Did Hitler ever come close to developing an A-bomb?

[Evil Tristin]

Or was Germany too pathetically behind in the A-bomb development that it would be a German wank to make this happen?
How would you make Germany beat the US in the A-bomb development?

[Anaxagoras]

Short answer: no. There was never any point in the entire Nazi era when Germany ever came close to developing an atomic bomb. Indeed, it never really came close to developing the beginnings of a program to even think about developing an atomic bomb.

Read "Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb" by Thomas Powers for the best and most complete treatment of this question.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

IMHO, you'd need a pre-war POD for Germany to develop the atomic bomb first, and even then it'd be tricky. Forex, if you have a peaceful Germany, it has the industrial capability to do so but because it is at peace, it doesn't have the need to do so. If you have a warlike Germany, it might have the desire to do so, but not the industrial capacity -- which is being used to fight the war.

Ideally, you'd need some sort of scenario that has Germany at war but not pressed so hard that it lacks the capacity to build an atomic bomb. You also might sidestep things by handwaving away the Manhattan Project, allowing Germany to develop the weapon at a much more leisurely pace.

[The Kiat]

Even not counting their alleged nuclear test, I think the Japanese were closer to developing The Bomb than the Germans. Germany just had a ramshackle, half-hearted attempt at developing it. Something about having research teams compete against each other instead of cooperate.

[pwarner328]

Originally Posted by The Kiat

Even not counting their alleged nuclear test, I think the Japanese were closer to developing The Bomb than the Germans. Germany just had a ramshackle, half-hearted attempt at developing it. Something about having research teams compete against each other instead of cooperate.

perhaps because most of the scientist who could have developed it left when the nazis took power??

[Cook]

Originally Posted by The Kiat

Even not counting their alleged nuclear test, I think the Japanese were closer to developing The Bomb than the Germans...

Reference this please.

[CalBear]

Originally Posted by Cook

Reference this please.

There was a program on History Channel that made this fairly ludicrous test claim. It has since developed a life of its own.

The Japanese did have a reasonable theoretical program in place. All it lacked was $40,000,000,000, unlimited resources and electrical energy, a raft of brilliant scientists and engineers, a functional nuclear reactor, and a safe place to work.

[Bill Cameron]

Nazi Germany came as close to developing the Bomb as members who continue to ask this asinine question come to using the forum's Search Function.

[DireSituation]

Originally Posted by Bill Cameron

Nazi Germany came as close to developing the Bomb as members who continue to ask this asinine question come to using the forum's Search Function.

Oh, so win.

But to answer the OP's question, the idea might've been conceived, but hardly proposed or anything that sort.

[LordInsane]

Originally Posted by Bill Cameron

Nazi Germany came as close to developing the Bomb as members who continue to ask this asinine question come to using the forum's Search Function.

IE, often fairly close, depending on whether 'use' is defined as successfully using or not? Bomb, after all, is a four letter word.

[The Kiat]

Originally Posted by Cook

Reference this please.

I don't think it's enough evidence to stand up in court, but here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanes...se_weapon_test

Originally Posted by CalBear

There was a program on History Channel that made this fairly ludicrous test claim. It has since developed a life of its own.

The Japanese did have a reasonable theoretical program in place. All it lacked was $40,000,000,000, unlimited resources and electrical energy, a raft of brilliant scientists and engineers, a functional nuclear reactor, and a safe place to work.

Or they could just pick one route to take, instead of all the route the American project sank its resources into, and gotten lucky enough to pick the most efficient way. Don't sell the Japanese short; that was a big mistake made by America back in the war. I do find it ironic that the test supposedly happened in what is now North Korea, and had about the same yield... nuclear fizzle. No matter, the scientist destroyed all the research and documentation they had before it could fall into Soviet hands, so we will never know the truth about their nuclear program, and if it even got off the ground.

[Astrodragon]

Originally Posted by Bill Cameron

Nazi Germany came as close to developing the Bomb as members who continue to ask this asinine question come to using the forum's Search Function.

Or their brains.....

[Bill Cameron]

Originally Posted by Astrodragon

Or their brains.....

You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment...

... especially when you remember I'd be perma-banned in less than a New York minute.

[Blair152]

Originally Posted by Evil Tristin

Or was Germany too pathetically behind in the A-bomb development that it would be a German wank to make this happen?
How would you make Germany beat the US in the A-bomb development?

