This is an awesome read, and likely correct in the narrative, but the cubes they have at hand to study have a bit of a provenance problem - how do we know they were the ones used for the German research?
At any rate, getting a reactor running still was a long way from the industrial capacity the Americans used to get a working device. Industrial capacity Germany just didn't have late in the war. And after Afrika Korps' defeat, they weren't getting any easily accessible materials anymore.
Among other things (from the article and the linked paper):
> "handwritten note accompanying the cube: “Taken from the reactor that [Adolf] Hitler tried to build”"
> "Most of these surviving cubes, including those analyzed in this work, can be traced directly back to the individuals who removed them from Germany during the war, providing proof of their provenance" [and interpreting the context, there's other cubes besides these, and they're consistent]
> "small notches were cut to fit the aluminum wire that tied each chain together"
It's generally forgotten that Japan was also developing a nuclear bomb. They were a long ways from making a viable one, though. It was abandoned after the surrender.
I cant remember which, but a documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki said that after the first bomb, Japanese scientists were deployed to confirm or deny the US's claim of an atomic weapon.
If I remember right, the Japanese scientists confirmed signs of an atomic explosion, but the leaders were stuck in a debate as to whether or not to accept the findings
Maybe someone better educated can correct me if I didn't get that history quite right
Hideki Yukawa was the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner for his work on strong-force related physics in the 1930s.
>It was abandoned after the surrender.
Japan is strongly believed to be on the order of months away from assembling a nuclear weapon, and not just one, they have the materials for many. For them it is not geopolitically useful to actually finish a weapon, but they are more than capable.
Do you have a reliable source you can share which supports that claim? Because el wiki says nothing of the sort. It discusses two main projects, "Ni-Go" and "F-Go", neither of which successfully enriched fissile material. One was built but did not operate successfully, the other was not built.
> Today, Japan is considered to be a latent or threshold nuclear state, capable of developing weapons in a short timespan. It is unique among non-nuclear weapons states in that it possesses a full nuclear fuel cycle and plutonium stockpile, as part of its civilian nuclear energy industry, and advanced developments in the industries necessary to make nuclear weapons.
The science is only half of the question. Another substantial issue was, even with equal knowledge to the US, did German and/or Japan have the industrial capacity to create a nuclear weapon?
Fun fact also: For all the effort put into the Manhattan project, MORE time/resources were spent on its eventual delivery system (the B-29) than the bomb itself. So even if Germany/Japan had a nuclear bomb, could they have also developed a practical delivery method, something capable enough to trust with such a weapon?
I had this discussion last week with someone who asked about whether Canada could build a bomb. Ya. Easy. Modern industrial capacities dwarf anything from the 1940s and Canada certainly has the brainpower and raw materials. But could Canada so easily develop a delivery platform, say an ICBM or stealth fighter? Likely not.
The Manhattan Project was so very expensive because they pursued plutonium production and uranium enrichment simultaneously. They also developed three uranium enrichment methods in parallel. Two of these actually contributed to the Hiroshima bomb. The uranium enrichment projects were much more expensive than the plutonium project. Britain and France built their first atomic bombs much more economically by pursuing the plutonium path alone.
No that's the entire point of the article even if they had the physics down, they did not have enough uranium in the whole of Germany for a working reactor let alone a uranium fission bomb.
The delivery method was much closer in reach than the bomb, given their missile program if they had a concrete target they could probably easily build a scaled up version of a v1 or v2 to deliver the weapon.
My response to this comment was initially the common folk story:
It's not comparing like with like, but the V-weapons programs probably cost about as much as the Manhattan Project.
But looking further into it that does not hold up. The entire enormous production runs of several obvious candidate major german weapons systems combined do not appear to be particularly close to approaching the cost of the Manhattan Project, much less Manhattan + B-29.
The Manhattan Project employed around 130,000 people compared to something like 17,000 on the V-2 project (plus 60,000 concentration camp prisoners). Cost comparisons are in the neighborhood of $1.9B for the A bombs versus $800M for the V-2.
Germany did put U-boats off of the US East Coast. It would probably be a one way trip to put one off of the Brooklyn docks. If they had two and used the first to clear a path for the second, it could have worked.
Yes but that would be wildly inefficient. A nuke on the ground ("lay-down" delivery) is already maybe 40% as powerful as one in the air. Put it under even a few feet of water and that becomes only 20% as most of the energy goes sideways/down through water/dirt rather than directly at the target buildings. Water is shockingly dense at scale.
