Another possible example of a country holding out against adversaries with much greater resources is Prussia in the Seven Years War. I believe Prussia’s enemies had a huge advantage in population, fielded larger armies and possessed technology similar to what Prussia had.
I think the difference is that Napoleon was invading European Russia, then governed by a moderately effective Tsar. The Japanese were attacking Asiatic Russia - not the heartland - and particularly Russian colonial interests, and fighting an incompetent Tsar. Note the very different reaction a few years later when war with Germany and Austria-Hungary broke out, at least initially - the country rallied around the Tsar for a while, but when he failed he lost his crown and his head.
Benno implies that the US (and earlier the British with their “Tubular Alloys” project) need not have bothered developing an atomic bomb because he asserts that there was no such program in Germany. I don’t know precisely how true this is, but let’s assume that it is true. When the Americans embarked on this project at the instigation of the English, Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein and, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, they were forced to confront the worst case scenario: that Germany was working on such a bomb since the English, US and German scientists (and probably many others) all knew it was theoretically possible. In war, it is usually not a very good idea to only consider the “best case” scenario - ie, “Nah, they’re not working on it”. Since the Germans were talented physicists, chemists and mathematicians it would be reasonable to assume that they were working on this. If you consider that “you don’t know what you don’t know” to have assumed anything else would have been criminal.
Incidentally, I don’t think that heavy water plant was bombed so much as sabotaged by a British Commando team led by a Norwegian, as well as a ferry carrying heavy water having been sunk by a well-placed charge in the hull. Also, I observe that for all the pontificating and “crocodile morality” by the Japanese concerning the atomic bomb, had they succeeded in creating one, they wouldn’t have hesitated for a nano-second in deploying it. The consummate irony is that if the Japanese had surrendered at the same time as Germany, no atomic bombs would have been dropped during WW2 at all.
Consider, Cojimar, that the Russian fleet had to travel all the way around Africa, thru the Indian Ocean, etc. to finally reach their Pacific base. They were exhausted. Consider also that the “resources” and industry needed to process them were about 12 time zones to the west; and consider that the Russian fleet was 1) a shadow its earlier self and 2) that it’s firing accuracy was not good. The Japanese were operating close to their home bases and had vastly superior night-fighting capabilities were the Russians had, um, none. Ironically, this gave the Japanese an inflated sense of their naval prowess that came back to bite them big time when the chips were down.
& if the nukes had not been used in anger against perfidious Nippon…
…then perhaps it is more likely that the cold war would’ve got hotter?
‘Dr Manhattan’ might’ve won a few Asian dust-ups that actually ended up draws, or losses…
Acytually, I think it’s scarier than that. Stalin was quite happy to push the western allies in Berlin and elsewhere, but wasn’t willing to risk war - in part due to the US nuclear monopoly. If the word hadn’t seen the effect of nuclear weapons on a live target, do you think he would have been so restrained?
If you’re talking about Korea, the use of the bomb might have invited Soviet retaliation as it probably would have resulted in a full scale land war with China, a full scale war MacArthur was pining for. While Mac was crowing how we needed to nuke the bejesus out of the Chinese because they, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway stepped in and took over the 8th Army from the deceased Walker and quietly spanked the Chinese and pushed them back in several punishing operations like Ripper and Killer. All the time while MacArthur was becoming an alarmist old fool prone to histrionics on how the UN might need to withdraw.
Yes, the Russians did have to send their ships a long distance but from 1941-45 the U.S. was able to bring its navy thousands of miles to the Japanese home islands. As far as firing accuracy and night fighting capabilities go, I would think the Russians would have the means to correct such problems in a prolonged conflict. They might be initially disadvantaged but over time overcome their adversaries through greater resources.
The Russo-Japanese war is similar to the U.S. conflict with Japan in that in both instances the Japanese enjoyed some initial successes. However, the Russo-Japanese war only lasted about 1 year while the conflict with the U.S. dragged on much longer. If the U.S. had agreed to a peace treaty in 1942 or 1943 that allowed the Japanese to maintain all the territory they had conquered the peace would have been very favorable to Japan. However, I don’t see how the Japanese would have had any reason to believe the Russians would be willing to agree to peace after such a short period of time.
I also see some hypocrisy in this condemnation of Speer. As I have mentioned in other threads, America’s allies were engaged in a considerable amount of vile behavior in later conflicts. If Speer’s complicity in slave labor is an issue then why is British and American complicity in the crimes of the South Korean regime somehow not an issue?
Bringing it back to the topic at hand, I think it’s pretty clear that there was a German nuclear program. This program may not have received the critical support of the German government that it needed to actually bear fruit, witness the tremendous investment made by the Americans to produce just three bombs before the end of the war. There is no other credible explanation for the German interest in the heavy water produced by Norsk Hydro. I’m open to other explanations if anyone has one.
