successfully argued that it took away from it. In fact, there's a theory that says that the allied feet dragging on the matter was that they didn't mind at all that the Nazis spent time and effort on an endeavour that took that same time and effort from something that could have helped their war effort.
Not that I subscribe much to that theory, just to be clear.
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If Germany had used chemical weapons, the Allies would have also. The Allies didn't know about German nerve gas, and the Germans didn't realize the Allies didn't have their own, but the Allies had pretty large stocks of the older weapons.
The German Army depended heavily on horses for transport. You can put a gas mask on a horse (I've seen pictures), but you can't make the horse do anything with the mask on. A truck will run just fine on air that would kill a horse or man. The Germans knew that starti
Re:Their own scientists weren't even close (Score:5, Funny)
So you are saying that Heisenberg was uncertain?
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So you are saying that Heisenberg was uncertain?
Well, his momentum was low, we know that, so that means that his position was indeterminable. Which is a fair match which history actually. :-)
Re:Their own scientists weren't even close (Score:5, Funny)
So you are saying that Heisenberg was uncertain?
At least he had principles.
Bombs and sabotage helped too (Score:2)
Allied bombings and sabotage by resistance fighters contributed as well. It's possible the German physicists could have made more progress if they had secure places to do their work like Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford. And of course the Nazis sabotaged themselves by chasing off the best scientists in Europe.
Heisenberg himself ... calculated that the Americans had just managed to refine 500kg of U235 in order to make a bomb. An overestimate by about a factor of ten.
As it turned out, the Americans also overestimated the amount of material needed by another factor of ten. They had enough material for over twenty. but they used it all on three bombs.
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There is an interesting discussion of Heisenberg's critical mass calculations here: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.d... [mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de]
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There is an interesting discussion of Heisenberg's critical mass calculations here: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.d... [mpiwg-berlin.mpg.d]
Interesting. I hadn't seen that one before. They argue that Heisenberg knew more than he let on as a bargaining chip to be used in the negotiation with the allies. They play his "tons" statement as both not giving away useful information and as a pedagogical device used to explain the principles to Otto Hahn.
It's a nice theory, but I'm not sure it passes Occam's razor. It's still quite possible that he just didn't know any better, or was a bit confused himself as to the details, not having given the subject
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It should be noted that Little Boy didn't actually use compression to achieve fission. It was a gun type bomb (the only one ever built - and it was built not because it was a good design but because it was the EASY design - enough so that they didn't even bother to do a test).
Fat Man, of course, set the pattern for all subsequent nuclear weapons. And it did use compression....
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After the war, Heisenberg *claimed* that he prevented work on the bomb, and accused Bohr of being morally wrong in helping to create a bomb. Whether Heisenberg deliberately obstructed the creation of a Nazi bomb, we'll never know. We only have his word for it.
Well, he met [wikipedia.org] with Bohr during the war, just before Bohr fled west. The contents of the meeting is unclear however, and there are differing accounts of what was said. So there's at least the possibility.
Forthermore, we know that Heisenberg didn't have a "can do" attitude when it came to developing a bomb, dragging his feet. This is sharp contrast to someone like Werner von Braun, who was instrumental in getting the rockets flying, even as the prototypes exploded left and right. Now, whether Heisenberg dragge
And this is news? (Score:2)
We just thought they were close to having the bomb (Score:2)
We just thought they were close to having the bomb because someone found a prototype of a digital clock in the wreckage of the Reichstag.
Stop the presses! (Score:3)
So exactly what everyone has been saying without variation since the Alsos teams arrived in Paris in 1944 turns out to be correct?
Slow news day.
p.s. Had a nice chat with one of the Alsos guys once. Described showing up in one of the labs and everyone there being shocked to see just who was walking through the door. All their former colleges were in fatigues, which they kinda thought was weird. But then when they explained why they were there, and what they were trying to stop, all of the Germans immediately went "What?!? No, we were never doing that!" but then understood why they were in uniform and armed.
Boron in Graphite (Score:3, Informative)
Also see the Nuclear Graphite [wikipedia.org] History section for some details.
huh (Score:2)
Edith Keeler (Score:2)
I never understood why she had to die. They should have just taken her with them. The effect would likely be the same. If it mattered so much they probably could have used their advanced medical knowlege to fake her death. The only change to history would be the disappearance of her body. How bad could that be?
I'm Sure We Had Nothing To Do With That (Score:2)
Interestingly, it seems there are a lot of misconceptions [npr.org] about that what was going on over there. One might draw parallels to what's going on over there today in Syria, but it seems that we're not in the business of fucking assholes so much anymore. No one has the energy to fuck those assholes anymore.
Not quite accurate... (Score:2)
Szilard actually wrote the letter (Einstein only signed it). Regardless, it only stated that Germany had ceased selling uranium from Czechoslovakian mines. It does not mention that Germany is actually working on an uranium bomb. The letter urges further research on chain reactions. The letter does not urge that the US develop an uranium bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Mint Nazi Propaganda on Slashdot, modded +2?
Well, that's a first.
Re:WMDs (Score:5, Informative)
Not the first time the US thought an enemy had WMDs but didn't, huh?
Hitler certainly had WMDs [bbc.co.uk], just not nuclear
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Actually they did but not the V-weapons. They had developed nerve agents but never used them. It seems that Hitler was not a fan of gas in combat. The Japanese did use gas in the war in China but the US warned them that if they used it on US troops then the US would retaliate.
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I always wondered if Hitler's reluctance to use gas was a direct result of him being gassed in WWI.
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That is the common theory.
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Yes, let's attack a sovereign nation without any provocation because we don't like what they are doing and they could possibly build a bomb and theoretically might attack us someday.
It is people like you - those who would rather circumvent peaceful negotiations in favor of murderous pre-emptive strikes - who are the biggest danger to our planet. Fortunately you are the minority.
But please keep your fear mong
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speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required
because Germany:
has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines, which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, Von Weishlicker [sic], is attached to the Kaiser Wilheim Institute in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Well known war profiteer Einstein wrote that to further the interests of his weapons manufacturing company and his international banking cartel buddies. Also, big oil.
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Because the other 50% were genocidal Nazis? Maybe? Just a shot in the dark.
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On invading hostile countries with weapons of mass destruction, but only criticized for 50% of it.
We invaded Germany? Really? Your version of history doesn't match the rest of the world's.
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Also, everyone knew that the chemical weapons we'd provided to Saddam were well past their best-by date.
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Nobody ever claimed Iraq had nukes. WMDs can be chemical or biological as well, and everyone knew Saddam had used chemical weapons on the Kurds.
Calling chemical weapons Weapons of Mass Destruction is pushing things though. I suppose theoretically a biological weapon could wipe out a whole city if you could properly weaponise anthrax or something, but I don't think anyone has actually proved this can be done in practice. And a chemical attack, although psychologically unpleasant, doesn't really kill any more people than a conventional bombing or rocket raid.
The whole "WMD" thing was just a way of conflating theoretical threats with that of nuc
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The Soviets had not attacked the Japanese north coasts, but were making a hash of amphibious landings in the Kuriles. Despite all their advantages, the Red Army assault forces were only saved by the surrender.
I've seen no evidence that the Soviet attacks caused the surrender (although they must have had a lot of influence). The Japanese at least blamed it on the nukes. The Imperial rescript announcing surrender mentioned "a new and most cruel bomb" and lumped everything else (like the destruction of t