Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - How Close Were the Nazis to Making an Atomic Bomb?

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

During the second world war, one of the biggest efforts of the war was the Manhattan Project: the secret American program to create an atomic bomb. The scientists and staff of the Manhattan Project were in a race to beat Nazi Germany to be the first country to build the A-bomb. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, and Americans detonated the first device in July, they had seemingly won the race. But was it in fact a race at all? How close were the Nazis to actually building an atom bomb? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Second World War, one of the biggest efforts of the war was the Manhattan Project, the secret American program to create an atomic bomb. The scientists and staff of the Manhattan Project were in a race to beat Nazi Germany to be the first country to build the A-bomb. When Germany surrendered in May of 1945, and Americans detonated the first device in July of that year, they had seemingly won the race. But was it in fact a race at all? How close were the Nazis to actually building an atomic bomb?

Learn more about the Nazi nuclear program on this. episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely.

Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. This episode is sponsored by the Tourist Office of Spain.

Did you know that Spain has the third highest number of world heritage sites of any country? It's true. Spain has a whopping 49 years. UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Their most recent World Heritage Site was selected just this year. It's the Pacio del Prado and Buen Rietiro, a landscape of arts and sciences. It's the area in Madrid that includes the Prado Museum, the Terraced Royal Botanical Garden, and the residential neighborhood of Barrio Hermannios. This now sits alongside other great world heritage sites in Spain, such as the works of Anton Gaudi in Barcelona, the Alhambra in Granada, and the historic

mosque cathedral of Cordoba. You can live. learn all about Spain's world heritage sites and information to plan your next trip by visiting Spain.Info. Once again, that's Spain. Info. If you were to travel back in time to the year 1930 and take bets from people about which country would develop the first atomic bomb, the smart money probably would have been on Germany. Germany at this time had an all-star lineup of talent that was at the forefront of nuclear and quantum physics. Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and many others were all Germans who were some of the top physicists in the world at that time. However, whatever high hopes the German physics world had changed dramatically when the Nazi party came to power in 1933.

Their racial theories caused many of the top German scientists to flee the country, including the likes of Albert Einstein. As Germany began annexing more countries, other scientists began to flee as well, leading physicists from Hungary, Austria, and Denmark, all left to find rest of, mostly in the United States and the United Kingdom. On top of the physicists leaving, Nazis also had bizarre prohibitions about teaching what they called Jewish physics, which was mainly Einstein's theory of relativity. Even though many physicists had left Germany, not all of them had. They still had a lot of talent, enough talent to make people worried. In August of 1939, Hungarian physicist Leo Salard wrote a letter to the President of the

United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which was signed by a Albert Einstein. That letter warned that Germany might develop an atomic bomb. There was good reason to be concerned. In January of 1939, German researchers Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman had discovered the fission of uranium, and the implications from that became very obvious. This letter was the impetus that led to the creation of the Manhattan Project and the development of the American atom bomb program. I'm not going to go into too much depth about the Manhattan Project on this episode, but suffice to say that it was a very expensive, very organized, and very secret project. It was also huge. At one point or another, during the project, over 600,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project, and most of them had no

clue what they were working on. The people working on the Manhattan Project were in a race with an opponent they couldn't see. There was no way of knowing if they were in the lead or if they had won until the race was actually over. As far as they knew, the race might end with a mushroom cloud over London or New York. During the war, there was very little information coming out of Germany about the development of their program. When the war ended, it had become clear that Germany never did develop an atomic bomb. So the question became, how close did they come? Well, there was a German nuclear program. However, the program wasn't nearly on a par with what the Americans were doing. The German program, as it turns out, was really just to get a working

nuclear reactor to produce electricity. Something, which first occurred at the United States in 1942 with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. The German program began soon after the 1939 discovery of fission. However, that was never well organized and was halted with the invasion of Poland on September 1st. On the day of the invasion of Poland, a new nuclear program was started under the auspices of the German military's weapons division. Soon after the war began, two conferences took place with many of the leading physicists still in Germany. One of the themes to come out of the meeting was that the physicist stressed to the government that the creation of an atomic bomb was extremely difficult

and would require a huge investment and a lot of time. Verner Heisenberg, probably the most preeminent physicist still in Germany, said at the second conference that, quote, in principle, atomic bombs could be made, but it would take years and probably not before five years, end quote. He further went on to note, quote, I don't. didn't report it to the fear until two weeks later, and very casually, because I did not want the fear to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic bomb. Albert Speer felt it was better that the whole thing should be dropped, and the fear also reacted that way. End quote. Basically, Heisenberg and the other physicists totally undersold

