Would the Atomic Bomb Have Been Built if America Didn't Do It?

[Least Original User Name Ever]

Dad and I are arguing the point. I say Germany would have, and even when they lost he war, their scientists would have been picked up somewhere and told to keep the faith alive. Nuc-u-lar power seems inevitable, to me.

Dad says it's too expensive, and that sciences don't communicate amongst themselves. "Making heavy water is too big a technique for most countries with limited budgets to mess with" he says.

Well, anyone got an answer? This gonna end up being a debate?

[Wesley Clark]

Yeah, it would've. The Soviets got the bomb in 1949, showing that had a huge motivation in getting a bomb of their own. The Germans had a bombmaking program during the war, but the US got there first. That was one of the main reasons the Manhattan project was so heavily funded, because it was to outrace Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_...energy_project

[brianjedi]

Originally Posted by Wesley Clark

Yeah, it would've. The Soviets got the bomb in 1949, showing that had a huge motivation in getting a bomb of their own. The Germans had a bombmaking program during the war, but the US got there first. That was one of the main reasons the Manhattan project was so heavily funded, because it was to outrace Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_...energy_project

A lot of the Soviet program was based on information collected on the Manhattan Project by spies, though. If the U.S. hadn't undertaken the Manhattan Project, it's doubtful that the Soviets would have built a bomb before the 50s at the earliest.

[chrisk]

Originally Posted by brianjedi

A lot of the Soviet program was based on information collected on the Manhattan Project by spies, though. If the U.S. hadn't undertaken the Manhattan Project, it's doubtful that the Soviets would have built a bomb before the 50s at the earliest.

Okay, that sounds fair. Following is easier than leading the way. However, I think I'd agree that they'd have gotten there.

[seenidog]

I think that if we did not get if first, someone else would, there were a lot of other coutries working on it. If we had not, then my money would be on the Japanese being first, refining on German tech. Russia had nothing, and if we had not developed it would still have nothing. The Germans were close, but barking up the wrong tree, but would have goten there eventually. After the war Germany had nothing left to work with, while Japan (who had knowledge of German plans) had some superstructure left to work with. Pure conjecture of course, if you disagree I will not even try to defend this opinion, it is pure "What if".

[Lumpy]

Germany would not have developed the bomb, and neither would have Japan. Both were crushed before they could ever develop the bomb, Germany completly without using nukes and Japan nearly so. Both were occupied after the war and had approved governments installed, so I don't see either becomeing a post-war nuclear power.

The USSR had physicists who were actively working on fission until the war interrupted their work. However they might never have gotten approval for a bomb program if the US had not conclusively demonstrated that nukes were possible. As it was, Beria was deeply suspicious of his own bomb program, suspecting that the scientists were simply promising the sky just to fund basic research with no immediate application. Without the US program, I don't see the USSR beginning a serious bomb program until the Khrushchev era.

Britain was too impoverished to develop the bomb on it's own, with much higher priorities for it's limited budget. France wouldn't have bothered unless others already had nukes, ditto China, etc.

Without the US, I'd say the 1960s before you saw nukes.

[Cardinal]

The book "Bodyguard of Lies" tells how the allies got permission from the king of Norway (in exile) to sink a ferry carrying most of the heavy water the Germans had managed to make. The ferry was the security hole in the transport chain. A big roll of plastique was put in the hull of the ferry, and the whole thing went down in a very deep, very cold fjord.

According to the book, this was a third-rib dagger shot for the German nuclear bomb program.

[Bashta]

Originally Posted by Cardinal

The book "Bodyguard of Lies" tells how the allies got permission from the king of Norway (in exile) to sink a ferry carrying most of the heavy water the Germans had managed to make. The ferry was the security hole in the transport chain. A big roll of plastique was put in the hull of the ferry, and the whole thing went down in a very deep, very cold fjord.
According to the book, this was a third-rib dagger shot for the German nuclear bomb program.