I'm not sure, water is very good at conducting shockwaves. If you had an aquarium the size of an olympic swimming pool you could kill all of them by dropping a hand grenade in it.
This was already known. The British put the German scientists into a big country house after the war and bugged all the rooms. After the US dropped the atomic bombs the German scientists spent weeks discussing with eachother how the Americans could have done it. They never got it right.
Is this the same mansion that the war office put a bunch of high ranking PoWs in? Same idea - butter up the generals, bug the entire building and wait for them to spill secrets (which they did so often, and with such value, that military intelligence ignored Churchill’s request to shut it down).
Yup. The race-to-AGI-because-China in particular. I’m basically a China Hawk and generally in favor of AI development, but I can recognize the same pattern.
Heisenberg used a bad approximation that led him to incorrectly believe he would need tons of U235 to produce a bomb. His model for bomb viability was essentially "a random neutron walk should not leave the core until producing enough generations to explode." In reality, you don't need that much U235 because earlier generations have exponentially more descendants and they are closer to the core -- the later generations can leak neutrons out of the core like a sieve and the exponential party deep in the core won't even notice, effortlessly replacing them by cooking a tiny fraction of a generation longer.
It was Peierls and Frisch, two Jewish German scientists, who figured out those dynamics, modeled them with the Neutron Diffusion equation, and repeatedly prodded UK intelligence until they were taken seriously. Then the project got sent across the Atlantic for safety and scale-up and the rest is history.
Germany could have had the Atom Bomb in WWII, but Nazi Germany could not have because Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.
Another problem is that Germans went for heavy water reactors and didn't even get as far as prototypes. Americans built graphite moderated reactors and quickly built plutonium production reactors at Hanford. Also, Allies were able to prevent Germans getting heavy water from Norway.
It's interesting, and concerning, to see the exact same thinking in the US today.
The claim was that theoretical, mathematical models of physics, like special relativity, were a product of "Jewish thinking," designed to deliberately confuse the world.
There's a recent video in which Tucker Carlson interviews Jess Elofson and they mutually agree that algebra is nonsense, with Elofson calling it "fake math". They didn't go so far as to relate it to some ethnic source (from the part I watched), but "designed to deliberately confuse the world" is the big selling point. The people they hate are people smarter than them.
On the plus side, this is why these anti-intellectual movements always fail, because in the end they just can't get much useful done, other than attacking and destroying which doesn't require finesse or understanding.
Edit: I have to retract what I wrote about not relating it to an ethnic source. Elofson literally used the term "goy slaves" in that interview.
I was mocking the Nazi attacks on the work of Jewish scientists which branded that work as "Jewish Science" and declared it inferior, because this whole story is a Reverse Uno card on that narrative.
Yes, but it would have been a better world if the Nazis had never invented the idea of Judenphysik in the first place. It stopped Gentile German physicists from working on whole areas of research!
but imagine if they did, wow, history would absolutely be completely different and they'd still be in power
speaking of which, pretty sure he's turning Iran to sand after the elections, he'll have nothing left to lose and US is only country to ever use nuclear weapons on a million innocent civilians, twice, so why stop now?
we're out of other weapons except these which seems wildly illegal to use especially on civilians
I read your parent to be saying the opposite. That more people would be upset if Putin were using weapons like these, but no one cares when the US does. (Speaking of the Lockheed PSM, not nukes.)
There's no law with any teeth at that level. Who's going to enforce it?
Of course the ICC might issue arrest warrants for US leaders, just as they have for Netanyahu, but the practical implication of that is mostly that ICC members will be subject to attacks of all kinds.
> Imagine if Putin was using those on Ukraine civilians but US uses them no problem?
Since neither of those things are true, what do you think this unlikely thought experiment might tell us?
This is an awesome read, and likely correct in the narrative, but the cubes they have at hand to study have a bit of a provenance problem - how do we know they were the ones used for the German research?
At any rate, getting a reactor running still was a long way from the industrial capacity the Americans used to get a working device. Industrial capacity Germany just didn't have late in the war. And after Afrika Korps' defeat, they weren't getting any easily accessible materials anymore.
Among other things (from the article and the linked paper):
> "handwritten note accompanying the cube: “Taken from the reactor that [Adolf] Hitler tried to build”"
> "Most of these surviving cubes, including those analyzed in this work, can be traced directly back to the individuals who removed them from Germany during the war, providing proof of their provenance" [and interpreting the context, there's other cubes besides these, and they're consistent]
> "small notches were cut to fit the aluminum wire that tied each chain together"
It's generally forgotten that Japan was also developing a nuclear bomb. They were a long ways from making a viable one, though. It was abandoned after the surrender.
