WI: Germany Develops Nukes in Early 1944

[Gunnarnz]

Originally Posted by Winston Smith

Or it would be, if it wasn't the most insane idea for a WI outside the ASB section.

Careful, there's a lot of competition for that role.

[Mike Stearns]

Originally Posted by Winston Smith

Their's more chance of Japan having a bomb by '44.

Actually, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Japenese Navy tested a prototype atomic bomb right before the end of the war.

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[Asnys]

Originally Posted by Mike Stearns

Actually, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Japenese Navy tested a prototype atomic bomb right before the end of the war.

I don't like to be so blunt, but this is... Not plausible.

Yes, Japan had a nuclear program. So did every major power. But a few cyclotrons does not a bomb make. You can't separate enough HEU with those to make a useable weapon, not in the time they had available. They had some centrifuge and thermal diffusion designs, but those were designs, not factories.

I took a glance at those links. I haven't finished watching them, and at this point I don't intend to. But I googled their first two "technical experts." I wasn't able to find anything interesting on Col. Myers, but Prof. Oliver Manuel apparently believes the sun is made of iron, and has written extensively to that effect. If he's one of their star witnesses, I don't see any reason to believe a word they say.

[The Red]

Originally Posted by Mike Stearns

Actually, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Japenese Navy tested a prototype atomic bomb right before the end of the war.

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You're kidding right?

[El Pip]

Originally Posted by iddt3

Wouldn't that add hugely to the cost and complexity though? Or at least the time required?

Not so much cost, at least compared to everything else, but possibly complexity and certainly time. The complexity is having to figure out the ore chemistry and how to turn that particular ore into something useful and do so in very large quantities. This is a chemistry/mineral processing problem so needs an entirely different set of resources from the rest of any nuclear programme.

All possible of course, it's just another delay while you figure it out and then build a massive plant to do the processing (after you've just built a massive mine to dig it all up). Assuming a similar critical path as the Manhattan Project with the fissile material as crucial no the physics, using mined uranium means the POD has to be pushed even further back to give time for all the mines and plant to be set up.

That or follow the current spate of threads that are ignoring logistics and suggest a German invasion of the Belgian Congo.....

[Cook]

Originally Posted by Asnys

Yes, Japan had a nuclear program. So did every major power.

In the 1930s and ‘40s Japan wasn’t even a blip on the radar as far as Physics research went.

[fastmongrel]

A massive open cast Uranium ore mine, all the massive electricity generating plants to run the centrifuges and the massive factories full of centrifuges might just show up on a recce photo. Then Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force turn the region into a moonscape.

You simply cant hide all the required infrastructure anywhere in Germany. The Manhattan project was huge and took over vast areas of the US and Canada.

[Snake Featherston]

How? The German bomb project had fundamental misunderstandings of how to actually make a Bomb, and any POD that changes this will give at least the USA and possibly the USSR nukes at the same time as the Nazis get them.

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by MrChief

Just a note here don't forget that the Americans completed their development of the Bomb with a lot of aquired German knowledge aka the paperclip conspiracy.

Additionally a V2 rocket had a payload of 1000kg, so if they had developed smaller nukes, rather than fixate on the American design and go a little outside the box here. Could they have developed a 1000kg nuclear device, it is a possibility, I know technology possibly was not there at the time, but if it was, then what?

This, after all, is a forum dedicated to the question what if?

Nonsense. The Germans did not have a concept that would lead to a viable weapon. They did not have any proper means to enrich uranium that were feasible for any kind of Bomb WWII-era technology could have made. Ignoring the dismissal of relativistic physics as "Jewish" science, from a strictly infrastructural sense the Germans had nothing of the sort required to design a functional nuclear weapon.

Originally Posted by MrChief

I think you are missing the point here, after a little research the technology, and weapons wise Germany were far more advanced than the US in 1944, it was German scientists that completed the Manhatten project................it was also German Scientists that enabled space travel for both the USA and USSR. (the paperclip conspiracy).

So it could have happened. The Reich were dangerously close to nuclear technology had the sabotage of Vemork, Norsk Hydro not been successful who knows where that could have gone. Therefore it is possible that this could have happened. Hitler was about in estimate 6 to 8 months away from developing a nuclear bomb at this time and all that prevented it was the destruction of the material that would have fused it.

The planned delivery medium eas the V2 rocket, which automatically leads to the assumption that a 1000kg payload was the plan, although there were plans for a 2000kg version of the rocket, but that had an estimated completion date of 1948. So, the prospect of the Third Reich developing nuclear weapons in this period is highly possible for the following reasons:

1 They had the scientific know how the success of the Manhatten project owes its accellerated success to captured German scientists.