Incidentally, I just came in here to say that. Something of a item of national pride amongst Norwegians, depicted in the semi-documentary Kampen om Tungtvannet* (The Battle of the Heavy Water, lit. transl.) As far as I am aware, the guides met and led the British operatives in the high mountains near Rjukan, in the Northern part of our country, down to the facility. The facility was sabotaged, but they discovered that the Germans had shipped off a shipment of the Heavy Water beforehand. As far as I had thought, the decision to sink the ferry was a field decision, but that's just an impression I had.

The civilian casualties in the operation were divisive for the resistance fighters, several cells opining that the casualties were completely unnecessary and that the operation was a hoax to back up under the false rumours spread by the Allieds of a Nazist 'superweapon,' designed to keep the Allied civil population in line with fear. Fortunately the majority supported the view that we, today, recognize as the truth and were able to smuggle out the resistance fighters to safety, along with the British operatives.


* - Probably accurately portrayed, as three of four Norwegian Guides played themselves in the movie Norway needed heroes, I guess. Pardon my English.

[samclem]

Moving this one to IMHO. Probably not a Great Debate, and probably not factually answerable in GQ.

samclem

[jjimm]

Originally Posted by Bashta

Incidentally, I just came in here to say that. Something of a item of national pride amongst Norwegians, depicted in the semi-documentary Kampen om Tungtvannet* (The Battle of the Heavy Water, lit. transl.)

I've read about this. Those men were astonishingly tough, living off almost no supplies and little more than their wits for weeks, and enduring hundreds of kilometres' walk though the snowy mountains before successfully completing their mission. True heroes, and acknowleged as such here in Britain. Didn't know about the sabotage of the shipment, though.

[appleciders]

Originally Posted by Bashta

Incidentally, I just came in here to say that. Something of a item of national pride amongst Norwegians, depicted in the semi-documentary Kampen om Tungtvannet* (The Battle of the Heavy Water, lit. transl.) As far as I am aware, the guides met and led the British operatives in the high mountains near Rjukan, in the Northern part of our country, down to the facility. The facility was sabotaged, but they discovered that the Germans had shipped off a shipment of the Heavy Water beforehand. As far as I had thought, the decision to sink the ferry was a field decision, but that's just an impression I had.

The civilian casualties in the operation were divisive for the resistance fighters, several cells opining that the casualties were completely unnecessary and that the operation was a hoax to back up under the false rumours spread by the Allieds of a Nazist 'superweapon,' designed to keep the Allied civil population in line with fear. Fortunately the majority supported the view that we, today, recognize as the truth and were able to smuggle out the resistance fighters to safety, along with the British operatives.


* - Probably accurately portrayed, as three of four Norwegian Guides played themselves in the movie Norway needed heroes, I guess. Pardon my English.

That sounds like a fascinating story- is that documentary in English, or at least translated or subtitled?

[Bashta]

Originally Posted by appleciders

That sounds like a fascinating story- is that documentary in English, or at least translated or subtitled?

Originally Posted by jjimm

I've read about this. Those men were astonishingly tough, living off almost no supplies and little more than their wits for weeks, and enduring hundreds of kilometres' walk though the snowy mountains before successfully completing their mission. True heroes, and acknowleged as such here in Britain. Didn't know about the sabotage of the shipment, though.

I'm very happy to hear that the operation and efforts has gained recognition outside of military corridors - makes me all tingly with national pride, y'know - but the glory of the operation truly should be ceded to the commandos, however enabling the efforts of the locals were.

Sadly, my search for a translated version hasn't yielded any results, and as it's a low-budget 1948 release with acting that could be, at best, called theatrical in nature, I sincerely doubt it was rereleased and subtitled. I do, however, know that it was released on DVD in Norwegian, as that's how I saw it a few years ago, on the school bench. (Not as part of the curriculum; rather the artifact of an eccentric history / natural sciences professor who was on his last year before retirement and pretty much did as he damn well pleased. Ran away with a container of kalcium and tossed it on the sea at the New Year's celebration down in the harbour . . . aah, memories)

So, if you're very interested in the history, - or, like me, a cultural masochist (can't stop watching, 'cause if you did, the piece of shit would win) - you could always proccure the Norwegian release DVD/VHS and infer the meaning by contest, as the acting is highly theatrical.

