how did the USA made the atomic bomb so quickly? Were the German scientists from operation paperclip already working on it for the Nazis?
In: Engineering
Aided by some top quality sabotage as well. Recommend watching the Ray Mears documentary [The Real Heroes of Telemark] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUfiMoY30ac&list=PL9pMBAGDqeF1NvdiD4FsTaayfPs7UvJ6I).
How a pack of hard as nails Norwegian winter survival lads took out a heavy water production facility.
I believe there’s a 60s film about it as well but I’ve not seen it.
A Norwegian special-forces ski-team infiltrated a Norwegian power-plant that was making heavy-water, which is what the Germans were using for their research, and sabotaged all the vats and sunk a ship carrying supplies … killing a number of innocent countrymen in the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage
This slowed down the already hamstrung German research effort.
Meanwhile in the US they built a new city, school-system and all, dedicated to supporting the staff to create the bomb.
A lot of scientists were aware that such a weapon could *theoretically* be made. Once the war started, the volume of publications related to nuclear science precipitously dropped as scientists realized there were competing programmes to weaponize the technology.
The USA mobilized a huge amount of resources, since their industrial base was protected from active warfare. The USA also had the dual advantages of close cooperation with the UK nuclear group and the many scientists who had fled to the USA in the 1930’s to avoid creeping nationalism in Germany and nearby areas.
The Germans were absolutely working on building a nuclear weapon. They were largely hamstrung by competing resource needs and active saboteurs within their projects.
If you are interested in the details, I highly recommend two books:
* Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is a narrative history of period roughly 1920-1950, primarily from the Allied point of view. It covers who, how and why, without assuming you know a lot of physics or military jargon.
* Neal Bascomb’s The Winter Fortress, covers German nuclear plans, their efforts to use a Norwegian hydroelectric plant to aid them and the UK/Norwegian strikes against it. Again, not too much tricky science and it moves pretty quickly.
Yes, they were.. but it’s important to note that the atomic bomb was ready to go in 1945… Work started on it 1939 or at least that is when the Manhattan Project started
Paperclip had nothing to do with the Bomb. The US had been working on the Manhattan Project for years when Germany surrendered.
These are not hard facts, but there were also some interesting declarations from Werner Heisenberg, one of the most import Physicists of the century and one of the chiefs of the german nuclear program.
After the war, he said that he had deliberately slowed down if not sabotaged the nuclear program.
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