Thread

Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal

137 points · 121 comments · xqcgrek2

expedition32 · 1790925650 · focus · HN ↗
This was already known. The British put the German scientists into a big country house after the war and bugged all the rooms. After the US dropped the atomic bombs the German scientists spent weeks discussing with eachother how the Americans could have done it. They never got it right.
1. amsully · 1790960324 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s a great read from beginning to end <a href="https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/nazi-germany-1933-1945/transcript-of-surreptitiously-taped-conversations-among-german-nuclear-physicists-at-farm-hall-august-6-7-1945" rel="nofollow">https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/nazi-germany-1933-1945/tran...
  1. yalok · 1790962529 · focus · HN ↗
    Amazing. Kind of reminds of the modern day discourse on potential dangers of AGI and humans misuse of it.
    Robotbeat · 1790963455 · focus · HN ↗
    Yup. The race-to-AGI-because-China in particular. I’m basically a China Hawk and generally in favor of AI development, but I can recognize the same pattern.
    aaroninsf · 1790969003 · focus · HN ↗
    That would be a false similarity in some important ways.
    This was a very specific single technical problem, requiring a silo from basic science to theoretical physics to advanced engineering, etc., with each layer having its own space of failure modes.
    Something like the reverse is true with sufficiently-capable and sufficiently-efficient AI, which we are rapidly evolving to.
    In our current situation, the attack surface is quite literally our entire highly interdependent civilization and its components. AI does not need to be autonomous, it just needs to employed, either will wilful bad intent, or, poorly stated goals, or, poor alignment, or, simple mistakes and errors, to break things.
    The challenge with security is always that the attacker need only succeed once.
    This does not mean doomerism has it right, especially in narratives based on poor understanding or extapolation beyond what is now konwn. The chance of "extinction" in particular is overstated.
    The chance of one or more compounding "Chernobyl scale" gray swan events however is ever increasing.
    Personally I don't think that's remotely contestable.
    As a civilization and society and industry we need to have process, and public process at that, about the nature of the risks faced.
    That process has not yet emerged in any coherent way; a hundred letters have been signed and such but to no actual effect, bar one performative "executive order" this week.
  2. NDlurker · 1790962623 · focus · HN ↗
    That was incredibly interesting. Thank you for sharing.
  3. fierycatnet · 1790963721 · focus · HN ↗
    Nice gem
  4. throwaway219450 · 1790965343 · focus · HN ↗
    Is this the same mansion that the war office put a bunch of high ranking PoWs in? Same idea - butter up the generals, bug the entire building and wait for them to spill secrets (which they did so often, and with such value, that military intelligence ignored Churchill’s request to shut it down).
    <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260811-the-uk-stately-home-where-nazis-were-bugged" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260811-the-uk-stately-...
    tempestn · 1790966410 · focus · HN ↗
    Why did Churchill want it shut down?
    throwaway219450 · 1790967481 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20698098" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20698098
    The Beeb has run this a couple of times.
    > Mrs Fry also says Winston Churchill was outraged when he learned the generals had been bussed into the lavish Simpson's-in-the-Strand in central London for lunch. He ordered what he called "the pampering of the generals" to be stopped.
    > But spoiling the generals and boosting their egos was providing so much useful information that the British intelligence officers decided to carry on, and simply stopped telling Churchill about it.
    [deleted] · 1790967553 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  5. tempestn · 1790966370 · focus · HN ↗
    You should submit that as a post, if you haven't already. Fascinating read.
  6. constantius · 1790977689 · focus · HN ↗
    > HAHN [discovered nuclear fission] was completely shattered by the news and said that he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which had made the bomb possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realized the terrible potentialities of his discovery and he felt that now these had been realized and he was to blame.
    > HAHN: I must honestly say that I would have sabotaged the war if I had been in a position to do so.
    > VON WEIZSÄCKER again expressed horror at the use of the weapon and HEISENBERG replied that had they produced and dropped such a bomb they would certainly have been executed as War Criminals having made the “most devilish thing imaginable”.
    > WEIZSÄCKER: History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine. In other words, the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in GERMANY under the HITLER regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war.
    Fascinating. You definitely must post it, I'd enjoy reading a discussion about this, as would others in this thread.
  7. OG_BME · 1790979777 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank you for sharing this!
2. smallmancontrov · 1790961229 · focus · HN ↗
  Heisenberg used a bad approximation that led him to incorrectly believe he would need tons of U235 to produce a bomb. His model for bomb viability was essentially "a random neutron walk should not leave the core until producing enough generations to explode." In reality, you don't need that much U235 because earlier generations have exponentially more descendants and they are closer to the core -- the later generations can leak neutrons out of the core like a sieve and the exponential party deep in the core won't even notice, effortlessly replacing them by cooking a tiny fraction of a generation longer.
