There was a really good post somewhere on Reddit a while back that I can't seem to find now that had a lot more details on the idea of a Nazi atom bomb, mostly political. I think the gist was that one of the key steps in a nuclear program at the WWII stage is the realization that an artificial nuclear explosion is practical, if difficult, and makes a very effective weapon of war. That also means that they understand the core physics concepts and have some idea of what building a bomb would involve.
As I understand it, the Nazi regime never got to the point of even realizing that a bomb was a serious possibility. So naturally, they never devoted real resources to figuring out the details and how to go about actually building one.
There's also the economic aspect - the initial development work was massively expensive, and even the other major WWII combatants who had an idea that a bomb was possible didn't think they would be able to devote enough resources to it to actually build one for that war. They may well have been right - even with the massive resources the US poured into the project, the war was still pretty close to being over before they had a bomb ready to drop.
Richard Rhodes' "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb" is a pretty thorough account of the whole enterprise, and concludes that the Germans were nowhere near, so I don't think this is a particularly controversial revelation.
My favourite account of the German nuclear programs (note: using the plural here is deliberate, and significant) is "Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall" (http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Uranium-Club-Secret-Recordings...), by physicist Jeremy Bernstein.
The centrepiece is a curated set of transcripts from secret recordings of the candid conversations of a group of German scientists detained together for months after the war (specifically for the purpose of surveilling such conversations).
Some vaguely YC-ish lessons on how their failure to produce could be attributed in many ways to seemingly mundane organizational structures that were debatably inherent to Nazi German society and internal politics.
Also some borderline pornographic payoff when they find out about Hiroshima. At the time, they were convinced they were 10 years ahead of anyone else, and were being detained as a prelude to being showered with honours and put in place to bring American and British science into the modern age. Then they set about convincing themselves they failed on purpose for moral reasons.
Some related terrible bad luck (well, for the Third Reich) in organization: the scientists' saving throw to get serious resources devoted to the project was ruined when a secretary preparing the invitations for a seminar accidentally substituted the agenda for a highly technical one happening around the same time, and the major figures who would have otherwise shown up declined.
It is controversial for those people who hang their hat on the concept that America was in some sort of race to build and use the bomb before the enemy used it against America. No serious historian thinks that was ever a factor once the logistics were apparent, but the History channel still pumps out constant "documentaries" about Nazi superweapons about be deployed had the war lasted another week or two.
Per e.g. the facts that Rhodes lays out, if the Germans had not screwed up organizationally, had not incorrectly dismissed graphite as a moderator for natural uranium reactors, they might have succeeded with the plutonium path. The fear was legitimate, and per Groves in Now It Can Be Told (he was in charge of counterintelligence), it took us a long time and quite some distance into Western Europe to be fairly confident they weren't doing it. So, no, not the last week, not even 1945, but indeed for a long time.
This. What mattered from the standpoint of US decision making wasn't what the Germans were actually doing, but rather what the US leadership thought the Germans were doing.
Or more specifically, from an intelligence viewpoint, what the Germans could be doing. Intent was well established when Hitler declared war on us (big mistake), but before that always comes capabilities. They had the uranium (something that Japan never had), they had the industrial capability for the plutonium path (ditto), and they most certainly had the scientists (even after chasing all their Jews away). If they'd gotten serious about it sufficiently earlier than we did....
They might have nailed down the science, but not the efforts necessary to gather the fissile material. And then, even if they did have the resources, actually doing all that so close to the action and with the risk of bombing by air or spies, would be inconceivable. The american, actually the canadian-american project as that's where the uranium came from, had the advantage of vast open spaces well outside the range of any enemy aircraft.
the efforts necessary to gather the fissile material
That's what the plutonium path is all about. It doesn't require a lot, and between the uranium ore from Africa they got when the captured Belgium, and the not as rich ore from Czechoslovakia, it was judged it might be enough.
You say it's "inconceivable", but it was indeed "conceived", considered to be possible, if perhaps unlikely, by lots of scientists and engineers working on the Manhattan Project. Who as it progressed had a better and better idea of exactly what was required. And who knew how long we dicked around with the concept before committing to it, and then putting Groves in charge.
There's also the danger of 20/20 hindsight. For example, the critical March 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran...) laid out the scientific path to success (fast fission) and estimated about 1 kg (2.2 lb) of U-235 was required. Later it was learned it was 52 kg, and plutonium-239 a much more modest 10 kg. Suppose the universe instead allowed 1 pound of Pu-239? Is that still "inconceivable"?
Was the V-2 effort "inconceivable"? It required a similar order of magnitude of effort, we knew more about the project because they had to test fly it, the threat was obvious and it did cause a lot of harm, and yet the "risk by air" was not enough to take it out prior to that harm.
