Scientists Probe Whether Uranium Cubes in US Lab Were Produced by Nazis (nwaonline.com) 215
The New York Times reports:
Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland are working to determine whether three uranium cubes they have in their possession were produced by Germany's failed nuclear program during World War II. The answer could lead to more questions, such as whether the Nazis might have had enough uranium to create a critical reaction. And if the Nazis had been successful in building an atomic bomb, what would that have meant for the war...?
The Nazis produced 1,000 to 1,200 cubes, about half of which were confiscated by the Allied forces, said Jon Schwantes, the project's principal investigator. "The whereabouts of most all of those cubes is unknown today," Schwantes said, adding that "most likely those cubes were folded into our weapons stockpile."
Two history professors speculate in the article that the technology ultimately would not have changed outcome of the war. Kate Brown, who teaches environmental and Cold War history at MIT, argues that without planes that could fly long distances without being spotted, "the only target I can think of would be London." Brown said that while a Nazi bomb would not have had much of an impact on the war, the Nazis set the stage for the Cold War simply by trying to build one. The Soviets, who were then U.S. allies in defeating Germany, were aware that the Americans took this uranium out of the country "right out from under them," she said. "That becomes a real engine for suspicion that sets up the Cold War, almost immediately," Brown said.
The project's principle investigator tells the Times they're planning to use a process called radiochronometry to date the cubes by measuring how much their uranium has decayed.
"We do believe they are from Nazi Germany's nuclear program, but to have scientific evidence of that is really what we're attempting to do."
The Nazis produced 1,000 to 1,200 cubes, about half of which were confiscated by the Allied forces, said Jon Schwantes, the project's principal investigator. "The whereabouts of most all of those cubes is unknown today," Schwantes said, adding that "most likely those cubes were folded into our weapons stockpile."
Two history professors speculate in the article that the technology ultimately would not have changed outcome of the war. Kate Brown, who teaches environmental and Cold War history at MIT, argues that without planes that could fly long distances without being spotted, "the only target I can think of would be London." Brown said that while a Nazi bomb would not have had much of an impact on the war, the Nazis set the stage for the Cold War simply by trying to build one. The Soviets, who were then U.S. allies in defeating Germany, were aware that the Americans took this uranium out of the country "right out from under them," she said. "That becomes a real engine for suspicion that sets up the Cold War, almost immediately," Brown said.
The project's principle investigator tells the Times they're planning to use a process called radiochronometry to date the cubes by measuring how much their uranium has decayed.
"We do believe they are from Nazi Germany's nuclear program, but to have scientific evidence of that is really what we're attempting to do."
Japanese Navy nuclear bomb program (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Japanese Navy nuclear bomb program (Score:4, Insightful)
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It is not a crackpot theory.
It is known that Japan had a nuclear weapons research program.
It is realistic that they had a timetable that said 1945, but it likely would have taken years more to build actual bombs. They may very well have had a successful test, but it would likely have used all the materiel they had. And even if they finished one, two, three, four, or ten bombs, it would have taken them years to threaten the US mainland with them. By the end of the war they had almost no access to oil.
Germany
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For a Nazi nuclear bomb to have mattered it would need to have been combined with their long range bomber programme that was targeting the US east coast. They were planning to use a rocket powered aircraft in an orbital flight, although in practice actually getting back to Germany after deploying the weapon would have been difficult.
Another option was to use a submarine launched aircraft, but it's not clear if they could have actually managed it by that stage of the war.
The thing that could really have chan
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I'm pretty sure a Nazi bomb would have mattered a great deal at the Battle of the Bulge, or to break lines outside of Moscow as a tactical device rather than a strategic city-buster.
Being able to instantly smash thousands of opposing soldiers and all their equipment, gun emplacements, cover, etc. and then exploiting the absolute chaos that erupts afterward would have made a sizable difference if executed at the right time.
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Can you cite a source on that? Other than some anonymous post by someone trying to discredit actual scientific work.
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Why would admitting that the claims of non-scientific idiots exist "discredit actual scientific work?"
And, do you feel extra-sciency when you say things like that?
You can check the news and find out that two people were recently hospitalized in Texas for Ivermectin overdoses. Seems good evidence that those two believed the claim!
