I’m sure the Axis powers had scientists working to develop new weapons, just as the Allies did. But were they working on a nuclear fission weapon? Were they putting the same amount of resources into it as the U.S. was? Do we know how close they were to succeeding?
Also, do we know who any of the scientists working on it were? Were any of them famous, or did any of them go on to become famous?
Both Japan and Germany were working on fission weapons—after VJ Day, some Japanese cyclotrons were cut up and dumped in Tokyo bay by U.S. forces—but they were both pretty damn far from making anything usable. (Japan was really damn far from making anything usable.)
Other dopers here have more of the details, and I’m sure they’ll be along shortly…but from what I remember, the German bomb program was pretty small, undersupported, and persuing the wrong paths of research.
Here’s a page giving some detail on the German bomb program, complete with a diagram of a projected bomb design—a design that makes Little Boy look like the pinnacle of eligant design.
Here is a good run down of the Japanese Program, about the Scientists and who was doing what.
Warner Heisenburg of uncertainty principle fame was the head of the german program. Alot of ink has been spilled on whether the German program floundered because he purposly sabotaged it or because he simply misunderstood how an A-bomb would work
Hiesenberg’s main focus was on building a nuclear reactor, not a bomb. It also appears that his understanding of how an atom bomb might work was seriously undeveloped. I recommend you check out the book Hitler’s Scientists : Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact by John Cromwell. It is a fascinating account, and details all the major German scientists involved.
:smack: sorry, it’s by John Cornwell
Because many of the top European physicists were Jewish or of Jewish heritage, Germany lost Einstein, Bohr, Szilard, Teller, Fermi, among many others. Heisenberg was the only really top-notch scientist left, and as others have mentioned, it’s not clear that he was working wholeheartedly to make a bomb. The only other scientists of note working for the Germans were Otto Hahn, Carl von Wiesacker, and Max von Laue.
The Germans devoted nowhere near the resources to their atomic program that the Americans did. Hitler considered physics “Jewish science” and had no real comprehension of the potential of the Bomb. He was far more interested in his Vengeance weapons (the V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs) and jet planes.
In any case, it is highly unlikely that Germany could have dedicated as much money as was spent on the Manhattan Project (about $2 billion, back when a billion dollars was worth something) without completely gutting the rest of its war effort. And even if they miraculously had spent that much, it’s unlikely they would have had the industrial capacity to make a working bomb. The build-up of Manhattan project has been compared to building the entire U.S. automobile industry in about two years.
That the Manhattan Project managed to build, before the end of the war, two atomic bombs, based on entirely different physical principles (Little Boy, the gun-type uranium bomb, and Fat Man, the implosion-type plutonium bomb) was due to an unbelievable assemblage of genius, hard work, risky decisions, and incredible good luck. Many American physicists didn’t believe it wouldn’t be possible to make a workable bomb in time to be used in the war, and there is no doubt the Germans felt the same way.
Heisenberg built an atomic pile in Haigerloch, near the Black Forest, for neutron multiplication studies. But it was much too small to sustain a chain reaction, something Fermi had accomplished in Chicago on Dec. 2, 1942.
There is a telling incident regarding how far behind the U.S. the Germans were. Heisenberg and the other German physicists were captured by the Allies in the spring of 1945 and held prisoner in a farmhouse in England. The place was bugged in an attempt to determine the answer to the question in the OP. When the Germans heard that the Americans had dropped and atomic bomb on Japan, Heisenberg flatly refused to believe that it was a uranium bomb or had anything to do with fission. He was certain they were lying, or that the device had been misreported.
For additional information, I recommend Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Gen. Leslie Groves’ Now It Can Be Told, Samuel Goudsmit’s Alsos, and Stephane Groueff’s The Manhattan Project. All but the first are out of print, but you could find them in a good library or at an online used bookseller.
Richard Rhodes’ is the best choice for a single source. He covers the German effort and the Japanese effort in good detail. The whole book is worth reading: he covers the history of atomic physics as well as anyone I’ve seen.
