The Soviet Union Goes All Out to Build Atomic Bomb Starting In the 1930s

Err... No? PTFE (Teflon) is necessary to handle the really nasty Uranium flourides that are used for Uranium isotopic enrichment. Not used, AFAIK, for the plutonium route at all.

I could be wrong, this was from memory of my undergrad days in Physics, but the solutions you need for plute extractions are rather nasty - I think (from memory) its a purity issue, you need something that doesn't react at all so there is no contamination.
 
What would be the point? By that point they would already control Berlin and thus have won the war, and doing so would have required them evacuating the entire city of troops before setting off the bomb, plus I'm pretty sure they wanted Hitler and the Nazi leadership as prisoners..


Why do you think the nuke would be used post occupation? He was insinuating they'd smuggle it in.
 
Why do you think the nuke would be used post occupation? He was insinuating they'd smuggle it in.

The thing isn't exactly small...

Is smuggling a weapon possible? Sure. Lots of stuff is possible. But packing a huge wonder-weapon on a truck and sending off into the heart of Nazi Germany isn't the most feasible of ideas. The logistics would be crazy, and the number of things that could go wrong is astronomical.
 

Bearcat

Banned
I could be wrong, this was from memory of my undergrad days in Physics, but the solutions you need for plute extractions are rather nasty - I think (from memory) its a purity issue, you need something that doesn't react at all so there is no contamination.

Don't you generally need enriched Uranium for a reactor to produce meaningful amounts of Plutonium? I'm not talking about traces, I mean the tens of pounds needed for weapons.
 
Neither of those planes could deliver a first gen nuke. Not even the typical B-29 could - the B-29 'Silverplates' were upgraded to carry it.

So what you're saying is that the Allies didn't have a delivery system to deliver a nuke, and then hurriedly converted something they had so that they could deliver a nuke?

My point exactly.
 
"Fat Man" weighed 10,200 pounds. The Armenian Genocide states that for a short, 400 mile mission the Flying Fortress could carry 8,000 pounds. Overload weight is 17,600 pounds. Modify it, and station your Flying Fort Plus 100 or 200 miles outside Berlin.
 
Don't you generally need enriched Uranium for a reactor to produce meaningful amounts of Plutonium? I'm not talking about traces, I mean the tens of pounds needed for weapons.
No. If you use graphite or heavy water as the moderator you can have a very nice reactor with just natural uranium. Canada's CANDUs used natural uranium until the last interation (which hasn't been built yet).

IIRC India's (?first?) Abombs are made without any recourse to enriched uranium. (Thanks to the lack of control we placed on the fissionables resulting from the reactors we sold them. Sigh.)

If you want to go the US light water route, then, yes, you need enriched uranium. But there is no need to go that route. It speeds things up, no doubt, but it's not necessary.
 

Markus

Banned
Let’s say Stalin gets the idea in his head that a-bombs could be a decisive weapon. He put the considerable resources of the Soviet command economy to work on an urgent basis to make him some. How long would it take before the Soviets had an A-bomb? How much would that effort take away from other Soviet military production? Fewer tanks? Fewer planes? Fewer artillery pieces? What impact does that have on the war?

They could not even build decent destroyers before 1937.
 
Top