2 They had the material to build it, until a commando mission in Norway removed it

3 They had the ideal delivery medium in the V2 long before anyone else.

4 A 1000kg payload nuke was possible. The radiation leakage from lack of cladding may have been an issue but this was an unmanned missile, so does does it matter?

So the what if comes into play in a very big way now:

I have no doubt that because of Hitler's inbuilt affinity to the British (a war that by his own admission, Hitler never wanted) London would have only received conventional payloads. However, Moscow is another situation altogether. The Russians were not even considered human in Nazi ideology, so frying a few hundred thousand would have meant nothing, lets face it the horrors of the holocaust on the Jews show what they were prepared to do to pervieved sub-humans.

Therefore I think that the precept here is a valid one and worthy of some research.

No, actually, it is not. To develop the atomic bomb requires *as a starting point* getting enough enriched uranium for critical mass. Then there are several more steps just to get enough uranium to make a functional fission bomb, and then there's the problem of actually designing the metal case for such a bomb. And at the most crude core of the problem there's the Nazis dismissing relativity as Jewish science.

And the point about Operation Paperclip is a humbug. The Nazis did not lead either the USA or USSR to rocket technology. The USSR had the first viable MRLS system in terms of actual use on the battlefield. That in itself is a very viable use of technology in a sense that actually did a lot of good (they used them for high quantity of firepower in desperate situations just as the USA did in 1991). Crude ballistic missiles did the Nazis no more good than the War of the Cities did Saddam Hussein.

Originally Posted by MrChief

Give me time and I will post you a copy of my historical work on the third reich. However, a few corrections

My point about paperclip is not wrong....it states that the Germans had the scientific know how during the war, and it was actually a conspiracy between the USA and USSR, actually Kruschev was in charge of the negotiations from the Russian side as to who got who (but that is entirely another discussion)

You also miss the point of weight, weight could be decreased by not using layers of lead under the vast armoured steel clad (which was also not required in this scenario) A rocket is virtually impossible to shoot down, I know of two successess by the RAF out of what was called PFL, the first and third words are pure and luck, I will leave the middle one to imagination!

Additionally captured papers in 1945 after the defeat of the Reich, led to the success of the Manhatten Project, yes the Americans got them, not the Russians, for some reason Germans in that era were far happier to surrender to US/UK forces as it increased their life expectancy vastly.

So from my knowledge of the science, political and military machines of the Third Reich, this scenario is far from impossible, I would actually say that the prognosis here is more one of a lucky escape that one of it could never have happened. I can assure you, that some of the documents I read in what remains of the Nazi governments archives in Berlin show a very different picture to your accepted belief.

Again, Paperclip shows nothing of the sort. I repeat that crude ballistic missiles would never win the Nazis WWII any more than Saddam won the War of the Cities and the Iran-Iraq War with their more advanced descendants. Ballistic missiles are good for scaring people, they aren't war-winners. The V-Weapons were a waste of time and money and feasible only in the sense that the Nazis killed a lot of Jews and POWs to make them. The Vergeltungswaffen show only that Nazi politics relied on the politics of murder and terror, they show nothing of the Nazis having the infrastructure and capability to build/use it required to make viable atomic bombs, the ability to create plutonium or gun-delivery bombs, or most fundamentally the same approach to physics shared by all people who understand that when reality and ideology clash the latter invariably, always, and forever always has and always will lose utterly, completely, and totally.

The Soviet atomic bomb project benefited some from spies but knowing the paper details of how to build a Fat Man/Little Boy style Bomb didn't mean having the actual nitty-gritty of how to do it was possible, nor did this lead to the Soviet capability to make hydrogen bombs.

[hairysamarian]

Originally Posted by Asnys

...but Prof. Oliver Manuel apparently believes the sun is made of iron...

That's far from the grittiest detail that showed up in a quick search just now. Leaving that alone, however, this looks like a History Channel production. That's the same channel that runs "Ancient Aliens" and did a special about Jesus being a space alien a year or so ago. Credibility is in short supply where they're concerned.

[PMN1]

Originally Posted by Gunnarnz

Careful, there's a lot of competition for that role.

Rapidly expanding competition at that as well......

[CalBear]

The Reich NEVER had the material. The British destroyed the heavy water long before the Reich had any use for it, but that is the EASY part. Before you can make a bomb, you need fissionable material.

