Rendered at 05:26:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
leonidasrup 7 hours ago [-]
Boron contamination of graphite also slowed the Manhattan Project:
"
Fermi writes that "The results of this experiment was [sic] somewhat discouraging" presumably because of the absorption of neutrons by some unknown impurity. So, in December 1940 Fermi and Szilard met with Herbert G. MacPherson and V. C. Hamister at National Carbon to discuss the possible existence of impurities in graphite. During this conversation it became clear that minute quantities of boron impurities were the source of the problem.
"
This is why the German's used heavy water instead of graphite as a neutron moderator, which made it much harder to build a reactor. Their early reactors consisted of concentric spheres of heavy water and uranium powder. This was an unfortunate combination, as uranium powder ignites on contact with water. Leaks caused explosions on two separate occasions [0].
In contrast, the first allied nuclear reactor was a literal pile of uranium and graphite on a squash court.
[0] The Bastard Brigade (great book on all of this)
Sounds like a good time travel story: the mission is to go back in time and plant a single uranium cube, to be found ~80 years hence, to convince people that the German bomb project was doomed so that– ahh, but let's not spoil it! :)
TomJansen 5 hours ago [-]
So that WW2 had to go on for an extra 2/3 years?
xbmcuser 2 hours ago [-]
Germans had already surrendered and the Japanese were going to surrender as Russians now were able to move their force against Japan before the nuclear bombs were used. They were used to test the bombs and make sure no such war happens again specially the 2nd Bomb on Nagasaki that was used a few days after they bombed Hiroshima.
defrost 2 hours ago [-]
> They were used to test the bombs and make sure no such war happens again
The two cities were already on a "to be bombed" list and were the 73rd and 74th Japanese cities to be utterly destroyed by bombing.
So, Yes - they were literally used to test the bombs.
The "and make sure no such war happens again" is more of a post WWII retcon of the Cold War era.
rightnutwingjob 1 hours ago [-]
In all likelihood, the two nuclear bombs killed fewer people than the bombing that otherwise would have occurred.
defrost 1 hours ago [-]
Really?
They certainly killed less people than the bombing that had already occurred - the destruction of Tokyo alone likely killed more people than either atomic bomb.
There's no real consensus in the alternative history conjecture space, and no way to resolve the theories floated, Gar Alperovitz (for one example) made the argument that
* that Japan was already defeated at the time the decision to use the bomb was made, and that US intelligence already knew this;
* that Japan had been suing for peace and was ready to surrender without an invasion;
* that the real reason the bomb was used was so to demonstrate its power to the Soviet Union, in an attempt to exert more influence on them in the postwar;
* and that Japanese Emperor’s surrender statement invoked the bomb only as a politically-acceptable “excuse” for his people, when actually he surrendered primarily because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
This is alternative history, not real history. Remember, there was an attempted coup even after the first bomb to prolong the war. The Japanese leadership at the time were very zealous verging on religious zeal. One of the things that got them to eventually give up was a captured US fighter pilot that (under threat of death) told the Japanese that the US had 100s of atomic bombs. This was a lie but he didn't know that and just was trying to get the insane intelligence agent to not cut his head off (literally). There were other factors too. The USSR invading Manchuria for example. Also the US was in the process of ringing the home islands with 50 fleet carriers (the big ones, 50kt displacement) which would have been able to bomb Japan at will. Even with all of this, there was a significant faction of Japanese leadership who wanted to fight on.
These claims are more about politics than anything. Its an attempt to retcon history to vilify the US. The Japanese had never been invaded and that was a huge point of pride. They were training the civilians for a guerrilla war. Just because you can find a person in the Japanese government who wanted to surrender at that point (and there were) doesn't mean that's the decision that would have been taken.
PS That 3rd point is especially specious...if it were true, no 2nd bomb would have been used.
PPS Stuff like this is why historians don't like nor will engage with hypotheticals or the alternative history folks. Its clearly politically motivated, not a good faith attempt to understand history.
fc417fc802 34 minutes ago [-]
> Its an attempt to retcon history to vilify the US.
