Uranium cubes reveal why the German nuclear project failed
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
" 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. "
The Germans tried to build a reactor, not a bomb, or am I wrong?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.