The final detail is that even if low priority (you're not going to convince many it was truly impossible), the consequences of their getting it before it was too late for the Third Reich were ... well, it would have been existential for them.
The final detail is that even if low probability (you're not going to convince many it was truly impossible), the consequences of their getting it before it was too late for the Third Reich were ... well, it would have been existential for them.
Nobody else had the raw materials in such a useful form. I say this is the quirk of history that gets overlooked when it comes to the race to get the bomb.
For the US, it was than raw materials and talent. It was infrastructure. The US had the juice to run all the centrifuges. A decade of rural electrification created the Tennessee Valley Authority. Germany didn't have that sort of abundant electric generation, let alone protected from bombing.
I remember reading somewhere that the abundance of electricity in the US led its planners to ignore the fragility of Axis power infrastructure when selecting targets for strategic bombing. Allied dam busting was tactical and carried out by medium bombers at low level not the heavies from altitude used on targets deemed important.
Centrifuges? IIRC, that was not used for uranium separation until the 1960's. At Oak Ridge TN were the Y-12 electromagnetic separation (calutron) and K-25 gaseous diffusion separation plants.
Indeed, electric power was a real issue for the Nazis. They did use the Norwegian heavy-water plant at Rjukan quite extensively, so it was sabotaged on several occasions.
It was class warfare as well as the war told by the movies.
This was on both sides, so you had things like how none of the German bombs ever managed to hit a 'royal' palace, e.g. the one that German lady lives in with postcode SW1A 1AA.
Meanwhile, the train tracks that led to the concentration camps were miraculously spared from the Allied bombing campaigns.
From the perspective of the arms companies, why bomb something like a power plant when you could expend far more ordnance wiping out working class populations?
Churchill was first and foremost an oil man, despite the war time heroics he had his eye on the pie, carving up the oil wealth of the Middle East between BP and the Americans. WW2 was just a chapter in mechanised warfare that started in 1914 and goes on to this day, the war never stopped, certainly not in 1945. Things were only getting started then. Laos is a case in point - a secret war when more ordnance was dropped on the country than everything dropped in WW2.
We try to rationalise the behaviour of psychopaths, as if they were thinking in any type of common sense way.
I don't believe the dambusters thing was a shoe-string operation, although not quite Manhattan Project in cost, it certainly was not cheap. It was also 'standard' Lancaster bombers - the de-facto 'heavy bomber' of the time, albeit 'a small plane made of things like wood' in comparison to whatever we have today.
You seem to be imagining that the bombers in WW2 had modern bombing technology. At the time, they didn't have the technology to accurately target a single building (especially at night when the raids on London were conducted). They certainly didn't have the accuracy to target something as narrow as a train track. Bombing tactics at the time consisted of dropping a huge number of bombs and hoping that a few of them got lucky and hit something valuable.
I also note that it doesn't take long to repair railroads, and repairing them quickly after enemy damage has been a focus of engineers starting with our Civil War.
A lot of WW2 happened before Americans joined the party. At the start and up until the Blitz, both sides wished to avoid civilian casualties (incredible idea). Even the Nazis wanted to just take out the RAF, docks and munitions factories. But then some bombs landing in Berlin gave Hitler the idea to start terrorising British cities, so London's docks became a target in expectation that a lot of ordnance would miss and terrorise Londoners. Whitehall was also targeted - a 'decapitation strike' in modern parlance.
Coventry was removed from the map in summer 1940, to a certain extent Churchill had been waiting for this to happen (Bletchley Park had thee intercepts) so that reprisals could begin. And so it began. Bomber command kind of gave up on 'precision' and it then became eugenics - kill off the working class people! Bomb their houses! Factories, docks, railways were no longer the targets, it really was working class housing to be terrorised.
I have not heard about Churchill's advisor - Lindemann - on any History Channel documentaries, but not everything is as it gets told. I am not seeking a contrary view, just, the more you study a subject doing one's own research the more it differs from our own rosy propaganda. I also think that what the germans did in Namibia before the war is also quite fascinating, the depths of inhumanity that we learned of after the concentration camps were discovered were plain to see a generation earlier. It is as if the germans missed out on colonies and sought to make colonies in eastern Europe to make up for missing out on the land grab that the British (Portuguese, French and Spanish) empires had managed.
As for the Buckingham Palace incident, that was a stray bomb, not one of many aimed at the palace that happened to get through.