The answer to your question is yes. Let me explain. Prior to 1938, the prevailing opinion was that the atom couldn't be split. (The word "atom" means "indivisible" in Greek). In 1938, German scientists managed to do what was then considered the impossible------they split the atom. Germany,
in the early days of World War II, was farther ahead in atomic research than
the United States and Britain were. In 1939, Leo Szilard, and other scientists, urged Albert Einstein to write a letter to FDR to urge him to put
American atomic research on the front burner. That was the genesis of the
Manhattan Project. By 1944, seeing that the Allies were ahead of him, Hitler ordered that all research be stopped on "the Jewish Bomb."

[Bill Cameron]

Originally Posted by Blair152

Let me explain.

Please don't.

As with so many things, you display a cursory knowledge of a few words and phrases while remaining wholly ignorant of the topic in question.

I know I'm going to regret this because you won't be able understand it, but here's a quick primer on the history of nuclear fission.

While the word 'atom" is derived from the Greek word meaning "indivisible", it had been first realized and then proven by the late 19th Century that sub-atomic particles existed. That meant atoms could be subdivided or "split".

Next, Rutherford actually "split" an atom in 1917 during World War One. He bombarded nitrogen with naturally occurring alpha particles and detected protons. Because protons only exist an atom's nucleus, Rutherford had split the nuclei of nitrogen atoms.

While Rutherford's technique was an excellent research tool, it required a constant energy input and used particles that "cluttered" the results leading to difficulties in detecting or identifying those results.

In 1932, Chadwick identified the neutron and in the process tidied about several aspects of sub-atomic bookkeeping. Fermi, and several others, quickly realized that neutrons made better "bullets" than Rutherford's alpha particles because, as neutrons are a single sub-atomic particle while alphas are made up of several sub-atomic particles, impacts by neutrons would create less "clutter".

Fermi began bombarding uranium with neutrons, choosing uranium because it's decay products were relatively well known, thanks to the work by the Curies and others, and because those decay products could be identified chemically by relatively easy means.

Fermi's announcement that he'd split uranium atoms in 1934 was quickly called into question on concerns regarding the chemical proofs he had provided. A German chemist named Noddack correctly theorized and then proved that Fermi's "proofs" were fundamentally flawed. While Fermi had undoubtedly split atoms, he couldn't prove it in a rigorous scientific sense because of the flaws in his team's chemical analysis of the results.

In 1938, Strassman and Hahn ran experiments similar to Fermi's with one significant difference. They included a genius in chemistry in their efforts and she, Lisa Meitner, was able to provide the proofs the rest of the scientific community required to needed to accept that nuclear fission had indeed been induced by artificial means.

There was another interesting discovery made at the same time too. Along with creating nuclei fragments that were already known to be uranium decay products, uranium fission gave off single neutrons which could then be used to trigger more fission events. It was the theoretical possibility of a self sustaining chain reaction that excited the scientific community so greatly in 1938. Rather than requiring an energy input, the fission of uranium could power itself.

Very soon after that, it was the realization that such a chain reaction could theoretically release large amounts of energy that led to the Szilard-Einstein letter to FDR in 1939.


Bill

[BlairWitch749]

Originally Posted by Bill Cameron

You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment...

... especially when you remember I'd be perma-banned in less than a New York minute.

You know Bill, the farthest advanced super WMD project the Germans had was run by the Reich's post office . Some Nazi bigwig in there who had a background in chemistry, came up with the idea for an endothermic bomb (works like a nuke except it freezes everything instead of burning everything)... the Russians seemed to have gained intel that they where fooling around with this thing in '44 and conveyed via the Swedish ambassador that if the German's used one of these things that they would retaliate with chemical weapons and murder all German POW's.

The Russians captured the research on this thing (it seems a lot of it was just theoretical) and continued it themselves working parallel to their nuke project. Supposedly they had some successful tests (according to Harry Truman) but it was always classified by the KGB. I think now if you go to the Moscow central committee archives one can read about it, I haven't heard of any scholars going there to research it yet (might try to see if I can find it on my next trip to europe since mrs bw speaks Russian

[AMF]

Originally Posted by Anaxagoras

Short answer: no. There was never any point in the entire Nazi era when Germany ever came close to developing an atomic bomb. Indeed, it never really came close to developing the beginnings of a program to even think about developing an atomic bomb.

Read "Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb" by Thomas Powers for the best and most complete treatment of this question.

This is a link to a short article in physicsworld.com by the German historian Rainer Karlsch and by Mark Walker, John Bigelow Professor of History at Union College, Schenectady New York:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/22270
In order to read the full article you have to register, but it's free and takes only about a minute, then the full article becomes accessible.