the idea of an atomic bomb to Hitler. Heisenberg later explained that they didn't want to put themselves in a position where a failure to deliver a bomb would have potentially disastrous results for themselves and possibly their families. That being said, as we'll later see, their belief in the difficulties of developing a bomb was legitimate. In fact, the amount of money and effort that went into the Manhattan Project sort of prove that point. The Allies didn't know any of this, of course. They were still working under the assumption that the Germans were trying to do the same thing that they were doing. General Leslie Groves, the overall head of the Manhattan Project, said after the war, quote, unless and until we had positive knowledge to the

contrary, we had to assume that the most competent German scientists and engineers were working on an atomic program with the full support of their government and with the full capacity of German industry at their disposal. Any other assumption would have been unsound and dangerous. End quote. By 1942, the Third Reich realized that the nuclear program wasn't going to be able to contribute anything to the war, so the program was moved out of the control of the army. army. It still had funding, and it was considered important to the war effort, but it was basically on its own as far as oversight went. The program was split into several different parts, the development of a working reactor, the creation of heavy water, which is used to moderate

the speed of neutrons in a reactor, and the enrichment of uranium to create uranium 235. The goal explicitly from 1942 on out was the creation of a nuclear reactor for energy production. The production of heavy water was stymied from the start, from 1940 to 1944, the British and Norwegian Resistance conducted a series of sabotage and bombing operations on facilities producing heavy water in Norway. The town of Notodden had a massive hydroelectric facility, which is why it was used for producing heavy water. The Norwegian resistance famously sunk a ferry called the SF Hydro when the Germans tried to remove the remaining heavy water produced at the facility. There's a great museum in the town of Notodden, Norway, which

documents the activities of the Norwegian resistance in sabotaging heavy water production, and I highly recommend visiting. In addition to the problems with heavy water production, the Germans had huge problems with the enrichment of uranium. Germany had no cyclotrons at the start of the war, which could separate isotopes electromagnetically. The United States had 20. Cyclotrons aren't a very efficient way to enrich uranium, but they could work in theory, and they didn't even have that. They managed to put together a sort of prototype reactor in a beer cellar in the town of Hagerlach. The reactor looked like a chandelier with cubes of uranium hanging down on strings. This reactor prototype was captured by the Allies' Alsace mission in 1945.

The Alsace mission was a small unit designed to get scientific information on the access powers during the war. When they found the reactor, they confiscated 659 uranium cubes. Many of those cubes have been lost, but one landed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They did a forensic study on their cube to determine if it was from the Nazi reactor. They determined that it was created in 1943, was mined in what was then German-controlled Czechoslovakia, and contained no elements which would indicate that it was used in a nuclear reaction. In other words, the German reactor never worked.

The Alsace mission also captured most of the German physicists and brought many of them back to the UK for questioning. Their story was basically what I've outlined here, and was corroborated by the uranium samples which were recovered. Ferener Heisenberg was in England when he received the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb. on Hiroshima, and he simply didn't believe it was possible. He said, quote, I don't believe it. I don't believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their 500 million pounds in separating isotopes, and then it's possible, unquote.

What he didn't know was that the Americans had actually spent $2 billion in 1940s money. The entire conversation of the German physicists assembled when they heard the news was one of genuine disbelief. It was all recorded, and it's actually a fast-eastern. fascinating read, as most of them were horrified that such a weapon was built and used. In the end, Nazi Germany wasn't anywhere close to building an atomic bomb, but no one knew that. It ended up being a race with really only one competitor. I want to end with one particular quote, and I'm leaving it for last because the source of

it is of dubious authority. We don't really have any direct recorded quotes from Hitler on the subject of nuclear weapons. He was dead by the time they were used, and he never said anything publicly about them before that. However, in the autobiography of SS General Otto Scorsney, he did recall a conversation he had with Hitler, where he asked him about the rumor of the development of atomic weapons. He reported Hitler as saying, you know, Mr. Scorsney, that if the energy won through nuclear fission and the radiation would be used as a weapon, that this would mean the end of our planet? The results would be horrible, of course. Even if we could control the radiation and would use nuclear fission as a weapon, even then the results would be terrible.

When Dr. Tott was here, I read that such a device with controlled radiation would set free energy that would lead to devastation only compared to what happened when meteors fell in Arizona and the Bicall Lake. That means that every kind of life, not only human but also animal life and plants would be completely destroyed for hundreds of years in a radius of 40 kilometers. This would be the apocalypse. And how should we keep the secret? Impossible. No, no country, no group of civilized persons could consciously take the responsibility. From strike to counter-strike, mankind would extinct itself. Only some tribes in the Amazon region and in the jungles of Sumatra would have a certain chance of survival.

End quote. Did Hitler say and really believe this? On one hand, this runs counter to our image of Hitler as a bloodthirsty dictator. Surely Hitler would have no problem using such weapons. On the other hand, maybe the scientists in Germany did make an impression on him and convinced him not to pursue the development of such weapons. Maybe that was the reason why Germany never actively pursued the creation of an atomic bomb. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson.

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