Coventry was removed from the map in summer 1940, to a certain extent Churchill had been waiting for this to happen (Bletchley Park had thee intercepts)
R.V. Jones in Most Secret War lays out an entirely plausible account of how Coventry happened. It's important to realize that militaries hide data like exact targets behind code names to avoid various sorts of exposure, and these code names are also used on what they consider to be secure channels. Famously the Japanese attack on Midway; as Wikipedia puts it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway#Allied_code-b...):
Admiral Nimitz had one priceless advantage: U.S. cryptanalysts had partially broken the Japanese Navy's JN-25b code. Since the early spring of 1942, the US had been decoding messages stating that there would soon be an operation at objective "AF". It was not known where "AF" was, but Commander Joseph J. Rochefort and his team at Station HYPO were able to confirm that it was Midway; Captain Wilfred Holmes devised a ruse of telling the base at Midway (by secure undersea cable) to broadcast an uncoded radio message stating that Midway's water purification system had broken down. Within 24 hours, the code breakers picked up a Japanese message that "AF was short on water."
Since 1996 the Ultra decrypts for the relevant period have been available in the UK National Archives. Between 07:35 GMT on Sunday 10 November 1940 and 05:00 on Monday 11 November a German signal was deciphered and given the serial number CX/JQ/444, paragraph 4. This message set out code words to be used by aircraft on an operation named "Mondschein Sonate" but did not give Coventry as the target or a date. It did say that transmission of a figure 9 would denote "KORN" and hindsight has recognised this as the code name for Coventry. This was not realised at the time however, even though PAULA had been identified as Paris and LOGE as London. Indeed, the word KORN was used in two reports from an aircraft taking part in a raid on Southampton on 30 November, two weeks after the Coventry Blitz. Another decrypt on 11 November or early on 12 November gave navigational beam settings for Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and Coventry but no dates. There was a hiatus in Ultra decrypts from 01:15 GMT on 13 November until 02:40 on 15 November, by which time the raid was well underway: Churchill could not have received new Ultra intelligence on the afternoon or evening of the attack because there was none to give him. Intelligence from captured airmen and documents did not offer an unambiguous picture either.
Back to you:
As for the Buckingham Palace incident, that was a stray bomb, not one of many aimed at the palace that happened to get through.
During the Blitz, Buckingham Palace and its grounds were struck on sixteen separate occasions (of which nine were direct hits). The Palace forecourt, inner quadrangle and South and North Wings were all marred by high explosive and delayed-action bombs.
According to it, the famous bombing I mentioned was deliberate targeting during daylight:
A single German raider specifically targeted the Palace with a stick of five high explosive bombs. Two of these hit the inner quadrangle, a third struck the Royal Chapel in the South Wing and the remaining two (one delayed-action) fell on the forecourt and on the roadway between the Palace gates and the Victoria Memorial. The explosions in the quadrangle ruptured a water main and blew out most of the windows on the southern and western sides. The interior of the Royal Chapel was lacerated. Four workers were injured; one later died....
It turns out, driving out all of your physicists and mathematicians because they were Jewish and gutting your academic system wasn't quite the smartest idea in the world.
And the physicists and mathematicians that stayed where either unable or had no interest in building an atomic bomb. Here is an excerpt from what Hans Bethe wrote about Heisenberg[1]:
The best proof of his lack of interest came at the end of the
war. Heisenberg and about ten other German nuclear scientists
were interned at Farm Hall, a country estate in England. All of
their conversations were secretly taped. When the news of the
Hiroshima atomic bomb was broadcast, these scientists could not
believe it. When they recognized that it was real, they asked
Heisenberg how it could have been done. His first attempt at
explanation was totally wrong! He hypothesized something like a
nuclear reactor, with the neutrons slowed by many collisions
with a moderator.
One of the other Germans at Farm Hall was closer to being right. He thought the Americans must have separated and enriched uranium, perhaps by building millions of mass spectrometers. The Manhattan Project tried something like that, building many huge "calutrons" which used magnetic separation to sort atoms by atomic weight. This is incredibly inefficient, but with enough money thrown at it, works. It was the Manhattan Project's plan B, in case the gaseous diffusion plants didn't work.
But the Germans never built any. They never built the huge industrial installations needed to separate uranium or make plutonium. The project never got beyond the lab stage. The Manhattan Project built several square miles of industrial plants. That was General Groves' contribution - he was a Corps of Engineers builder, had been in charge of building the Pentagon, and knew how to run a big project.
It helps that we were so far from either side of the war. We could build huge facilities like that above ground and just camouflage the building where Germany would have had to build much more fortified or even underground facilities.
Even if the Germans were willing to pursue a Manhattan Project of their own, they didn't have the industrial capacity to divert to build up the infrastructure for it (let alone support the ongoing resource commitment it'd require). Hell, they didn't have enough to adequately support their war effort even considering Speer's efforts after he was appointed Minister of Armaments. The political games between top Nazi officials, the refusal to mobilize women as factory workers due to ideology (good German women stayed at home and plopped out babies, basically), and the reliance on slave labor all helped the Germans thoroughly screw themselves.
