The wrong side won WW2.

submitted by radicalcentristNational Centrism from (self.debatealtright)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Bullet-Jesus 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Nazi nukes is a pretty big longshot. The Nazi's had neither the knowhow, resources or will to pursue the nuclear option.

The material used in the trinity test was bought specifically by the Allies to prevent Germany getting it and German facilities that could even be involved in a nuclear program were surgically targeted by Allies bombing and special forces.

Any German program will be years behind an Allied one and I shudder to imagine the Allied bombing campaign dropping more nukes than they did historically.

[–]send_nasty_stuffNational Socialist 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

The National Socialist Government was quite close to nuclear capabilities. They had a heavy water plant and before Warner Heisenberg absconded (and got himself killed) they were months away from developing a pineapple sized piece of uranium.

EMJ did a good write up on Heisenberg in Vol 38 of culture wars

https://culturewars.com/volumes-31-40/cw-38-2

You can read the start of it here

https://www.unz.com/ejones/werner-heisenberg-and-jewish-science-part-i/

[–]Bullet-Jesus 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

heavy water plant

Is this the Norwegian one or is it another one in Germany?

Warner Heisenberg absconded (and got himself killed)

What? Is there another Heisenberg? Werner Heisenberg died in 1976.

pineapple sized piece of uranium.

"Pineapple sized piece" of what kind of uranium? Trinity and Fatman used 6.2kg and 6.4kg of plutonium for their cores respectively; Little boy required some 64kg of enriched Uranium.

Looking at what the Alsos Mission recovered and what was taken off of U-234, it is evident that Germany had enough unprocessed Uranium in 1945 to produce a bomb; the hard bit would be constructing a place to refine it all. If they could do all that they might test a device before 1950.

If Germany had managed to stall out the war for another 5 years or so they may have been able to produce weapons-grade uranium in sufficient quantities to deploy atomic weapons in the war. An interesting thought is that had the German leadership focused on developing atomic weapons in the early 30s they might have had a functioning arsenal before the war even began but hindsight is 20-20.

[–]TheJamesRocket 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Is this the Norwegian one or is it another one in Germany?

The Germans had two heavy water plants up and running during the war. They had the well known Norsk Hydro plant in Rjukan, and the I.G. Farben plant in Leuna (near Berlin). Both of these were bombed out of commission.

"Pineapple sized piece" of what kind of uranium?

The quote from Heisenberg was about the quantity of enriched uranium he believed was necessary to initiate a nuclear explosion. The bomb itself would obviously be larger than just the uranium content alone.

it is evident that Germany had enough unprocessed Uranium in 1945 to produce a bomb; the hard bit would be constructing a place to refine it all

The German scientists had been working on the process of uranium enrichment since 1941. They invented several different methods of achieving this: Through centrifuges, isotope sluices, and mass spectrometers. All of these devices were actually in operation by 1944. The problem was that the Germans simply did not make enough of them, and as a result, they were only able to result small quantitys of uranium before the war ended.