An attempt to vilify ... the side that eagerly deployed nuclear weapons on civilian targets? I'm from the US and I'm not someone who is blind to pragmatism but your argument here just seems completely absurd to me. We clearly committed an atrocity with somewhere between minimal to no legitimate justification.
Then again, after seeing the adjacent comment about avoiding soviet involvement it occurs to me that perhaps we inadvertently did them a favor in a roundabout way. Japan probably would have lost a lot more than the kuril islands otherwise.
nickff 27 minutes ago [-]
Where did you get the idea that the USA was “eager” to deploy the atomic bomb?
>Stimson wrote in his diary afterwards that after his briefing, Truman felt “the terrible responsibility that such destruction placed upon us here and himself.” [1]
[1] “Memorandum of Conference with the President, August 8, 1945 at 10:45am,” in Stimson diary (8 August 1945), Henry Lewis Stimson Papers (MS 465), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
The USSR declared war on Japan on August 8th, as part of a secret agreement with the West. The US knowing this, first nuked Japan on the 6th and then again on the 9th. It's hard not to see 'us' as trying to force a surrender before the USSR could get significantly involved. Why? Because territories in WW2 were split up in significant part based on who conquered which part. Hence East Germany going to the USSR and West Germany going the the West. Thanks to the US getting a quick surrender from Japan, the USSR was able to be completely excluded from the following occupation of Japan.
If any documents were ever created about this debate, they've probably been destroyed, and those involved have taken it to the grave with themselves. So I suppose technically we can never know for sure. But I think the cynical view is far more well supported. Or at least I think the cynical aspects were the majority of the logic behind it. And it was not only about control of Japan but also about sending a message to the USSR as the US undoubtedly saw the outlines of a new West-East world order emerging after WW2. And all the way up until the 80s [1] our dominant political philosophy was that we could win by intimidation and demonstrations of force, nuclear in particular.
------------
Wow, loving LLMs when digging into topics now a days. GPT was able to direct me to Truman's diary entries which are public record. [2] I take back the weasel wording above. Truman himself was quite clear on his intention and desires:
"Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
> Why? Because territories in WW2 were split up in significant part based on who conquered which part. Hence East Germany going to the USSR and West Germany going the the West.
That was particularly painful for Churchill to accept at the end when he had to hand over Poland to Stalin. Poland was the reason Britain officially entered WW2 in 1939
> We and France are to-day, in fulfillment of our obligations, going to the aid of Poland, who is so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack upon her people. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace, but a situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel themselves safe had become intolerable. And now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage
(Chamberlain, Sep 3, 1939)
thisisauserid 3 days ago [-]
This is central to the plot of D: Heavy Water, Neal Stephenson's second installment of the Bomb Light Trilogy.
the__alchemist 6 hours ago [-]
Holy shit this is out? I went to the book tour for Polostan. Ordered; ty!
mjmvisser 5 hours ago [-]
Enjoy, it’s riveting!
mauvehaus 4 hours ago [-]
Since Norsk Hydro was mentioned in the article, I have to mention in turn one of my favorite books ever: The Winter Fortress by Neil Bascomb. It's the true story of the Norwegian commando sabotage of the heavy water plant. Short version: after a failed attempt by the English, some locals who'd fled to England and received training parachuted in, blew it up, and then skied to neutral Sweden. Legends, the lot of them: they froze their balls off and didn't have enough to eat, but they pulled it off.
Every time I re-read it, it makes me want to take up nordic skiing. It is absolutely up there on my list of greatest true stories ever told with Touching the Void, The Emerald Mile, and a select few others.
I am so excited to read this; thank you! I've reread The Winter Fortress every year or two since the first time.
mk_stjames 22 minutes ago [-]
Little extra fun fact since Norsk Hydro was mentioned in the article and now you've mentioned it again-
Norsk Hydro was founded as a hydro power plant + nitrogen fertilizer production company (the nitrogen production needing lots of electricity, and the hydro plant to provide said energy...) but around WWII, pivoted to light metals, and built aluminum and magnesium factories with German company IG Farben, in order to support them in the war, as they were partially under Nazi occupation by then. That all went south but then after the war they kept on with the aluminum business.