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Well good thing that all those "knowledgeable people" kept that data to themselves instead of publishing it in a reputable medical journal. After all, we wouldn't want just any shitheel doctor to be able to save lives - that shit needs to be kept proprietary for as long as possible!
What kind of dumbass logic are you trying to sell?
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You mean like all these studies?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
It is still being studied, it is not known that it works or doesn't, but some have had good outcomes by using it.
Sorry, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is claiming that the whole reason the cold war started is because the US took Uranium cubes manufactured by the Nazis?
Looks like some folks trying to make a career for themselves are not above resorting to some writing some serious fiction.
Re:Sorry, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Another oddball claim is this:
Two history professors speculate in the article that the technology ultimately would not have changed outcome of the war. Kate Brown, who teaches environmental and Cold War history at MIT, argues that without planes that could fly long distances without being spotted, "the only target I can think of would be London."
The Nazis could have delivered bombs by uboat, and devastated English ports or any East coast US city with a harbor. A nuclear mine wouldn't have quite the same devastation as an air burst, but would still wreak havoc. Consider the Beirut warehouse explosion, which was much smaller than Little Boy's blast. These historians also don't seem to consider that nukes could be used tactically. That's probably because no one has ever actually used them that way, but I suspect that's largely a historical accident. WW2 would certainly have been the time when they would have been used that way, if ever.
A nuclear bomb may not have allowed the Nazis to WIN the war, of course, unless it was developed and deployed very early. But it may have prevented them from LOSING. That is, it may have forced an indefinite stalemate, because any concentrated allied force would be in danger of instant annihilation from a single bomb. Even the Russians would have been unable to advance in the face of such a deterrent.
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Problem with submarine delivery is that by the time they would have had a bomb submarine detection had got pretty good and ports were well defended. Even out in the open sea it wasn't safe for u-boats, let alone in shallow areas with a lot of traffic. Getting a mine close enough to be effective would have been extremely risky, and it's unlikely that they would have had the material to mass produce them.
I think the most likely delivery method would have been a modified V2 rocket.
You might be right about a st
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In times of war, the US controls its borders with relative success. During WWII there were some minor attacks on the west coast of the US, which were detected and repelled. It wasn't really practical to get useful land units into Mexico and then advance them across the southern border given the logistics involved. Today it would be much easier to get the necessary units there, but it would also be much easier to detect them with overflight.
There's no good reason to protect the southern border of the US more
Re:Sorry, what? (Score:4, Informative)
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Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland are working to determine whether three uranium cubes they have in their possession were produced by Germany's failed nuclear program during World War II. The answer could lead to more questions, such as whether the Nazis might have had enough uranium to create a critical reaction. And if the Nazis had been successful in building an atomic bomb, what would that have meant for the war...?
Yes, no, no, and N/A. Sheesh, all of this has been known for decades, why is the NYT writing about it now? For anyone not familiar with it, Google "Uranverein" or "Haigerloch".
on the dark side of the moon. (Score:2)
You must be suffering from Brain Damage
Deliver it? (Score:3)
That loony was mad enough that he would have blown up Berlin.
"If I can't have it, nobody can!"
Re:Deliver it? (Score:5, Informative)
2. The article makes the terminally dumb assumption that the only way to reach USA mainland was an aircraft.The author forgot that most of the nuclear duty by the Soviets in the early days of the cold war as by submarines with nuclear tipped cruise missiles. Germans had all the technology to get a similar package together. So if they had a nuke, they could nuke Wash DC or NY any time they like - a scaled up V1 from a sub offshore. Perfectly adequate for the job and perfectly capable of getting to target as US air defence patrols were practically inexistent at that point.
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Unlikely. Their subs were just too damn small to carry something like that. Do remember that the average U-Boat was about 1/3 the size of the average American boat back then. And American boats were none too roomy....
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Germans had all the technology to get a similar package together. So if they had a nuke, they could nuke Wash DC or NY any time they like - a scaled up V1 from a sub offshore. Perfectly adequate for the job and perfectly capable of getting to target as US air defence patrols were practically inexistent at that point.
You mean like this [nationalinterest.org]?