Oh, that’s well known - what is a little less well known is how incompetent it was. They’d completely screwed up their critical mass calculations and thought a bomb impossible but reactors for power feasible. When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Heisenberg et al were held as PoWs at Farm Hall near Cambridge, and all their conversations were bugged without their knowledge. From those it was clear they didn’t initially realise that it was a nuclear bomb, and when it became clear that it was they attempted to rationalise their screw-up as deliberate sabotage. In reality, if we believe Bohr’s account of the conversations he had with Heisenberg before his escape to the UK (and as he had less of an axe to grind, I tend to) it’s clear that they would have done so if they could.
Another example is when they first tried to use graphite as a moderator. The physicist doing it (can’t remember his name) was so lovesick that he didn’t notice that his samples were contaminated with Boron, a ravenous neutron absorber. When this was later pointed out, German industry decided that producing sufficiently pure graphite was impossible - this at a time when the US was producing thousands of tonnes of the stuff from Petroleum Coke*.
- Funny story there - when Los Alamos first phoned up a chemical plant about getting the stuff, they were asked what priority they had and the physicist replied “I can give you an A now, AAA by the end of the week”. This completely floored the plant guys, as they’d never seen more than a C before. After that, procurement at Los Alamos was reorganised somewhat to avoid that sort of collateral screwing up of US industry.
Great stuff, pdf27… I did see a program on the History Channel about the Farm Hall recordings.
I don’t know where you get your nonsense?
There definitely was a German atomic weapons project in fact at least three, one was German Naval Ordnance, another by German Army Ordnance and also the SS project based in Vienna. Then of course we should not discount the Reichsforschungsrat (RFR) project either said by witness Claere Werner to have supervised two Atomic test blasts at Ohrdruf in March 1945
Hiesenberg was briefly the head of the civilian Uranium research project. If you refer to those research projects then they were never about development of atomic weapons. Heisenberg spent much of his time on trying to develop a nuclear reactor. The other major role of the civil Uranverin was to develop heavy water production and Uranium enrichment.
But there is a really fascinating question: “Why was there no such program ?”. Otto Hahn discovered the fission of Uranium in 1938 and a few month later another German scientist wrote: “give me one ton of Uranium and I send the Wannsee (a large lake in the outskirts of Berlin) into the orbit”. The Germans knew the principles of fission and chain reaction before the outbreak of war.
The second thing you have to take into account is: The Americans did not develop THE A-Bomb. No, they developed two totally different types of A-Bombs and they used both types, the one in Hiroshima and the other one in Nagasaki. So the Germans could have one of the two types with probably less than half of the overall effort of the Manhattan Project.
No the Manhattan Project only developed the Plutonium Mark III bomb “Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki. The Uranium weapon was not American in origin.
The Hiroshima bomb was developed in Germany and was known there as 76-Zentner. It was captured near Hanover in early April 1945 and flown out of an airfield in that area by the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh to Cherbourg, France for Operation LUSTY. If you research it you will discover that Lindbergh was embedded with General Patton’s 3rd Army.
If you bother to research even a little further you will find there was no history of Little Boy in the Manhattan project before April 1945. There was a similar project to develop a Plutonium gun device known as “Thin Man” which had to be abandoned in February 1945.
Up until the failure of “Thin Man” there was absolutely no project for the Little Boy Uranium bomb.
If you do some genuine research you will also find that the huge Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion plant K-25 did not even begin production until March 1945 and when that came online was only able to enrich Uranium to 2% U235, so where did all the 64kg of HEU for Little Boy come from?
The ten Caultrons of the Y-12 plant by February 1944 were only producing 200grams (ie 0.2kg) of 12% enriched U235 per month so perhaps you need to do some math and tell me how they arrived at 64 kilograms of HEU for HIROSHIMA, plus the Uranium for at least two Plutonium bombs (ie TRINITY and NAGASAKI) by August 1945?
During April 1945 Oppenheimer finally decided to serial link all three Oak Ridge processes using the results from one plant as feed stock for the next process and only by that method could they produce reasonably enriched Uranium for Hanford.
The Nagasaki-bomb was based on Plutonium. This metal is “easy” to obtain (you can “breed” it in a reactor), but difficult to handle. For the Germans “too difficult to handle”, they simply thought it would be impossible to make an A-Bomb out of Plutonium.
They thought nothing of the kind…
More nonsense, you clearly have never heard of Jozef Schintlemeister in Vienna who was a huge proponent of the Plutonium bomb. Prof Fritz Houtermanns calculated the critical mass for Plutonium 239 and published this in a report (G-94) from October 1941. The Nazis called it Eka Osmium.
