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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!

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