The company went on to become experts in aluminum extrusions, and were then contracted not just for the base metal but also to manufacture the first bonded aluminum bare chassis for the S1 Lotus Elise in 1995, which went on to be the basis for the Tesla Roadster.
qnleigh 2 hours ago [-]
This story is also covered in The Bastard Brigade, which details many other Allied attempts to sabotage the Germany nuclear program. Fun fact: Heisenberg was close to being assassinated by a famous baseball player (Mo Berg). Very entertaining and interesting book.
hunterpayne 34 minutes ago [-]
There's a movie about that which focuses on Berg who was a pretty impressive person. He was a MLB player at a time when that was the biggest sport in the US but the players made next to nothing. He also spoke 10 languages fluently and spent most of the war translating intelligence intercepts. Supposedly he found Heisenberg but judged that he wasn't a threat and so didn't kill him. That's the story anyway, no idea how true that is.
testing22321 4 hours ago [-]
Nordic skiing is great.
As a snowboarder I was reluctant, but got into it a few years ago. We pull our young daughter in a chariot with skis about 10km into a little cabin by a river with a wood stove.
Cheese, salami and hot chocolate and we make the return loop. Three evenings a week all winter long is a great way to spend time outside.
4 hours ago [-]
Beijinger 4 hours ago [-]
"As the German scientists were racing against time,"
The Germans tried to build a reactor, not a bomb, or am I wrong?
beloch 2 hours ago [-]
Building a reactor was a step on the way to building a bomb.
Two isotopes were used for fission bombs in WWII: Uranium 235 and Plutonium. More than 99% of naturally occurring Uranium is Uranium 238, which will not sustain a chain reaction necessary for a bomb. There are only trace amounts of Plutonium in nature, but it can be produced in reactors that use U238 for fuel. So, to make a fission bomb you need to either separate U235 from U238 or build a reactor to create Plutonium.
It's worth noting that the shortage of heavy water was no accident. The Allies sabotaged the heavy water production facility in Norway that Germany relied on[1].
In the context of the time, those US scientists that built a reactor were all in for nuclear energy and absolutely 100% did not think that a nuclear weapon was economically feasible.
"Economically feasible" meaning maybe, perhaps, theoretically possible but even if so astronomically expensive in time, money, and physical resources.
It took the UK/CA/AU Tube Alloys group to find ways to make a weapon more practical, and multiple letters, attempts, and a one on one press the flesh tour to convince the US nuclear types that a weapon was both possible and achievable.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
If you go to the Los Alamos Science Museum you can see an original letter from Albert Einstein where he proposed that a nuclear bomb could be fit on a ship and sailed into harbor in 1938. A ship-sized nuclear bomb was not of interest to President Roosevelt at the time for a likely good reason. It's only when the UK realized that it wasn't a ship size. It was something that you could drop from a conventional airplane bomber of the day that the US became interested.
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
Seen it, read it, and aware of why it was ignored at the time - the ability to make such a weapon, as relayed by Einstein, was a hearsay tale of speculation.
Some time later Mark Oliphant visited the US in person and walked key people through a circles and arrows on chalkboard breakdown of how such a thing would be actually possible.
lazide 3 hours ago [-]
It was also a failure of imagination. A ship sized tsar bomba at the time would still be quite interesting - armor the ship like a Iowa class (or more), and give it an automated navigator (very doable at the time, plus or minus a mile or two), and it’s a war ender.
gonzalohm 3 hours ago [-]
And sail the ship into Berlin?
lazide 3 hours ago [-]
Wait until the wind is right, add some of the right contaminants, and you wouldn’t need to do so to poison all of Germany for at least a generation.
Also, Tokyo Bay.
For the Axis powers, it would be an even easier sell of course.
At least if any of them could believe - or even imagine - that it actually could exist or be as devastating as it was of course. And frankly, unless you saw the footage of an actual Tsar Bomba, how could anyone?
defrost 2 hours ago [-]
Footage of the actual Tsar Bomba has no scale, detonating as it did high up in the atmosphere - for anyone watching it might have been a really big or really small explosion.
For the first bomb ever made to immediately jump to Tsar Bomba size, or for it to utilise an understanding of fallout and contaminants that didn't exist prior to the Castle Bravo tests seems ... unlikely.
chasil 3 hours ago [-]
The plutonium bomb was vastly more difficult to design than the uranium version.