I cant remember which, but a documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki said that after the first bomb, Japanese scientists were deployed to confirm or deny the US's claim of an atomic weapon.
If I remember right, the Japanese scientists confirmed signs of an atomic explosion, but the leaders were stuck in a debate as to whether or not to accept the findings
Maybe someone better educated can correct me if I didn't get that history quite right
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Nishina#Atomic_bomb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunsaku_Arakatsu (check out his academic advisor!)
Hideki Yukawa was the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner for his work on strong-force related physics in the 1930s.
>It was abandoned after the surrender.
Japan is strongly believed to be on the order of months away from assembling a nuclear weapon, and not just one, they have the materials for many. For them it is not geopolitically useful to actually finish a weapon, but they are more than capable.
Do you have a reliable source you can share which supports that claim? Because el wiki says nothing of the sort. It discusses two main projects, "Ni-Go" and "F-Go", neither of which successfully enriched fissile material. One was built but did not operate successfully, the other was not built.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_progr...
> Today, Japan is considered to be a latent or threshold nuclear state, capable of developing weapons in a short timespan. It is unique among non-nuclear weapons states in that it possesses a full nuclear fuel cycle and plutonium stockpile, as part of its civilian nuclear energy industry, and advanced developments in the industries necessary to make nuclear weapons.
Germany’s racism/ethnic/religious hate killed their efforts for the bomb..
The science is only half of the question. Another substantial issue was, even with equal knowledge to the US, did German and/or Japan have the industrial capacity to create a nuclear weapon?
Fun fact also: For all the effort put into the Manhattan project, MORE time/resources were spent on its eventual delivery system (the B-29) than the bomb itself. So even if Germany/Japan had a nuclear bomb, could they have also developed a practical delivery method, something capable enough to trust with such a weapon?
I had this discussion last week with someone who asked about whether Canada could build a bomb. Ya. Easy. Modern industrial capacities dwarf anything from the 1940s and Canada certainly has the brainpower and raw materials. But could Canada so easily develop a delivery platform, say an ICBM or stealth fighter? Likely not.
The Manhattan Project was so very expensive because they pursued plutonium production and uranium enrichment simultaneously. They also developed three uranium enrichment methods in parallel. Two of these actually contributed to the Hiroshima bomb. The uranium enrichment projects were much more expensive than the plutonium project. Britain and France built their first atomic bombs much more economically by pursuing the plutonium path alone.
No that's the entire point of the article even if they had the physics down, they did not have enough uranium in the whole of Germany for a working reactor let alone a uranium fission bomb.
The delivery method was much closer in reach than the bomb, given their missile program if they had a concrete target they could probably easily build a scaled up version of a v1 or v2 to deliver the weapon.
My response to this comment was initially the common folk story:
But looking further into it that does not hold up. The entire enormous production runs of several obvious candidate major german weapons systems combined do not appear to be particularly close to approaching the cost of the Manhattan Project, much less Manhattan + B-29.The Manhattan Project employed around 130,000 people compared to something like 17,000 on the V-2 project (plus 60,000 concentration camp prisoners). Cost comparisons are in the neighborhood of $1.9B for the A bombs versus $800M for the V-2.
The thought experiments around Mutually Assured Destruction back in the day showed us that you don't actually need a delivery system to participate.
Germany did put U-boats off of the US East Coast. It would probably be a one way trip to put one off of the Brooklyn docks. If they had two and used the first to clear a path for the second, it could have worked.
Yes but that would be wildly inefficient. A nuke on the ground ("lay-down" delivery) is already maybe 40% as powerful as one in the air. Put it under even a few feet of water and that becomes only 20% as most of the energy goes sideways/down through water/dirt rather than directly at the target buildings. Water is shockingly dense at scale.
I'm not sure, water is very good at conducting shockwaves. If you had an aquarium the size of an olympic swimming pool you could kill all of them by dropping a hand grenade in it.
If North Korea can manage it, I think with a bit of commitment it should be doable.
This was already known. The British put the German scientists into a big country house after the war and bugged all the rooms. After the US dropped the atomic bombs the German scientists spent weeks discussing with eachother how the Americans could have done it. They never got it right.
It’s a great read from beginning to end https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/nazi-germany-1933-1945/tran...
Is this the same mansion that the war office put a bunch of high ranking PoWs in? Same idea - butter up the generals, bug the entire building and wait for them to spill secrets (which they did so often, and with such value, that military intelligence ignored Churchill’s request to shut it down).
