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

[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]

@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]

@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]

@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.

@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.