Were both judged infeasible for different reasons? Perhaps uranium purification challenges and the implosion required for plutonium?
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
In general the take was that human created nuclear weapons were infeasible (regardless of design) because of what was thought to be the barrier to cross to achieve a chain reaction.
The Frisch–Peierls memorandum changed that understanding ... provided that reading of the FP-memorandum was convincingly conveyed to people that made things happen, what Einstein put to paper (and was ignored) and that Oliphant pushed through in person.
Little Boy on Hiroshima was a gun design, a grossly inefficient McGyver that used some 64 kilograms of enriched uranium to successfully convert less than half a gram to energy.
Fat Man on Nagasaki was an implosion device - a necessary design change due to simply not having enough uranium or an enrichment pipeline to sustain the needs of a gun design.
The first device detonated, at Trinity in the USofA, was an implosion device, created to test the more difficult design.
Further, there was an abandoned / discarded "Thin Man" device IIRC.
These were all alternative implementations that were pursued after the FP-memorandum was pushed about to make the case that weapons were apparently possible rather than not yet achievable - the prevailing belief in the US prior to Oliphant doing the rounds.
rjsw 2 hours ago [-]
Trinity and Fat Man were plutonium bombs, they needed to be implosion designs because it was realized that a gun wouldn't work using plutonium [1].
As I said above - and perhaps you might like to try a primary source rather than wikipedia ?
These weapons were, however, as different as their monikers imply. Little Boy was a uranium, gun-type weapon, whereas Fat Man was a plutonium, implosion-style weapon. Two types were needed because there was only enough uranium for one gun-type weapon, and the U.S. government knew it would need to make more than one weapon.
Clickbait antidote: The cubes revealed only that the uranium was a bit less dense than textbook values because of tiny internal voids.
That measurement fed a computer model, but if I'm reading the article right, most of the work was actually based on wartime records on heavy water and graphite. Anyway, the model showed they would have needed twice the uranium and heavy water they actually had.
hunterpayne 28 minutes ago [-]
It should be noted that they didn't have the supplies for the design they tried. There were designs that could have worked with what they had. And its unlikely that during the war anyone knew exactly which designs the Germans tried and even less chance that someone would have known if a specific novel design would have worked. Its an interesting detail but largely irrelevant.
Its also suspected Heisenberg didn't want the design to work (its the given reason why he wasn't killed by Berg). But it was still a reasonable possibility during the war that the Germans could have made it work.
Crunchified 3 hours ago [-]
IIRC, US Colonel Hogan got Luftwaffe Colonel Klink to drink a bunch of that heavy water as a cure for baldness as a truckful of it transited through Stalag 13.
Phew, that underground mission was more important than I thought!
AndrewKemendo 7 hours ago [-]
Awesome article and interesting to see Heisenberg get it wrong. It really was a perfect situation for the US because we could get all the radioactive material with little issue.
A clean reminder that logistics is everything.
Also cool that the author is married to Sean Carroll.
failbuffer 4 hours ago [-]
It mega-helped that Edgar Sengier saw the importance of uranium ore and shipped 1200 tons of it out of the Congo to New York before the U.S. government even realized it would need it.
1970-01-01 4 hours ago [-]
We always knew they weren't close because Moe Berg was going to shoot Heisenberg during his lectures in Zurich if he suspected they were.
mmooss 6 hours ago [-]
Relatively recently, recordings were released of conversations between captured Nazi scientists held at a house in the UK (I think I saw it on HN). They were housed together and the house was bugged purposely to capture casual conversation for intelligence purposes.
IIRC one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible. Enough talented, high-ego people could not work together on project that large and demanding.
Also, IIRC, when the Hiroshima bomb was announced, many couldn't believe it. They had been working on a power generation reactor as a first step - though I'm not sure the OP fits that story?
Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?
ZnerflBerp 5 hours ago [-]
The sheer economic costs of the manhattan project were prohibitive to a nation like Germany, even if they'd managed to build a functional project team.