Again, pardon my English.

[jjimm]

Researching further, a Biritsh survival expert and author called Ray Mears wrote a book called The Real Heroes of Telemark, and the BBC made a documentary based on this, with the same title.

There's also a BBC radio documentary about it (which now I recall is where I heard the story - didn't read it after all), and even better still, the documentary is still available as a streaming RealAudio presentation. Excellent.

Anyone who's casually browsing this thread should give up a few minutes of their time to listen to it - it's an astonishing story.

[Bashta]

Excellent finds, Jjimm! Listening to that Radio Documentary right now - reluctant to install Real software as I am - and in my search to find a transcript of it, I was recommended another book by Knut Haukelid, the Race Against the Atom. I'm thinking about ordering it - thanks, again, for bringing the documentary to my attention!

[bonzer]

Yes, it would have been done.

The case that everybody in this thread seems to be vastly underestimating is the UK. It's worth realising that ICI proposed during the war that they build one as a private company - albeit funded by the government on a cost basis. Now this proposal was both quickly rejected by Whitehall and, in hindsight, was distinctly optimistic, but it is an indication of how promising the prospect looked from a British perspective. Furthermore this British optimism was probably decisive in Vannevar Bush persuading Roosevelt to fund the US attempt to a build a nuclear weapon during the likely timescale of the war. Not only that, the British programme was an entirely serious attempt to independently build one while at war well into 1943. The only reason that this was abandoned as a go it alone project was because Churchill and Roosevelt then agreed that the British effort be absorbed into the American one.
Now the UK project clearly couldn't have easily delivered a weapon in the 1940s. But the UK did successfully test its first nuclear weapon in 1952. This undoubtedly partially relied on knowledge gained during the wartime cooperation with the US after 1943, but it'd be a silly underestimation of the quality of the physicists involved to argue that the British success depended on these American insights.
Playing the counterfactuals, if the US programme had died at birth, there's no technical reason why an independent British one wouldn't have continued to a successful conclusion sometime during the 1950s. The only factors against this are political. For example, taking a minimal change to the actual timeline, it's not clear that the incoming Labour government in 1945 would have committed to the project of building a purely British bomb without the example of wartime success (not to mention the goud of the insult of being cut out of postwar nuclear cooperation with the US).

The German case is far too messy and controversial to realistically construct a counterfactual. But a victorious Reich would have probably been able to find the resources to build one.

As for the Soviets, the decisive issue is possibly the timescale on which Stalin latches onto the issue. There's the relatively convincing argument - due to the likes of David Holloway - that he didn't realise the significance of a nuclear weapons programme until after Hiroshima. While the actual early development of Soviet nuclear weapons strongly utilized what their spies had gleaned from Britain and the US, there were capable nuclear physicists in the USSR who had begun to understand the implications of fission by themselves. Again the obstacles were fundamentally political rather than technical.

Originally Posted by Bashta

I'm very happy to hear that the operation and efforts has gained recognition outside of military corridors - makes me all tingly with national pride, y'know - but the glory of the operation truly should be ceded to the commandos, however enabling the efforts of the locals were.

The story's really quite well known in Britain and the US, not least due to the 1965 Hollywood film version The Heroes of Telemark.
If anything, I'd argue - without detracting from the courage of those involved - that the fame of the Norwegian angle has rather distorted perceptions of the German nuclear programmes. The attacks had a useful effect, but they weren't decisive in the failure of the German efforts.

[Least Original User Name Ever]

Originally Posted by jjimm

Researching further, a Biritsh survival expert and author called Ray Mears wrote a book called The Real Heroes of Telemark, and the BBC made a documentary based on this, with the same title.