Then again, Germany did consider dispersing radioacive sand over New York [warhistoryonline.com] and other cities, if they could somehow reach the East coast. They even considered the development o
Somehow reach the east coast? (Score:3)
Then again, Germany did consider dispersing radioacive sand over New York and other cities, if they could somehow reach the East coast.
Somehow reach the East Coast? Their submarines were blasting shipping all up and down the US east coast for much of the war.
Also: Nukes work just fine if you set them off under water. They get dropped as bombs because they can blast down and set fire to a wider area that way. But US east-coast cities are dense targets. A nuclear torpedo or delayed-action mine, delivered
It is fortunate that Hitler killed the Jews (Score:2)
The USA atomic program was largely driven by Jews that fled persecution in Germany. So it is actually very fortunate for us that Hitler persecuted them. Otherwise it is entirely possible that Germany would have had the bomb first. Delivered by an up-sized V2 rocket.
In the 1930s, atomic research was considered abstract theoretical work that was of limited interest to the more practical American scientists.
One of Bismark's reforms 100 ears earlier had been to integrate the Jews into society. Hitler would
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> Otherwise it is entirely possible that Germany would have had the bomb first.
But all of these types of speculation attribute and require levels of sanity to that regime that would have stopped it from *becoming* that inns regime . . .
It is the same mania that produced the blitzkrieg and its early successes and devoted, for example, outsized resources to offensive plane weaponry without sufficient planes to protect these, and so forth.
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Getting a submarine to the coast and using torpedoes is one thing. Reconfiguring a sub to hold missiles is another. Even if they could have somehow launched V1s from a sub, the amount of time it would take to prepare the launch from a sub would be extraordinarily long and would subject the sub to heightened risk of detection.
That said, the idea was probably not to simply make note that Germany could hit the U.S., but that by using sand over a wide area, or, in the case of subs, multiple missiles, that it c
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Re:Somehow reach the east coast? (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to do more research. You can start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and fall down the rabbit hole of open publications from there.
Water is pretty immune to activation effects; it is the salts in "salt water" that can be a problem. The thing is, it's mainly sodium and chorine that would be activated. Sodium-24 would be dangerous but has short 18-hour half-life; Chorine-36 has a very long half-life and is not very dangerous. In reality, with the dilution of both in water you don't have a real concern unless you took a swim in the area right over the IP.
Physical effects are even less of an issue for the landlubbers. A lot of the energy of an underwater detonation goes up, not out. You don't get a tsunami. Shock waves bouncing off the sea floor (in the case of a shallow detonation, like in littoral waters of a bay) can actually pull water back towards the IP, reducing the size of the expanding wave.
In short, if all you got is submarine delivery, you're better off putting the gadget on a raft and floating it into into some harbor somewhere and hoping for decent thermal effects.
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For that matter US steel was still being delivered to Nazi controlled Europe and Vichy France until quite late in the war through cutouts and multi-flagged shipping, sometime though third country ports but not always. A returning ship could have carried a nuke as ballast, and as long as the crew didn't know what it actually did they could set it off in New York harbor (incidentally vaporizing the evidence).
Of course this is still a concern today, or at least should be, when less than 5% of cargo containers
Radioactive dust (Score:2)
" dispersing radioacive sand over New York"
A US naval officer came up with the idea first. But he was only a Lt.
The story was called Solution unsatisfactory (or something like that.)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Much too heavy (Score:5, Informative)
> An Arado Ar234 could cruise through either Russian or British air defence
If I'm not mistaken, an AR234 could carry 750 kg under each wing. The Little Boy bomb weighed about 4500 kg.
I mention "under each wing" because balance is key for aircraft, especially those like the AR234 that are providing cutting-edge performance.
They could redesign a variant to carry the bomb internally as deploy it, resulting in a plane that could carry 1/3rd the weight of an atomic bomb. So still no go even with a redesigned plane. Still not even close, really.
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I was going to call BS on your claim about Germany being able to have a sub launched missile, of any kind, during WW 2 but it turns out that you are spot on.
Germany did in fact have a Sub Launched Ballistic Missile [wikipedia.org] in development. The war ended in Europe before it was actually test fired. Though the sub had to surface to launch and the missile itself was not actually in the sub but in a towed launcher so it wasn't a true "SLBM" in the same sense the term is used today.