(how many nations had 14,700 tons of silver lying around)
fooker 5 hours ago [-]
A nation like Germany on the cusp of losing a war sure. The opposite scenario of Germany controlling all the resources of Europe and Africa is a scary proposition.
jcranmer 4 hours ago [-]
> The opposite scenario of Germany controlling all the resources of Europe and Africa is a scary proposition.
It shouldn't be. In WW2, in 1942, Germany did essentially control all of Europe, save only the UK. And at the height of its power, Germany's vast industrial machine produced roughly on par with the UK. Not the entire British Empire, just UK.
It turns out that the Nazis were complete incompetent buffoons when it came to economic management. Their grand master plan for Europe was to overrun the east, not for some vast rich treasure trove of minerals to fuel an industrial juggernaut, but to plop down more homesteads to feed their inefficient agricultural economy. And even if the Nazis had a grand plan to become an industrial juggernaut, they still faced the prospect of the industrial juggernaut par excellence, the US.
lazide 3 hours ago [-]
The US at the start of WW2 was primarily an inefficient agrarian economy.
The war machine is what changed that - that and not being reachable by enemy bombers, and hence not bombed to bits.
Germany started middling and ended destroyed.
hunterpayne 3 minutes ago [-]
Complete nonsense. The US became the largest economy in 1870 (70 years before the start of the war). And in 1875 it became the 1st country to start using crude oil. Even in 1940, the US exported 75% of the worlds oil. Most of the main directions of advance by Germany and Japan were trying to get access to the 15% of the worlds oil they could get to (Romania, Baku and Indonesia). The US economy was 3x the size of Germany's (#2 by GDP) and was the majority of the world's industrial and manufacturing.
Let's try this another way, during WWII the US built warship tonnage equivalent to all the rest of the world's navies combined...in just 1943. Then the US did that again in 1944. At one point, the US hit a Japanese fleet with 17 fleet carriers at once. Keep in mind the Japanese only built 9 fleet carriers total and that was considered the most powerful fleet in the world at the beginning of the war.
jcranmer 1 hours ago [-]
No, that's categorically not true!
Germany required like 10 percentage points more of its labor force in agriculture in 1939 than the US did, and that still wasn't enough to make Germany self-sufficient in food; the US was of course one of the major food exporters in the world (in neither case were agriculture workers more than a third of the population, I should note). US agriculture also had largely mechanized in the 1910s, albeit many farms did switch back to draft animals during the 1920s and 1930s due to the collapse in agricultural prices, making animal feed grown on your own farm cheaper than buying fuel for the tractor. Europe agriculture largely didn't mechanize until the 1950s, after WW2.
dboreham 5 hours ago [-]
I don't believe the silver was strictly necessary. Copper windings would have worked for the calutron. Silver was used because copper was not as easily available at the time. But the point is valid. The project was originally British, moved to the US for economic reasons.
throwaway81523 5 hours ago [-]
The silver bus bars in the magnetic separators were kind of a stunt, if that's what you're thinking of.
jcranmer 5 hours ago [-]
> Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?
From the Farm Hall transcripts, it seems that Heisenberg was "happy" to have been working on a reactor and not a bomb, but from context, this seems less like an objection to the principle of working on a weapon and more like gratitude that the Allies couldn't hang him for working on an atomic bomb. Recall that the conversations took place after Germany had been utterly defeated and the scientists were prisoners at the mercy of the British--prisoners in a gilded cage, but prisoners nonetheless.
kragen 5 hours ago [-]
> one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible
This makes me think about the pervasive classification and paranoia in the "defense" contractors supporting the US Department of "Defense". Any information that's classified, even at the lowest "confidential" level, is only provided on a "need-to-know" basis. And unclassified projects are sort of looked down on, so there's a perverse incentive to classify more than necessary. This "secretive, isolationist approach" seems like it probably prevents a lot of groups from "sharing information or resources", in the article's words (though it concludes that wasn't the biggest problem facing the German effort).
When sharing classified information that someone might not need to know might be a crime, and might get your clearance pulled even if it's not, the incentives run strongly counter to sharing information. Consequently, I confidently claim that there are very, very few people in a position to serendipitously make significant discoveries that involve combining two or three different classified facts.