There's also a BBC radio documentary about it (which now I recall is where I heard the story - didn't read it after all), and even better still, the documentary is still available as a streaming RealAudio presentation. Excellent.

Anyone who's casually browsing this thread should give up a few minutes of their time to listen to it - it's an astonishing story.

Good lookin, jjimm. I was hoping the documentary brought up would be in English, but this should suffice. Thanks again.

[Muffin]

Canada.

On 5 September 1945 ZEEP went critical. It was a test reactor at Chalk River in Ontario, and was the first reactor outside of the USA to succeed.

The Canadians had been working on nuclear development in Montreal since 1940, and the British had joined them in 1942.

In WWII in Canada, C.D. Howe was Minister of Munitions and Supply, following the war he was Minister of Trade and Commerce, and his engineering firm, the C.D. Howe Company, lead the nuclear industry, particulary in the mid-1950s and following, when from Montreal it designed the Chalk River NRU. His engineers went on to populate AECL and Ontraro Hydro.

I extect that if the USA had not involved itself in WWII, then work in Canada would have ben stepped up, resulting in the bomb. As it was, the USA did develop the bomb, and Canada has remained under its wing, permitting Canada to instead develop and export peaceful nuclear technology, such as CANDU.

[Chronos]

I had always heard that the Norwegian heavy-water sabotage was the most brilliantly successful counter-intelligence effort in history. Heavy water isn't actually all that useful in building a fisssion bomb (it's crucial for a fusion bomb, but that's some time later), and from what I've read, the Allies were aware of that at the time. But by attacking the German supplies of heavy water, we managed to convince them that it was important, thereby sending them down the wrong lines of research.

Back to the OP's question, we can't really extrapolate the success of the other Allied countries based on how much they actually did accomplish during the War. The American Manhattan Project drew on the expertise of pretty near all of the physicists available. Had they not been working on the American project, many of those physicists would likely have been working for Canada or the UK. The project itself probably wouldn't have looked too different, just where it was being done, and who was funding it. The funding is really the only thing that would have any impact on the success, and even there, it's a reasonably predictable effect. If, say, the British were only able to afford a tenth of the funding the Americans spent, they could still at worst develop the bomb in ten times the time it took the Americans, and probably much quicker than ten times the time (if still longer than the Americans took).

[Eva Luna]

Originally Posted by bonzer

As for the Soviets, the decisive issue is possibly the timescale on which Stalin latches onto the issue. There's the relatively convincing argument - due to the likes of David Holloway - that he didn't realise the significance of a nuclear weapons programme until after Hiroshima. While the actual early development of Soviet nuclear weapons strongly utilized what their spies had gleaned from Britain and the US, there were capable nuclear physicists in the USSR who had begun to understand the implications of fission by themselves. Again the obstacles were fundamentally political rather than technical.

You may be interested in my kinda-sorta ex-boyfriend's new-ish book, then.

[Antonius Block]

Here in the US, the PBS series Nova recently (November 2005) aired a 52-minute documentary titled Hitler's Sunken Secret. Don't be put off by the History Channelesque title: it was actually very well made. The DVD is available from Amazon.com or directly from PBS. The complete transcript is online here, and well worth reading for those who are interested (but not interested enough to pay $20 for the DVD!). Knut Lier Hansen (one of the Norwegian saboteurs involved) is interviewed, as are some of the civilian survivors of the sinking of the ferry Hydro.

In addition to giving the backstory of the German program to make a Bomb, and the history of the raids on the Vemork plant, the documentary followed recent efforts using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) to find the Hydro, and its payload of heavy-water barrels, at the bottom of Lake Tinn. Apparently, there had been some concern that the Germans may have been using barrels filled with regular water as a decoy, in which case the civilian loss of life during the sinking of the Hydro would have been in vain.

The ROV team succeeds in salvaging one of the barrels in near-mint condition and found that:

SPOILER:

it does, indeed, have heavy water still in it, in a concentration that matched the 1944 manifest.