The Germans also had a rocket with an
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And what was the planned payload weight of that "SLBM" ? If it's anything under 2500kg, you're not getting a 1940s-era nuclear weapon into the air with it.
Re:Deliver it? (Score:4, Informative)
drop a nuke and then say Aufiderzein
That would be 'Auf Wiedersehen', surely?
Re: Deliver it? (Score:2)
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An Arado Ar234 could cruise through either Russian or British air defence before anyone can intercept it, drop a nuke and then say Aufiderzein and get back to base.
Since that had a 2000kg maximum bomb load, and only 1000kg on the centreline, it would not have been capable of carrying a 1945 nuclear weapon. They had to modify the B-29 (silverplate modification) to make it capable of carrying them, with the Lancaster the only possible back up option at the time. The Ju 390 might have been an option, or the Me 264, although only the 390 was anywhere near ready for it. It was slow, though.
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V1 payload weight: 850kg
V2 payload weight: 725kg
"Little Boy" weight: 4400kg
Just the uranium and tungsten tamper / neutron reflector weighed 2300kg [wikipedia.org].
So that's quite the scaling they would need to do, on a submarine that wasn't exactly luxurious with space to begin with. The United States didn't even bother with submarine-launched nuclear weapons until they had a whole lot of testing and number crunching ability, combined with a lot of rocketry experience which enabled miniaturizing all of the above so it wou
So explain to me (Score:2)
Why does this matter in the least? To anyone other than a historian, I mean.
I do find it interesting from a historical standpoint... I'm just trying to figure out why the "what if" questions are of even a thing. To me, it seems equivalent to the old SNL sketch "What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?", excepting the lack of involvement by comedy writers.
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Why does this matter in the least? To anyone other than a historian, I mean.
You talk as if history were just some occupation for arty bods, and not important to our real lives. History teaches many useful lessons that can be applied here and now, such as don't do that stupid shit again.
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History teaches many useful lessons that can be applied here and now, such as don't do that stupid shit again.
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Or, alternatively, those of us who learned from history are doomed to watch those who failed to learn from it
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Or, alternatively, those of us who learned from history are doomed to watch those who failed to learn from it.
I like that version better than the original. It is more historically accurate.
There is a cruel spectator sport of watching stupid fuckers being really stupid. That is like toffs shooting pheasants. There is a reason why pheasants are a game bird. It is because they can barely fly, and are unusually stupid, even for a bird.
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Many years ago, when I lived with my parents in a house on the side of the Malvern hills, a male pheasant decided that my father's back garden was the ideal strutting ground. The bird was not just stupid, but vain as well. If you came up to it, the bird would move away, and keep some fixed distance. For some reason, the cats did not seem interested. Maybe the bird was too big. Or maybe a cat wants a bit of challenge, and the pheasant was less interesting than a fluffy toy.
I am pretty sure the only reason wh
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Re: So explain to me (Score:2)
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You answered your own question. It matters to historians. The debate over the impact of the Nazi regime's decision to not prioritize nuclear weapon development is a longstanding one that has been clouded by political agendas and viewpoints (e.g. the desire to rehabilitate scientists involved with it). Hard physical, quantifiable, physical evidence of Nazi progress or lack thereof is quite useful in that context, either to confirm what most historians thing or challenge it.
If i recall correctly, Heisenbe
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Perhaps the summary asks the wrong question. Not "Did that uranium cube come from the Nazis?" But how far along was their nuclear program? Were they close to building a bomb? Would they have used it? The subject line reads like "Eeek! Nazis!"
Having a couple of cubes of the stuff retrieved from their R&D program proves very little. Maybe something about their processing capabilities.
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Yes, in isolation it doesn't prove much. But really that's just a starting point for a historian. It's not the cube itself that will prove important, but the tracing its history back.
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Pretty much [atomicheritage.org] although one still doesn't want unaccounted plutonium loose.
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Heisenberg was pursuing a heavy water reactor which would be fueled with natural (unenriched) uranium, and that in retrospect that his design was not very promising.
Also: It got stalled when a commando mission took out the plant that was supposed to supply them with heavy water.
The US had a LOT of smart guys pursuing MANY routes to bombs and production of fissionables - and indeed used two different bomb designs for the drops on Japan.
