Nazis manage to come away with Norway's heavy water

Wimble Toot

Banned
What would have happened if the raid never occurred or it failed?

Not much - the Third Reich had five sources of deuterium oxide {D20 or heavy water}

Vermork was just one - but the largest, but it had been destroyed in a bombing raid, so only 2 tons remained

the others were

1) Leuna plant, south of Merseberg, near Berlin (Harteck/Suess process - codename Stalin Organ)

2) Kiel Plant (Dr K Geib’s hydrogen sulphide exchange process)

3) Hamburg Plant (possibly near Zeven, Harteck low pressure distilation process)

4) Munich Plant (Clusius-Linde, Nernst Distribution Process)

If they needed it that badly, the Nazis would obtain, but be defeated long before a useable nuclear weapon could be made
 
Access to resources is just one part of the puzzle, there's still the lack of funding/manpower/proper organisation/willingness to embrace 'Jewish physics' sabotaging the project. Or projects, as they were, because why pool all your resources into one big project when you can do it the Nazi way and have lots of little ineffectual ones?
 
It is interesting to speculate on their thoughts as they work up to a sustained chain reaction, or fail at it.

If memory serves there’s been some speculation that if Heisenberg’s reactor had achieved a chain reaction then the proper protections weren’t in place to prevent it from irradiating the entire site and killing Heisenberg and most of his team.

Not sure if the same applies to Diebner and his team, but they were working on something more akin to a dirty bomb in any case.
 
I've seen that speculation. I'm wondering what experiments & tests warned Fermi & caused him to take some precautions with his efforts? One would hope Heisenberg & Co were smart enough to see the problem before they started to glow.
 
I've seen that speculation. I'm wondering what experiments & tests warned Fermi & caused him to take some precautions with his efforts? One would hope Heisenberg & Co were smart enough to see the problem before they started to glow.

Seeing as Heisenberg was building The Bomb for the Nazis I would hope that the gamma rays would blast away. I haven’t seen anything saying that Heisenberg was aware of the danger.
 
A Nazi-wank sees them building self-sustaining nuclear piles followed by bombs.
As the Eastern Front collapses, Nazis bury A-Bombs at key rail yards and harbours in Eastern Europe. As they retreat, Nazis detonate bombs, ruining Russian logistics and causing hundreds of thousands of radiation casualties. Fall-out drifts over Russia, contaminating crops, etc.
WALLIES need another month or three to conquer Nazi Germany but by August 1945, they have zero incentive to advance any farther east than Berlin. No WALLIED General wants to move into that apocalyptic wasteland.

This time-line also prevents a Cold War because communists occupy little of Eastern Europe and the Russian economy is in too bad a shambles to present any threat until the late 1950s.
 
My wank has Heisenberg miscalculating the yield right up to the end. For the first test the observation bunker is only eight hundred meters from ground zero, and contains the entire development staff... *
 

Manman

Banned
The Nazis might not make a bomb but rather some sort of radiation weaponry if they are unable to make a nuke.
 
I was under the impression that heavy water was a dead end in terms of nuclear weapons production. The Manhattan Project produced two devices, a gun-type device using enriched uranium-235 (which was highly inefficient) and an implosion-type device using plutonium-239.

So, if the Nazis get their hands on more heavy water, what happens? Nothing.
 
It is interesting to speculate on their thoughts as they work up to a sustained chain reaction, or fail at it.

I've posted before on what passed for safety with their reactor design, or lack of it.
People living downwind of Haigerloch were lucky they never got to trying to go critical with that design
 
I was under the impression that heavy water was a dead end in terms of nuclear weapons production. ...

In itself yes. The Heavy Water reactor was like Fermis pile in Chicago a test or experiment to understand the finer details of sustained chain reactions. Ferris pile was essential on the route the US was on in getting to a bomb, but in itself was just a oversized laboratory experiment. Not a production device in any sense. Once they understood better how chain reactions occurred ect.. the Germans would have been had to either find a efficient method of producing the Uranium isotope, or realizing Plutonium was a option.
 
Heavy water moderated reactors allow a sustained chain reaction using natural, rather than enriched, uranium (though it is quite inefficient - a slight degree of enrichment gains you a lot of efficiency) so it is a significant shortcut on the way to nuclear weapons. From a heavy water moderated natural uranium reactor you can harvest plutonium - though you need LOTS of fine-tuning work to ensure that you maximize the recovery of Pu-239 before it continues catching neutrons and gets contaminated by Pu-240; and you need to know this in advance, too, in order to initiate the said fine-tuning. A nuclear bomb made of Pu-239 contaminated with a few % of Pu-240 will fizzle on initation since the latter tends to spontaneous fission - or may even fizzle (killing the team and damaging/irradiating the facility) during the assembly, depending on the geometry of physics package and on the fraction of Pu-240.
 
I've posted before on what passed for safety with their reactor design, or lack of it.
People living downwind of Haigerloch were lucky they never got to trying to go critical with that design

The reactor they had was not in danger of a meltdown or explosion (far too small for that), it merely had nearly no shielding. It going critical would kill everyone in the facility with neutron irradiation, and turn everything inside radioactive through secondary isotopes via neutron capture, but is unlikely to cause signficant contamination outside of the cave it was in.
 
Had the heavy water tank gone critical I wonder if they would simply give up, try again with heavy water, or moved on to a graphite design or attempted something else?
 
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