The Nazis almost built a working nuclear reactor. [View all]

[hunter]

Tracking the journey of a uranium cube

The world entered the nuclear age when the Trinity bomb was detonated on 16 July 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The origin of the age can be traced back through a small uranium metal cube and 663 others like it. The Manhattan Project and the immense power unleashed by the weapons it produced were created in response to fears that scientists in Nazi Germany were working on their own weapon. The cube, a component of the “reactor that Hitler tried to build,” represents the Germans’ failed endeavor that catalyzed the nuclear age.

Some questions remain. How did a piece of uranium from Germany end up in Maryland 70 years later? How many like it are out there? What happened to the rest? Who is Ninninger? Years of research into the cube and its history has revealed a complex, intriguing, and incomplete story. From our research, we have uncovered some new information about the German nuclear program itself: The Germans could have built a nuclear reactor.

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https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4202

Had the Germans succeeded they were still a long way from building a bomb. Breeding and refining plutonium, or separating uranium 235 from natural uranium were still problems requiring formidable resources, as was building an implosion type bomb.

The Nazis had none of those resources when the B-VIII heavy water reactor was built.

Unaware of the immense progress the Manhattan Project had made, the Germans hoped that though they were almost certainly going to lose the war, they would be able to salvage the reputation of their physics community by being the first to achieve a self-sustaining nuclear reactor.

It's interesting that the Reich Minister for Armament and Ammunition, Albert Speer, had released German stocks of uranium in the summer of 1943 for use in non-nuclear ammunition. Uranium is still used in armor-piercing projectiles. Many parts of Iraq are still contaminated with Uranium used in our war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

It's also interesting that even though Germany realized they probably didn't have the resources to build atomic bombs, they were still imagining things like nuclear powered submarines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_program

I've always been keenly aware of ethical questions in science and engineering. One of my grandfathers was an Army Air Corp officer in World War II, the other grandfather a Conscientious Objector who had agreed to build and repair ships for the Merchant Marine rather than go to jail.

My Army Air grandfather never flew, which was a good thing because he was a bit of a klutz, probably somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but he did mysteriously acquire a knack for exotic metals during the war, and was hired by the aerospace industry when the war ended. I think he saw the war as a dirty business that needed to be done. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan must not prevail. (My other grandfather had a similar opinion, which is probably why, even though he was a pacifist who would not take up arms, he chose work in the shipyards over prison.)

My Army Air grandfather was taciturn about military work, partly I assume because much of it was still classified, but partly out of some kind of humility. The last job he had before he retired was working for the Apollo Project. He was immensely proud of that work and would always talk about it.

I like to imagine that my grandfathers wouldn't have aggressively applied their talents to the war effort had they been on the other sides, in Germany or Japan. In that case I wouldn't be here. It's likely that my engineer grandfather would have been killed on some battlefield, and that my pacifist grandfather would have died as a dissident in some horrible manner. My ancestors didn't come to America in the 19th century for the opportunity, they came because the Europe they knew was a dangerous place for political and religious dissidents. Later, atomic scientists like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi came here for similar reasons.

Returning to the article I posted, don't you think it was a bit late in 1944 to be worrying about the "reputation" of German Physics?

Are there scientists today working under similar assumptions as the builders of the B-VIII heavy water reactor? If so, in what fields of science?