The documentary claims that by 1944, the Germans were no longer putting effort into development of a nuclear weapon, but that the heavy water was destined for a research reactor in a cave in the Bavarian town of Haigerloch.

Did the saboteurs check with London before sinking the Hydro? From the transcript:

KNUT LIER HANSEN: I personally thought that the only place that they would never be able to recover the barrels from would be the bottom of Lake Tinn.

NARRATOR: But the saboteurs knew that sinking the ferry would almost certainly mean the death of friends and neighbors. Could a few barrels of water really be that important? They sent a message to London.

NORWEGIAN SABOTEUR (Dramatization): Doubt whether the effect of the operation is worth the reprisals which must be reckoned on. Stop. As we cannot decide how important the operation is, we request a reply soonest—if possible, this evening.

NARRATOR: London replied immediately.

LONDON UNDERGROUND (Dramatization): The matter has been considered, and it is decided that it is very important to destroy the heavy water. Stop. Hope it can be done without too great misfortune. Stop. We send our best wishes for success in the work.

KNUT LIER HANSEN: A message came back that this plan should be carried out, the heavy water destroyed once and for all, unambiguously put, regardless of the loss of life. So we started the operation.

Bashta, velkommen to the SDMB, hope you decide to stay here, and your English is excellent!

[flurb]

To have any kind of meaningful response to the OP, I think we'd have to establish when and how exactly we're aborting the American atomic weapon program. As has been stated, the Americans worked closely with British and Canadian counterparts who would have surely carried their knowledge home. And Soviet espionage of the US program certainly advanced by an order of magnitude their own nuclear program.

So are we talking a "strangling in the cradle" scenario (say, Einstein does not send his famous letter to FDR proposing a US atomic weapons research project?) Or does the program die later -- Fermi can't get a sustainable chain reaction in December of 1942, or the Trinity test fails in July of 1945?

[Antonius Block]

Addendum to previous post:

The messages that went back and forth between "Swallow Blue" (Einar Skinnarland, one of the Norwegian saboteurs) and the London-based Special Operations Executive (SOE), prior to the sinking of the Hydro, are available online at the "slide show" link on this PBS NOVA page.

[Antonius Block]

Originally Posted by Chronos

Heavy water isn't actually all that useful in building a fisssion bomb (it's crucial for a fusion bomb, but that's some time later), and from what I've read, the Allies were aware of that at the time.

The Germans were planning on using the heavy water as a moderator in a "natural uranium" (U-238) reactor to produce fissionable plutonium (Pu-239). If they had succeeded, they would have ended up with a device similar to the "gadget" tested at the Trinity site and the Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki.

Returning to the OP, the Wikipedia article on the UK's pre-1943 Bomb research project, "Tube Alloys", suggests that the UK and Canada had actually done a fair amount of the necessary work prior to being folded into the Manhattan Project, and that the passage of the US McMahon Act in 1946 was something of a slap in the face to the UK and Canada, which had provided a great deal of brainpower to the Project (while building upon work originally done in France and Germany prior to WWII).

[Muffin]

Originally Posted by Antonius Block

. . .the passage of the US McMahon Act in 1946 was something of a slap in the face to the UK and Canada, which had provided a great deal of brainpower to the Project (while building upon work originally done in France and Germany prior to WWII).