Joe
commasense: I don’t know about Hitler being obsessed with jet planes. It’s not true that the Me-262 project would have decided the war in Hitler’s favor if he hadn’t demanded that it be used as a fighter-bomber. It was an unreliable, unmaneuverable plane with armament that wasn’t suitable against fighters. Had it been developed more extensively, I think it would have proven to be a disappointment.
It’s the other ‘wonder weapons’ that Hitler put all his faith in. Here’s a page about V-1 propaganda. “How about V number 2 to V number X?” One of the V-weapons being planned was a atmosphere-skipping bomber with the range to reach New York and return. It had a small payload that could have only been effective if it were nuclear. But there is no evidence that it was being designed to carry nuclear weapons, because it was not then known how large a nuclear weapon would be. (Or so I’ve read. Calculating how much uranium is needed for a critical mass is relatively simple, but I don’t know if the calculation was known in the 40s.) Of course, this bomber was never built. Except for the V-1 and V-2, none of the planned wonder weapons, which ranged from long-range guns to surface-to-air missiles, ended up having even a significant psychological impact.
A nuclear weapon, of course, would have had enormous effect on the outcome of the war. I still don’t think an Axis victory would have been possible because Allied industrial production was so much higher, and because the Americans would have developed a nuclear weapon of their own in 1945 or '46 regardless of events in Europe. Again because of industry, I can’t imagine that the Axis could have produced a nuclear weapon before the Americans did. There’s no one thing you could change to allow the Germans to produce a nuclear weapon before May 1945. To allow a German bomb, you’d have to change many things – you’d have to prolong the war by at least a year or two, you’d have to keep their industry intact, and you’d have to make things in general go sufficiently better for the Nazis to allow them the luxury of an extensive nuclear program. As things were, their science and industry had to focus on more immediately practical matters like building tanks and planes and finding fuel for them.
There are some considerations to be made about what would be done with an Axis nuke. It’s been said that Hitler was averse to using chemical weapons because of his experience with them in WW1 – might he have thought the same way about nuclear weapons? I don’t think so, but I think a more plausible reason for why the Nazis never used chemical weapons might suggest what they’d have done with an A-bomb. The Nazis had large stockpiles of nerve gas, but didn’t want to use them in combat because they (incorrectly) believed that the Allies also had nerve gas. If they had developed a nuclear weapon, there would be good reason to believe the Allies also had one, and they would have been right. They might have sued for peace rather than risk mutual annihilation – maybe a return to the borders of 1914, plus Austria and the Sudetenland and including Alsace-Lorraine. The outcome would depend on Hitler’s mood at the time, which was unpredictable and erratic in '44 and '45 and would have been worse by '46 or '47. A peace treaty may have been unacceptable to him. And, if the ‘Nero order’ (wherein he resolved that if he was going to die anyway, he would take Germany along with him) is anything to judge by, mutual destruction might have been far more acceptable than a repeat of Versailles.
That leaves a Bioweapon as payload for the Nazi Orbital Bomber, doesn’t it?
Anybody got good data on German Bioweapons?
If you’re interested in this subject, I highly recommend seeing or reading the play Copenhagen about the relationship between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
I’ve seen Copenhagen. It is a terrific play and offers interesting insights into the issues surrounding use of the Bomb. But it is a work of fiction, written by a playwright, not a historian.
It is largely based on Thomas Powers’ book Heisenberg’s War (which I own, but haven’t read yet). I’ve heard that Powers is quite sympathetic to the view that Heisenberg espoused later in his life, that he was doing everything he could to hold back the German Bomb effort, an outlook that many other historians see as disingenuous and self-serving.
My advice is to read or see Copenhagen for its thought-provoking entertainment value, read Heisenberg’s War for one man’s view on Heisenberg, and read some of the other works mentioned here for additional viewpoints.
And, as noted above, you’d have to give them an ideology that was dedicated to simple old-fashioned imperial aggrandizement without the racial-purity obsession that caused them to drive out some of their best physicists.
The risk of “mutual annihilation” wasn’t an issue at the time. If both sides had developed nuclear weapons, it would have been a handful of 10-20 kiloton warheads, which really wouldn’t have added all that much to the existing level of destruction (some instances of conventional mass-bombing, such as Tokyo and Dresden, were actually more destructive than Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs).
