Thread

1. 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. 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. 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.

         1. 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.

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