The second one was experiencing its first test, which is part of why the
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Actually, the Trinity test was the same plutonium design used in Nagasaki, so Nagasaki was the second detonation of that bomb type. The problem after Trinity was that the "Fat Man" design was highly complex; exploding it on a test stand was one thing; transporting it across the ocean then dropping it from a plane was another. Fat Man had to be complex because you have to bring the critical mass of plutonium together really fast to prevent a "fizzle" -- the energy of the growing chain reaction damaging yo
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Actually, the Trinity test was the same plutonium design used in Nagasaki, so Nagasaki was the second detonation of that bomb type.
Oops. Yes, that's correct.
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Interestingly enough, the projectile in Little Boy exceeded the critical mass by itself. It was a hollowed-out cylinder, so the uranium wasn't concentrated into one monolithic mass. It also remained subcritical prior to detonation because it wasn't exposed to the tungsten carbide reflector that surrounded the smaller target mass at the other end of the gun.
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I'm not sure you should rely on Harrison Ford movies for your understanding of history.
The Norwegian heavy water sabotage [wikipedia.org] is a well documented series of attacks by resistance groups, allied bombers, etc. They resulted in, first the moving, then the decommissioning, of the heavy water plant the Germans were counting on to provide moderator material for their plutonium-producing reactors, along with the loss, during transport, of the bulk of its heavy water inventory at the shutdown. Postwar analysis indica
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From a historical perspective the question is if US scientists were simply more willing to produce a weapon of mass destruction. If the Nazi scientists, because of personal ethics or political motivation, purposely sabotaged the Nazi program.
Little boy was a simple fail safe device that once we understood fusion was obvious. The only question was how much fissionable material was necessary for critical mass. Ultimately about 60 kilograms was used. Most of the US nuclear
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Why does this matter in the least? To anyone other than a historian, I mean.
I do find it interesting from a historical standpoint... I'm just trying to figure out why the "what if" questions are of even a thing. To me, it seems equivalent to the old SNL sketch "What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?", excepting the lack of involvement by comedy writers.
"Why durs histry mutter to nurds?"
It's one of those knowy things, that people like to know about. If you're not interested in history... shouldn't you be gaming or watching television or something?
"What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?" (Score:2)
I haven't seen that one.
But I have seen the one where Spartacus had a nuke powered aircraft carrier and went back in time to Pearl Harbor, Dec 6 1941
The Nazis had effective subs (Score:5, Interesting)
U-boats could have delivered payloads quite close to London or US coastal cities. One nuke, underwater, dropped off anywhere near the largest ports, could have annihilated allied supply lines. Nuclear mines left on the invasion routes into Europe could have helped isolate Germany from the Russians approaching from the East, or the Americans, British, and rescued allies approaching from the West and South. And leaving a nuke outside Moscow. Earlier in the war, a nuclear weapon ignited on Russian soil, if not next to Moscow itself, could have triggered s Soviet surrender.
The idea that nuclear weapons would not have reshaped the war seems ill-founded, they certainly reshaped it for the Japanese.
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Keep in mind that the supply of enriched fuel for these was *extremely* short.
The Manhattan Project produced enough for a whopping *three* bombs. The next was months away. This was actually part of the reason the Nagasaki bomb came only three days after Hiroshima: to make it *look* like we had plenty and could drop them at will.
Barring evidence otherwise, I see no reason to believe that Germany would have been able to produce significant quantities faster than the US, given the resources the US poured in
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The shortage of refined uranium was indeed an issue: I don't disagree. Could Germany have built two bombs to commit the same sort of bluff which the USA committed on Japan? The US would not perhaps have been the logical nation to bluff: could they have used one or two weapons to mislead the Soviets? There are a lot of possibilities and questions.
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The tragedy is that the nuclear bombings of Japan had almost no effect at all. Japan was already trying to negotiate terms of surrender and in the end the only major sticking points (control of Japanese islands and the fate of the emperor) were resolved as they wanted anyway.
If the Allies has just offered them those terms of surrender the bombings could have been avoided.