  It was Peierls and Frisch, two Jewish German scientists, who figured out those dynamics, modeled them with the Neutron Diffusion equation, and repeatedly prodded UK intelligence until they were taken seriously. Then the project got sent across the Atlantic for safety and scale-up and the rest is history.
  Germany could have had the Atom Bomb in WWII, but Nazi Germany could not have because Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.
  1. sandworm101 · 1790961479 · focus · HN ↗
    >> Jewish Science
    Jewish Scientists.
    darubedarob · 1790961753 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    smallmancontrov · 1790961846 · focus · HN ↗
    I was mocking the Nazi attacks on the work of Jewish scientists which branded that work as "Jewish Science" and declared it inferior, because this whole story is a Reverse Uno card on that narrative.
    ahartmetz · 1790962468 · focus · HN ↗
    Some part of the German physics community even did "German physics" which did not include quantum physics and relativity.
    gloryjulio · 1790963067 · focus · HN ↗
    Agree with that. There were also 'Soviet Science'.
    eli_gottlieb · 1790963292 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, but it would have been a better world if the Nazis had never invented the idea of Judenphysik in the first place. It stopped Gentile German physicists from working on whole areas of research!
    atq2119 · 1790963928 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm okay with that if it helped prevent Nazi Germany from building an atom bomb...
  2. darubedarob · 1790961620 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  3. ianburrell · 1790962861 · focus · HN ↗
    Another problem is that Germans went for heavy water reactors and didn't even get as far as prototypes. Americans built graphite moderated reactors and quickly built plutonium production reactors at Hanford. Also, Allies were able to prevent Germans getting heavy water from Norway.
  4. antonvs · 1790964153 · focus · HN ↗
    > Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.
    It's interesting, and concerning, to see the exact same thinking in the US today.
    The claim was that theoretical, mathematical models of physics, like special relativity, were a product of "Jewish thinking," designed to deliberately confuse the world.
    There's a recent video in which Tucker Carlson interviews Jess Elofson and they mutually agree that algebra is nonsense, with Elofson calling it "fake math". They didn't go so far as to relate it to some ethnic source (from the part I watched), but "designed to deliberately confuse the world" is the big selling point. The people they hate are people smarter than them.
    On the plus side, this is why these anti-intellectual movements always fail, because in the end they just can't get much useful done, other than attacking and destroying which doesn't require finesse or understanding.
    Edit: I have to retract what I wrote about not relating it to an ethnic source. Elofson literally used the term "goy slaves" in that interview.
    RajT88 · 1790965172 · focus · HN ↗
    The word "algebra" comes from Arabic al-jabr - so it's Muslim math to them I guess would be the talking point?
    With his seeming love of certain periods of German history, I think it's appropriate to observe that Tucker Carlson has a backpfeifengesicht.
    xhkkffbf · 1790979690 · focus · HN ↗
    It was invented before Islam began. I believe the creator was Persian.
    RajT88 · 1790995351 · focus · HN ↗
    I took a spin through wikipedia - the roots go well back into pre-Christianity.
    It's pointless to try and make this point with fans of Mr. Carlson. They don't want to know.
    throwawayffffas · 1790967952 · focus · HN ↗
    Wait until Tucker hears about imaginary numbers.
    ludicrousdispla · 1791020100 · focus · HN ↗
    maybe he'd just consider it a hyperbolic statement
    antonvs · 1791039775 · focus · HN ↗
    Even worse, complex numbers!
    belviewreview · 1790983354 · focus · HN ↗
    Fake math? Does he know that all the electric circuits in the equipment that is used to broadcast his program are designed using algebra?
  5. nostrademons · 1790989717 · focus · HN ↗
    It looks like Heisenberg wasn't wrong about the chemistry, only about the economics and willingness of Americans to throw massive amounts of resources at a project:
    > HEISENBERG: I don’t believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their ₤500,000,000 in separating isotopes; and then it’s possible.
    In reality, the Manhattan project cost about $2B, roughly ₤500,000,000 at the exchange rate of the time. And 85% of it went into building the huge isotope-separation plants in Oak Ridge and Hanford. Heisenberg's estimate was just about on the mark; he just didn't understand that America was willing to spend ₤400M building huge factories to do the necessary uranium separation.
    > WIRTZ: We only had one man working on it and they may have had ten thousand.
    In reality, America put 600,000 people to work on it. The Germans were incredulous because they could never get political buy-in for the massive scale mobilization needed to build the bomb. America was willing to spend more and employ more people.
    TitaRusell · 1791102598 · focus · HN ↗
    Germany just wasn't the kind of industrial powerhouse that the US and USSR were. Their whole blitzkrieg strategy was based on the knowledge that they could not win a war of attrition.
3. gib444 · 1790963806 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm trying to reconcile such wildly clever people not wondering if they were being surveiled? Or didn't they care?
  1. smallmancontrov · 1790964950 · focus · HN ↗
    This was after Germany surrendered.
    I'm sure they had suspicions and cared a bit, but in order to stay silent about their passion subjects they would have had to care more than a bit.
    db48x · 1790970442 · focus · HN ↗
    And they mostly hated the Nazis and were glad to be rid of them. Plus secercy obviously no longer mattered now that a bomb had actually been used. Nothing they had to say could materially advance an enemy’s nuclear program.
  2. xhkkffbf · 1790979749 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps they suspected and they deliberately said things that they knew their new overlords would want to hear?

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