I like this quote from William Knudsen, which really sums things up: "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."
It almost looks like the nuclear and hydrogen bombs were a "Jewish revenge" (Teller, Ulam, Szilard, Rabi, von Neumann, ...). Even Fermi was kicked out of Italy because of remote Jewish connotation of his wife. Entire Europe, not only Germany, shoot itself in the foot at this point.
Some, but certainly nowhere near all of the scientists involved were jewish. What did happen was that rising antisemitism (in many many countries) caused jewish academics to suddenly become more mobile, more willing to move about the planet or country and take positions on strange projects. I think it less revenge and more market forces that resulted in a relatively large number of jewish experts working on the bomb.
I think a better interpretation is that they were able to convince themselves that bringing nuclear weaponry into the world was the lesser of two evils.
I have visited the Atomkeller Museum, in Haigerloch. As far as I can remember what you can see on the picture [1] from the article is almost everything there is to see. At the entrance is a glass box with a slowly ticking Geiger counter but that's it. Basically it's a small rock cavern with a hole in the ground.
There's a book about Germany working on the atomic bomb from about 10 years ago. One thing that I always stuck in my mind was that the Nazis had several different programmes, run by different organizations. I remember at least three, Wehrmacht, SS, and Post Ministry (I know, this is kind of WTF). All of these organizations actively competed against each other over a very limited amount of resources, in particular heavy water and fissible material. Of course that won't produce meaningful results if you're being sabotaged by other organizations in your country.
An interesting quirk of history, it was the reconstituted German rocket program in the U.S. which finally gave global delivery capability to American nukes.
I was under the impression that Heisenberg made a fundamental mistake on a back of envelope calculation of the amount of an important input required that led him to believe it was not a tenable option and therefore the project was eventually killed. that doesn't mean that we didn't just get very lucky and that he might have on the flipside gotten very close to building something
There was just a little bit of space in the tip for a warhead. Sometimes the tip was filled only with concrete from a shortage of explosives. Not without a reason the scientists in Peenemünde were calling V2 a "flying laboratory". Its actual military effectiveness as a missile was quite poor. For a scale:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Ag...
To make any difference on the Eastern Front the Nazis would have needed an awful lot of nukes - one or two low yield weapons really wouldn't have made much of a dent in Soviet forces.
Even if the Nazis had managed to nuke the D-Day beachheads - they were still going to lose to the Soviets.
So, the Germans would use early atomic weapons as battlefield tactical weapons? There's a million ways that could go wrong, and wouldn't impact the end of the war in the slightest, other than Germany getting first dibs on being nuked before Japan (and probably an all out Allied air assault on Germany with chemical weapons).
>So, the Germans would use early atomic weapons as battlefield tactical weapons?
Pre-Trinity, pre-Hiroshima most people had no idea what a nuclear weapon could do. You can tell a general twenty kilotons of TNT, but he isn't going to believe it until he sees it. See also: the Davy Crockett tactial nuke.
>There's a million ways that could go wrong,
Another thing that everyone knows, now. Remember, we used to do atmospheric testing of the things mere tens of miles from populated areas. https://imgur.com/gallery/8j0VRkn
My point was that the way the US delivered nuclear weapons to Japan and the delivery mechanisms upon which Cold War and contemporary nuclear arsenals are optimized, is not the sole way in which nuclear weapons can be used for effect.
Continuing our conversation, the fact that using nuclear weapons carries a risk of retaliation has defined geopolitics for seventy years and is what has given us the term Mutually Assured Destruction.
I am not certain that the US and UK would have been tremendously invested in retribution in 1945 had the Nazi's had used atomics against the Soviets in the East. This feeling is based on the shape of post war real-politik toward many former Nazi's despite the atrocities that were actually committed.
Finally, the implication that Allied fire bombing was somehow less ruthless than chemical weapons does not resonate with me. My take is that white phosphorous is simply easier to turn into a reliable stockpilable weapon than poison gas [particularly given changes in air pressure and temperature that bombs in a bomber undergoe]. It is my opinion that the Allies actual use of atomics speaks to the no holds barred nature of their bombing campaign.
As I understand it, the Nazi regime never got to the point of even realizing that a bomb was a serious possibility. So naturally, they never devoted real resources to figuring out the details and how to go about actually building one.
There's also the economic aspect - the initial development work was massively expensive, and even the other major WWII combatants who had an idea that a bomb was possible didn't think they would be able to devote enough resources to it to actually build one for that war. They may well have been right - even with the massive resources the US poured into the project, the war was still pretty close to being over before they had a bomb ready to drop.