The Hiroshima-bomb was based on Uranium-235. This metal is easy to handle, but it’s extremely difficult to separate it from the other isotopes. You need huge plants with thousands of centrifuges (but no reactor and no heavy water, therefore the “bomb the plant in Norway and it’s over”-theory is nonsense).
By July 1944 the Germans had shipped 6,200kg of Heavy Water to the laboratory of Karl Wirtz in Silesia. Heisenberg only got 600kg and was told that this was all there was and thus the myth evolved that all of Germany’s Heavy Water was destroyed by sinking the Hydro ferry.
This 6,200kg incidentally does not include the Heavy Water production of the Linde Plant near Munich nor the IG Farben Leuna plant, not the two plants in the Italian Alps at Merano or Citrone.
The German scientists knew this would work, but no one with reputation made an attempt to convince Hitler. On the contrary, Heisenberg -in real desparation- asked his danish college Nils Bohr, what he would do in such a situation. You can imagine the answer.
Actually Heisenberg was quizzing Bohr about his pre-war experiments transmuting Thorium 232 into Protactinium 233 to obtain Uranium 233 for nuclear weapons. His speech notes for the June 1942 Harnack Haus conference found in KGB archives in Russia reveal that far from being a pacifist Heisenberg gave an address to fellow German scientists about the need to harvest Protactinium for an atomic bomb. During 1944 he was a consultant the Dallenbach project at Bisingen developing a Synchrotron to develop Plutonium through nuclear transmutation.
So Heisenberg decided to direct the effort towards a nuclear power plant (and for this, it’s true, you need a reactor and heavy water as mediator). But even that failed. He never suceeded in establishing a self-sustaining chain reaction (Enrico Fermi achieved this in 1942 in the USA). So there was really no danger of Hitler getting an A-bomb into his hands.
Oh really then why did Roosevelt convey a threat to Hitler through Lisbon in July 1944 that the Allies would drop the bomb on Dresden unless Hitler sued for peace within six weeks?
This threat was in the conversations secretly recorded at Farm Hall in 1945 and was later confirmed by Dr Harteck in 1974.
Untrue:
June Rittner was responsible for the installation BY MI-6 of concealed microphones in all the bedrooms and living spaces at Farm Hall, near Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire. Ten German nuclear scientists who had been gathered up by ALSOS and kept in a hotel at Luxembourg were flown from Belgium to RAF Temspford on the 3rd of July 1945.
Three days after their arrival, the hidden microphones recorded this:
DIEBNER: “I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?”
HEISENBERG: “Microphones installed? [Laughing]. Oh no, they’re not as cute as all that. I don’t think they know the real Gestapo methods; they’re a bit old fashioned in that respect.”
After this exchange Diebner was quite guarded, but Heisenburg began loudly proclaiming his pacifist dislike for the Nazi regime and trying to tell all his fellows that he never supported the atomic bomb project anyway. Several colleagues drew away from him in disgust and even commented when he was not in the room about Heisenberg’s hypocracy
From those it was clear they didn’t initially realise that it was a nuclear bomb, and when it became clear that it was they attempted to rationalise their screw-up as deliberate sabotage. In reality, if we believe Bohr’s account of the conversations he had with Heisenberg before his escape to the UK (and as he had less of an axe to grind, I tend to) it’s clear that they would have done so if they could.
Another example is when they first tried to use graphite as a moderator. The physicist doing it (can’t remember his name) was so lovesick that he didn’t notice that his samples were contaminated with Boron, a ravenous neutron absorber. When this was later pointed out, German industry decided that producing sufficiently pure graphite was impossible - this at a time when the US was producing thousands of tonnes of the stuff from Petroleum Coke*.
not that he did not notice… the refining process used in Nazi Germany to obtain Carbon caused boron contamination so that his assessment was correct for the Carbon they had to work with… Had they used a different chemical process they could have obtained Carbon without Boron contamination.
Simply not true because the Potsdam agreement was reached in July 1945 before the Bomb was used against Japan.
The Hiroshima bomb “Little Boy” weighed 8,900lbs (4,040kg). The German atomic bomb known as 76-Zentner was captured by Cmdr Ian Flemming’s 30AU Royal Marine Commandos near Espelkamp on 4th April 1945 and that weapon weighed 3,800kg
Not to be confused with a small boosted fission bomb design by Dr Schumann and Dr Trinks in 1942 which the Japanese claimed in a diplomatic signal from Stockholm to Tokyo in 1944 to be a 5kg “Uranium atom smashing warhead of devastating effect.” The signal was declassified by the American NSA in October 1978 from a MAGIC intercept in WWII.
Ironically, I’d like to ask you the same question.
Awesome! Crackpot conspiracy sources from fanbois and completely disingenuous postwar rantings of Nazi scientists. “Yeah! We were so close, had it not been for Hitler…” :rolleyes:
Not possible.