Excerpts from an article by Gordon Edwards http://www.ccnr.org/myth_1.html#war

Building the bombs was relatively easy compared to the major technical difficulties involved in obtaining the two nuclear explosive materials: highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Canada helped the United States to overcome these obstacles.
Canada supplied the American military with uranium from the Port Radium mine in the Northwest Territories. In addition, uranium ore concentrates from the Congo were found in a warehouse on Long Island, stored there by its Belgian owners for safekeeping. All of this uranium was refined at Port Hope, Ontario. Some of it was processed directly into weapons-usable material -- highly enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb -- at a top-secret enrichment facility covering several acres of land near Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The remainder was used to fuel special military nuclear reactors built at Hanford, Washington, in order to produce plutonium (which does not exist in nature) for the Nagasaki bomb. The Hanford reactors required an exceptionally pure form of graphite to moderate the nuclear reaction -- for without a moderator, a uranium-fueled nuclear reactor simply cannot function, and therefore cannot produce the plutonium needed for nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, at a secret laboratory in Montreal financed entirely by the Canadian government, war-time research on a more efficient way to produce plutonium was carried on. The basic idea was to use heavy water instead of graphite as a moderator. It was expected, on theoretical grounds, that a reactor moderated by heavy water would produce two or three times as much plutonium as other kinds of reactors. The theory was proven correct after the war, when Canada's NRX reactor (built at Chalk River, Ontario) earned an international reputation as the world's most efficient plutonium-producing reactor, using heavy water as a moderator.

The work in Montreal was carefully supervised by British and French scientists, who had brought to Canada the world's only existing supply of heavy water, spirited out of Norway by a French diplomat to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Nazis. Canadian scientists welcomed the opportunity to work with the Europeans on the atomic bomb project. In addition to the heavy water research, the Montreal laboratory performed important chemical experiments involving plutonium separation, also known as "reprocessing". Meanwhile, Canada arranged for the Americans to manufacture their own strategic supply of heavy water at a reconverted chemical plant in Trail, British Columbia.

By the end of the war, Canadian participation in the atom bomb project had become more expensive than all other scientific research activities of the Canadian government combined. A large, secret organization had come into being under the direction of British scientists -- the French had returned home when the war ended -- and it was soon producing results.

The dust had scarcely settled over Hiroshima and Nagasaki when, on 5 September 1945, the first Canadian nuclear reactor (called ZEEP) began producing plutonium for the continuing American bomb program. Nearby, construction of another, larger reactor for the same purpose (the NRX) was under way.

[bonzer]

Originally Posted by Chronos

I had always heard that the Norwegian heavy-water sabotage was the most brilliantly successful counter-intelligence effort in history. Heavy water isn't actually all that useful in building a fisssion bomb (it's crucial for a fusion bomb, but that's some time later), and from what I've read, the Allies were aware of that at the time. But by attacking the German supplies of heavy water, we managed to convince them that it was important, thereby sending them down the wrong lines of research.

To tighten up Antonius's point, such an argument doesn't work either as an explanation of the thinking at the time or as a justification in hindsight.
Heavy water can be used as a perfectly good moderator and was, in fact, being seriously considered as such in the UK at almost exactly the time of the attacks on Vemork. In particular, in about April 1943 it was being discussed at the level of Churchill and Lord Cherwell whether they should commit to building a big heavy water plant and pile in the UK. This was the natural progression from the large amount of research on its production carried out in the previous couple of years, mainly at ICI. As events unfolded, this became unnecessary as originally envisaged because of the resumption of Anglo-American cooperation and all this work was transfered to Canada. So it's not as if the British thought that heavy water was a deadend at the time.
Additionally, the attacks on the Norwegian heavy water supply horrified the Americans, who were worried that such interest would betray to the Germans that the Allies had nuclear programmes of their own. They explicitly didn't want this revealed, so doing so as part of a deception was out of the question.
Nor was it necessary, in hindsight, to commit the Germans to relying on heavy water by this stage. That had become the moderator of choice on all the German projects by the end of 1941. (The reasons for this decision are one of the more fiercely argued aspects of the German case, but there's no argument over the chronology.)

That said, so much dubious stuff has been written around the subject - A Man Called Intrepid being the most obvious - it really doesn't surprise me that the suggestion has been made.

Originally Posted by Eva Luna

You may be interested in my kinda-sorta ex-boyfriend's new-ish book, then.

Ah! The book's actually been on my vague to-read list for a while. You've just nudged it up a notch or two.

[Quartz]

Funnily enough, the Ray Mears programme has just been shown on UKTV History.