The authors claims that Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and others were not resistance fighters who sabotaged a Nazi bomb project, as Thomas Powers seems to have claimed, but that they were not scientific failures either, as Samuel Goudsmit or Paul Lawrence Rose seem to have claimed. They did not deny or sabotage the possibility of a nuclear bomb, but on the other hand they did not do their utmost to make it possible.

Walker states that in a draft patent application written by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1941 explains the possibility of a nuclear reactor and the suitability of plutonium as a nuclear explosive. When von Weizsäcker submitted his patent on 3 November 1941, he no longer mentioned the use of plutonium in a nuclear bomb, but described only the use of a reactor for generating power.

The most controversial part of the article is probably Karlsch's claim, supported by Walker, that the Germans tested a small nuclear device in March 1945 in Thuringia, in central (formerly East) Germany. This is a link to an English summary of Karlsch's book:
http://openlibrary.org/b/OL21831143M..._Hitlers_Bombe

I can neither confirm nor refute Karlsch's claim, but the summary shows that the Soviet nuclear weapons engineers Professor Vladimir Mineev and Professor Alexander Funtikov support Karlsch's claim. If you click on the Mineev link above, you will find, among many other things, that he has taught at Tel Aviv University in 2004, so just in case you thought Karlsch's book is a Nazi fantasy, there is some strong evidence that it's not.

Mineev and Funtikov say that the device tested in Thuringia was probably a "boosted" bomb, a hybrid between a fission and fusion bomb, and that this type of bomb was at first mentioned by the Americans in a patent application in November 1945.

Among the various scientists who contest Karlsch's claims are Cathryn Carson (Berkeley university), Detlef Loose (Twente) and Ulrich Schmidt-Rohr (Heidelberg), mentioned in this German newspaper review article.

I repeat, I can neither confirm nor refute Karlsch's claims, but the fact that professors of history or of physics support it, seems to lift it above discarding it as Nazi propaganda.

[ObssesedNuker]

Originally Posted by AMF

:snip:

The fact that the first American boosted-bombs, which were their third-generation nukes[1], came two years after the World War 2 bombs should tell you something. That should tell you everything about any possibility of a German boosted-bomb

[1]First generation nukes were the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs. Second-generation devices were much easier to produce, but offered no other other real improvements over first generation devices.

[The Red]

Heisenburg - No.

Diebner - ...we're going to need to wait until 2045 but until then it's sketchy. Whether or not they got their reactor on line or not is subject to debate.

[AMF]

Originally Posted by ObssesedNuker

The fact that the first American boosted-bombs, which were their third-generation nukes[1], came two years after the World War 2 bombs should tell you something. That should tell you everything about any possibility of a German boosted-bomb

[1]First generation nukes were the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs. Second-generation devices were much easier to produce, but offered no other other real improvements over first generation devices.

First of all, I do not want to defend Karlsch's, Walker's, Nimeev's, Funtikov's and other's thesis at all costs. On the contrary: the first thought that struck me when I heard of Karlsch's claim also was: impossible, Germany was under heavy bombardment and they did not have the resources anyway. Another thought that struck me was: why did we not hear of this sooner. Then: why was there no equivalent to Wernher von Braun in the German nuclear programme, who like von Braun first worked for Nazi Germany and then for the US. If German scientists managed to build a bomb with the very limited resources they had, the Americans would have been just as keen to on hiring them for their own nuclear programm as they were keen on hiring von Braun or Dornberger for rockets, but nothing of the sort seemed to have happened.

Still, after reading the book edited by Karlsch in 2007, I was not at all so sure on these points, given the scientific qualification of his supporters.

So return to the argument you used, ObsessedNuker. It seems to go like this: if the Americans can build a boosted bomb only two years after WW II, then the Germans cannot build such a bomb before. The argument rests on the assumption that the Americans are neccessarily ahead of the Germans. Your argument has some common sense, after all the resources available to the US were many times greater than those available to Germany. The argument is however far from being an absolute proof. Germany was ahead in liquid propellant rockets, axial flow jet turbines and swept wings for high speed aircraft, limited resources or not.

Furthermore, this is not the kind of argument to sweep aside the statements of at least two professors of physics and nuclear weapons engineers, that it was most likely this kind of weapon that was detonated in Ohrdruff, Thuringia in March 1945. Its yield was low - statements vary between one kiloton and half a kiloton - but they nevertheless clearly state that this was a nuclear weapon. I have already mentioned the names of some scholars who contradict these statements in my last post.