(I don't actually know this, because I don't know any classified facts.)
Maybe this is part of the sclerosis that causes the US defense-industrial complex to "basically produce useless junk", in the words of Les Earnest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ych6pvLMKCU), and which prompts Sergey Tovkach to say, "There isn’t a single Western drone that’s proven itself effective in this conflict." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM). Maybe that's why Russian propaganda in 02024 reported that Ukraine had to withdraw the USA-made M1A1 tanks far from the front (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCIN-t3VxJ0).
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
Not to take away from your comment, but to clarify: That's not the paranoia the Nazi scientists meant. They meant fear of the SS, being spied on, being stabbed in the back by a co-worker in a power struggle, fear for the families, etc.
kragen 16 minutes ago [-]
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the paranoia was similar in the two cases. I appreciate the clarification.
brians 4 hours ago [-]
Or look at it the other way: having seen what assembled scientists can do, we separated them, gave them an Orwellian environment, and slept easy.
See Anathem for more on this.
insom 3 hours ago [-]
A double Stephenson comments section :)
codedokode 1 hours ago [-]
Why famous scientists supported Nazi regime? Aren't scientists supposed to be smart?
" Fermi writes that "The results of this experiment was [sic] somewhat discouraging" presumably because of the absorption of neutrons by some unknown impurity. So, in December 1940 Fermi and Szilard met with Herbert G. MacPherson and V. C. Hamister at National Carbon to discuss the possible existence of impurities in graphite. During this conversation it became clear that minute quantities of boron impurities were the source of the problem. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_graphite
In contrast, the first allied nuclear reactor was a literal pile of uranium and graphite on a squash court.
[0] The Bastard Brigade (great book on all of this)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1
The two cities were already on a "to be bombed" list and were the 73rd and 74th Japanese cities to be utterly destroyed by bombing.
So, Yes - they were literally used to test the bombs.
The "and make sure no such war happens again" is more of a post WWII retcon of the Cold War era.
They certainly killed less people than the bombing that had already occurred - the destruction of Tokyo alone likely killed more people than either atomic bomb.
There's no real consensus in the alternative history conjecture space, and no way to resolve the theories floated, Gar Alperovitz (for one example) made the argument that
( in https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004FGMR3S )These claims are more about politics than anything. Its an attempt to retcon history to vilify the US. The Japanese had never been invaded and that was a huge point of pride. They were training the civilians for a guerrilla war. Just because you can find a person in the Japanese government who wanted to surrender at that point (and there were) doesn't mean that's the decision that would have been taken.
PS That 3rd point is especially specious...if it were true, no 2nd bomb would have been used. PPS Stuff like this is why historians don't like nor will engage with hypotheticals or the alternative history folks. Its clearly politically motivated, not a good faith attempt to understand history.
An attempt to vilify ... the side that eagerly deployed nuclear weapons on civilian targets? I'm from the US and I'm not someone who is blind to pragmatism but your argument here just seems completely absurd to me. We clearly committed an atrocity with somewhere between minimal to no legitimate justification.
Then again, after seeing the adjacent comment about avoiding soviet involvement it occurs to me that perhaps we inadvertently did them a favor in a roundabout way. Japan probably would have lost a lot more than the kuril islands otherwise.
>Stimson wrote in his diary afterwards that after his briefing, Truman felt “the terrible responsibility that such destruction placed upon us here and himself.” [1]
[1] “Memorandum of Conference with the President, August 8, 1945 at 10:45am,” in Stimson diary (8 August 1945), Henry Lewis Stimson Papers (MS 465), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
If any documents were ever created about this debate, they've probably been destroyed, and those involved have taken it to the grave with themselves. So I suppose technically we can never know for sure. But I think the cynical view is far more well supported. Or at least I think the cynical aspects were the majority of the logic behind it. And it was not only about control of Japan but also about sending a message to the USSR as the US undoubtedly saw the outlines of a new West-East world order emerging after WW2. And all the way up until the 80s [1] our dominant political philosophy was that we could win by intimidation and demonstrations of force, nuclear in particular.
