# germany's nuclear development (WW2) **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 20, 2003, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/germanys-nuclear-development-ww2/169823 "2003-04-20T08:04:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![whypay88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b487fb/32.png) [@whypay88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whypay88)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2003, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/germanys-nuclear-development-ww2/169823/1 "2003-04-20T08:04:47Z")
was her first atomic bomb close to completion at the end of the war? ---
**Author:** ![Desmostylus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c57346/32.png) [@Desmostylus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Desmostylus)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2003, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/germanys-nuclear-development-ww2/169823/2 "2003-04-20T08:22:54Z")
No. [http://tms.physics.lsa.umich.edu/214/other/news/032100sci-bomb-germany.html](http://tms.physics.lsa.umich.edu/214/other/news/032100sci-bomb-germany.html) > [@](#): > > Because financing and industrial support for the German atomic bomb program had been so weak, Heisenberg said, he and his team abandoned the practical goal of actually building a bomb, deliberately concentrating on nuclear reactors. > > But some Allied scientists, notably Dr. Samuel A. Goudsmit, a Dutch-American physicist, took great exception to articles in The New York Times in which Heisenberg aired his views. Goudsmit and other critics said those statements were a whitewash of an active bomb program stymied only by Heisenberg’s misunderstanding of some basic physics of bombs. > > Dr. Goudsmit, the discoverer of the electron’s so-called spin and the founder of the world’s most prestigious physics journal, Physical Review Letters, had been the scientific director of the wartime effort by the Allies to learn about Germany’s bomb program. His parents had died at Auschwitz. > > The possibility that an explanation more like Dr. Goudsmit’s was correct made Heisenberg’s increasingly frequent statements of concern about the morality of nuclear weapons harder to accept by some Allied scientists. > > “I pray that the politicians will be clever enough to save us from the evil misuse of science,” Heisenberg, who returned to prominence in German science after the war, told The Associated Press in February 1947. > > In later years, “a subtle escalation was introduced,” Dr. Jeremy Bernstein in “Hitler’s Uranium Club” (AIP Press, 1996) , wrote skeptically. “Not only did they work only on the ‘peaceful’ reactor, but they actually ‘prevented’ the atomic bomb from falling into Hitler’s hands.” > > Over the decades, some authors – most persuasively, Thomas Powers in “Heisenberg’s War” (Knopf, 1993) – would argue that Heisenberg knew more about bomb physics than he let on, but deliberately killed the project. But even if the incompetence argument could be defeated, there remains little evidence of Heisenberg’s wartime concern with the morality of atomic weapons – except, possibly, for Copenhagen. > > When Heisenberg later wrote that he had intended to warn Bohr of the enormous technical challenges that stood in the way of building a bomb, implying that Allied scientists could safely refuse to build one too, was he being truthful? By extension, was he truthful about his intentions in the German bomb program itself? ---
**Author:** ![NameAlreadyTaken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/97f17d/32.png) [@NameAlreadyTaken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NameAlreadyTaken)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2003, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/germanys-nuclear-development-ww2/169823/3 "2003-04-20T16:56:07Z")
Minor hijack, but if you ever get a chance to see Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, it’s well worth it. The play re-enacts the meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen and covers many of the points raised in **Demostylus** ’s quote. My paper copy of the play also contains numerous references to what is a very highly contested subject. As I recall, the consesus is that Germany wasn’t close to building a bomb, but the reasons why are still subject to debate and the release of additional classified material. In particular, the [Farm Hall Tapes](http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1992/s92/s92.goldberg.html), hold some answers as to “How much bomb knowledge did the Germans have?” Depending on how you read the tape transcripts, Heisenberg knew quite a bit about making a bomb, but his team didn’t. The fundamental issue seems to be that Heisenberg either purposely or mistakenly calculated the amount of material necessary, and uses this to convince the German government that the project was impossible. The debate is about whether Heisenberg got the math wrong by accident or on purpose. ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2003, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/germanys-nuclear-development-ww2/169823/4 "2003-04-20T23:51:56Z")
On any reading of Heisenberg’s understanding and motive, they were indeed a very long way short. The furthest they got was beginning to assemble a prototype reactor at Haigerloch, moderated with heavy water. Heisenberg seems to have believed this would work, but the more informed concensus is that it was still far from a functioning design. So they weren’t particularly close to a working reactor (something the US and the UK had acheived 2 1/2 years earlier), never mind a bomb. However, these things are murky. Did Heisenberg even understand what a bomb would involve ? There are several arguments that can be used to suggest that he did. Thomas Powers’ case rests fairly heavily on the handful of contacts between physicists on both sides at the time, most famously the meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg that’s the subject of _Copenhagen_. One complication here is that a [key set of documents](http://www.nbi.dk/NBA/papers/introduction.htm) - Bohr’s postwar drafts of letters to Heisenberg trying to explain his version of the meeting - have only relatively recently been released by the Niels Bohr Institute. No historian has yet produced an account incorporating this new evidence. I personally find the main other evidence that Heisenberg was even thinking in terms of bombs extremely weak. His seminar at Farm Hall is a brilliant bit of physics, but it’s after the fact. He knows that a bomb is possible and so came up with an explanation of how it was done. The main other argument derives from the “grapefruit” quote in Speer’s _Inside the Third Reich_. I don’t have a copy to hand, but basically Speer was to claim that Heisenberg said he could destroy a city with an explosive the size of a grapefruit. That seems a plausible description of an atom bomb. Except (though it has to be said that the literature on Nazi nuclear research hasn’t picked up on this) that it was a common piece of popularisation in the 1930s to dramatise nuclear energy in this sort of way. A typical American quote of the period is that you could destroy a city with the energy in a baseball. But that’s just illustrating _E = mc[sup]2[/sup]_, not proposing it can actually be done. I suspect Heisenberg used such a illustration to Speer and the latter misremembered it after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The contemporary evidence is consistent with Heisenberg perhaps realising that a bomb was possible, but only for a huge critical mass. Much larger than a grapefruit and so not acheiveable during wartime. What he did think was possible was a reactor. And given the importance of U-boats to German strategic thinking, this was possibly a significant project in its own right. Then there’s the possibility that they might have been thinking of dropping a reactor as a bomb. Current ideas about dirty bombing make this seem incredibly insane as an efficient use of resources, but one never knows. Powers is certainly worth reading, though I fail to find his thesis convincing. (The oddity is that it’s a rehash of Robert Jungk and yet Jungk had previously retracted the hypothesis.) The better portrait of the climate Heisenberg was operating in and the strategies he adopted is _Uncertainty_ (Freeman ,1991), the excellent biography by David Cassidy. Mark Walker’s various contributions are also good. While _Copenhagen_ works very well as a piece of theatre, to judge by the original West End production, I personally thought it was slightly dodgy history. The odd thing is that I agree that Frayn’s Postscript to the printed edition (Mentuen, 1998) is a rather nice run round some of the issues involved. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_Ellis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@Michael\_Ellis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Michael_Ellis)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2003, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/germanys-nuclear-development-ww2/169823/5 "2003-04-21T00:25:25Z")
[More interesting (if speculative) stuff.](http://www.luft46.com/armament/armament.html) Check under the ‘Miscelleneous’ section. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2003, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/germanys-nuclear-development-ww2/169823/6 "2003-04-21T16:39:39Z")
Germany could never have built a bomb, because their calculations of the role of the moderationg materila (heavy water) were all wrong. Also, the Germans were never able to produce enriched uranium-their reduction process was faulty. Conclusion: Heisenburg screwed up-whether on purpose or not will be never known!