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If, by "in the process", you mean opening a negotiation for possible surrender in the future, then yes, they were doing that with the Russians. The problem for the US was multi-fold: they did not want to invade the Home Islands (MacArthur was straining at the leash to invade and willing to throw a goodly part of a million lives into the effort...he was kept in the dark about the "Project's" fruit until the end), they knew that the Russians were kicking Japan's butt in China and were licking their chops for
Dude, they were running their navy (Score:2)
As for Stalin, same thing. The Russians had to drag their tanks home with mules for fuck's sake. They weren't going to be doing anything with Japan. They were going home to lick their wounds and try and get some reparations out of the rest of the world.
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The Soviets invaded Manchura, successfully, just before the end of World War II. Desperate for fuel or not, 1,000,000 troops on the ground can steal or build boats to invade.
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Actually the Japanese were communicating with the Soviets to get them to act as intermediaries with the US to handle a conditional surrender. The upper echelons of the US military knew this, which was part of the rush to drop the first two bombs before that could happen. They deliberately kept that information from the White House. The fictional "every last man, woman and child suicide attacks" were a fiction they used to get Truman to sign off on what he knew was going to be the most horrible weapon eve
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We also just saw when a determined nation with a military religious history is invaded by troops from another continent. Previewing the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea by invading Japan first could have killed millions.
Transformers (Score:2)
Wait wait wait. Hold up, how do we know for sure these werenâ(TM)t an energy source for Transformers. Hmm, or was that Energon cubes. Nevermind, carry on.
Only One Question Will Be Answered (Score:5, Insightful)
And that question is: when were the cubes made? That is all the analysis will reveal.
This is a topic I know a lot about. About the German fission research efforts, about how the topic has been handled by historians, about how newspaper reporters go about writing stories like this, and about the work that PNNL does.
The actual story is this: the lab has cubes of uranium that lab folklore says came from Nazi Germany, but there is no documentation about it, and they are trying to corroborate the origin by at least confirming their date of manufacture. Nuclear materials analysis is one of the things that PNNL does, and this is a nice little project to work on. And that is the entire story.
The reporter could not just let that run, so he tried to insert an angle about "how this would provide new evidence of something, something, Nazi bomb!" But it doesn't. The speculations in the article are the reporters own speculations - the PNNL guy refused to get drawn in, and so the reporter called some history professors to get some comments about the Nazi fission program to add to the story, but none of them supported his speculations either.
If, as seems likely, these cubes originated in wartime Germany, the dating will support that origin. But this will tell us nothing at all about Nazi fission research. The Germans had on the order of a thousand tons of uranium that they had seized in Belgium, and had uranium mines at Jachymov (current name) in Czechoslovakia. They had plenty of uranium for a fission bomb program, if they had started one (they did not, they just had a collection of loosely organized research projects) and in fact used uranium in armor-piercing munitions (which it is really useful for) as they had no other real wartime use for it.
What is the point? (Score:2)
The Nazis lost. This seems to be forgotten (Score:3)
They lost. Seriously, they lost. They lost the technology war to the UK (fighter planes), US (bombs) and tanks to the Russians and arguably Allies
I'm fed up of seeing this resurrected crap about them. Here's what actually happened - their strategies worked at first, then they started to suck and were beaten at intelligence, air warfare, tank warfare, infantry....they lost.
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That is because the UK and the US decided to make it an industrial war: steel, not lives. And that definitely worked.
Sure they were (Score:2)
The rest is on the other side of the moon with the Space-Nazis, waiting for an iPad.
It's only London, after all. (Score:3)
Might have had a large impact on one of the unoccupied countries putting up a significant fight. But, yeah, no biggie.
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And perhaps a small impact on the build-up of forces for D-day, and the intelligence gathering and analysis at Bletchley Park.
It should be easy to tell. (Score:4, Informative)
the trace impurities in the Cube should tell where it came from, and if it ever saw a critical mass.
Risible (Score:2)
There is a lot of long bows being drawn there.
1) The Germans didn't even come close to a theoretical bomb design, never mind even building one
2) If they did build it they didn't have an aircraft capable of delivering it. Note the US needed a whole new aircraft to carry it and have adequate range. The Lancaster could carry one but the Germans never had a long-range heavy bomber.
3) Even if they could get one in the air it's life expectancy over Western Europe in later 1944/1945 would not be long thanks to All
First things first (Score:2)
If the cubes have a swastika and/or a Reichsadler stamped on them, the answer is probably "yes" :)
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... I fail to see how we could be any worse off if they did.