------------
Wow, loving LLMs when digging into topics now a days. GPT was able to direct me to Truman's diary entries which are public record. [2] I take back the weasel wording above. Truman himself was quite clear on his intention and desires:
"Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
- President Harry S. Truman, July 18th 1945
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet#Impact
[2] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28466-document-47-trumans...
That was particularly painful for Churchill to accept at the end when he had to hand over Poland to Stalin. Poland was the reason Britain officially entered WW2 in 1939
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal
> We and France are to-day, in fulfillment of our obligations, going to the aid of Poland, who is so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack upon her people. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace, but a situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel themselves safe had become intolerable. And now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage
(Chamberlain, Sep 3, 1939)
Every time I re-read it, it makes me want to take up nordic skiing. It is absolutely up there on my list of greatest true stories ever told with Touching the Void, The Emerald Mile, and a select few others.
https://www.abebooks.com/Winter-Fortress-Epic-Mission-Sabota...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition
Norsk Hydro was founded as a hydro power plant + nitrogen fertilizer production company (the nitrogen production needing lots of electricity, and the hydro plant to provide said energy...) but around WWII, pivoted to light metals, and built aluminum and magnesium factories with German company IG Farben, in order to support them in the war, as they were partially under Nazi occupation by then. That all went south but then after the war they kept on with the aluminum business.
The company went on to become experts in aluminum extrusions, and were then contracted not just for the base metal but also to manufacture the first bonded aluminum bare chassis for the S1 Lotus Elise in 1995, which went on to be the basis for the Tesla Roadster.
As a snowboarder I was reluctant, but got into it a few years ago. We pull our young daughter in a chariot with skis about 10km into a little cabin by a river with a wood stove.
Cheese, salami and hot chocolate and we make the return loop. Three evenings a week all winter long is a great way to spend time outside.
The Germans tried to build a reactor, not a bomb, or am I wrong?
Two isotopes were used for fission bombs in WWII: Uranium 235 and Plutonium. More than 99% of naturally occurring Uranium is Uranium 238, which will not sustain a chain reaction necessary for a bomb. There are only trace amounts of Plutonium in nature, but it can be produced in reactors that use U238 for fuel. So, to make a fission bomb you need to either separate U235 from U238 or build a reactor to create Plutonium.
It's worth noting that the shortage of heavy water was no accident. The Allies sabotaged the heavy water production facility in Norway that Germany relied on[1].
________________________
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
"Economically feasible" meaning maybe, perhaps, theoretically possible but even if so astronomically expensive in time, money, and physical resources.
It took the UK/CA/AU Tube Alloys group to find ways to make a weapon more practical, and multiple letters, attempts, and a one on one press the flesh tour to convince the US nuclear types that a weapon was both possible and achievable.
Some time later Mark Oliphant visited the US in person and walked key people through a circles and arrows on chalkboard breakdown of how such a thing would be actually possible.
Also, Tokyo Bay.
For the Axis powers, it would be an even easier sell of course.
At least if any of them could believe - or even imagine - that it actually could exist or be as devastating as it was of course. And frankly, unless you saw the footage of an actual Tsar Bomba, how could anyone?
For the first bomb ever made to immediately jump to Tsar Bomba size, or for it to utilise an understanding of fallout and contaminants that didn't exist prior to the Castle Bravo tests seems ... unlikely.
Were both judged infeasible for different reasons? Perhaps uranium purification challenges and the implosion required for plutonium?
The Frisch–Peierls memorandum changed that understanding ... provided that reading of the FP-memorandum was convincingly conveyed to people that made things happen, what Einstein put to paper (and was ignored) and that Oliphant pushed through in person.
Little Boy on Hiroshima was a gun design, a grossly inefficient McGyver that used some 64 kilograms of enriched uranium to successfully convert less than half a gram to energy.
Fat Man on Nagasaki was an implosion device - a necessary design change due to simply not having enough uranium or an enrichment pipeline to sustain the needs of a gun design.
The first device detonated, at Trinity in the USofA, was an implosion device, created to test the more difficult design.
Further, there was an abandoned / discarded "Thin Man" device IIRC.