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260811-the-uk-stately-...
Why did Churchill want it shut down?
You should submit that as a post, if you haven't already. Fascinating read.
Amazing. Kind of reminds of the modern day discourse on potential dangers of AGI and humans misuse of it.
Yup. The race-to-AGI-because-China in particular. I’m basically a China Hawk and generally in favor of AI development, but I can recognize the same pattern.
That was incredibly interesting. Thank you for sharing.
Nice gem
Heisenberg used a bad approximation that led him to incorrectly believe he would need tons of U235 to produce a bomb. His model for bomb viability was essentially "a random neutron walk should not leave the core until producing enough generations to explode." In reality, you don't need that much U235 because earlier generations have exponentially more descendants and they are closer to the core -- the later generations can leak neutrons out of the core like a sieve and the exponential party deep in the core won't even notice, effortlessly replacing them by cooking a tiny fraction of a generation longer.
It was Peierls and Frisch, two Jewish German scientists, who figured out those dynamics, modeled them with the Neutron Diffusion equation, and repeatedly prodded UK intelligence until they were taken seriously. Then the project got sent across the Atlantic for safety and scale-up and the rest is history.
Germany could have had the Atom Bomb in WWII, but Nazi Germany could not have because Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.
Another problem is that Germans went for heavy water reactors and didn't even get as far as prototypes. Americans built graphite moderated reactors and quickly built plutonium production reactors at Hanford. Also, Allies were able to prevent Germans getting heavy water from Norway.
> Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.
It's interesting, and concerning, to see the exact same thinking in the US today.
The claim was that theoretical, mathematical models of physics, like special relativity, were a product of "Jewish thinking," designed to deliberately confuse the world.
There's a recent video in which Tucker Carlson interviews Jess Elofson and they mutually agree that algebra is nonsense, with Elofson calling it "fake math". They didn't go so far as to relate it to some ethnic source (from the part I watched), but "designed to deliberately confuse the world" is the big selling point. The people they hate are people smarter than them.
On the plus side, this is why these anti-intellectual movements always fail, because in the end they just can't get much useful done, other than attacking and destroying which doesn't require finesse or understanding.
Edit: I have to retract what I wrote about not relating it to an ethnic source. Elofson literally used the term "goy slaves" in that interview.
The word "algebra" comes from Arabic al-jabr - so it's Muslim math to them I guess would be the talking point?
With his seeming love of certain periods of German history, I think it's appropriate to observe that Tucker Carlson has a backpfeifengesicht.
>> Jewish Science
Jewish Scientists.
I was mocking the Nazi attacks on the work of Jewish scientists which branded that work as "Jewish Science" and declared it inferior, because this whole story is a Reverse Uno card on that narrative.
Some part of the German physics community even did "German physics" which did not include quantum physics and relativity.
Agree with that. There were also 'Soviet Science'.
Yes, but it would have been a better world if the Nazis had never invented the idea of Judenphysik in the first place. It stopped Gentile German physicists from working on whole areas of research!
I'm okay with that if it helped prevent Nazi Germany from building an atom bomb...
I'm trying to reconcile such wildly clever people not wondering if they were being surveiled? Or didn't they care?
This was after Germany surrendered.
I'm sure they had suspicions and cared a bit, but in order to stay silent about their passion subjects they would have had to care more than a bit.
but imagine if they did, wow, history would absolutely be completely different and they'd still be in power
speaking of which, pretty sure he's turning Iran to sand after the elections, he'll have nothing left to lose and US is only country to ever use nuclear weapons on a million innocent civilians, twice, so why stop now?
we're out of other weapons except these which seems wildly illegal to use especially on civilians
* https://apnews.com/article/iran-lamerd-us-prsm-lockheed-mart...
Imagine if Putin was using those on Ukraine civilians but US uses them no problem?
If you think US will drop a nuke on Iran you are delusional, borderline insane.
Are we doubting the levels of stupidity in US's current administration?
Why do you think that anyone here considers US use to be "no problem"?
I read your parent to be saying the opposite. That more people would be upset if Putin were using weapons like these, but no one cares when the US does. (Speaking of the Lockheed PSM, not nukes.)
> wildly illegal to use
There's no law with any teeth at that level. Who's going to enforce it?
Of course the ICC might issue arrest warrants for US leaders, just as they have for Netanyahu, but the practical implication of that is mostly that ICC members will be subject to attacks of all kinds.
> Imagine if Putin was using those on Ukraine civilians but US uses them no problem?
Since neither of those things are true, what do you think this unlikely thought experiment might tell us?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0150vqp