WWII Hero Credits Luck and Chance in Foiling Hitler’s Nuclear Ambitions | Hacker News Reader

WWII Hero Credits Luck and Chance in Foiling Hitler’s Nuclear Ambitions

nytimes.com

For anyone interested in the history of nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, there is an excellent book by Richard Rhodes called The Making of the Atomic Bomb. He follows the scientists who made the discoveries leading up to nuclear fission and development of the bomb. His research is thorough and his storytelling engaging. The author does a great job of developing the characters and getting the reader excited about what could otherwise be dry descriptions of physics experiments.

Great book, and his followup book Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb is equally good.

Seconding the recommendation. One of the finest non-fiction books ever written.

Cool story, but it seems like a bit much to credit that raid with foiling Hitler's nuclear ambitions. From what history I've read of it, it seems more important that not only were may Jewish scientists lost to the Allies due to Nazi persecution, but even further, many of their ideas were discredited because they came from Jews.

In order for a Nazi nuclear program to have any real potential, enough top leaders had to take the idea of it seriously, and there was plenty going against it - not only how radical the idea seemed and that it was seen as having come from the Jews, but just how much work it would take to actually carry out and how strained their resources were with all of the other wars they started. It seems like, as far as getting a budget priority comparable to the American project, they were way, way behind.

It wasn't just the Nazis that thought like this, the Communists did too http://history.stackexchange.com/q/14699/4449

*Axis

> While long celebrated by foreign, particularly British, filmmakers, the exploits of Mr. Ronneberg and nine other Norwegians involved in thwarting the Nazi nuclear project became widely known in Norway only this year, when NRK, the state broadcaster, ran “The Heavy Water War,” a six-episode mini-series that became a national sensation.

* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3280150/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heavy_Water_War

* http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/aug/06/the-sabo...

* http://nordicnoir.tv/news/the-saboteurs-arrive-this-friday-o...

"M.R.D. Foot, the official historian of Britain’s wartime sabotage and intelligence service, the Special Operations Executive, which organized Mr. Ronneberg’s mission, described the raid on a Norsk Hydro plant producing heavy water in Nazi-occupied Norway as a “coup” that “changed the course of the war” and deserved the “gratitude of humanity.”"

Grouse team, tough mothers.

In 2003, Ray Mears and members of the Royal Marines [0] and Norway Winter Warfare specialists, jumped, static line with a quarter of a tonne of full kit into the Hardangervidda (Hardanger plateau) to re-create the key elements of this raid. You can watch how difficult this feat was,[1] even by modern standars.

[0] Royal Marine Mountain Leaders, Arctic & mountain warfare Cardre ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Leader_Training_Cadre

[1] "Ray Mears' Real Heroes Of Telemark S01 E01" ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDAh5bLOrtM

The Nazi nuclear bomb project was always non-viable because of the cost - Germany just didn't have the industrial resources to build a bomb. The Germans knew this and so didn't really make much of an effort to build a bomb.

And not much of a delivery mechanism either.

The V-3 might have made a good one for hitting London. Or the Fw 200 Condor.

There were ideas for submarine launched V2 rockets as well as the Amerika Bomber [1], the He-177 could have dropped a bomb on London.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_Bomber

Fantasy devices, never likely to have been built. The Nazis were good at making designs on paper that would never have been produced.

Sure. The V2 launcher wasn't too complicated, just a container that would be towed behind a submarine.

Not industrial resources, but an amazing point about money: "The German V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) cost the equivalent of around USD $40 billion (2015 dollars), which was 50 per cent more than the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket#Assessment

It's also worth to note that pretty much any German scientist that was even remotely capable of figuring out how to build the bomb didn't want to actually build one. Heisenberg and his team were working on reactors and cyclotrons and intentionally killed any possible weapon program internally.

Heisenberg made strange claims after the war that he intentionally tried to derail the Nazi bomb after the war, but on closer inspection, these claims don't hold water. It's not clear that German scientists were ever even close to the principles behind building a functional bomb.

There is a great play about this, 'copenhagen' by Michael Frayn.

I always thought the idea of German scientists sandbagging because they didn't want to give the Nazis the bomb was interesting. I'm not sure where I read it, but I read somewhere that all through the war, they made the numbers out to be that a bomb was a practical impossibility, like the critical mass for a chain reaction being on the order of tons instead of kilograms. Despite this, when they were told of the successful American use of the fission bomb, one of them quickly sketched out how the bomb had to have worked.

I haven't read anything solid on it either way, but it's compelling to think that some of the most critical people held off on doing their best because they didn't want Hitler to have it. I do remember reading that it was pretty well established that the German foreign intelligence agency was doing just that - phoning it in because they couldn't stand Hitler.

Off-Topic

Sorry for being a spoiler, but I scan every day through hacker news to find some interesting stuff about programming, IT and startups. I'm tired of all this nytimes.com spam and low carb diet stuff.

I think you're wrong about this article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

That's been in the guidelines for many years.

Here's a recent post from a mod: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606151

> That's emphatically wrong, and the most important thing to understand about HN. Any subject is on topic as long as it is intellectually interesting. As pg pointed out when he created this site, good hackers are interested in more than startups and computing. There's a reason why the site guidelines lead with that.

As DanBC explain the on-topic specter is wider, I think this is not off-topic, but I also think that there are too much stories from popular newspapers.

An important detail to help the community is to upvote the good stories. That makes them float and is a small incentive for the author and the submitter. Any upvote is small, but it helps to keep the front page full of interesting stories. Go to the front page and upvote 5 interesting stories!

A more difficult task is to find some stories that are about a subject you know and write an interesting comment. It's more difficult, and you have to wait until you have to say something relevant. (Pro tip: don't write oneliners, because they are usually downvoted.)

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