These were all alternative implementations that were pursued after the FP-memorandum was pushed about to make the case that weapons were apparently possible rather than not yet achievable - the prevailing belief in the US prior to Oliphant doing the rounds.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_Man_(nuclear_bomb)
That measurement fed a computer model, but if I'm reading the article right, most of the work was actually based on wartime records on heavy water and graphite. Anyway, the model showed they would have needed twice the uranium and heavy water they actually had.
Its also suspected Heisenberg didn't want the design to work (its the given reason why he wasn't killed by Berg). But it was still a reasonable possibility during the war that the Germans could have made it work.
Phew, that underground mission was more important than I thought!
A clean reminder that logistics is everything.
Also cool that the author is married to Sean Carroll.
IIRC one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible. Enough talented, high-ego people could not work together on project that large and demanding.
Also, IIRC, when the Hiroshima bomb was announced, many couldn't believe it. They had been working on a power generation reactor as a first step - though I'm not sure the OP fits that story?
Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?
(how many nations had 14,700 tons of silver lying around)
It shouldn't be. In WW2, in 1942, Germany did essentially control all of Europe, save only the UK. And at the height of its power, Germany's vast industrial machine produced roughly on par with the UK. Not the entire British Empire, just UK.
It turns out that the Nazis were complete incompetent buffoons when it came to economic management. Their grand master plan for Europe was to overrun the east, not for some vast rich treasure trove of minerals to fuel an industrial juggernaut, but to plop down more homesteads to feed their inefficient agricultural economy. And even if the Nazis had a grand plan to become an industrial juggernaut, they still faced the prospect of the industrial juggernaut par excellence, the US.
The war machine is what changed that - that and not being reachable by enemy bombers, and hence not bombed to bits.
Germany started middling and ended destroyed.
Let's try this another way, during WWII the US built warship tonnage equivalent to all the rest of the world's navies combined...in just 1943. Then the US did that again in 1944. At one point, the US hit a Japanese fleet with 17 fleet carriers at once. Keep in mind the Japanese only built 9 fleet carriers total and that was considered the most powerful fleet in the world at the beginning of the war.
Germany required like 10 percentage points more of its labor force in agriculture in 1939 than the US did, and that still wasn't enough to make Germany self-sufficient in food; the US was of course one of the major food exporters in the world (in neither case were agriculture workers more than a third of the population, I should note). US agriculture also had largely mechanized in the 1910s, albeit many farms did switch back to draft animals during the 1920s and 1930s due to the collapse in agricultural prices, making animal feed grown on your own farm cheaper than buying fuel for the tractor. Europe agriculture largely didn't mechanize until the 1950s, after WW2.
From the Farm Hall transcripts, it seems that Heisenberg was "happy" to have been working on a reactor and not a bomb, but from context, this seems less like an objection to the principle of working on a weapon and more like gratitude that the Allies couldn't hang him for working on an atomic bomb. Recall that the conversations took place after Germany had been utterly defeated and the scientists were prisoners at the mercy of the British--prisoners in a gilded cage, but prisoners nonetheless.
This makes me think about the pervasive classification and paranoia in the "defense" contractors supporting the US Department of "Defense". Any information that's classified, even at the lowest "confidential" level, is only provided on a "need-to-know" basis. And unclassified projects are sort of looked down on, so there's a perverse incentive to classify more than necessary. This "secretive, isolationist approach" seems like it probably prevents a lot of groups from "sharing information or resources", in the article's words (though it concludes that wasn't the biggest problem facing the German effort).
When sharing classified information that someone might not need to know might be a crime, and might get your clearance pulled even if it's not, the incentives run strongly counter to sharing information. Consequently, I confidently claim that there are very, very few people in a position to serendipitously make significant discoveries that involve combining two or three different classified facts.
(I don't actually know this, because I don't know any classified facts.)
Maybe this is part of the sclerosis that causes the US defense-industrial complex to "basically produce useless junk", in the words of Les Earnest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ych6pvLMKCU), and which prompts Sergey Tovkach to say, "There isn’t a single Western drone that’s proven itself effective in this conflict." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM). Maybe that's why Russian propaganda in 02024 reported that Ukraine had to withdraw the USA-made M1A1 tanks far from the front (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCIN-t3VxJ0).
See Anathem for more on this.