Quote:
Originally Posted by TLAM Strike
(Post 1909624)
I saw a documentary on PBS once that basically said that after the war the OSS and MI6 got all the German Scientists in a house together and listened in, then sent the transcripts to our Scientists who told them that the Germans had the formulas wrong and thought they needed a lot more nuclear material for the bomb to work. Apparently we let the German Scientists go after that.
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I found the incident I was thinking of, it was in 1942:
Quote:
June 23, 1942 – Leipzig, Germany (then Nazi Germany) – Steam explosion and reactor fire Shortly after the Leipzig L-IV atomic pile — worked on by Werner Heisenberg and Robert Doepel — demonstrated Germany's first signs of neutron propagation, the device was checked for a possible heavy water leak. During the inspection, air leaked in, igniting the uranium powder inside. The burning uranium boiled the water jacket, generating enough steam pressure to blow the reactor apart. Burning uranium powder scattered throughout the lab causing a larger fire at the facility.
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That set the project back by a long time, primarily because, as you said, they thought they needed more material than they did, that and because of their politics most of their decent scientists left a long time ago, and those that didn't were usually denounced as Jews. Plus we were bombing most of Germany at that point.
Of course, then there's the whole "Hitlers Bombe" story, but that's a conspiracy for another post... |