To get that you need either a continental land mass loaded with centrifuges to spin the exceptionaly rare -235 isotope out of natural uranium. Using natural Uranium you would need approximately 112,676,000 TONS of ore to obtain sufficient U-235 (Uranium metal runs about 0.25% per ton of ore and U-35 makes up roughly 0.71% of uranium metal by weight. The other, and obviously preferable method, is by use of a nuclear reactor (breeder type to be specific). This allows you to enrich the natural element around 10-15 times before centrifuging and also allows you to create the far more useful plutonium element.

Manhattan used somewhere around 20% of the TOTAL electrical output of the Tennessee Valley Project (which provided power to around a dozen states in peacetime). The total Mw needed for Manhattan exceeded Germany's power output capacity, even if no other electrical usage was allowed..

The head of the Reich Post Office Project was Heisenberg (of Effect fame). He either made a computation error (or, possibly intentionally threw a spanner into the works, there is some recent discussion that this is the case).

Paperclip had NOTHING to do with Manhattan. Spaceflight yes, Nukes, not a bit (it is also of some question exactly how much the Soviet system owed to Reich scientists, it seems that Stalin kept The Designer i.e. Korolev, completely separate from the scientists from Germany).

A V2 was far from an ideal launch platform. Not for a 5,500 kg warhead. It is almost impossible to reduce the weight of 1st Gen weapons due to certain electronic requirements, mainly in the wiring although it is easier to achieve with a Uranium "Gun" design than an implosion device. Five V2 combined couldn't loft either Little Boy or Fat Man.

I won't even start going into the other entirely separate breakthroughs needed in several other fields to allow the Bomb to be built.

Germany had not a prayer.

Originally Posted by MrChief

I think you are missing the point here, after a little research the technology, and weapons wise Germany were far more advanced than the US in 1944, it was German scientists that completed the Manhatten project................it was also German Scientists that enabled space travel for both the USA and USSR. (the paperclip conspiracy).

So it could have happened. The Reich were dangerously close to nuclear technology had the sabotage of Vemork, Norsk Hydro not been successful who knows where that could have gone. Therefore it is possible that this could have happened. Hitler was about in estimate 6 to 8 months away from developing a nuclear bomb at this time and all that prevented it was the destruction of the material that would have fused it.

The planned delivery medium eas the V2 rocket, which automatically leads to the assumption that a 1000kg payload was the plan, although there were plans for a 2000kg version of the rocket, but that had an estimated completion date of 1948. So, the prospect of the Third Reich developing nuclear weapons in this period is highly possible for the following reasons:

1 They had the scientific know how the success of the Manhatten project owes its accellerated success to captured German scientists.

2 They had the material to build it, until a commando mission in Norway removed it

3 They had the ideal delivery medium in the V2 long before anyone else.

4 A 1000kg payload nuke was possible. The radiation leakage from lack of cladding may have been an issue but this was an unmanned missile, so does does it matter?

So the what if comes into play in a very big way now:

I have no doubt that because of Hitler's inbuilt affinity to the British (a war that by his own admission, Hitler never wanted) London would have only received conventional payloads. However, Moscow is another situation altogether. The Russians were not even considered human in Nazi ideology, so frying a few hundred thousand would have meant nothing, lets face it the horrors of the holocaust on the Jews show what they were prepared to do to pervieved sub-humans.

Therefore I think that the precept here is a valid one and worthy of some research.

[Rubicon]

Originally Posted by CalBear

T

Manhattan used somewhere around 20% of the TOTAL electrical output of the Tennessee Valley Project (which provided power to around a dozen states in peacetime). The total Mw needed for Manhattan exceeded Germany's power output capacity, even if no other electrical usage was allowed..

USA total hydroelectric production 1937: 43 702 KwH (millions)
(USA total electric production 1937: 121 050 KwH - millions)

German total electric production 1937: 48 969 KwH (millions)

Bit of a hyperbole there.

[CalBear]

Originally Posted by Rubicon

USA total hydroelectric production 1937: 43 702 KwH (millions)
(USA total electric production 1937: 121 050 KwH - millions)

German total electric production 1937: 48 969 KwH (millions)

Bit of a hyperbole there.

Except we are not talking about 1937.

The U.S. and Canada built significant additional capacity as Manhattan began. Germany was actually struggling to keep up to pre war levels thanks to the RAF.

[Rubicon]

Originally Posted by CalBear

Except we are not talking about 1937.

The U.S. and Canada built significant additional capacity as Manhattan began. Germany was actually struggling to keep up to pre war levels thanks to the RAF.

On the contrary, German electricity production was rising all the way to 1944 and was yet another failure of the strategic bombing campaign.

http://www.usaaf.net/surveys/eto/ebs16.htm