The bomb had already been found by the 8th Army a year before Fleming is alleged to have found it, which is a credit to the 8th Army which, among other things, wasn’t anywhere near Espelkamp at the time due to the slight problem of the 8th Army not serving there and D Day having inconveniently not yet occurred to enable the 8th Army to be there in April 1944. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread993532/pg1
http://occupyilluminati.com/76-zentner-the-nazi-atomic-bomb-found-at-espelkamp-in-1945/
The German atomic bomb not found by the not present 8th Army was, according to the last highly credible link :rolleyes: a 76-Zentner 3.8 tonne Atomic Bomb inscribed “To be fired only by order of the Fuhrer.”. Presumably this was inscribed in really heavy chalk as an early example of fail safe firing systems for nuclear weapons. Jesus wept!
Given the apparent absence of a delivery system, presumably the Fuhrer was going to give the order to fire it (there being no mention of a nuclear trigger, but undoubtedly the Germans had one in April 1944 a good 15 months before the Manhattan Project had a bomb which could be detonated) to wipe out the strategically crucial area around Espelkamp, which oddly enough wasn’t under serious Allied attack in April 1944 and even if it was the bomb could have wiped out Hanover (albeit out of range) and surrounds with absolutely no impact on the Allied threat to Germany, but an own goal for Germany.
Much the same in April 1945, but more so when things were more desperate.
Given that by April 1945 Hitler was doing everything he could to resist the Allies and to destroy Germany where he couldn’t, why didn’t he give the order to fire his massive weapon?
It appears that the author of the book about Fleming’s 30 AU unit is utterly ignorant of Fleming’s massively important capture of a working German atomic weapon. http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Ian_Fleming_s_Commandos_The_Story_of_the.html?id=qpxWkaXoyO8C&redir_esc=y as, apparently, was Hitler even about the existence of this magnificent weapon when he had one less than a month to live before committing suicide after throwing everything he had at the advancing Allies. Apart from his atomic bomb.
Yeah, right!
If you are going to quote me from a post on another website then don’t mislead people by failing to quote my explanation that I made a typo about the dates on that website, otherwise you are simply deliberately misleading people.
I also explained there that I was trying to relate what a German correspondent had told me in broken English. If you will not quote me in full then don’t bother tricking people by partially quoting me
I did not mention the 8th Army in my post here. The 6th Para regiment supported by 3 Royal Tank Regiment went into Espelkamp but the underground bunker there was taken by 3RTR with 23rd Hussars (armored cars) and the 4th Shropshire Light Infantry. The records however are held at the Imperial War Museum in the file for the British 8th Army Corps which is probably why you are so confused.
Given the apparent absence of a delivery system
Strange you’ve never heard of this aircraft below with a 6,000kg bomb load which performed a number of successful air raids over england called the Steenbock raids, nor of the He-177B or He-277 which could bomb England from above 49,000ft?
… presumably the Fuhrer was going to give the order to fire it (there being no mention of a nuclear trigger, but undoubtedly the Germans had one in April 1944 a good 15 months before the Manhattan Project had a bomb which could be detonated) to wipe out the strategically crucial area around Espelkamp, which oddly enough wasn’t under serious Allied attack in April 1944 and even if it was the bomb could have wiped out Hanover (albeit out of range) and surrounds with absolutely no impact on the Allied threat to Germany, but an own goal for Germany.
Clearly you have not done any research or you would know that the US 8th Air Force specifically targeted Espelkamp, Minden and Hanover on the tip off from a young SS Grenadier POW called Plumeyer who revealed under interrogation by the US 9th Army the location of this secret underground plant (MUNA Lubbecke)
No Espelkamp was captured 4th April 1945 and if you wish to check i suggest you visit the IWM records.
Given that by April 1945 Hitler was doing everything he could to resist the Allies and to destroy Germany where he couldn’t, why didn’t he give the order to fire his massive weapon?
Again I refer to Farm Hall transcripts which secretly tape recorded German nuclear scientists referring to an American threat to Hitler via Lisbon to abandon his nuclear weapons program or Dresden would be nuked. Churchill also waded in with a threat conveyed to Hitler via Romania’s Marshall Antonsecu. Churchill threatened Hitler if he used the atomic bomb against Britain then the RAF would respond by delivering Anthrax all across Germany, which would lead to mass starvation within 2 weeks.
Other than derision Rising Sun you have offered no explanation why there are no design drawings for Little Boy, no records of who built it or when or how in the Manhattan project and you have not explained to us how the Americans who were struggling in crises in April 1945 to produce enough Uranium to fuel the Hanford reactors could have come up with 64kg of Uranium just five months short of bombing Hiroshima?