We wouldn't have to deal with Critical Race Theory I suppose.
But what would become of your right to religious freedom, or your right to bear arms, or your right to free speech, or your right to... on second thought, never mind...
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Perhaps but considering the state of the Luftwaffe in late 1944/45 the chances of one getting there unmolested were very small. You would need to send a large dispersed squadron over with fighter escort.
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The couldn't get to the US mainland? Horsepuckey, they could have put the device on a submarine or one one of the cargo ships of the numerous collaborators. Aircraft are not the only way to move things, and considering the size and mass of an early crude uranium bomb it was probably the least practical. A nuke going off in the Port of New York would have been devastating not only to the most important port in North America at the time but to morale as well.
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I think a world without americans would be a much better dream, as most germans aren't as arrogant as a lot of americans
Right. Because a party platform of racial superiority just screams humility.
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You insensitive clod. Most of us read Philip K. Dick and know the truth of "The Man in the High Castle".
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One of the alternate history theories that I've heard was along the lines, "if Hitler would have waited three years he could have ruled the world." He would have had a unbeatable army and navy. Jet aircraft, cruse missiles and a 3 stage ballistic missile that could have reached the homeland of the United States. An he would have posed nuclear weapons.
Of course this is all hogwash. Any one that knows anything about history and weapons development would spot that. In three years its doubtful that G
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One of the alternate history theories that I've heard was along the lines, "if Hitler would have waited three years he could have ruled the world." He would have had a unbeatable army and navy. Jet aircraft, cruse missiles and a 3 stage ballistic missile that could have reached the homeland of the United States. An he would have posed nuclear weapons.
The UK was working on jets before WW2 (from August 1939), as well as cruise missiles. The UK worked on explosive-filled, radio-controlled aircraft in WW1. Bear in mind, the UK and France were also building a lot of tanks, France was beginning to equip its troops with semi-automatic rifles, new aircraft. The UK was intending to embark on semi-automatic rifle designs (it trialled the US M1 rifle but rejected it), and would have had strategic bombers available by 1942. The USSR would have moved to the T-34M ha
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Thank goodness for the Norwegians who went after the heavy water facilities early on, and every other person who went after the German nuclear program.
Or the Iranians have nukes.
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If Germany had the bomb they could hit more than just London with nukes. In fact Germany hit many more places than London with the V2s.
A V2 did not have the carrying capacity to carry a 1940s nuclear bomb, though. Nowhere near.
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There is speculation that it was not necessary, from a military point of view, to devastate two major Japanese cities, in order to end the war with Japan.
Of course there is also speculation that the death toll for that slog would have been greater than that for the nuclear attacks. And more speculation that anthrax bombs might have been waiting in the wings if the nukes hadn't gotten the job done...
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Of course there is also speculation that the death toll for that slog would have been greater than that for the nuclear attacks.
That was, I imagine, the motivation behind the awful decision to use such terrible weapons -- to end the war before any more slaughter of soldiers pointlessly slugging it out. And bear in mind that we are talking about Japanese lives. They appeared to be prepared to fight to last man, and not just give in when it looked hopeless, which as far as I know it was at the time when the atom bombs were dropped.
I read that kamikaze pilots were not exactly noble volunteers. They were given a choice: get in that plan
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The families of the kamikaze pilots were also threatened if they failed to carry out their mission, or at least die honorably in the attempt. If they did go through with it their families were comparatively better off than the rest of the population with additional food rations and the like.
An overlooked wrinkle in the suicide bomber recruitment was undertaken by the FARC. They found people with terminal illnesses who were deep in debt (sometimes from medical costs). They offered to pay off the debts and
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They were made of natural Uranium (not enriched). The by far dominant Uranium isotope in natural (unenriched) Uranium (U-238) is not fissionable except by fast neutrons such as produced by fission of U-235 (0.7% of natural Uranium, though I'd have to look up if the usual fission neutron from U-235 is energetic enough) or fast neutrons from fusion reactions (as occurs in thermonuclear weapons). Uranium used in the common civilian nuclear power reactors has to be enriched to 3-5% to provide useful power (ht