It was only in the next decade, when the US and USSR each had hundreds of megaton-range bombs, that “mutually assured destruction” became a constraint against all-out war.
I was not suggesting that Copenhagen be used as the only source of information about this, only that if one were interested in the issue then one would very probably enjoy the play.
To the OP: Not very. In addition to the theoretical difficulties they had (and purity problems with their moderator that mislead them as to the overall project) the allies did a pretty good job of getting radioactives (from Belgium) and heavy water (from Norway) out of easy axis reach. And that is even aside from the discrepancy in resources between the US (and allies) and the Axis. The US could afford to invest vast resources in both good ideas and bad. The Axis could not. And the Manhattan project took a whole lot of resources. When there was a copper shortage, the Project “borrowed” 10000 tons of silver from the treasury to make wire for electromagnets and other equipment ( some sources say ~15k tons - at any rate, all that was in Fort Knox)
Good book recommendations so far. IIRC there is a book out there somewhere that takes extensively from the (fairly) recently declassified epsilon tapes, the recordings made secretly of Heisenberg and his colleagues while under house arrest in England post-war.
One of the complaints most of Heisenberg’s peers had (notably Bohr) was that he did not seem to see a moral difference between him working for a Nazi bomb and the scientists working for an allied bomb - the difference being one of flags rather than good vs evil.
I didn’t mean to imply that that’s what you meant, and I agree with you about the play.
Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts, by Sir Frank Charles.
The Japanese had a small program under physicist Hideki Yukawa. It never got anywhere, because there was no local supply of uranium. The Germans had a tiny program …it was like nothing compared to the Manahattan Project. In addition to theoretical mistakes made by Werner Heisenburg (they thought hat heavy water was the only effective neutron moderator), the method they used to enrich uranium was not effectice-the method (developed by the german metallurgical firm Degussa) resulted in impure uranium, which contained elements that would “poison” the reaction.
Lastly, their reactor design was all wrong (blocks of uranium suspended by chains, submerged in heavy water). Had the thing gone critical, Heisenburg and everybody else present would have been irradiated to a crisp.
Various scattered comments and (minor) corrections:
I discussed the historiography of the debate on the German bomb at length and mentioned most of the literature in one of my posts in this thread, earlier this year.
Most of those working on the German project were distinguished physicists, though it’s fair to say that in most cases the work they’re otherwise best known for was done before 1939. The major exception is possibly Fritz Houtermans, who was well known in the field before the war, but whose most major work was done afterwards. However, there is a selection effect: older, established scientists had a better chance of not being called up for military service and hence were more likely to both work on the project and to survive the war.
I’d be very dubious of much that’s on that page.
Von Laue never worked on any of the German wartime nuclear projects. He was picked up by Alsos at the end of the war and then interned at Farm Hall with those who had led them. I can’t prove it, but I presume that he’d just been included as someone who might have worked on a bomb. By the time it became obvious that he was denying this and his story could be proved, he was probably in England and would be regarded as having been exposed to the secrets involved via his fellow internees.
It’s an understandable mistake, but Farm Hall can’t really be described as a “farmhouse”. It’s a moderately substantial country house near Cambridge.
Actually, it wasn’t the tapes that were declassified. Nor were there any tapes in the first place. The standard recording media available would have been either wax discs or wires. These haven’t survived and it’s not known what exact method was used. (As I think I’ve mentioned on the board before, I’m told that the bugging wiring is still in place in the house, so I suppose the minor technical point may be resolvable.) What has survived, and what all the controversy was about them being withheld, are the reports forwarded to London and beyond summarising what the surveillance was turning up. These quote liberally from the recorded conversations and are all that is now available, but they are still a heavily edited version - with all the problems that leaves unanswered.
That’s a nice edition (though it’s actually Sir Charles Frank), but there’s also Hitler’s Uranium Club (AIP, 1996), where Jeremy Bernstein adds a more extensive, and somewhat opinionated, commentary to the same documents.
The project Yukawa was on wasn’t the main Japanese programme. He was working on uranium separation for the navy with a team of about 20 people. Had they got anywhere significant, the various projects would presumably have been reorganised, but as it was they were probably entirely independent.