Werner Heisenberg
July 6, 1942: Nazi Germany moves its atomic bomb project from the civilian to the military sphere. In so doing, they essentially give up on it. Thus do they give up on what could have been their last chance to win World War II outright, rather than succeed enough to reach a settlement with the Allies that would have allowed themselves to continue.
NOTE: Although I have dated every entry on this blog to 2022, the article I detail here was posted on August 16, 2023. I came upon it by accident, and thought it worth it to write an entry around it.
In 1938, two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, discovered nuclear fission. Fission is the reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei, releasing huge amounts of energy. Harness this power, physicists said, and you could create a bomb so powerful it could flatten entire cities.
Almost immediately, German scientists commenced work on an atomic bomb project. Backed by a strong German industrial base and military interest, the Uranverein (uranium club) employed some of the world's top nuclear experts. Although the project was secret, word got out via scientists fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. Among them was Albert Einstein, who warned U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939.
Anxiety over the development of a Nazi secret weapon rippled around the world. The US response was The Manhattan Project. Led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the program began in Summer 1942, researching ways to build a fission bomb using the elements uranium and plutonium.
Fear of the rival Nazi project spurred the U.S. government on. With huge financial backing, it took just 3 years for Oppenheimer and his team to successfully test their first nuclear weapon. The first "live fire" nuclear weapon hit Hiroshima 3 weeks later.
"I don't believe a word of the whole thing," said Werner Heisenberg, then-head of the German nuclear research program, when he heard the news about Hiroshima. At the time, Heisenberg and the 9 other senior nuclear physicists working on the German project were incarcerated in an English estate called Farm Hall. The British secretly recorded the scientists, hoping to discover secrets of the Nazi nuclear projects.
The other German physicists shared his incredulity. Most believed it was a bluff to induce a Japanese surrender. "I didn't think it would be possible for another 20 years," Otto Hahn had said. Heisenberg and Hahn's reactions show just how far the German program was from developing a nuclear weapon.
"The U.S. completely overestimated the German development of the Uranproject. It wasn't until Farm Hall they understood that," Takuma Melber, a historian at Heidelberg University in Germany, told DW.
By the time the The Manhattan Project was up and running, the German nuclear weapons program was already dead. The German researchers knew they would be unable to separate the isotopes necessary for creating an atomic bomb in less than 5 years. They never achieved a successful chain reaction, and had no method of enriching uranium.
The nuclear weapons program was scrapped in July 1942, with the research splitting into nine different institutes around Germany. "Before 1942 it was a military project, but then it became only a civil project," Melber told DW.
From then on, the goal shifted away from a nuclear weapon to building a nuclear reactor that could sustain nuclear fission on a smaller scale. Heisenberg moved his research to a cave laboratory under a castle in Haigerloch, Germany, where he and his team built an experimental nuclear reactor comprised of uranium cubes dangling from wire and submerged in a tank of heavy water.
This experiment was the furthest the German nuclear program progressed, but the reactor never worked: There wasn't enough uranium present in the reactor's core to achieve a chain reaction. But they were close. Scientists now believe that if the reactors had contained 50 percent more uranium, Heisenberg could have created the first nuclear reactor.
With a head start and brilliant scientists working on the project, why did Germany fail to develop its nuclear program? For one, Germany was bleeding scientists. Many Jewish and Polish scientists like Lise Meitner, a Jewish physicist who played an instrumental role in Hahn and Strassmann's discovery of nuclear fission, fled persecution. A number of these refugees fled to the U.K. and U.S., where they worked on the Manhattan Project. Other scientists were drafted into the German army.
Wartime pressure in Germany also rendered scarce some of the resources necessary for the research, like sufficient amounts of enriched uranium, said Melber. Water, which is needed to cool nuclear reactors, was also in short supply. "Heavy water production was underway in Nazi-occupied Norway, but Allied and Norwegian forces attacked these facilities," said Melber.
But ultimately it was the lack of political support that halted progress. "Hitler had difficulties understanding the project" and cut support of it in 1942, Melber said. Without this backing, the nuclear program had very few resources to draw on, especially compared to the Manhattan Project, which employed 500,000 people, about 1 percent of the U.S. workforce, and cost the U.S. government around $2 billion. (Today, around $36 billion.)
By comparison, the Uranverein and subsequent programs involved fewer than a thousand scientists and were budgeted at 8 million reichsmarks, equivalent to about $36 million dollars today.
The Farm Hall tapes also provide another reason for the German failure: The scientists themselves were morally opposed to the atomic bomb and secretly sabotaged the effort. One of the scientists, Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, said, "I believe that the reason we didn't do it was because all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war, we would have succeeded."
Heisenberg himself was opposed to the idea of a nuclear bomb, saying, "At the bottom of my heart, I was really glad it was to be an engine and not a bomb." The German scientists at Farm Hall went on to hope that "History will record… Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war… and that the Germans produced a workable engine."
Eighty years on, the irony is that the modern German state hosts U.S. nuclear weapons, believing them vital for Germany's security, but is vehemently opposed to nuclear power.
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Heisenberg was released by the Allies early in 1946, returned to scientific research, and died in 1976. Today, when he is remembered at all, it is not for his role in the Nazis' hope to built an atomic bomb, or for his 1927 discovery of the uncertainty principle, which led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932, "for the creation of quantum mechanics." It's for his name being adopted as a street name by high school teacher turned drug dealer Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston, on the TV series Breaking Bad.
American conservatives, eager to portray anything on the right as better than anything on the left, like to remind liberals that Communists have killed more people than Fascists. The response to this is simple. The Soviets had the bomb, and never used it. The Chinese have the bomb, and have never used it. If Hitler had the bomb, there is no doubt that he would have used it -- on Moscow first, on London second, and then, if at all possible, on America.
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July 6, 1942 was a Monday. There was only one score on this historic day, and it was baseball's All-Star Game, at the Polo Grounds in New York. The American League beat the National League, 3-1. Lou Boudreau of the Cleveland Indians and Rudy York of the Detroit Tigers hit home runs off Mort Cooper of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1st inning, and that decided it for the AL. Cooper would have the last laugh, though, helping the Cardinals win that season's World Series.
